Research Ongoing Projects

In this project, we are currently investigating how political speeches use temporal figures to legitimise power, herald conflicts or position political programmes. Our approach is based on the concept of chronopolitics, in particular the dimension of politicised time as a strategic tool of political communication (see Esposito & Becker 2023). To this end, we have compiled a multilingual corpus of public speeches, parliamentary contributions and interviews, and employed 15 large language models (LLMs) to identify typical temporal-political terms. We have consolidated the resulting word lists into five multilingual dictionaries and subsequently examined their correlation within the corpus. Initial results show a clear connection between terms relating to the exercise of political power and language referring to the present – an indication that political authority is often linked to the ability to act immediately. Further categories, such as repetition, change and continuity, are planned for the next phase of the project.

Another key focus within the HCDH is the CAEDHET research initiative – Critical AI Engineering, Digital Humanities, and Educational Transfer – a collaborative research group comprising the Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities (HCDH), the Heidelberg School of Education (HSE) and the Heidelberg University of Education. Together, the team focuses on current developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, critical reflection on technology and digitally supported education. Ongoing projects range from the analysis of AI-supported collaboration and prompting practices to epistemological and didactic questions surrounding machine-generated text.