The Flow: From Deep-Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities Creating, Evaluating, and Critiquing Workflows for Historical Corpora

• Applicants: Dr. Angela Huang; Professorin Dr. Silke Schwandt
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 510867704

At the moment, clear-cut workflows and ready-made tools for the implementation of text recognition approaches and methods derived from natural language processing are only available to scholars with in-depth knowledge of information sciences and the ability to code. This problem gets even accentuated, when focusing on pre-modern scripts and non-western languages, where scholars need a working understanding of the language and knowledge about the technology used. This project will address this issue by developing digital workflows that build on available technologies, leading to new means of working with historical sources. In the past decade, machine-learning approaches have been made available that allow for the processing of text in completely new ways. Due to the opacity and complexity of these technologies, however, we see their impact only at the margins of the humanities. With our project, we will further the wider adoption and critical use of machine-learning technologies in the humanities, adopting them to operationalize theoretical perspectives and evaluating the technologies with questions of history and Islamic studies in mind focusing on legal and administrative corpora. Legal and administrative sources from the 13-15th centuries in England, the 14th-17th centuries in the northern European Hanse area, from the 16-18th centuries in Switzerland and the 19th century in Ethiopia will be analyzed within a praxeological and institutional framework. Research questions in this area profit from the development of digital workflows in particular because of their focus on the analysis of societal processes, of how law has been practiced and how it affected aspects of everyday life. These processes are usually implicitly present in the relevant documents and this makes them hard to detect. Workflows such as the one in this project address this problem and help to make the invisible visible. We will therefore be able to analyze the respective legal practices of each period and place, refine our understanding of the stabilization as well as the changes in legal practices, and even generate insights in the social life of communities that would otherwise be hard to depict.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Tobias Hodel; Professorin Dr. Serena Tolino