Abstract
AI raises multiple essential issues for the humanities and the social sciences. AI is obviously a major societal issue whose consequences are currently invading the public sphere raising a variety of questions of acceptability, privacy protection or economic impact, and involving expertise that span across the entire range of social and human research. But AI is also a new way of doing research, where massive data processing is made possible by techniques of machine and deep learning, offering new perspectives for analysis.
Reflecting about the nature of intelligence and humanity, but also helping the humanities and the social sciences to benefit from the methodological advances of AI: this is the double challenge that this chapter would like to tackle. We will present the major questions posed to artificial intelligence by the humanities and social sciences, to go through some of the proposed approaches, but also to show how artificial intelligence has become an essential working tool for this field.
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Notes
- 1.
Mask (?) of a dog, representing Anubis or Qebehsenouf, with movable jaw, Egypt, 21th dynasty (c. 1069–945), h: 19 cm, w: 11 cm, Paris, Louvre museum, N4096.
- 2.
This paper uses “Sentiment analysis” algorithms, measuring the “general feeling” of a text, i.e. the “positive feeling” or “negative feeling” associated with that text.
- 3.
This is a recurrent ambition that can be observed at every change of scientific paradigm. We can certainly find it in the positivist thought of literary history or in the linguistic turn and the horizon constituted by formal linguistics.
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Gefen, A., Saint-Raymond, L., Venturini, T. (2021). AI for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences. In: Braunschweig, B., Ghallab, M. (eds) Reflections on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12600. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69128-8_12
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