Christa Schneider | AS 2024
Christa Schneider is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bern (Switzerland), specializing in historical sociolinguistics, language history, and digital humanities. She holds advanced degrees
in linguistics from the University of Bern, culminating in a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics, where her dissertation focused on dialect variation in the Bernese region. Her research interests encompass a wide range of linguistic and historical topics, including early modern Swiss and British/Scottish history, with a special focus on sociohistorical analysis, multilingualism, and language change in the contexts of Switzerland, Lithuania, and the British Isles.
In recent years, Schneider has been involved in numerous interdisciplinary projects, incorporating digital tools such as machine learning and natural language processing to analyze historical texts. Her expertise extends beyond traditional linguistics, blending digital methodologies with a deep understanding of historical documents and sociolinguistic variation. She is currently developing her second book, which seeks to integrate historical sociolinguistics, language history, and broader historical research to provide a comprehensive exploration of language change and variation in Switzerland. Schneider’s work is characterized by its innovative combination of linguistic analysis and digital humanities, making significant contributions to both fields.
Research project
On Sociolinguistic Patterns in Premodern Witch Trial Papers
This research proposal aims to investigate the sociolinguistic phenomena revealed through the analysis of witch trial records from the Early Modern period across various Germanic linguistic regions, including Switzerland, Scotland, England, possibly Scandinavia, and Austria. The project is based on a multidisciplinary approach, combining methodologies from Historical Sociolinguistics, Digital Humanities, social and legal history, and language history to explore the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of these trials. The archival preservation of witch trial records provides a unique window into the past, offering insights into the sociolinguistic situation of the time. Recent digitization and transcription of parts of the Bernese Tower Books have facilitated detailed analyses of the linguistic situation in Early Modern Bern, revealing the significant role of spoken language. The suggested Ambizione-Project aims to expand on the findings from the Tower Book studies by creating a multilingual corpus of witch trial records, employing Digital Humanities tools to digitize, transcribe, annotate, and analyse the data. Thus, key methodologies include digitisation, transcription, annotation, Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis. The project's interdisciplinary nature requires drawing on theories from various fields. In terms of Language History, the focus will be on language contact, policy, orthography, and ideologies, relying on foundational works in regions where it is well-developed. Historical Sociolinguistics will provide insights into the social dimensions of language use, and Digital Humanities methodologies will be pivotal for corpus creation and data analysis. Lastly, the social and legal history framework will help contextualize the witch trials within the broader societal and legal practices of the time. This ambitious project aims to provide a comprehensive corpus that adheres to FAIR principles, enabling further research and offering new perspectives on the Historical Sociolinguistic developments in Europe during the Early Modern period.
