The SSPP Methods Centre Seminar Series

Almost every text that social scientists work with today is either born-digital, has been digitised or can be digitised with relative ease. Parliamentary records, government archives, NGO websites, news media, collective bargaining agreements and social platforms all illustrate this never-ending digitalisation of knowledge and communication. These digital texts are everywhere, each carrying distinct affordances, biases and challenges.

This seminar showcases practical approaches to researching digital texts and reflects critically on what our methods enable—and exclude. We will discuss tools and workflows (from scraping and text mining to close reading and annotation), issues of data quality and reproducibility, and questions of epistemic injustice in how and why we “do things with digital texts”.

If you would like to present your work or build methodological confidence in this area, please send an email to sspp-methodscentre@kcl.ac.uk.

Session 1 — How to Do Things with Digital Text: Methods and Critique

22 October 2025, 4.00-5.30 pm, Bush House South East (SE) 2.05 and on Teams

In the first session, Claudia Aradau and Juan Grigera will discuss their research with and about digital texts. Claudia will draw on her research using the UK’s parliamentary archive, Upper Tribunal decisions in immigration and asylum, NGO websites, and AI-related patents across security and tech firms. Juan will explore through his research with large corpora of newspapers, policy white papers and collective bargaining agreements how economic ideas travel into practice.

They will reflect on the challenges of method selection, sampling, and the illusion of completeness; the politics of classification; and how combining ‘distant reading’ (computational text analysis such as topic modelling, named-entity tracking, and tracing semantic shifts) with close reading can bring to light unique insights and expose the blind spots embedded in digitised sources.