Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann, M.A.

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Anglistik III - Building 23.21, Level 1, Room 66

Universitätsstrasse 1

40225 Düsseldorf

Germany

Benzenbergstrasse 39

40219 Düsseldorf

Germany

Phone (office): +49 211 81-15927

Email: cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

(see my homepage for social media contact information)

Doctoral candidate in English Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany

Thesis title: The Corporate Blog as an Emerging Genre of Computer-Mediated Communication: Features, Constraints, Discourse Situation

Adviser: Dieter Stein

Committee: Janet Giltrow (UBC Vancouver), Roger Lüdeke (Düsseldorf)

Predicate: summa cum laude

Undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA

Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany

Magister Artium (equivalent of American Master degree) in English and Information Sciences

Grade: 1,1 (A)

A&M Junior High School, College Station (TX), USA

Abtei Gymnasium (High School), Duisburg, Germany

Erlem Elementary School, Norwich, UK

Grundschule Gartenstrasse (Elementary School), Duisburg, Germany

In my time as an undergrad and before enrolling as a PhD student I worked in the real world as a web applications developer for several companies and institutions. These include:

During my time as a dev I did most of my coding in PHP (i.e. a LAMP environment), although I also realized one major project in CFML (ColdFusion). In addition to MySQL, I have worked briefly with MS SQL and PostgreSQL and am still fluent in XHTML and CSS. I also have basic knowledge of JavaScript and like playing around with APIs such as Google’s GData, Flickr and Twitter. Most of my coding these days is research-related and accordingly I have adopted what I feel is the best environment for academic hacking (Linux). While I still use Perl, Python and PHP occasionally, the open source statistics package R has recently emerged as my favorite tool for most language-related coding. I also like AsciidDoc, which was used for this website.

As someone investigating texts on the Internet with computational means, I locate myself both in Internet studies and digital humanities.

I have been involved in the so-called open access movement for several years, beginning in my time as an editorial assistant for the e-journals Constructions and Language@Internet. Since managing the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference in 2008, my interest in the sociology of scholarship on the Net has grown into a research area of its own. We have previously perceived the Internet largely as a "read-only" medium, a convenient channel for transporting information, but not much more. Via simple hypertext authoring systems such as wikis and blogs and through social networks like Facebook we are increasingly communicating and documenting our lives online, be it in private or professional contexts. The Internet is no longer a space filled with documents, but one filled with people.

Scholarly communication is not unaffected by this. When a publication "lives" on the Web it should not only accessible to people around the globe, but also be interactive and mutable. The academic article as a text form is likely to change profoundly in an environment where everything can be linked, commented and bookmarked. What’s more is that models, visualizations and other multimedial elements also become interactive, a change that fundamentally upsets our conceptualization of research publications as static documents (records).

Open Access is a requirement for a future of research that is truly open and makes use of the resources at our disposal. While the existing model of academic publishing has served us well in the past, it is itself a product of its medial environment (knowledge exchange via paper), and is this likely to change in profound ways in the future.

Apart from my research and teaching, I am also involved in a project that I hope will have a lasting impact on Linguistics: eLanguage. The goal of this project, which was initiated by the Linguistic Society of America, is to house a wide range of e-journals devoted to different subfields of the discipline under a single technical and organizational umbrella. The editors of the member journals inside such a hub are fully independent, but agree on a common set of rules (peer review, a common style sheet etc). They benefit from pooling their resources, both in terms of tech support and because the content from all member journals can be centrally aggregated, increasing every single member’s visibility.

As a side-effect of my work on corporate blogs, I have developed a strong interest in using the Web as a source of language data, and in working with digital language data (corpora) in general. Blog posts, as well as data retrieved from Twitter, conveniently come with annotations (when something was posted, who wrote it, what the author considers it to be about etc) which makes them potentially interesting for sociolinguistic inquiries. This and the popularity and proliferation of blogs has sparked my interest in working with a variety of Web sources, as well as classical corpora that combine material from pre-digital genres. The notion that access to more data is better and the belief that a climate which encourages data sharing will benefit linguists everywhere strongly connects to my support for Open Access and was also the theme of a recent NSF-funded workshop on cyberlinguistics to which I was invited.

I used a blog for my 2007/2008 Introduction to English Linguistics class to provide learning materials to students. Based on this and following extensive revisions, the Dept. for English Language and Linguistics at Düsseldorf has published the Introduction to English Linguistics electronic reader, freely available under a Creative Commons license.

November 2, 2010, Osnabrück

I held this invited talk at the University of Osnabrück’s Zentrum für Promovierende (Center for Graduate Studies). It was aimed at PhD students and dealt with publishing and presenting one’s work online, touching issues such as Open Access and virtual identity/perception management from a practical perspective. <blog post with video and slides>, <just slides>

October 21, 2009, Cologne (in German)

Held in October 2009 at the University of Cologne as part of an event for Open Access Week 2009 (#oaw09). <slides>

September 10, 2009, Schloss Rauischholzhausen/Gießen, Germany (in German)

These are the slides for my presentations at the 1. Milestone Meeting of the Forschungsverbund Interactive Science, held on September 10th, 2009. The topic of my talk (in German) was Google Wave and its potential for scholarly communication. <slides>

September 4, 2009, Seattle, USA

This talk was held as part of the conference Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies at the University of Washington and was largely based on what I presented (in German) for my thesis defense earlier in 2009. Many thanks to Crispin Thurlow for organizing what I thought was an outstanding conference. I’m looking forward to more events in the series! <slides>

July 29, 2009, Leipzig, Germany

I gave this talk on interfaces between Digital Humanities and Internet Studies at the 1st European Summer School "Culture & Technology" held at the University of Leipzig. Thank you to Elizabeth Burr for inviting me and for organizing an extremely stimulating and interesting event. <slides>

June 24, 2009, Cologne, Germany

Slides of a talk given as part of the workshop "Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication", organized by Julian Newman and Esther Breuer, at the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science. <slides>

May 7, 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I had the opportunity to give this talk at the weekly colloquium of the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS) in Amsterdam. Sarah Kjellberg initiated the visit and Anne Beaulieu kindly arranged the presentation. My main focus was on publishing practices in different disciplines (generously simplified and generalized in my presentation) and on paper publishing vs. digital communication. Thank you to Anne, Paul, Nick, Ernst and everyone else who attended for the very stimulating discussion that provided me with a number of new ideas. <slides>

January 29, 2009, Düsseldorf, Germany (in German)

These are the slides used for my PhD defense in January 2009. They summarize my most central oberservations regarding the linguistic-pragmatic characteristics of weblogs (in general, not just corporate blogs). <slides>

December 11, 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany (in German)

Luka Peters invited me to present some of my findings on corporate blogging at this wiziq session of an e-learning class held at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Thanks for having me! <slides>

June 25, 2008, IBM Social Computing Group (Virtual Cue Brew Session)

This presentation was given as part of a virtual meeting organized by Catalina Danis of IBM’s Social Computing Group on the topic of Open Science and Open Research. Thanks to Wendy Kellogg, Tom Erickson and everybody else who joined in to discuss the topic and many thanks to Catalina for inviting me. <slides>

November 8, 2007, Paderborn, Germany

A presentation I gave at the University of Paderborn on corpus development and the advantages of structured web data (blogs) to gain new perspectives on style and individual differences in language use. <slides>

November 5, 2007, Leipzig, Germany

This presentation I gave at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig touched upon some of the similarities between eLanguage and the WALS project, which aims to make information on the world’s languages accessible on the Net using linked data principles. Many thanks to Martin Haspelmath for inviting me and for an immensely interesting discussion. <slides>

September 5, 2007, Munich, Germany

Another practically oriented presentation, this one held at the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) in Munich. I formulated a few general observations about the use of blogs in organizations, pointing out (among other things) that blogging is often misunderstood purely as a new method for PR and marketing, when personal knowledge management (PKM) is in fact one important way of utilizing blogs that may have far greater potential. Thanks to Robert Forkel for inviting me! <slides>

August 31, 2007, Enschede, The Netherlands

This practically-oriented presentation was held while I visited Telematica Instituut (now Novay) in August 2007 on invitation from Lilia Efimova. The discussion after the talk was very productive and I have closely integrated much of what we talked about into my thesis research. <slides>

July 27, 2007, Birmingham, UK

Held as part of the workshop on Genre and the Web, which was in turn part of the Corpus Linguistics 2007 conference. I would like to thank the three referees who reviewed my submission for their comments and suggestions. <slides>

July 12, 2007, Vancouver, Canada

I held this presentation on eLanguage and its envisioned role for linguistics at the first PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver Canada, on July 12th 2007. <slides>

June 22, 2007, Düsseldorf, Germany

This short presentation was held as part of the "Tag des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses" ("junior researchers' day") at the University of Duesseldorf on 22 June 2007. <slides>

June 5, 2007, Osnabrück, Germany

I was invited to present this methodological piece at the linguistic research colloquium of the University of Osnabrück. Thanks to Andreas Bergs for inviting me! <slides>

May 31, 2007, Düsseldorf, Germany

Presentation held as part of the research colloquium of the Department of English Language and Linguistics. <slides>

28 February 2007, Siegen, Germany

Presentation held as part of the workshop "Syntactic Variation and Emerging Genres" at the 29th annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS). <slides>

Please note: all links marked as Open Access point to freely available full papers. Those files marked as preprints represent the manuscript state of the work in question before undergoing peer review and not the final, published version. For citation purposes, please refer only to published material.

Puschmann, Cornelius (in press/2010). The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation. Svenja Hagenhoff, Dieter Hogrefe, Elmar Mittler, Matthias Schumann, Gerald Spindler & Volker Wittke (eds.): Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung, Universitätsverlag Göttingen.

Puschmann, Cornelius (in press/2010). "Thank you for thinking we could" — use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs. Heidrun Dorgeloh & Anja Wanner (eds.): Approaches to Syntactic Variation and Genre. Walter de Gruyter. <preprint>

Puschmann, Cornelius (2009). Vom Object Web zum Discourse Web. Metaphern der digitalen Kommunikation im Wandel und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Wissenschaft. LIBREAS.Library Ideas, Issue 5, Volume 2 (15). <open access>

Puschmann, Cornelius (2009). Diary or Megaphone? The pragmatic mode of weblogs. Presented at "Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies", September 3-6 2009, Seattle, WA, USA. <preprint>

Puschmann, Cornelius (2009). Lies at Wal-Mart. Style and the subversion of genre in the Life at Wal-Mart blog. Janet Giltrow & Dieter Stein (eds.): Theories of Genre and the Internet. Walter Benjamin. <preprint>

Puschmann, Cornelius and Peter Reimer (2007). DiPP and eLanguage: Two cooperative models for open access. First Monday, Volume 12 Number 10 (1 October 2007). <open access>

Bayer, Oliver et al. (2005). Evaluation of an Ontology-based Knowledge-Management-System. A Case Study of Convera RetrievalWare 8.0. Inf. Serv. Use 25.3,4 (2005): 181-195. <preprint>

Puschmann, Cornelius (2010). Pragmatics. Chapter in "Introduction to English Linguistics — a Reader". Published by the Dept. for English Language and Linguistics, University of Düsseldorf. <open access>

Puschmann, Cornelius (2005). Imagining the End. Don DeLillo’s Underworld as Counterhistory of the Cold War (unpublished M.A. Thesis, literary studies). <open access>

Apart from programming languages, I am also proficient in German (first language), English (near-native) and French (though actual speakers of French may dispute this).

Together with Khan-Duc Kuttig and Petra B. Schubert, I currently serve as co-editor of Register and Context.

In concert with our partners at the Max Planck Digital Library and conference chair Dieter Stein, I managed the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference, which took place in November 2008 in Düsseldorf. I also served as the panel chair for the section New Forms of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 in Academia.

Together with my colleagues Isabella Peters, Violeta Trkulja and Katrin Weller I organized Social Software @ Work, a workshop on uses of social software in corporate and institutional settions that took place in Düsseldorf in September of 2009. We hope to repeat the event in 2010 after receiving strong positive feedback.

I am a member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). I am also proud to serve as a member on the LSA’s committee for undergraduate programs (UPAC), and as an ex officio member on the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and the Committee for Member Services and IT (COMSIT).

A piece citing my research on corporate blogging has recently been published in RP Online (in German).

Anything on this site that is my intellectual property is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Germany License unless noted otherwise.