Rabea Kleymann: Entangled Methods. Diffractive Approaches for the Digital Humanities

Lecture as part of the online conference New Materialist Informatics 2021 at the University of Kassel

Panel Presentation: Transdisciplinary Methodologies and Interventions

Mixed methods approaches are firmly established in the digital humanities. Their reasoning is often founded on the premise that the complexity of the object of inquiry is addressed via the plurality of methods used. Further, the research data obtained can be put into a coherent narrative. This premise, however, presupposes the possibility of an integration of methods and data.

The purpose of this talk is to bring into sharper focus the “orthodoxy to integration” (Uprichard & Dawney 2019, 21), which is understood as one main feature of the epistemic culture within the digital humanities. In order to make the methodological mixtures and the accompanying forms of data integration visible, the neologism “entangled methods” is introduced in reference to posthumanist approaches. What new perspectives open up when we speak of “entangled” instead of mixed methods in the digital humanities? How can the disciplinary intersections of the humanities, design, and computer science be renegotiated in this way?

registration via ConfTool

The Germanist Rabea Kleymann is a research associate with the project Composting. Material Cycles and Reusability in Biology, Literature and Technology.