The Project identified significant new and expanded functions of poetry in the digital age. It appears more and more in social and political contexts, as the PI and sociologist Gestring show: wall poems, audio walks, and poetry installations in public spaces negotiate issues of urban politics, gentrification, and topics such as social inequality. Moreover, poetry reflects the digitalization of society and the effects of AI and language processing, as Keylin studied on the examples of digital oral poetry. PoetryDA further investigated the role of poetry in such diverse contexts as disability advocacy (Wolff), Anthropocene studies (Schmidt) or social media activism (Korecka).
PoetryDA has introduced new tools for analyzing poetry beyond the traditional book format. These include, e.g. the methods of film analysis, multimodal analysis, and performance analysis. The Project employed qualitative methods like research interviews, media ethnography and netnography. Such methods were used to, for example, ask poets about their use of digital sound technologies (Matter) or to investigate participatory practices such as commenting and sharing poetry on social media platforms (Keylin, Korecka).
The key research findings are systematized in “Poetry in the Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Handbook” (2025), edited by Benthien, Keylin, and Wehmeier. The Handbook brings together research questions, approaches, topics, and methods from the Project team as well as its broad scientific network. Its four parts (a) adapt established concepts of poetry theory, (b) reflect on new genres and formats of poetry, (c) present interdisciplinary methodologies and new fields of research, and (d) address current debates in research.
The project has established the peer-reviewed open-access book series “Poetry in the Digital Age,” edited by the PI that introduces novel research objects, theories, and methods. To date, two monographs by the PoetryDA team have been published in the series, with seven more to appear in 2026/27. All deal with new research topics using novel interdisciplinary approaches.
In addition, each of the three Sub-Projects published an anthology on its subject area and Schmidt compiled a further volume addressing the entanglements between the human, technological, and natural spheres in the 21st century in poetry. The series showcases not only the research results of the Project but also external volumes that bring PoetryDA into dialog with international poetry scholarship (manuscripts from Norway, Sweden, France, and Estonia have been acquired so far).
PoetryDA has developed three forms of knowledge transfer: (a) the public event series “Poetry Debates” that initiated discussions about poetry in the digital era; (b) the curation of the Project’s Instagram profile by a poet twice a year; (c) a series of micro videos on the question “Why Poetry?” on Instagram.
