The metrics lab at the ISA World Congress in Melbourne

Eleanor Townsley and Ben Gebre-Medhin presented work from the Disciplinary Address Project at the twentieth World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Melbourne, Australia.

Their talk, Speaking for Sociology (and the social sciences): Computational Text Analysis of a Century of Presidential Addresses to the Disciplines, was featured on a panel titled Theories and Methods in Undertaking Histories of Sociology which was chaired by Marcel Fournier and Natalia Maystorovich Chulio.

Their presentation reviewed the challenges and opportunities for combining computational and human coding on creatively selected bespoke historical datasets. The Presidential Addresses to the Social Sciences corpus was presented as an example of the potential for medium data to advance the objectives social scientific inquiry by exploring the boundaries between human and machine coding of text documents.