The best way to get in touch with me is via email scharloth[]waseda.jp.
My public key for encryption can be found here.
My office is located in building 11 on the 14th floor, room number 1448.
My mailing address is:
Waseda University
School of International Liberal Studies
1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050
Japan
I use Mastodon as my social network of choice. My handle is @josch@chaos.social.
As head of my faculty's German program I run an Instagram account (unfortunately).
I'm a co-founder of the Waseda Game Lab.
I'm co-host of the Tuwort-Podcast, a monthly broadcast in German on latest research in linguistics.
I'm a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
The magazine "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" publishes a sample chapter from my book "Hässliche Wörter". The chapter “With scientific chatterboxes into expertocracy” is now freely available on the website!
The first workshop of the Waseda Game Lab "Video Games — Rules, Play & Culture" will be held on July 11, 2024, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Waseda University, Main Campus, Building 7, Room 7-209.
Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, and Joachim Scharloth will be presenting their latest research.
Together with Bryan Hikari Hartzheim I have founded the Waseda Game Lab. The Game Lab is a platform for all game-related activities: It hosts workshops and talks, coordinates teaching and training and serves as a host for international game studies scholars. Faculty and students across the university are invited to attend events.
I study language in political discourse. For example, I have examined interpretations of the mask in different political camps during the pandemic and the meaning and function of the term “woke” in political debates in Germany.
I am particularly interested in communication at the political fringes. I regularly publish on the language of populism and the New Right, which are particularly important for the political situation in Germany at the moment. This also applies to conspiracy theories which I investigated with the example of Holocaust denial. I am particularly interested in radicalization processes, which I model as processes of semantic folding from a linguistic perspective.
Because of their significance for political and cultural change, I work intensively on social movements. I was scientist in charge of the EU-funded project “European Protest Movements Since the Cold War” and author and editor of several books on the 1968 movement and am co-editor of the book series “Protest, Culture & Society” at Berghahn Books.
During my time as a professor of applied linguistics at TU Dresden, the PEGIDA movement formed in the Saxon capital. This motivated me to look into the forms and functions of derogatory speech. As a member of an interdisciplinary research group, we succeeded in establishing the Collaborative Research Center “Invectivity”, funded by the German Science Foundation.
In my research, I examined right-wing online media and social media comments for forms and functions of hate speech, resulting in the monograph "Hässliche Wörter".
Together with my colleagues Saburo Okamura and Willi Lange, I have developed data-driven methods for computing a basic vocabulary of German. As part of several JSPS-funded projects, we have created a basic vocabulary on the basis of very large corpora and described it lexicographically, made network structures within the basic vocabulary visible that facilitate the learning of vocabulary, and finally analyzed and ranked the vocabulary in its use in speech acts.
The result is the first basic vocabulary of German to be published under a free license (CCBYNC).
During the pandemic, I started working on the development of computer games for foreign language learners. What was initially intended as a ludic pastime quickly turned out to be an occupation that can only be successfully mastered on the basis of a thorough scientific study. For this reason, I am working intensively on the development of a best practice for learning games based on audiovisual metaphors. On the other hand, empirical research into the effects of games is an important concern for me.
I also try to combine research and teaching in this area. In my course “Game-Based Language Learning: From Theory to Practice”, I develop an educational game together with students.
In the history of language, I looked at how discourses about linguistic norms are shaped by normative ideas about culture and society. Using language ideologies of the 18th century, I have examined how ideas of purity (purism), authenticity and history (perfectibility, circular images of history) were used to reject linguistic forms or make them part of standard German.
In addition, my research focuses on historical pragmatics, i.e. the reconstruction of communicative practices. Here I am particularly interested in how conventional communicative practices are disrupted and changed and how new ones emerge, because this can contribute to changing society. I investigated this using the example of the 1968 movement.
I also analyzed the development of the genre of the picture postcard in the 20th and 21st centuries with colleagues from the University of Zurich as part of a project funded by the German Science Foundation and the Swiss Science Foundation.
I am the co-editor of the publication series Protest, Culture and Society with Berghahn Books (together with Kathrin Fahlenbrach & Martin Klimke).
The book series already comprises more than 30 volumes.
Learning Objective: Learn the grammatical gender of German nouns based on derivational morphemes.
Narrative: Players control a character that wants to cross a river. The river is made up of multiple horizontal rows formed by planks, each labeled with a word. These rows move in opposite directions relative to their neighboring rows.
Gameplay: By stepping onto a plank in the first row, players decide the gender of the noun on the plank. From this point onward, only planks with nouns of the same gender can be stepped on; otherwise, the character dies. If players fail to switch rows before the plank they are standing on moves out of the visible play area, the character dies.
Game Components and Mechanics: The movement of the planks creates time pressure. For each successful crossing of the river, players receive different scores depending on the choice of gender, incentivizing players to choose neuter even though it makes crossing harder, because neuter words are less frequent. The nouns are randomly selected from a large pool and placed in random order. To maintain motivation, the algorithm ensures that crossing is always possible.
Levels: The game includes only words whose endings strongly correlate with a particular grammatical gender. The game is divided into 17 levels, grouped into four sets. In each level, only words with a limited number of endings appear. In the first two levels of each set, nouns with two to three different endings are used. To draw attention specifically to the relevance of endings, the third level in a set consists of machine-generated fantasy words (e.g., "Drinnichtkeit," "Unimismus," "Extradieloge"). The fourth level uses all the nouns from the first two levels. In the 17th and final level, all nouns from the previous levels are used.
Link: Grogger based on endings, Basic version with A1 vocabulary
Learning Objective: Practice chunks necessary to reach certain communicative goals.
Narrative: Players control Taru-san, a salaryman at a Japanese company who has to do business with a German company. He wants to outperform his colleague George Monchichi and his eternal foe is Saru-san.
Gameplay: The player swings from vine to vine which are represented as pendulums with phrases and in doing so creates meaningful sentences. There are several paths through the thicket of vines. However, there are grammatical and content-related restraints to what can be combined. A coherent text is created by swinging from one liana to another until the end. Monkeys occupy vines and limit the freedom of the player. The player competes with a slow NPC (explorative mode) or an adaptive and aggressive agent (chase mode).
Game Components and Mechanics: Players click on the hanger of a pendulum to make Taru-san cling to it. Other monkeys must be avoided and change their vine randomly from time to time.
Levels: No levels, but different tasks.
Link: Tarus-san the Fearless
Learning Objective: Deepen vocabulary knowledge by activating knowledge of semantic relations.
Narrative: –
Gameplay: Players must identify the word in a group of four horizontally aligned words (moving vertically down the screen) that is least semantically related to the other three. If the correct word is identified, the row disappears once it reaches the bottom of the screen; otherwise, the row remains and shortens the available space for the subsequent rows. The game ends when the game area becomes too small due to the remaining rows.
Game Components and Mechanics: The word rows are chosen so that they exhibit different types of semantic relations. The sets of four words are randomly selected from a large pool. The vertical movement of the word rows creates time pressure, which increases as the game progresses. Correct word selection earns points. Feedback on mistakes is immediate, as the row remains in the player’s view. The correct solution is shown at the end of the game.
Levels: The game consists of five levels. In each level, three or four of the words are related by different semantic relationships.
- Level 1: three synonyms and one antonym
- Level 2: two words are hyponyms of a hypernym; the fourth word is a related word
- Level 3: three words are co-hyponyms; the fourth word is a related word
- Level 4: two words are meronyms of a holonym; the fourth word is a related word
- Level 5: three words belong to one category, the fourth to a related category
Link: OffTopic based on semantic relations, Basic version without semantic relations
E-Teaching Award, Waseda University, Tokyo (02/2022)
Teaching Award of University of Technology Dresden for the interdisciplinary course "Risk Narratives" (10/2016)
Visiting Professor, Heidelberg University, Excellence Program "Expanding Internationality", Department of German (2020-2023)
Mercator-Fellow, Special Research Area "Transformations of the Popular", University of Siegen, Germany (10/2022-12/2022)
Visiting professor at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Department of Modern and Classical Languages (10/2014)
Visiting professor at the University of Zurich, Department of German (9/2009 - 7/2010)
JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (10/2006 - 4/2007)
ERASMUS Lecturer University of Linkoeping, Sweden (9/2005)
Scholarship from the German Science Foundation, Graduate School "Dynamics of Non-Standard Varieties" at the Universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim (8/1998 - 8/2001)