School of Social and Political Science

Description

Can anthropological theories be combined with machine learning methods? Do recent advances within text mining allow for the realization of Levi-Strauss’ dream of a computational structuralism? Might we go as far as saying that computers are becoming vehicles of social scientific analysis: are we about to witness the birth of distinctly anthropological forms of artificial intelligence? By presenting recent attempts to use data science methods for augmenting and automatizing the collection, processing and analysis of qualitative data, my hope is not only to discuss the rise of so-called computational anthropology in my own and others work, but also to unsettle epistemological boundaries between, and predominant assumptions among, computational social scientists and data scientists.