Start-up Fundings - funded applications

The telephone network was an important social reference point in 20th century Latin America. Desires, hopes, anger, visions of development and social rules developed around the telephone.

On the one hand, telephone exchanges and public telephones were seen as a symbol of progress. Companies and politicians promoted an idealized version of the telephone network: In their opinion, white users in urban areas demonstrated the modernity of Latin American societies. International organizations also advocated this position and presented telecommunications as the key to economic growth in rural regions. This contrasted with the experiences of many users, who often struggled with interrupted calls, poor transmission quality or faulty equipment. On the other hand, telephones became a symbol of shoddy service and the political neglect of infrastructure. Since the 1980s, there have been fierce political debates about the privatization of telephone companies and the regulation of telecommunications. At the same time, the first experiments with mobile phones began, replacing landlines in the 21st century and rendering public telephones meaningless. The project analyses the interactions between the political economy of telecommunications, state regulation, new technologies and their use in this period of social upheaval.

This project explores what happens if we use different basic assumptions about language in our empirical linguistic research. This allows us to gain insight into how these assumptions have influenced research outcomes.

The project focuses on the basic assumption that the monolingual native speaker of a standard variety is the “ideal speaker”, the benchmark for language acquisition and proficiency. This assumption is problematic because a vast majority of people in the world are bi- or multilingual and bilinguals are not merely two monolinguals in one person. Furthermore, standard varieties reflect historical and power relationships rather than language skills.

The main aim of the current project is – in two different research strands – to quantify what happens if we don’t continue to work with these problematic assumptions.

In first strand considers children growing up with Standard American English (SAE) or African American English (AAE). Children will be tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test or an AAE version of the same test to quantify how a test that matches or does not match the children’s own variety affects receptive vocabulary scores.

The second strand will develop a test that is based on English as a Global Language rather than a specific language variety. The test is inspired by dialect surveys and corpora and will include both a production and a comprehension part.

Detailed demographic and language background information will additionally be used to explore to what extent test results relate to socio-economic status and the number of language varieties children and adults are exposed to.

The research project “Disciplinary Histor[y]ies of History Didactics. Epistemic Orders, Players and Social Practices in 1970 and 1980" aims to initiate the first approach towards a historic praxeological analysis of history didactics in the 1970s and 1980s.

In order to investigate how social and scientific practice, that is, the agenda setting of the discipline at this time, together with its constellations and its interdependencies in the context of the journal “Geschichtsdidaktik”, which had constituted and established the field of history didactics during this period, we want to apply instruments stemming in the mode of scientific reflexivity from history of science and historical epistemology to original sources which, up to this point, have neither been edited nor published.

By collecting and analyzing these documents through the tools mentioned above, it is our goal to depict the process of producing knowledge in history didactics as a consequence of the acting of both, central and forgotten players of the “long summer of history didactics” (Heuer, Hasberg & Seidenfuss 2020) and their epistemic orders (“Wissensordnungen”) that have been handed down to this day.

The project thereby explicitly follows a praxeological approach that has been going unnoticed within the environment of history didactics so far: Practices are understood as a “nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki 1996, 89) and they incorporate the (scientific) players, their materialities and formations of meaning. As such, they are carried out through real acts in space-time and they are of extremely subjective character.

Accessing the existing sources in such a way enables us to study the period of constitution and establishment of didactics of history of the 70s and 80s as a social practice of its own and to analyze it as such: in its discourses, epistemic orders, constellations, contexts and networks.

The emergence and establishment of knowledge presuppose to a large extent the mobility of persons, objects, and institutions. Only when they move in the physical space or act across spatial distances and thus enter a direct relationship does knowledge come into being. For some time now, the history of knowledge has been studied from this perspective. In doing so, one falls back on a metaphorical understanding and often describes these processes as circulation. This term is widely used in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences to describe the emergence and dissemination of knowledge along unchanging trajectories, as can be seen in the circulation of planets or air. As much as this form of expression is indebted to contemporary science and serves the metaphorical representation of complex processes, it does not correspond to the real processes. For knowledge often takes place spontaneously, often unidirectionally and in any case rarely along fixed trajectories. The project aims to reconstruct the real movements and relationships in space and thus to subject the existing understanding of knowledge transfer to an in-depth examination based on a concrete historical event.

The object of investigation is the founding of universities (Tartu, Vilnius, Kharkiv, Kazan, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg) in Russia during the reign of Alexander I (1801-25), which will be evaluated, mapped and visualised. The curricula vitae, scientific activities, and institutional connections of several hundred professors and lecturers (due to the circumstances of the time, women were denied access to university research) are analysed. These were initially recruited mainly from abroad and show the strong pan-European interconnectedness of knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is examined from a pluriethnic and at the same time spatially critical perspective.

The planned project investigates the acquisition and development of word formation and the extension and modification of the mental lexicon in schoolchildren and adolescents. The focus lies on the intra- and extralinguistic factors that influence this development.

German word formation (derivation and compounding) is a rich combinatorial system with a manifold potential for semantic and categorial modification which substantially enlarges the lexicon. The majority of derivation patterns and their sophisticated meanings and meaning nuances is acquired during school age, in close connection with concomitant advances in literacy and education.

A crucial factor for the development of word formation and the lexicon is constituted by high lexical and contextual diversity in the linguistic input: variation in oral and written child directed speech as well as diverse types of interactions and interaction partners create an elaborate and varied input. The quantity and quality of the input both influence the manner and the speed of development. As the size of a child’s lexicon is a reliable predictor for educational success, the prerequisites for its development are highly relevant.

So far, research has not looked much into the details of the influence of interaction partners besides the parents, such as siblings or peers, nor of oral or written input provided by different types of media. These factors might have different impacts on mono- and bilingual children and/or children with unequal socio-economic backgrounds.

The project will study the general cognitive and psycholinguistic processes that account for the elaboration of the lexicon through word formation, and investigate how these processes are influenced by the abovementioned factors (mainly input by siblings and peers, mono- and bilingual input as well as medial input through speech and writing, socio-economic circumstances). Methodologically, a triangulation of corpus analyses of longitudinal speech recordings, transversal data collection of spoken and written language production as well as experimental investigation is planned.

The project aims to analyse how musical skills were transmitted from teacher to pupil in the 18th century through the example of Tartini's School of Nations (1728). This research wants to shed light on how certain teaching methods spread, replicated and consolidated over generations of students. The project also wishes to investigate the network of relationships between patrons and Tartini's students in a pan-European context, in order to frame the socio-professional conditions within which educational action took place. The figure of Tartini is exemplary in that he was a provider of diverse skills: instrumental, compositional, theoretical. Outlining the identity of the School of Nations and mapping the European diaspora of its members means being able to follow the branches of a didactic tradition and understand the enormous influence it had on the musical chapels in the courts of the time and on the musical institutions of individual nations more generally.

First of all: what does the term 'school' mean in this context? We are in an era in which knowledge is 'held' rather than shared and has an elitist character. Can we speak of a 'group' of trained pupils with defined characteristics? It will be important to assess the assumed uniformity of the technical-executive and stylistic model spread through the interpretations of Tartinian pupils throughout Europe. While the cultural-musical transfer between Padua and the court of Dresden, at which several of Tartini's pupils worked, has already been partially investigated by Pierluigi Petrobelli's studies, the capillary influences on many other European courts, starting with the French, Austrian or Bohemian ones, remain to be clarified in systematic contributions.

The project aims to serve as an example of a study on the processes of transfer of pedagogical-musical practices and dissemination of professional skills in a more holistic framework, which includes not only musicians but also incorporates other social actors. This work would enable the acquisition and digitisation of previously unknown sources located in various European libraries. Through the creation of a digital archive of the European Tartinian networks, available not only to the scientific community but also to the wider public, a large repertoire of documents and drafts would be made accessible for consultation. Given the international profile of the topic, a WEAVE project will be submitted, counting on partners from Switzerland, Germany and Slovenia.

Hardly any other place has shaped the working life of the 20th century as much as the modern office. In addition to being a place for socialization and administrative routines, the office was a space for interaction between humans and technology. Typewriters and telephones were found in an increasing number of workplaces from the late 19th century, followed by booking engines, dictation machines, and computers since the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century, smaller devices and new communication technologies enabled mobile work, leading some observers to predict the end of the office. At the same time, many companies outsourced their office work to countries in the global South, most notably India, which is now considered the "office of the world." The modern office was therefore both a micro-space for everyday technology acquisition and a macro-space for negotiating global labor relations.

This project will analyze how the use of digital technologies affected gender relations, spatial organization, and communication in the office. It will focus on the period between the late 1970s and the turn of the millennium, when PCs, the internet, and emails radically changed working environments. However, this development was uneven globally, as high acquisition costs and inadequate infrastructure slowed its spread in some regions of the world. The project will consider the perspectives of different historical actors, such as office workers, managers, and trade unions. In addition to analyzing the use of digital technologies in everyday work, it will examine public debates in which these actors intervened.

The Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, or Reichstag, is an integral part of the deliberative culture of early modern Europe. Similar to other such assemblies, e.g. the English Parliament, it is a forum of pre-modern political representation and one of the roots of modern parliamentarism. The 16th century is the period when the Imperial Diet gradually developed into a representative assembly of the estates. In the 16th century, Imperial Diets were still convened at irregular intervals and locations by the emperors. The negotiations of the representatives of the high nobility and the imperial cities, including lords and their envoys, lasted usually several months.

Historians researching the Imperial Diets make heavy use of the established edition series of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HiKo) which has published scholarly editions of Imperial Diet records since the 19th century. Until a few years ago, these editions were only available in print. However, the HiKo has begun retroactively digitising existing volumes and, with the edition of the Imperial Diet records of 1576, the HiKo in collaboration with the University of Graz published the first digital edition of a Reichstag. For the first time, a large number of electronic texts documenting Imperial Diets are freely accessible online for the benefit of historians. However, these 'mountains’ of textual data are unmanageable for human readers alone and require computational aid to prepare them to enable future research using contemporary methodologies.

As more and more source material on the Imperial Diet becomes available digitally, the question arises whether and how well these sources can be used for historical research. The proposed project (FWF and DFG), The Imperial Diets of the 16th Century: Text Mountains and Text Mining (Die Reichstage des 16. Jahrhunderts: Textberge und Textminen), will make a long-overdue contribution to research by analysing the participants and their communication networks across ten Imperial Diets, and in doing so, test and critically reflect upon the potential of digital humanities methods for the analysis of this specific text corpus and their added value for historical research. The focus will be on the analysis of central actors and topics documented by the Imperial Diet records and the application of methods such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Linked Open Data for publication of the results.

Funded by the Faculty's grant for upcoming project proposals, this study aims to examine foreign language teaching in school settings from the perspective of empirical foreign language education research. It focusses on the significance of language acquisition in the school context and is thus to be assigned to the research area of “Instructed Second Language Acquisition/ISLA”. In the study, the learners’ interlanguage development will be analyzed with respect to morphosyntactic phenomena of the target languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish and English. Within the period of two learning years, the study elicits task-based spontaneously produced oral and written learner performances at different points in time. Committing itself to the consideration of learner language development in foreign language teaching, an objective already formulated in the Austrian curricula for lower secondary schools since 2006 and upper secondary schools since 2004, the project contributes to an evidence-based description of learner language development for the languages mentioned and offers the possibility of closing a research desideratum which, in the Austrian context, has only been considered by a few case studies focusing on individual languages. The triangulation of the learner language performances with results from classroom observations will allow to see whether and how foreign language teaching supports the learners’ language development or, if so, counteracts it. Hence, the project attempts to contribute to the international debate of the inert knowledge problem in instructed second language acquisition as well as to promote and strengthen the dialogue between research outcomes and practical teaching approaches in classroom settings.

According to the common view in criminal law theory, compliance with legal obligations is owed not to the individuals protected by the law, but to the state. Thus, criminal law theorist do not conceive of individuals as holders of normative claims against one another, but merely as beneficiaries of the restrictions. This is primarily due to two reasons:  On the one hand, theorists often see the so-called ‘harm principle’ as the basis of criminalization. According to this view, the moral significance of a harm is not attributed to a violation of the normative position of a person with intersubjective claims. On the other hand, especially legal scholars in the German-speaking realm often harbor a narrow theoretical understanding of rights, the so-called ‘will theory of rights’. This theory holds that beneficiaries of duties have rights only if they have the power to claim compensation for the violation of the duties themselves.

In this project, we argue that, contrary to these two prevailing views, there is argumentative and theoretical space to show that individual rights have a central role in criminal law. The aim of the project is to ask questions about the possibility, nature, and normative implications of rights in criminal law: Is the violation of rights the reason for criminalizing behavior? To whom do subjects of rights owe compliance with criminal law provisions? The inquiry can sharpen our understanding of criminal law in terms of legal theory and legal ethics in two ways.

Descriptive implications: The approach may provide an explanatory framework for consent in criminal law. The possibility of permitting behavior by consenting makes a person’s normative position a central explanatory function in criminal law theory.

Normative Implications: The approach offers an alternative way of looking at the criminalization of behavior. There is a moral meaning of crime that consists in the violation of individual autonomy. Therefore, the view of what makes an act a prohibitable wrong can benefit from the inclusion of rights in criminal law theory. Moreover, recourse to rights in criminal law can provide a normative framework for new elements of criminal procedure (e.g., victims’ rights) and restorative justice (e.g., so-called ‘restorative justice’ approaches).

This project is to be applied for within the WEAVE-Funding-Scheme (Austrian Science Fund FWF and German Research Foundation DFG) as an International Cooperation between the University of Graz and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law for a duration of 3 years.

The proposed research project focuses on the remigration of Austrians who were persecuted and driven from their home country as “Jewish”, with special regard to the first postwar decade. Over 200,000 Austrians lost their home during the Nazi rule, fled to various countries within and outside Europe or were imprisoned in concentration camps. Over 60,000 of them perished in the camps. Of the 170,000 Jewish Austrians, only a fraction survived. A substantially smaller number of those who survived – numbers ranging in the low thousands – decided to return to Austria in the years following the end of the war. They returned to either rebuild their lives in Austria, to settle legal or financial matters and to reclaim their stolen property or to receive an education in their first language. In Austria, remigrants found destroyed communities and existences as well as a hostile environment and government(s) who were opposed to a return of those persecuted and expelled as well as to a restitution of stolen property and compensation for injustice and harm sustained.

The overall objective of the research project is to create a overall picture and pattern of remigration of Austrians who were persecuted as Jewish, with special focus on the following aspects: the legal and framework conditions for a remigration and the practical application of the former, the description and investigation of the diverse group of remigrants and their differing experiences, their personal motivations and the matter of the public discourse about and reception of this group within the Austrian society.

Considering the broad-ranging subject matter from legal frameworks to personal experiences it will be necessary to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to investigate the matter according to the aforementioned points of view. This multi-perspective approach incorporates a fundamental research of sources in national and international archives in order to be able to reconstruct the aforementioned frameworks and their application. Based on this, the interdisciplinary approach incorporates the use of personal memories and recollections in any form as well as media reporting public discourse.

The question, ‘How can we gain knowledge of a consciousness-independent reality?’, is intensively and diversely discussed in contemporary analytical philosophy and history of science. However, Alois Riehl’s contribution has been almost completely ignored so far. This is astonishing, since at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th Century, he developed a sophisticated philosophy of realism in his three-volume work The Philosophical Criticism. Therein, Riehl systematically combines a realism of spatiotemporal objects, a mathematical realism, a scientific realism, and a moral realism.

In order to re-establish the Philosophical Criticism as an immanent part of current research, and at the same time make it more accessible to a wider audience, it is crucial to see it in its diverse interrelationship with the scientific developments at the end of the 19^th Century. Therefore, it is necessary to combine two types of research methods: the problem-oriented and the contextualising approach.

During this project, Riehl’s three-volume main work will be re-edited in the series Philosophische Bibliothek of the publishing house Meiner. In this way, previously unpublished historical sources, such as the correspondence with Heinrich Rickert, Friedrich Jodl, Bartholomäus von Carneri, Hugo Münsterberg, Wilhelm Wundt, Eduard Spranger, Ernst Mach, and Hans Vaihinger, as well as the archive material of the Universities of Graz, Vienna, Freiburg, Halle, Kiel, and Berlin, will provide a critical approach to the text. The new edition is also the basis for the first comprehensive translation into English.

Academic writing has been a topic of intense research as early as the 1970s. However, not much is known about the longitudinal effects of writing interventions on the development of academic writing. Previous longitudinal studies all rely on data, which were not collected under experimental conditions. Therefore, these studies do not allow for causal deductions regarding the role of instruction in the development of academic writing. On the other hand, there are several intervention studies, but they do not give much insight into the processes of development, as the writing interventions, which were conducted in these studies, only covered short time spans.

In order to close this research gap, we will conduct a longitudinal intervention study, in which we investigate n=240 students’ development in academic writing over a period of three years. The longitudinal intervention will serve as a preparation for the Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit (VWA) and will be based on genre-based approaches in academic writing instruction, which have been among the most widely used approaches in the pedagogy of academic writing in recent decades. In our study, we examine the effects of three different genre-based treatments on the dependent variables academic text quality, writing motivation, and transfer using latent growth curve modelling. This allows the study to show how academic text quality and writing motivation develop under the influence of different genre-based writing interventions over a period of three years. In addition, the study can reveal whether and to what extent the skills acquired during the intervention can be transferred to the genre Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit.

Philipp Gumpenhuber (1706–1770) was associated with Viennese theatrical life as dancer, choreographer and ballet master. Commissioned by Giacomo Durazzo, Gumpenhuber was given the task of documenting the performances and rehearsals at the Viennese “Burgtheater” and “Kärntnertortheater” in a chronicle. Gumpenhuber’s manuscript chronicle (written in French and Italian) offers insights into the program of the two theaters between 1758–1759 and 1761–1763, documents theatrical rehearsals on a daily basis and provides information on the theatres’ personnel and performers as well as on important social and political events in the context of the theatrical life.

This project is situated between the disciplines of Digital Humanities and Music History and will result in a critical digital edition of Gumpenhuber’s chronicle incorporating XML encoding on the basis of the TEI standards. The resulting digital edition will make one of the most significant sources of Viennese theatrical life in the second half of the eighteenth century broadly and openly accessible via an online-platform. The tool set of the Digital Humanities extends the scope of a traditional historical methodology massively and will result in new insights on the topic that can be used also in a wide interdisciplinary context.

The project application will be submitted at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as a stand-alone-project and will be conducted in the form of an interdisciplinary cooperation between the Institute of Musicology and the Institute/Centre for Information Modelling.