1. Adapting Social Science Methods to
Humanities Research: Creating
Opportunities for Interaction between
Humanists and Social Scientists
Dr. Lynne Siemens
siemensl@uvic.ca
MLA, January 2013

2. The Social Scientist on the Panel
• By way of introduction (or perhaps even confession)
• Management Scholar
• Appointment in a School of Public Administration, University of
Victoria
• Interested in ways that Humanists, especially Digital
Humanists, collaborate with those inside and outside their
disciplines
• How do these interactions create and support new research
questions and methodologies?
• How do we create opportunities for the necessary discussions?

3. One Possibility : The
Interdisciplinary Centre
• Examples
• Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
(Cambridge)
• Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures (Kyoto)
• Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College (London)
• Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities (College Park)
• Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (University of Victoria)
• And many more (see http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
• Commonalities
• Representation of many disciplines, within and beyond the
Humanities, including Social Sciences, Computer
Science, Engineering and many others
• Intellectual hub for speakers, research
projects, training, tools, resources, collaboration
• Virtual and physical spaces
• And perhaps even coffee and comfortable chairs

4. The Interdisciplinary Centre:
Format
• Space for discussion and networks
• Structured interactions between Social Scientists and Humanists
• Talks, speakers and workshops grounded in a variety of disciplinary
perspectives
• Mentorship, training and guidance to graduate students and
researchers interested in learning methodologies beyond their
specific disciplinary ones
• Informal and “accidental” meetings
• Often the foundation to interdisciplinary innovation, collaboration
and knowledge sharing
• Reinforces the need for a coffee machine and comfortable chairs

5. The Interdisciplinary Centre:
People
• Those who represent many disciplines
• Both the obvious and the not so
• Those who are collaboration-ready
• Interested in working with others
• Interested in other disciplinary perspectives
• Faculty, researchers, students and many others