GAP-Workshop – Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy

Satellite workshop at the conference of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP), 12–13 September, Düsseldorf.

Location: Room 23.21 U1.72, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

Additional information: https://mnoichl.github.io/data-driven-philosophy-GAP2025/#/section-1

Update 2: The talks of Catherine Herfeld and Adrian Wüthrich have been switched. The change is reflected in the updated programme below.

Update: In this workshop we will rely on Google Colab notebooks. This service is free but requires a Google account, which you can set up in advance. If you already use Google Drive or have a Gmail account, you are all set. If you want to participate without registering for a Google account, you can also use a local Python installation on your own computer. It’s great if you can set this up beforehand, but if you don’t find time for it, we can also figure it out during the workshop.

Organization: Gregor Bös and Max Noichl

Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science, and artificial intelligence that can support the study of philosophical corpora.

The workshop comprises keynote lectures by Prof. Catherine Herfeld and Prof. Adrian Wüthrich that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl will assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.

If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get in contact with the organizers to discuss potential data sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.

Duration: 1 ½ days

Expected number of participants: 15–25

Tentative Schedule

Day 1

09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee.
09:30 – 10:00: Introductions and general remarks.
10:00 – 10:45: Keynote by Adrian Wüthrich.
10:45 – 11:15: Discussion of Adrian Wüthrich’s keynote.
11:15 – 11:30: Short break
11:30 – 12:00: Presentation on network visualization in edhiphy by Gregor Bös.
12:00 – 13:30: Lunch break
13:30 – 14:15: Keynote by Catherine Herfeld.
14:15 – 14:45: Discussion of Catherine Herfeld’s keynote.
14:45 – 15:00: Short break

15:00 – 15:30: Presentation on OpenAlex Mapper by Max Noichl.
15:30 – 17:00: Guided walkthrough of state-of-the-art text-analysis notebooks (different difficulties available).
17:00 – 18:00: Brainstorming session, initiating individual and/or group projects.

Day 2

09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee.
09:30 – 12:00: Facilitated project work.
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch break
13:00 – 14:00: Continued project work.
14:00 – 15:00: Project snapshots and farewell.