About
Digital texts and images shape contemporary conceptions of the world and are essential for discourse analysis research approaches; these belong to the central research strategies applied throughout the humanities. Despite the constantly growing number of relevant digital, multimodal discourse resources, digital humanities (DH) methods are thus far not systematically developed and accessible for discourse analysis approaches. Specifically, the significance of multimodality and meaning plurality modelling are yet to be sufficiently addressed. In order to address this research gap, the D-WISE project aims to develop a prototypical working environment as digital support for the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Analysis and new IT-analysis approaches for the use of context-oriented embedding representations.
D-WISE addresses for which purposes, when, and how DH methods can be meaningfully integrated into qualitative discourse analysis knowledge production, developing new or adopting existing methods for this purpose. The epistemological reflection and further development of hermeneutical methodology in the use of (semi-)automated processes plays an integral part here. Central prospective innovations of this project are (a) the provision of relevant DH methods in a unified working environment, which supports users in the humanities and social sciences throughout the coding process with open corpora and heterogeneous, multimodal data sources (e.g. text, image, video), (b) the methodological range expansion through the development of contextualized embeddings for improved meaning plurality modelling and integrated processing of multimodal data, and (c) aligning DH methods’ technical and methodological innovation to the epistemological principles of Grounded Theory as hermeneutic methodology.