“Fräulein vom Amt”: Exploring the history of communication in VR
How and what we communicate always depends on the social and historical environment. Virtual reality can be used to recreate past communication situations. Experience what the “Fräulein vom Amt” did and why it disappeared from society and language usage.
Most of us only know telephone exchange from old pictures and movies: rows of women with headphones sitting at small desks plugging telephone connections. At Scientifica, you can immerse yourself in the virtual reality of a historic telephone operator and slip into the role of the “Fräulein vom Amt”. Using the example of the term “Fräulein” (Miss), we will present to you the extent to which cultural and social change goes hand in hand with linguistic change. Our stand will thus shed light on the connection between communication, gender and the workplace as well as its historical change. We would like to invite you to join us in thinking about and discussing these developments in the present and the future.
In our research and teaching, we are focused on the interrelations between society, language use, and communication, which gives our chair a cultural linguistics profile. We examine changes in the use and meaning of communicative patterns and practices and relate them to their context-specific characteristics. We are interested in the history of language and communication as well as in current trends in the German-speaking areas. Our approach to research is empirical, combining digital methods with philological textual work. A critical examination of digital methods is very important and sometimes leads to new ways of using them, for example in the project “Virtual Telephone Exchange”. There, we are exploring the extent to which virtual reality can serve as a tool for a historical research interested in the history of objects and senses.
