Field of Focus III - Digital Humanities Annotation of moralizing practices

Project lead: Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder und Dr. Maria Becker

Contact: Dr. Maria Becker

As part of the project "Annotation of Moralizing Practices", we are creating a dataset of texts from different domains in which speech acts of moralizing are annotated.

By moralizing speech acts, we mean discourse-strategic procedures in which moral terms confine narrowly the description of contentious issues and required actions. Vocabulary referring to moral values (such as “freedom,” "security," or "credibility") is often used to enforce demands that need no further justification. This can be seen, for example, in the following sentence: “We should establish an organization to advance peace in the world and to fight violence in war zones.”

In the future, the dataset resulting from this project will function as an automated research on the phenomenon of moralization – a diffuse everyday concept that has the potential to operationalize as a term of descriptive linguistics.