We invite you to an open seminar on “Digital Analysis and Operationalization in Literary-Historical Research”. The seminar aims to explore and reflect on how we approach operationalization in digital research, how we interpret results from digital analysis of textual materials and how these might have consequences for our original research question, design and the relevance of our empirical data.

Programme

• Heidi Leclaire-Karlsen, University of Oslo: Making the Uncountable Countable – and the digital conceptual
• Jens Bjerring-Hansen, University of Copenhagen: Scaling up, adding layers, dealing with complexity. The operationalization of digital evidence in the study of literature
• Roel Smeets, Radboud University: Novel Perspectives: Dutch Fiction and Gender Equality, 1870-present

This HISTAC seminar explores operationalization in digital research of historical text. It aims to explore how digital tools can be used thoughtfully and rigorously in the humanities by discussing problems related to design strategies and troubleshooting the connection between research questions, data and results when working with large text corpora and distant reading. The seminar gathers researchers with domain expertise from the literary-historical field who work directly with large historical textual datasets. They will showcase on-going work and open a discussion on the possibilities in digital analysis tailored to the field’s specific needs.

Speakers

Heidi Leclaire-Karlsen, University of Oslo: Making the Uncountable Countable – and the digital conceptual
This talk explores how to identify discourse when it is defined, not by statistical signifiers, but by Foucauldian statements (énoncés). I will highlight methodological hurdles of operationalizing Foucauldian discourse analysis within large-scale digital corpora, and then consider how the rapid rise of large language models might reshape such analyses, drawing on examples from my research on women’s “place” in 19th-century society, and the theories I developed in the study “Foucault’s archeological discourse analysis with digital methodology”. I will also discuss how the operationalization challenge can be fruitfully addressed as part of a broader effort to conceptualize the technological reality we all inhabit. This digital epistemology also calls for a twist on the operationalization challenge: we need more humanities research on how algorithms operate. We must not only investigate the methodological-ethical questions—such as how biases can reproduce social discrimination when employing AI in our research—but also examine the broader philosophical implications of how algorithms shape human agency. For example, what characterizes algorithms that may threaten our free will, as opposed to those that may spark creativity and foster increased autonomy? Finally, I discuss how interdisciplinary partnerships between humanities scholars and technologists can help us navigate such questions.

Jens Bjerring-Hansen, University of Copenhagen. Scaling up, adding layers, dealing with complexity. The operationalization of digital evidence in the study of literature
In this presentation, I'll provide illustrations of how my colleagues and I have combined literary historical inquiry with digital methodologies in various ways. I'll pay special attention to our ambition – and challenges – to synthesize textual, paratextual, and contextual evidence in our research on 19th-century Scandinavian literature, with the goal of achieving large-scale robustness.”

Roel Smeets, Radboud University: Novel Perspectives: Dutch Fiction and Gender Equality, 1870-present
Is fiction a mirror of society? Or do stories produce new realities? This project examines how Dutch novels from the late 19th century to the present imagined and perhaps even fostered the emancipation of women in society. It combines two aspects that are often studied in isolation: (1) literary descriptions of gender across time and (2) the changing position of women in modern Dutch society. Using computer-driven text-analyses of large-scale corpora, this project aims to reveal the extent to which fiction precedes or follows shifts in society.

The seminar is open to all interested but please sign up.

Kontaktinformationer: Ea Lindhardt Overgaard (elt@cc.au.dk) og Maria Nørby Pedersen (manp@cc.au.dk).