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Dr. Jürgen Hermes

Research Fellow

Currently involved

Research Projects

Research Projects (past)

  • Lead IDH: Qualifikationsentwicklungsforschung/Stellenanzeigenpool, Kooperationsprojekt mit dem Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB)
  • Lead IDH: Vergleich von Berufsinformationsportalen – RADAR Projekt, Auftragsforschung für das Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB)
  • Collaborative partner: „ODRA - Ordnen, Deuten, Richtigstellen, Annähern #projektODRA (Social Media Rapid Reaction Unit)" (Stiftung Erinnerung-Verantwortung-Zukunft) 
  • Project Management: "Bild, Beschreibung, (Meta)Text", funded by the Research Commission of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Cologne
  • Advisory: Project HistoriaApp, funded by the eLearning-Förderfonds of the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
  • Advisory: Der Geschichtstalk im Super7000, a project of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf) and the University of Education FHNW (Basel, Brugg-Windisch) in cooperation with the association with the Verband Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD).
  • Project Management "Informationsextraktion aus Stellenanzeigen"
  • Dissertation: "Textprozessierung - Design und Applikation."
  • Project Management "Tesla" (Text Engineering Software Laboratory)
  • Project "SPre" (Raw text preprocessing)
  • Project "ARC" - Annotated Raeto-Romanic Chrestomazia (DFG-Projekt)

Teaching

Publications

  • Hermes, Jürgen, Kai Niebes, Sarah Oberbichler, and Andreas Wagner. 2026. LLMs unter Kontrolle: Offene Modelle in Forschung und Praxis. DHd Conference 2026, Vienna. https://zenodo.org/records/18702738
  • Wagner, Andreas, and Jürgen Hermes. Forthcoming. Encoded Humanities, or: Not Everything Has to Be Generative: A Dialogue on AI Tasks and Roles. In Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: Reflections from a Field in Motion.
  • Hermes, Jürgen, and Susanne Kurz. 2026. Digitale Kompetenzen für die nächste Generation. Das Kölner Modell: Nachwuchsförderung und digitale Expertise für die DH-Zukunft.In From Global to Local? Digitale Methoden in den Geisteswissenschaften im deutschsprachigen Raum: Ein Triptychon. Melusina Press. https://doi.org/10.26298/1981-5722-dkfd
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2025. Review of Richard Němec (ed.), Raumkonstruktionen. Digital Humanities und die ‚Messbarkeit‘ des NS-Regimes (Journal für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, Bd. 2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42520-025-00645-y
  • König, Mareike, Jürgen Hermes, Philip Schildkamp, Vivian Wolter, and Ulrike Wuttke. 2024. Microblogging mit Mastodon: Fediverse, Fedihum und Co. in den Digital Humanities – ein Praxisworkshop. DHd 2024 Quo Vadis DH, Passau, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10698458
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2023. Durch neuronale Netze zur Lingua Franca? Wie Algorithmen unsere Kommunikation bestimmen. In Joachim Berger and Thorsten Wübbena (eds.), OWissen ordnen und entgrenzen – vom analogen zum digitalen Europa?, 47–64. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Link
  • Eide, Øyvind, Jürgen Hermes, and Andreas Witt. 2023. Processing of Information—Linguistics, HKI, and Digital Humanities: Developments in Cologne. In Vielfalt und Integration—Diversitá ed integrazione—Diversité et intégration: Sprache(n) in sozialen und digitalen Räumen—Eine Festschrift für Elisabeth Burr, 215–226. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2022. Polygraphia III: The Cipher That Pretends to Be an Artificial Language. In C. Layfield and J. Abela (eds.), Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript (VOY2022). CEUR-WS Vol. 3313. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/#paper7
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2021. Chirpy Humanities. In Lisa Kolodzie et al. (eds.), Public Humanities. https://publicdh.hypotheses.org/42
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2020. Vision als Prozess. Gedanken zur Zukunft der Hochschule im Spiegel der Trias Mensch – Maschine. In Marko Demantowsky et al. (eds.), Was macht die Digitalisierung mit den Hochschulen? Einwürfe und Provokationen. Berlin: De Gruyter. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen, Harald Klinke, and Dennis Demmer. 2020. Public Humanities Tools: Der Bedarf an niederschwelligen Services. DHd Conference 2020 Spielräume, Paderborn.
  • Richter, Michael, Jürgen Hermes, and Claes Neuefeind. 2019. Aspectual Classifications: Use of Raters’ Associations and Co-occurrences of Verbs for Aspectual Classification in German. In Jaap van den Herik and Ana Paula Rocha (eds.), Agents and Artificial Intelligence. Springer.
  • Mensching, Guido, Jean-Yves Lalande, Jürgen Hermes, and Claes Neuefeind (eds.). 2018. Sprache - Mensch - Maschine. Beiträge zu Sprache und Sprachwissenschaft, Computerlinguistik und Informationstechnologie. Cologne. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen, Michael Richter, and Claes Neuefeind. 2018. Supervised Classification of Aspectual Verb Classes in German: A Comparison of Subcategorization-Frame-Based and Window-Based Approaches. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2018), 653–662.
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2018. Manipulation Algorithms: Why Cambridge Analytica Is Not the Greatest Threat. Spektrum.de. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen, and Manuel Schandock. 2016. Stellenanzeigenanalyse in der Qualifikationsentwicklungsforschung. Die Nutzung maschineller Lernverfahren zur Klassifikation von Textabschnitten. In: Fachbeiträge in Internet, Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung. Link.
  • Hermes, Jürgen, Michael Richter, and Claes Neuefeind. 2015. Automatic Induction of German Aspectual Verb Classes in a Distributional Framework. In Proceedings of GSCL 2015, 122–129. PDF
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2015. Experiments as Objects of Scholarly Communication. In Experiments in the Digital Humanities (#dhiha6), Paris. Link
  • Richter, Michael, and Jürgen Hermes. 2015. Classification of German Verbs Using Nouns in Argument Positions and Aspectual Features. In Networds 2015. PDF
  • Zampieri, Marcos, Jürgen Hermes, and Stephan Schwiebert. 2013. Identification of Patterns and Document Ranking of Internet Texts: A Frequency-Based Approach. In Non-standard Data Sources in Corpus-based Research. Aachen: Shaker.
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2012. Was so alles Text ist und wie man es untersucht. Guest contribution on Spektrum.de Scilogs. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen. 2012. Text Prozessierung: Design und Application. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cologne. Link
  • Hermes, Jürgen, and Stephan Schwiebert. 2009. Classification of Text Processing Components: The Tesla Role System. In Advances in Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence, 285–294. Berlin: Springer.
  • Hermes, Jürgen, and Christoph Benden. 2005. Fusion von Annotation und Präprozessierung als Vorschlag zur Behandlung des Rohtextproblems. In Sprachtechnologie, Mobile Communication and Linguistic Resources, 78–90. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
  • Benden, Christoph, and Jürgen Hermes. 2004. Präprozessierung mit Nebenwirkungen: Dynamische Annotation. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2004, 25–28. Vienna.

Talks and Presentations (translated, if originally held in German)

Forthcoming

  • February 2026: LLMs under Control: Open Models in Research and Practice. Workshop at the DHd Conference 2026, Vienna (with Sarah Oberbichler, Andreas Wagner, and Kai Niebes).

2025

  • November 2025: Simulating Human Judgments: The Potential of LLMs in Linguistic Experiments on Prominence. Poster presentation at the workshop “Large Language Models for Linguistic Analyses: Applications and Limitations”, organized by CRC 1252 Prominence in Language. Poster.
  • November 2025: Humanities — but Digital! The BA program Information Processing. Talk at OpenCampus 2025, University of Cologne.
  • October 2025: How Open Can LLMs Be? Language Models Between Aspiration and Reality. Webinar of the DHd Working Group AG KI. Slides.
  • October 2025: Zeitzeichen on 07/10/1915: The Voynich Manuscript Is Presented to the Public. Expert guest on the radio program broadcast on WDR 3 / WDR 5. Link to the program.

2024

  • December 2024: Ciphers at the Edge of Language Design: Trithemius’ Secret Word Lists and the Voynich Manuscript, Perhaps? Conference paper at “Bletchley Park 2.0 – Informing, Encrypting, and Decrypting in Renaissance Italy”, Villa Vigoni. Slides.
  • February 2024: Microblogging with Mastodon: Fediverse, Fedihum, and Digital Humanities. Hands-on workshop at #DHd2024 (with Mareike König, Philip Schildkamp, Vivien Wolter, and Ulrike Wuttke). Link to autodone; link to slides.
  • February 2024: vDHd2021 – Reflections with RaDiHum20. Interview on Radihum (with Waltraud von Pippich and Melanie Seltmann).

2023

  • June 2023: #arthistoCast Episode 3: Searching and Finding – Information Retrieval. Podcast interview (with Lisa Dieckmann and Jacqueline Klusik-Eckert). Link to arthistoricum.
  • May 2023: Digital Objects – Language Processing. Guest lecture in the seminar “IT Certificate of the Faculty of Arts: Digital Objects”, taught by Susanne Kurz. Link to Prezi.

2022

  • December 2022: Polygraphia III: The Cipher That Pretends to Be an Artificial Language. Video lecture at the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript, Malta.
  • April 2022: The Language of Art Criticism, Digitally Collected. Impulse talk at the “Round Table on Art Criticism”, Schloss Mickeln, 13 April 2022.
  • March 2022: Through Neural Networks Toward a Lingua Franca: How Algorithms Shape Our Communication. Talk at the conference “Ordering and Expanding Knowledge – From Analog to Digital Europe?”, Mainz, 16–17 March 2022. Link to program.
  • March 2022: Blogging Is Dead — Long Live Blogging! Moderator of the online panel discussion for the 10th anniversary of de.hypotheses (#dehypo10), with Mareike König, DHI Paris. Link to the event.

2021

  • December 2021: Computational Linguistics: An Overview. Talk at the ARTEST Workshop for Digital Humanities, Ulaanbaatar (remote participation).
  • November 2021: Evaluation of Extraction Algorithms. Talk at the OJV Forum “OJVs: Pre-Processing, Extraction, and Taxonomies”, Bertelsmann Stiftung, Berlin (with Christine Schäfer). Link to video recording.
  • August 2021: Virtual Summer School: Deep Learning for Language Analysis (#vssdl4la). Co-organization with Competence Area III – Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems and the Center for Data Science. Website.
  • May 2021: autoChirp Project PechaKucha. Host of the interim event at #vDHd2021. Program (blog post); interview (RaDiHum20).
  • April 2021: The Seven Great Mysteries of Humanity. Expert interview on the Voynich Manuscript for the ZDFinfo documentary of the same title. Link to media library.
  • March 2021: One Year Without a Gap – Looking Back at the First Event Week. Closing address of the first event week of #vDHd2021.
  • February 2021: Fake or Fact – What Can We Believe? Expert interview for the radio program “Bayern 2 Positionen”. Link to audio.
  • February 2021: ODRAlighthouse. Virtual poster and system presentation at #DHCon 2021, Cologne (with Dennis Demmer). Poster.

2020

  • November 2020: Software as a Service. Virtual short talk followed by an autoChirp workshop in the seminar “The History of the University of Bremen in 280 Characters”, University of Bremen. Slides.
  • September 2020: Virtual Summer School: Deep Learning for Language Analysis (#vssdl4la). Co-organization with Competence Area III – Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems and the Center for Data Science. Website.
  • April 2020: Digital Interventions in Memory Politics – The #projektODRA. Talk at the DHC Colloquium (with Björn Klein and Dennis Demmer). Video.
  • March 2020: Public Humanities Tools: The Need for Low-Threshold Services. Talk at DHd 2020 in Paderborn (with Dennis Demmer). Link.
  • January 2020: Social Media Scheduling. Poster presentation at #DHCon 2020, Cologne (with Dennis Demmer). Poster.

2019

  • December 2019: Zeitsprung 222 – The Voynich Manuscript. Podcast interview (host: Daniel Meßner). Link.
  • November 2019: Anti-Trolling Unit #projektODRA. Session chair at #histocamp, Berlin (with Björn Klein).
  • October 2019: Synonyms and Polysemes: Categorizing Job Advertisement Requirement Profiles. Talk at the Bertelsmann Foundation forum “Information Genesis from Online Job Advertisements” (with Johanna Binnewitt).
  • September 2019: Deep Learning for Language Analysis Summer School (#DL4LASS). Co-organization with Competence Area III – Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems. Website.
  • July 2019: Engineers or Linguists? Computational Linguistics Between Application and Theory. Advanced session in the “Lunch & Linguistics” series, Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS).
  • May 2019: Science Communication with Social Media. Talk in the seminar “Communication in Social Media” (Simon Meier), Dresden.
  • May 2019: Communication: Animal – Human – Machine. Lecture in the public lecture series “Human Agencies”, University of Cologne (with Øyvind Eide).
  • May 2019: Using Natural Language Processing Tools in Digital Humanities. Lecture and hands-on session at the DH Day organized by Anne Baillot, Le Mans.
  • May 2019: Diessen Retreat “Human–Machine–Future” (#DKMMZ19). Interview with Georgios Chatzoudis. Link.
  • January 2019: What’s Happening? – Fake News and Threatened Democracy. Participation in a panel discussion within the event series “Truth, Populism, Internet”, Cologne. Flyer.

2018

  • November 2018: Introduction to autoChirp for Twitter. Lecture and workshop at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (seminar by Levke Harders). Digital handout.
  • September 2018: Late Summer School: Machine Learning for Language Analysis (#LSSML4LA). Co-organization with Competence Area III – Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems. Website.
  • June 2018: Attribution of Research Data: Who Owns the Text or Data Corpus? Participation in the panel discussion of the same title at the conference “Text and Data Mining”, University of Trier. Website.
  • May 2018: Producing Instead of Consuming: An Interface for Location-Based History. Guest lecture in the colloquium “The Digital Challenge and Historical-Political Education” (Marko Demantowsky, Monika Waldis), Basel, Switzerland. Website.
  • April 2018: A Modular Workbench for Classification, Extraction, and Categorization Tasks on a Corpus of Job Advertisements. Paper presented at the conference “Text Mining on Job Advertisements – Strategies for Discovering Valuable Information from Large Corpora”, GESIS, Cologne. CfP / Program.
  • February 2018: Everything Is in Flux – Resources and Reviews in the Digital Humanities. Panel at DHd 2018, Cologne, with Rüdiger Hohls, Friederike Neuber, Anne Baillot, Christoph Schöch, and Patrick Sahle. Link.

2017

  • September 2017: Information Extraction: Hands-On Temporal Expression Detection. Workshop at the Summer School “Computer-Assisted Analysis and Processing of Language and Text – Text (and Data) Mining Methods in Humanities Research”, Graz, Austria. Slides.
  • September 2017: Participation in the 9th German–Israeli Frontiers of Humanities (GISFOH) Symposium “Negotiating the Other, Confronting the Self” (invitation by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Jerusalem, Israel.
  • July 2017: Digital Humanities and Working with Digital Corpora at the University of Cologne: Entry Points for Legal-Linguistic Research on EU Texts. 2nd Legal Linguistics Workshop Cologne “EU Legal Linguistics and Digital Perspectives” (with Patrick Sahle).
  • May 2017: Information Extraction from Job Advertisements: Developing Machine Learning Methods for Competence Extraction. Talk at a Brown Bag Session at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Bonn (with Alena Geduldig). Slides.
  • April 2017: Applying Machine Learning to Text Mining. Talk at Machine Learning Day 2017, organized by Competence Area III “Quantitative Modeling of Complex Systems”, University of Cologne. Website; slides.
  • February 2017: Twhistory with autoChirp. Poster presentation, slam, and system demonstration at DHd 2017, Bern. Poster (PDF).
  • February 2017: Image, Description, (Meta)Text. Paper at DHd 2017, Bern, with Lisa Dieckmann and Claes Neuefeind.

2016

  • November 2016: #histoTools: Software Tools for Historians. Session chair at #histocamp, Mainz.
  • October 2016: Image, Description, (Meta)Text: Automatic Content Analysis and Annotation of Art Historical Data. Paper presented at the conference “In, On, Under, Beyond, and In Between – Levels of Digital Images”, Cologne. Slides.
  • September 2016: Re-entweetment with autoChirp. Virtual lecture at the workshop “Twitter in Teaching” at the 51st German Historians’ Conference, Hamburg. Video.
  • June 2016: The Secrets of Cryptology: Encrypting Messages, Cracking Codes. Workshop as part of the media education program of the festival “Goldener Spatz 2016”, German Children’s Media Foundation, Gera.
  • April 2016: Analyzing Language and Literature: How Computational Linguistics Can Help. Lecture for the Society for the German Language (GfdS) at Buchhandlung Böttger, Bonn. Prezi.
  • March 2016: autoChirp in Action. Presentation of the web application autoChirp in the seminar “NRW History”, University of Düsseldorf. autoChirp website.
  • February 2016: Automatic Indexing, Annotation, and Attribution of Art Historical Data. Short talk at the DFG round table “The Digital Image”, Bonn (with Lisa Dieckmann).

2015

  • September 2015: Automatic Induction of German Aspectual Verb Classes in a Distributional Framework. Talk at the GSCL Conference 2015, Essen (with Michael Richter).
  • June 2015: Texts in a Laboratory. Talk at the #dhiha6 Conference Digital Humanities Experiments. Slides.
  • May 2015: Mining a Corpus of Job Advertisements. Talk at the workshop “Strings & Structures: Computational Linguistics and Biology”. Abstract; slides.
  • January 2015: Computer-Assisted Content Analysis Using Job Advertisements as an Example. Talk at a Brown Bag Session at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Bonn (with Manuel Schandock).

2014

  • November 2014: Classification of Text Segments Using Job Advertisements as an Example. Talk at the Research Colloquium of Linguistic Information Processing (with Alena Geduldig). Slides.
  • June 2014: Interview on the Voynich Manuscript. Podcast appearance on Holger Klein’s WRINT – Zum Thema, episode WR296.

2012

  • November 2012: Processing and Classifying Internet Texts with Tesla. Poster presentation at empiricom 2012, Aachen (with Marcos Zampieri).
  • August 2012: Automatic Identification of Patterns in Internet Language. Contribution to the workshop “Automatic Processing of Non-Standard Data Sources in Corpus-Based Research”, Cologne (with Marcos Zampieri and Stephan Schwiebert).
  • June 2012: Tesla – A Laboratory for Computational Linguists. Talk at TaCoS 2012, Trier (with Stephan Schwiebert). Abstract.
  • May 2012: The Tesla Platform. Poster presentation and system demonstration at the TextGrid Summit 2012, Darmstadt (with Stephan Schwiebert). Poster.
  • March 2012: Secret Scripts and Codebreaking. Contribution to Cologne Children’s University 2012. Abstract; slides; addendum.
  • February 2012: The Tesla Laboratory Research Environment. System presentation at the TextGrid User Meeting, Darmstadt (with Stephan Schwiebert).

2011–2004 (pre-PHd)

  • December 2011: Reproducibility, Method Transfer, Answer Machines. Doctoral defense for the award of the doctoral degree, Faculty of Arts, University of Cologne. Theses.
  • February 2011: Tesla – A Platform for Cooperative, Experimental Text Processing. Poster presentation and system demonstration at the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), Göttingen (with Stephan Schwiebert). Poster.
  • October 2010: Tesla – A Framework for Component-Based Text Processing. System presentation at Fraunhofer IAIS (with Stephan Schwiebert).
  • November 2009: Working in the Text Laboratory. Talk at the opening event of the PC pools Research-Based Learning & Guided Learning.
  • July 2008: Classification of Text Processing Components: The Tesla Role System. Talk at the GfKl Annual Conference 2008, Hamburg (with Stephan Schwiebert).
  • April 2008: One – Two – Many: Counting in Different Languages. Contribution to Cologne Children’s University 2008 (with Theresa Hanske). Abstract.
  • April 2007: Tesla – The Text Engineering Software Laboratory. System demonstration at the GLDV Spring Conference 2007, Tübingen (with Stephan Schwiebert).
  • March 2007: Tesla – A Laboratory for Computational Linguists. Poster presentation and system demonstration at the DGfS Annual Conference 2007, Siegen (with Stephan Schwiebert).
  • April 2005: Fusion of Annotation and Preprocessing as an Approach to the Raw Text Problem. Talk at the GLDV Spring Conference 2005, Bonn (with Christoph Benden).
  • February 2005: Annotation Included: Machine-Based Annotation of Linguistic Data. Poster presentation and system demonstration of the software SPre at the DGfS Annual Conference 2005, Cologne (with Christoph Benden).
  • September 2004: Preprocessing with Side Effects: Dynamic Annotation. Poster presentation and system demonstration of the software XPre at KONVENS 2004, Vienna.

Fellowships

Other Stuff

  • Suizid und Medienkonsum (seminar paper). Has surprisingly been quoted, thus downloadable here (Published under my birth name Jürgen Hühn).
  • Auxiliarkonstruktionen und maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (master's thesis). Ms., Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung, Institut für Linguistik, Universität zu Köln. Full Version (pdf), Abstract (pdf)

Contact

Mail: @

Office: Universitätsstraße 22 - 1st floor - room 1.01

Phone: 0221-470-4430

Consultation Hour: Monday, 3 - 4 p.m. (Please contact me in advance via email)

Responsibilities:

  • Course Guidance Informationsverarbeitung BA
  • Course Guidance Informationsverarbeitung MA
  • Course Guidance Linguistik - Computerlinguistik MA
  • Module Handbooks Informationsverarbeitung BA/MA
  • Course Schedule Informationsverarbeitung/Linguistik-Computerlinguistik

Links: