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## Introduction: The Role of Computational Methods within the Humanities and Social Sciences

Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen Aarhus University udb@cc.au.dk

Morten Tannert Aarhus University mota@edu.au.dk

## 1. The aim of this special issue

The fast-rising interest in computational methods within the humanities and  social  sciences  is  largely  driven  by  the  fact  that  texts  in  the  21 st century are digitized. We digitize cultural heritage and literary classics, and  new  texts  within  mass  communication,  education,  social  media, journalism and literature are by default produced in digital formats. This development means, firstly, that it has become relatively easy to build large text corpora and, secondly, that computational  methods, in particular natural language processing (NLP), have become increasingly important in the study of everything from literature and archeology to education and  sociolinguistics. Consequently,  explicit and  detailed analysis of linguistic structure has become the central starting point of much contemporary research within the humanities and social sciences.

This new  linguistic turn obviously has implications for the individual disciplines not only in terms of the methods that are applied, but also at a more fundamental level. With new analytical approaches and research  instruments  follow  opportunities  for  exploring  new  areas  and research questions, but new methodological approaches also carry with them  new  types  of  challenges  -  challenges  of  both  epistemological, ontological, methodological and ethical character. The aim of this special issue is to explore some of the limitations and possibilities of the new linguistic  turn  from  the  perspective  of  different  humanistic  and  social science  disciplines  and  on  the  backdrop  of  different  theoretical  and methodological ideas.

## 2. A return to surface structure

In  1987  Giddens  famously  declared  that  'Structuralism,  and  poststructuralism  also,  are  dead  traditions  of  thought.  Notwithstanding  the promise they held in the fresh bloom of youth, they have ultimately failed to  generate  the  revolution  in  philosophical  understanding  and  social theory  that  was  once  their  pledge'  (Giddens,  1987,  p.  195).  This  is probably true in the sense that structuralism and structuralism as paradigms and normative frames for understanding and interpreting language and social reality have proved both insufficient and problematic. But contrary to what one might think, this has not lead to a decreased interest in linguistic structure within the humanities and social sciences  -  quite  the  contrary.  What  Berry    (2011)  has  termed  'the computational turn' within the humanities and social sciences is, in fact, also an empirical turn with a strong focus on linguistic surface structure as  an  epistemological  stepping  stone.  It  is,  however,  a  methodological interest  rather  than  an  ideological  or  hermeneutic  interest  in  surface structure  driven  by  the  fact,  that  the  morpho-syntactic  structure  of language  can  be  transformed  into  quantitative  data.  Thus,  surface structure  has  become  the  interface  between  computer  science  and  the humanities and social sciences allowing researchers to apply advanced statistical  and  computational  methods  in  order  to  answer  what  has traditionally been considered qualitative questions.

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On the one hand, this holds great promise for empirical research within the humanities and the social sciences. On the other hand, it raises a host of serious methodological and theoretical questions. For instance, how  do  we  operationalize  social  phenomena,  what  are  the  proper theoretical  frameworks for interpreting the quantified results, are computational  methods  normative,  will  technological  advances  rather than  relevant  research  questions  drive  future  research,  what  type  of research questions can in fact be answered by means of computational methods?

## 3. The articles in this issue

This special issue comprises three articles that in different ways address some of the questions raised above. In the first article, Morten Tannert discusses the potential of using methods and tools from computational linguistics  within  the  field  of  educational  writing  research.  The  article covers three main sections. In the first section, Tannert provides a brief overview  of  educational  writing  research  and  positions  computational linguistics  within  the  field.  In  the  second  section,  it  is  discussed  what dimensions of educational writing can be studied by means of tools and methods  from  computational  linguistics.  The  discussion  is  based  on  a model  of  an  educational  writing  situation  and  on  four  metagenres  for educational writing. The third section centers on the question of how to accommodate methodological critiques of reductionism and technocentrism  in  computational  linguistic  writing  research.  Tannert suggests  the  notion  of  affordance  and  computational  hermeneutics  as important starting points for  more theoretically grounded and in-depth discussions of how to integrate methods from computational linguistics in educational writing research.

In the second article, Anne Agersnap and Kirstine Helboe Johansen adopt  a  meta-methodological  perspective  on  computational  methods. Agersnap & Johansen present a method for inferring knowledge about cultural  and  religious  patterns  from  measures  of  linguistic  features  by combining distant and close reading approaches. They argue that distant readings of texts - i.e. computational analyses of linguistic features in texts - do not exclude close reading, but rather create new types of texts that require close reading. Agersnap and Johansen illustrate this through two cases from a large corpus study of 11,955 Danish sermons. In the first case,  the  authors  show  how  it  is  possible  to  study  patterns  of  gender discourse by studying the distribution of personal pronouns in nominal and oblique cases in the sermon corpus. In the second case, Agersnap and Johansen  study  how  Danish  pastors  integrate  different  cultural  and Christian traditions (e.g. biblical, literary, historical or popular characters) in their sermons. The authors round off the article with a discussion of how  their  own  approach  relates  to  other  ongoing  methodological discussions within the field of digital humanities.

In the third article, Rebekah B. Baglini, Anita Kurm, Lasse Hansen, Kenneth Enevoldsen, and Kristoffer L. Nielbo address the challenge of multilingual sentiment analysis using a traditional lexicon and rule-based sentiment instrument that is tailored to capture sentiment patterns in a particular language. The article focusses on a case study of three closely related Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen og Morten Tannert Scandinavian Studies in Language, 12(1), 2021 (i-iv)

using  three  tailored  versions  of  VADER,  Baglini  et  al.  measure  the relative degree of variation in valence using the OPUS corpus. They find that scores for Swedish are systematically skewed lower than Danish for translational pairs, and that scores for Norwegian are skewed higher for both  other  languages.  They  use  a  neural  network  to  optimize  the  fit between  Norwegian  and  Swedish  respectively  and  Danish  as  the reference (target) language.

## References

Berry, D. M. (2011). The computational turn: Thinking about the digital humanities. Culture Machine , 12 , 1-22.

Giddens, A. (1987). Structuralism, Post-structuralism and the Production of Culture. In Giddens Anthony & Turner Jonathan H (Eds.), Social theory today (pp. 195-223). Polity.