Course 7: Theory and Epistemology of Digital Humanities

Michael Piotrowski · University of Lausanne

Lecturer

Michael Piotrowski is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Language and Information Sciences at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), where he investigates the epistemology and methodology of computational methods in the humanities. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and an M.A. in computational linguistics, and previously led the Digital Humanities research group at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. He is the author of the first textbook on natural language processing for historical texts and has published widely on modeling, uncertainty, formalization, and the theoretical foundations of digital humanities. His work consistently calls for greater conceptual precision and epistemological self-reflection in the field.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Piotrowski offers a critical lecture on the theoretical foundations of digital humanities. He argues that the field has often borrowed methods pragmatically while neglecting reflection on how those methods shape knowledge production, and he proposes a model-centered definition of digital humanities as a way forward.

Main Points

The lecture begins with the claim that digital humanities has too little methodology and too little epistemological self-reflection of its own.
Piotrowski questions vague or community-based definitions of the field because they do not explain what digital humanities actually does as research.
He distinguishes between applied digital humanities, which builds formal or computational models of humanities phenomena, and theoretical digital humanities, which studies such models at a higher level of abstraction.
The notion of a model is central: if digital humanities is to explain how it produces knowledge, it must define its research objects and modeling practices clearly.
The lecture is therefore both a critique of the field and a proposal for more explicit conceptual work.

Examples Mentioned

Debates about computational methods and the humanities
Critiques of uncritical tool adoption
Model theory as a basis for defining DH research

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 7_Piotrowski.txt

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