Methodology and Reflection: Linguistic Discourse Historiography as Digitally Supported Group Research (Methodological Cross-Sectional Project)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Marcus Müller
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441142207

Digital discourse analysis requires procedures in which manual-hermeneutic and algorithmic procedures mutually drive the process of knowledge. From a methodological point of view, the research group “Controversial Discourses. Language History as Contemporary History since 1990” sees itself in its entirety as a laboratory of collaborative methods of an understanding discourse history. The aim is to develop a workflow for digital analyses of interpretative categories that meets the quality standards and theoretical framework of discourse analysis. This raises a number of procedural questions that are still unresolved in the field, concerning on the one hand the quality standards of pragmatic annotation, e.g. the relationship between segmentation, categorisation and depth of interpretation in annotation, and on the other hand the double operationalisation step from the research question to the annotation scheme to pattern recognition. The aim of sub-project 7 is to evaluate, reflect on and incrementally optimise the methods of the research group and their integration into a collaborative workflow. This is pursued by means of the central research question: How can processes of collaborative annotation be optimised and appropriate measurement methods of their quality be developed? To this end, a systematic study on “Annotation as a method of discourse linguistics” will be carried out. This will bring together and systematise the methodological findings of the research group and conduct experiments on the use of classifiers based on artificial neural networks. Because of this reflexive character and the exclusive methodological orientation, the sub-project will not collect its own research data, but will work incrementally with the emerging research data of the other sub-projects. A decisive advantage of this setting is that these procedural-methodological questions can be worked on with a group in which profound expertise is available for their discourse-theoretical framing as well as all relevant qualitative and quantitative methods.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5182: Controversial discourses: Language history as contemporary history since 1990
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Noah Bubenhofer; Professorin Dr. Juliane Schröter