Machine-assisted mixed methods: augmenting humanities and social
  sciences with artificial intelligence
Andres Karjus
The increasing capacities of large language models (LLMs) present an
unprecedented opportunity to scale up data analytics in the humanities and
social sciences, augmenting and automating qualitative analytic tasks
previously typically allocated to human labor. This contribution proposes a
systematic mixed methods framework to harness qualitative analytic expertise,
machine scalability, and rigorous quantification, with attention to
transparency and replicability. 16 machine-assisted case studies are showcased
as proof of concept. Tasks include linguistic and discourse analysis, lexical
semantic change detection, interview analysis, historical event cause inference
and text mining, detection of political stance, text and idea reuse, genre
composition in literature and film; social network inference, automated
lexicography, missing metadata augmentation, and multimodal visual cultural
analytics. In contrast to the focus on English in the emerging LLM
applicability literature, many examples here deal with scenarios involving
smaller languages and historical texts prone to digitization distortions. In
all but the most difficult tasks requiring expert knowledge, generative LLMs
can demonstrably serve as viable research instruments. LLM (and human)
annotations may contain errors and variation, but the agreement rate can and
should be accounted for in subsequent statistical modeling; a bootstrapping
approach is discussed. The replications among the case studies illustrate how
tasks previously requiring potentially months of team effort and complex
computational pipelines, can now be accomplished by an LLM-assisted scholar in
a fraction of the time. Importantly, this approach is not intended to replace,
but to augment researcher knowledge and skills. With these opportunities in
sight, qualitative expertise and the ability to pose insightful questions have
arguably never been more critical.