Intellectual History and the Digital Humanities: Prospects and Challenges

DHN2020 Workshop (Riga and Online, 2020) - Tuesday 20 October, 13:30-17:00 EET

Contact persons:

Benjamin Martin, Uppsala University, Department of History of Science and Ideas (benjamin.martin@idehist.uu.se)

Mark J. Hill, Helsinki University, Department of Digital Humanities (mark.hill@helsinki.fi)

Update, 20 Oct: It is still possible to sign up; please contact the organizers via email!

Workshop Description

A growing number of historians are exploring ways of bringing digital methods to bear on questions of intellectual history, and such methods do seem to hold real promise for the field. At the same time, these exploratory efforts raise complex questions. How can essentially quantitative methods be made useful for the qualitative questions posed by historians of science and ideas? To what degree can or should intellectual historians simply adopt methods developed for the study of literature, or cultural sociology, or political theory? How should historians make use of and communicate findings made by algorithms that few readers (or fellow historians) understand? What exactly is gained by using DH for the study of intellectual history, and what risks getting lost? What models exist for collaboration between intellectual historians and data scientists, and how can these be improved?

In this workshop, we bring together an international group of historians actively engaged with these questions for a half-day of presentations, discussion and debate, focusing on four themes:

1. (Digital) History of Concepts: How are digital methods changing conceptual history?

2. Networking Intellectual History: Digital network analysis for historians of science and ideas

3. What Can DH Do for Intellectual History (and Vice Versa)?: A panel discussion

4. How To Do It: Models of collaboration between intellectual historians and data scientists

Discussions of the use of digital methods in a particular humanistic field often become highly technical, with a focus on a particular practical problem or programming-related solution. In this workshop, by contrast, we will combine short presentations on on-going research with ample discussion, in a round-table format, designed to address broader issues about the significance and value of digital methods for the way intellectual historians pursue their field’s most important goals.

We believe that intellectual history’s encounter with DH has lessons of relevance to a wide range of scholars and DH practitioners outside of the discipline. The interdisciplinary origins of the field of intellectual history, and its overlapping interests with those of literary scholars, political theorists, philosophers, and sociologists of culture, mean that methodological (and practical) insights from intellectual history’s application of digital methods could make a substantial contribution to the future development of the digital humanities. The goal of our workshop is to begin to collect these insights. We aim to make contributions from this event available to a wide readership through a workshop website and, if circumstances permit, publication in a relevant journal.

Format

The format of the workshop is as follows. After a brief welcome and introduction, the first two sessions will provide set of papers on specific digital approaches relevant to intellectual history. Each of these includes three 10-minute presentations, followed by a 15-minute discussion open to members of the audience. Session 3 and 4 will be round-tables. The first of these aims to allow reflection on the previous papers, as well as thinking about how these methods could be taken further by asking “What can digital humanities do for intellectual history?”. The final round-table will focus more closely on the practicalities of DH/IH work and collaboration.

In what follows we present these four themes in more detail, and outline the workshop program.

1. (Digital) History of Concepts: How are digital methods changing conceptual history?

• Moderator: Benjamin Martin, Uppsala University
• Jani Marjanen (University of Helsinki), “The case for quantitative conceptual history”
• Ewan Jones (Cambridge University), “Data Mining the Eighteenth Century”

Conceptual history–the study of the way concepts are used and gain meaning in specific historical contexts–has experienced a renaissance of late. What role does DH have to play in the field’s future? Is DH more or less useful for the field’s two main schools (the Bielefeld school of Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge school associated with Quentin Skinner)? How might methodological questions for historians of concepts be addressed by thinking about them through the lens of quantitative, digital methodologies? How are questions of method for conceptual historians themselves altered by scholars’ encounter with the formalized, quantitative thinking that digital approaches demand?

2. Networking Intellectual History: Digital network analysis for historians of science and ideas

• Moderator: Ylva Söderfeldt, Uppsala University
• Mark Hill (Helsinki University), “Intellectual Network Analysis”
• Paul Nulty (University College Dublin), “Semantic networks for comparative analysis of essentially contested concepts”

Key to practitioners of intellectual history is the importance of the context which informed a particular historical actor or idea. The trope that ideas do not emerge in isolation is taken as a truism which requires both detailed engagement with texts, and thorough examinations of context. For the most part, however, methodologically rigorous studies of the networks which actors or ideas were a part of have not been a part of intellectual history (although there are exceptions: see Edmondson and Edelstein’s 2019 Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters). This panel offers some reflections on the ways in which various forms of network analysis can be used to broaden contextual awareness, and thus deepen textual analysis.

3. What Can DH Do for Intellectual History (and Vice Versa)?: A panel discussion

• Panelists: Joris van Eijnatten, Utrecht University; Ylva Söderfeldt, Uppsala University; Mats Fridlund, Gothenburg University
• Moderator: Benjamin Martin, Uppsala University

By now, all humanistic fields are affected by the digital revolution, but they are not all affected in the same way. What are the particular features of intellectual history’s encounter with digital sources, digital methods, and the emerging theories, practices, and communities of the digital humanities? How can the research practices of the digital humanities address the existing research agendas of intellectual historians? To what degree is DH stimulating the development of new agendas? In short, what good is DH for intellectual history? What, in turn, do intellectual historians have to offer the broader DH community? In this round-table discussion, participants will address these issues by discussing the research questions and theoretical concerns that first led them to explore digital methods, and by sharing some of the substantial intellectual challenges that their application of these methods has implied.

4. How To Do It: Models of Collaboration between Intellectual Historians and Data Scientists

• Panelists: Ewan Jones, Cambridge University; Paul Nulty, University College Dublin; Ruben Ros, Utrecht University; Mikko Tolonen, University of Helsinki
• Moderator: Mark Hill, University of Helsinki

Few intellectual historians possess the technical know-how to conduct DH research on their own. What models exist for their collaboration with programmers, systems developers, and data scientists? Does every historian need to start from scratch, or is a consensus emerging on “best practices” for such collaboration? Moving beyond the question “Do intellectual historians need to be able to code?”, this panel will invite participants to share their own experiences of various models of collaboration, discuss the advantages and difficulties of these, and propose alternatives for the future.

Workshop schedule

13:30-13:35 Welcome, introductions

13:35-14:15 Panel 1: (Digital) History of Concepts: How are digital methods changing conceptual history?

14:20-15:00 Panel 2: Networking Intellectual History: Digital network analysis for historians of science and ideas

15:00-15:20 Coffee break

15:20-16:00 Panel 3: What Can DH Do for Intellectual History (and Vice Versa)?: An introductory panel discussion

16:05-16:45 Panel 4: How To Do It: Models of Collaboration between Intellectual Historians and Data Scientists

16:45-17:00 Concluding discussion