Daniel Knuchel

Research

My research lies in corpus pragmatics and digital linguistics as well as in the discourse analysis and sociolinguistics of contemporary German. I work empirically, with digital methods and from a cultural-analytic perspective.

I am interested in how knowledge, identity and communicative norms are produced and changed in linguistic practice, and how this can be described under digital conditions. Digitality changes both the objects of linguistics, from web forums to interaction with language models, and the procedures we use to study them.

Discourse, knowledge, society

In my dissertation I examined how HIV/AIDS is conceptualised linguistically in German-speaking Switzerland since the infection became treatable and seemingly disappeared from public attention. This led to the concept of discourse latency: an answer to the question of what happens to discourses when public interest fades. The monograph is in preparation. Further work concerns Wikipedia, conspiracy theories, 1980s protest communication and the linguistic construction of sexuality.

Postdigital writing cultures

I call writing cultures postdigital when digital tools and generative AI are no longer the exception but part of the writing environment. In my habilitation project I study how writing practices, texts and ideas about writing change within them, above all in school and academic writing. I read this not as a rupture but as an intensification of developments already present in digital writing. Part of the data comes from participatory projects with schools in which students and teachers take part as co-researchers.

Corpus pragmatics and digital methods

I work with large, mostly self-built data collections and combine quantitative procedures with qualitative reading. I always also ask what a tool does to the data and which findings it brings about in the first place. This stance has led to my own implementations of corpus-pragmatic procedures and an open toolbox for analysis and visualisation. Currently I am working on multimodal corpora, where text and image have to be read together, and on large language models as analytical tools.

Projects