Process Oriented Discourse Analysis - Technologies for Discourse-Based Research in Media History and the History of Science

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This project aims at establishing a virtual research environment for conducting discourse analyses in the humanities, in particular history. Based on a cooperation between media scholars, computer scientists, and librarians located at the Bauhaus-UniversitätWeimar and the University of Regensburg, this research environment will be developed and established in view of the crucial relation between media technologies and laboratory science in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Once established, it can be used in the context of similar projects carriedout in neighboring disciplines.The envisaged virtual research environment will (a) offer a theoretically grounded procedural framework for technology-driven projects in historical discourse analyses, (b) provide tailored user interfaces and tools for efficiently analyzing and modeling the corresponding research questions, and (c) be implemented at the University libraries in Weimar and Regensburg for unrestricted use by other scholars.In contrast to existing research environments our approach will ease the dynamic integration of the expertise of its users into the analysis methods and tools. The underlying text analytics pipeline will be grounded on explicit semantic models that users devise with regard to their research topics, partly drawing on active machine learning. Natural language processing, analysis algorithms, and knowledge-based text processing will be integrated to cope with the complex process of discourse analysis. In this regard, users will be able to use These tools by means of a specifically designed Discourse Query Language. Our planned research Environment shall also provide paradigmatic features such as 'Discourse Maps' and 'Discourse Lenses' in order to connect the virtual research environment and scholarly publications derived from it.Our project will be developed with respect to the so-called 'laboratory revolution' in the life sciences in 1860, referring to and relying on the extensive scholarship treating this topic in media studies and the history of science. Using the already existing corpus of the 'Virtual Laboratory' and further expanding it in view of the present project, our research environment will be tested and evaluated at every stage of its development. Overall goal is to model and map all discourse actors of the 'laboratory revolution' (i.e. scientists, engineers, instruments, organisms, concepts, sites, etc.) with regard to their contribution to translating and transposing processes and procedures from the laboratory into media technologies and vice versa.