Natural Language Processing In Oral History And Sociology - Incite at Columbia University

As part of the Narrative Workshop, Chris Pandza and Armin Pournaki joins us from the Oral History and Sociology department at Columbia University and SciencesPo to discuss “Natural Language Processing In Oral History And Sociology”.

The Narrative Workshop has limited capacity. To inquire about joining, please contact Dian Sheng or Amy Weissenbach.

About Chris Pandza

Chris Pandza is a designer who joined Incite Institute in 2021 as a Fellow on the Obama Presidency Oral History. Chris currently develops visual concepts to communicate Incite's projects with the public. He holds a BA in Media from Western University and an HBA from Ivey Business School. Chris also graduated from Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts program, where he developed new techniques for visualizing and organizing oral history archives. His thesis, “Using Natural Language Processing to Organize and Analyze Oral History Projects” won a 2023 Brodsky Award.

About Armin Pournaki

Armin Pournaki is a PhD candidate in the groups of Jürgen Jost (MPI MiS) and Thierry Poibeau (Lattice). In collaboration with Eckehard Olbrich (MPI MiS) and Jean-Philippe Cointet (médialab), he explores computational approaches to language and discourse analysis. More precisely in computationally extracting (political) narratives from raw text and empirically investigating their role in phenomena like polarization and issue alignment. This work is embedded in the EU Horizon project SoMe4Dem, in which they aim to provide stronger empirical evidence for the impact of social media on political debates and democratic processes.