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BMBF funds interdisciplinary project D-WISE on Digital Sociological Discourse Analysis

21 January 2021, by Chris Biemann

BMBF funds D-WISE project: Digitale Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse

Digital texts and images shape contemporary conceptions of the world and are essential for discourse-analytical research approaches. These are among the central, qualitative research questions in the Humanities. Despite the constantly growing number of relevant digital and multimodal discourse sources, digital humanities (DH) methods have not yet been systematically developed for discourse-analytical access. Specifically, the consideration of multimodality and the modelling of plurality of meanings have not yet been sufficiently addressed. In order to address this research gap, D-WISE is developing new computer-aided analysis methods for the application of contextual embedding representations and a prototypical working environment as digital support for discourse analysis in sociology.

The project elaborates for which purposes, when and how to use DH methods can be usefully integrated into qualitative discourse-analytical knowledge production and develops new or adopts exiting methofs for this purpose. The epistemological reflection and further development of hermeneutical methodology in the use of (semi-)automated procedures plays an integral part here.

Central prospective innovations of this project are

  1. the provision of relevant DH methods in a unified working environment, which allows the coding work steps with open corpora and heterogeneous, multimodal data sources for users in the humanities and social sciences,
  2. the expansion of the range of methods through the development of contextualized embeddings for improved modeling of plurality of meanings and integrated processing of multimodal data, and
  3. aligning methodological and technical innovation of DH methods to the epistemological approach called Grounded Theory (GT) as an instance of a hermeneutic methodology.

Project partners: a collaboration between empirical cultural studies and language technology

The project will run for  3 years, until 2024.

Find more information on the project page (tbd).