The lecture by Gregor Rohmann (Frankfurt a. M.) discusses the methodology and findings of the research project ‘Political Language in the Middle Ages. Semantic Approaches’ at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. It will present the digital tools developed by the project team for the analysis of semantic structures in medieval Latin sources based on the methodology of corpus linguistics. The lecture will focus on the concept of "contagion" as a case study to demonstrate how these tools can help us to understand how semantic change evolved in general, and especially how people conceptualized power, social conflicts, and group relations in times before politics as a social subsystem emerged.
Digital History: New Data-Driven Approaches in the Humanities 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. The GHIL seminar series in the summer term 2015 will explore the possibilities and limitations of these new approaches at the intersection of historiography and linguistics. Scholars from both disciplines will present their research and ideas. They will discuss not only their methodology, but also its application in empirical case studies, covering a broad range of themes from medieval to contemporary history.
Seminars are held at 5.30 p.m. in the Seminar Room of the German Historical Institute. Guided tours of the Library are available before each seminar at 4.30 p.m.
