Digital Technologies in the Social Sciences
Digital Technologies in the Social Sciences
June 5, 2017
Open to public
Organizer:
Digital Technologies in the Social Sciences
June 5, 2017 Cumnock 220
June 5, 2017 Cumnock 220
While the use of new technologies
in the humanities and social sciences has exploded in recent years, little
sustained attention has been given to questions of how these techniques can
contribute to business and economic history. Digitized sources can improve our
access to materials and can help us place our own individual case studies into
broader contexts. But have digital projects provided any real and original
blueprints for changing our historical methodologies and rethinking our
conclusions? This international workshop at Harvard Business School brings
together experts at the forefront of the application of new technologies to the
study of economic and business history, as well as to the history of political
economy, to explore different projects, technologies, and techniques in the
field and assess the degree to which digital resources can change our scholarly
approaches or result in new discoveries. In addition to allowing practitioners
at the vanguard of the digital social sciences to interact, exchange ideas, and
codify best practices, the workshop focuses on the question of whether digital
techniques simply aid us in confirming our hypotheses with more or better
visualized data or whether digital approaches can enable us to ask radical new
questions.