This project investigates how residents and visitors in Brooklyn, New York engage in dynamic discursive place-making, focusing on the ways they construct and negotiate their diverse and evolving identities in an urban setting marked by rapid demographic and cultural shifts. Discursive place-making and semiotic meaning-making are interconnected processes that shape both the experience of and interaction with urban environments. The transformation of space into place involves negotiating the diverse voices, signs, symbols and interests converging within the city (Busse 2019, 2021, 2022; Cresswell 2015; Busse & Warnke 2022).

The heiURBAN corpus is compiled by collecting and organizing language data from various modalities such as text, speech, image, and video within one digital interface.  Our aim is to show how individuals in Brooklyn encode cultural, social, and geographic meanings into both verbal narratives and digital markers in areas undergoing gentrification.

• To outline the historical and contemporary patterns of discursive variational place-making in designated neighborhoods
• To illustrate, on the basis of the model of urbanity  (Busse and Warnke 2015), how multi-modal discursive patterns construe Brooklyn as a brand
• To illustrate a global dimension of these practices

The project is currently being conducted at the chair of diachronic linguistics at the University of Cologne. The team members are:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Beatrix Busse
Post-Doc.: Dr. Nina Dumrukcic
Student Assistants: Alessia Carrone, Sydney Pipkin

Previous Team Members: Kellie Goncalves, Jennifer Smith, Ingo Kleiber, Aline Schmidt, Kristin Berberich, Jasna Dzanic