Prof Joachim Scharloth, Dresden University of Technology

Digital History: Computing Historical Watersheds, a Linguistic Approach :: Guest-Lecture

As the digital humanities continue to boom, historians are discovering the potential of big data, computational techniques and corpus-driven methods for opening up new avenues of research. Prof Joachim Scharloth’s lecture – organised in collaboration with the German Historical Institute of London – will explore the possibilities and limitations of these new approaches at the intersection of historiography and linguistics.

The automated analysis of huge digital text collections as a method of historical research is becoming more and more popular. But along with its rising popularity, its explanatory power is coming under scrutiny. The talk will focus on how computational methods can be used for a deeper understanding of cultural change from a linguistic angle. Starting with a short introduction to the basic principles of data-driven methods, the lecture will discuss different linguistic categories which can be used as indicators for cultural change and illustrate the corpus-driven approach using empirical evidence from large German newspaper corpora (1946-2014).

Joachim Scharloth is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Dresden University of Technology. His research focuses on developing linguistic methods for automated digital text analysis; and his main publications include 1968. Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte (2011); 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-77 (with Martin Klimke, 2008).

The lecture will start at 14.00, after it there will be space for the Q&A session. Coffee will be vailable from 13.30.

Guest-lecture events are free to attend, but places are limited so please register in advance to secure your place.