Marie-Luis Merten is assistant professor for Communicating Digitalized Spaces at the German Department of the University of Zurich. As a DSI professor, she conducts research on forms, functions and developments in linguistic online communication. After studying linguistics, Merten received her doctorate in 2016 with a thesis on historical grammar change at the University of Paderborn. She then worked as a senior researcher (linguistics) in the DFG-funded Digital Humanities project InterGramm, a corpus linguistic project on the linguistic development of Middle Low German at the University of Paderborn, which, in close cooperation with computer scientists and computational linguists, dealt with phenomena of linguistic fuzziness and ambiguity as well as their corpus analytical consideration. In 2020 she represented the junior professorship for Historical Linguistics of German at the University of Hamburg.
Marie-Luis Merten is currently working on two projects that focus on digital forms of communication: In cooperation with researchers from the Universities of Vienna and Augsburg, she is investigating these digital cultural artifacts in their complex meaning and social-discursive function, with particular interest in memes in political discourses. On the other hand, she focuses on digital commentary on the Internet, especially on linguistic activity in the commentary section of online news sites. It examines patterns of language use as routines of digital positioning.