Will a chatbot take over the tasks of interviewers in the future? Can artificial intelligence facilitate the evaluation of studies? Alexander Mehler is an expert in the field of computational humanities. During a visit to the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, he demonstrated the possibilities that the use of AI opens up for social science research.

What if a chatbot were to conduct surveys in the future? The voice recordings could then be automatically evaluated and used to generate statistically comparable data. Admittedly: At the moment, this is still a dream of the future. The DFG infrastructure priority programme “New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences”, which is also organizationally anchored at LIfBi, wants to pursue similar, exciting approaches and develop new types of data sources. After all, in order to ensure the future viability of social science panel surveys, they must also continue to develop in terms of technical possibilities.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Mehler, who is a member of the “New Data Spaces” program committee, has now visited LIfBi for an exchange. Mehler is Professor of Computational Humanities at Goethe University Frankfurt (Text Technology Lab) and works, for example, on the advantages of AI-based tools in the analysis of (text) data. As part of a LIfBi Lecture, he took an excursion through the information landscape of language-related social science approaches - using three examples - and emphasized how important he believes a shift from individual information processing to participatory, dialogical and multimodal communication dynamics is.

Alexander Mehler was also available for an exchange with researchers from the Center for Study Management and Department 3 “Research Data Center, Method Development”. 

This exchange continued at the official kick-off for the New Data Spaces project.