Lecture by Michael Piotrowski (UNIL Lausanne) on „Epistemological Issues in Digital Humanities“:
So far, digital humanities has largely contented itself with borrowing methods from other fields and has developed little methodology of its own. The almost exclusive focus on methods and tools represents a major obstacle towards the construction of computational models that could help us to obtain new insights into humanities research questions rather than just automate primarily quantitative processing.
The recently started SNSF-funded project “Towards Computational Historiographical Modeling: Corpora and Concepts” therefore focuses on two issues, identified as particularly pressing, and which together constitute a critical research gap:
1. Regardless of the application domain, digital humanities research tends to rely heavily on corpora, i.e., curated collections of texts, images, music, or other types of data. However, the epistemological implications have so far been largely ignored. We propose to consider corpora as phenomenotechnical devices (Bachelard), like scientific instruments: corpora are, on the one hand, models of the phenomenon under study; on the other hand, the phenomenon is constructed through the corpus.
2. Models of complex phenomena generally rely heavily on numerous concepts, e.g., (in history) textuality, feudalism, state, class, etc. Such concepts are effectively references to “submodels,” which serve as building blocks for larger models. Traditionally, these models were largely implicit and not formalized. This becomes a serious epistemological problem in digital humanities, because these concepts are the foundation for selecting data and building corpora. The lack of a formalization of these concepts is currently a major weakness of computational research in the humanities: while the quantitative computational analyses are highly formalized, their qualitative foundations are shaky.
In his talk, Michael Piotrowski (UNIL Lausanne) discusses some of the background and motivations for this project and tries to situate it in the larger context of theory formation in digital humanities.
Der Fokus des DH-Kolloquiums an der BBAW liegt sowohl auf praxisnahen Themen und konkreten Anwendungsbeispielen als auch auf der kritischen Reflexion digitaler geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung.
Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt. Informationen zur Teilnahme unter: DHd-Blog