S Texts as data - knowledge production in the (digital) humanities and social sciences (SozThe, Teil II) (080213-WS 22/23)

As students and scholars of the social sciences and the humanities we are constantly engaging with texts of all kinds. In our scientific practice, texts are so ubiquitous that we rarely even think about them as such. We think about their content or even their form, but we rarely question the role they play in the knowledge production process.

With the advent of digital research methods in the humanities and the social sciences these knowledge production processes have recently undergone a remarkable shift. Texts are now often considered to be a form of data that can be analyzed by using empirical methods previously employed in the natural sciences and in computer science. This has been perceived as both a threat to more traditional hermeneutic methods and as a boost to the scientificity of text-based empirical research.

At the same time, it is also a great opportunity to critically (re)examine texts as a specific kind of data and as an object of research, by looking more closely at how information is encoded in (digital) texts and how digital and other methods of research create scientific knowledge by analyzing texts and (re)producing these themselves.

In this class you will be able to

-          discover key theoretical perspectives on texts and digital scholarship.

-          examine different kinds of digital research methods related to texts.

-          develop your own assessment of the impact of digital methods on the social sciences and the humanities.

-          focus on those aspects of the topic that you are most interested in and discuss them with your peers.

Disclaimer: The seminar will be held in English, unless all participants prefer it to be held in German instead. The obligatory reading will therefore be English texts, but there will be optional reading in German as well.