Informationsystem Graffiti in Germany

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo; Professorin Dr. Gudrun Oevel; Professor Dr. Martin Papenbrock; Professorin Dr. Doris Tophinke
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Art History
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289287267

The project Graffiti in Germany is an interdisciplinary cooperation of the fields of linguistics and art history. Along with this project, a database containing pictures provided by the police is planned to document German graffiti of up to 20 years. The quality of the pictures regarding dating, localization and identification of the graffiti is considerably high; nonetheless, those data are usually being deleted after only a few years. By establishing the database, this inventory of pictures can be preserved and made available for scientific research permanently. The base stock of the project currently consists of about 100,000 photos originating from police archives in Cologne, Mannheim and Munich. The photos were taken between 1998 and 2013. Additionally, the database will contain 5,400 slides from the Sammlung Kreuzer (Kreuzer Collection), which date back to 1984 and 1985 and are part of the collection of the Stadtarchiv München (municipal archives of the City of Munich). Along with the project, further data are to be assembled coming from police corpora as well as museums and private collections. This acquisition aims at establishing a nationwide center for the documentation of graffiti in Germany. The benefits of this documentation are twofold. It is to capture a widespread and yet ephemeral subcultural form in a structuralized manner and at the same time it is to make it accessible for scientific research sustainably. Technical support is supplied by the Zentrum für Informations- und Medientechnologien (IMT) (Information and Media Technologies Centre (IMT)) at the University of Paderborn, which provides for scientific usage opportunities and for the database maintenance to be sustainable beyond the period of application/funding. The pilot phase covers 36 months. Within this time span, the data acquired from the Mannheim police (about 32,000 negatives and about 18,000 picture files) and from the Stadtarchiv München (Sammlung Kreuzer, about 5.400 slides) are to be recorded and processed systematically. From a research perspective, the corpus from the Mannheim police is particularly valuable, regarding both size and documented period. Standards for digital recording and systematization of graffiti are being developed. In the context of several dissertation projects emerging alongside the project, initial scientific analyses of the recorded material will be made within both a linguistic and a fine arts approach. For the first time it will be possible to take on a scientific perspective on developments and changes of graffiti over a longer period of time based on extensive and high quality recorded research data. This allows for the study of their (written) language specifics, their pictorial aesthetics and their social function as a marker of an urban communication type and indicator of urban conflict zones.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)