Editing the Author

Das Bildnis des Christian Kracht

In 2013, I published "Das Bildnis des Christian Kracht", an investigation which examines the public staging of the swiss author through book covers, interviews, social media and reputation management in online entries. 

Tracking IP addresses, temporal editing patterns, and content-specific insider knowledge, I documented that entries in the Wikipedia were systematically manipulated: critical passages disappeared, controversial receptions were reframed, and literary awards moved to the foreground. The findings pointed to a proximity between these edits and Kracht's publishing environment.

The study is cited in peer-reviewed German, English, Japanese, and Brazilian literary scholarship in journals and essay collections to date.

This forensic interest in language carried into my studies at the University of Hamburg, where I applied corpus-linguistic and statistical methods to trace the stylistic fingerprints of classical and contemporary authors.

[→ Study: Das Bildnis des Christian Kracht: Wie sich der Autor Christian Kracht im Internet und im Beiwerk von Büchern selbst inszeniert, Diplomica Verlag 2014 · DNB: https://d-nb.info/1136290125]