Brown Bag Seminar

The Methodological Unit organizes a weekly Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!

Every Wednesday at 12.15.

You are welcome to join us at seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A (access via door, not courtyard), 5th floor, or online via Zoom.

Should data on ethnicity be collected in Europe? A philosophical-experimental approach

Marion Godman and Nicholas Haas

Collecting data on ethnicity (and often also race) is widespread globally and often regarded as a way of tracking and mitigating discrimination and other forms of inter-group inequalities. Not so in Europe (e.g. Simon 2012; European Commission 2017). Most European countries have opted to exclude not only race, but also ethnic categories from national censuses or population registers.

In this paper, we argue, that there are several hitherto overlooked both moral and epistemic costs of not collecting data on ethnicity.

We first respond to the idea that in fact there is no dearth of data at all since ethnicity is already accounted for by more generally acceptable categories like immigrant, or country of birth. We argue that these are not at all obvious proxies at all because they either entirely miss or fail to distinguish epistemically relevant information. Further, we highlight how the use of alternative categories to ethnicity can lead to certain “slippages” or ambiguities in meaning: where concepts like “immigrant”, function as “code” for different ethnic or racial categories, while also retaining a more literal and often more encompassing interpretation.

In addition to scrutinizing the epistemic and moral arguments, we adopt an experimental philosophy approach to addressing the by conducting small experiments with online respondents. First, we explore whether individuals use “immigrant” as a proxy for “Muslim” (or “Arab”) when deciding whether to discriminate or not. Second, we experimentally evaluate whether individuals provide differential support for the same arguments when they concern gender as opposed to ethnicity to test whether ethnicity is indeed a more sensitive category that should not be probed or registered (as is commonly assumed).

Marion Godman is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and an affiliated scholar of the History and Philosophy of Science department, Cambridge University. Between 2012 and 2018 she was also based at Helsinki University working at TINT/Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. She works on a range of issues that concerns the philosophy of the human and social sciences and in political philosophy and endeavours to find a synthesis between these different areas as can be seen in her research monograph, The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds (2020, Routledge).

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Terminological borrowing between behavioral economics and law and technology literature – A topic modeling study

This presentation is based on our ongoing research that examines whether and how ideas from the field of behavioral economics (BE) are adopted and used in the field of technology law (TL). Technology law is an emergent field of legal studies that has a significant role in regulating novel technologies, especially during the current digital and computational transformations. While the relationship between BE and legal studies more generally has been described as a producer-consumer relation (Frerichs, 2011), the influence of BE ideas within technology law is not clear. We approach this research problem by way of modeling the extent to which terminology typical to behavioral economics is used in technology law literature. Drawing on publication abstract data from both fields (downloaded from OpenAlex), we use topic modeling (PLDA; McFarland et al. 2013) to extract terminology typical to both BE and TL discussions, and then to estimate whether behavioral economics terminology is present in technology law abstracts. Our current results indicate marginal presence of BE topics in TL – however this could be due to a number of factors, including problems related to data collection and model selection. In the latter part of the presentation we discuss possible ways of alleviating these problems, and draw critical reflections on the potential of topic modeling as a technique for modeling knowledge transfer across scientific fields.

Juho Pääkkönen works as a project coordinator at the HSSH methodological unit and is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki. His PhD work examines how social scientists adapt and repurpose new digital data and analysis techniques in their research.

Jaakko Taipale is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology specializing in Science and Technology Studies with focus on law-science interaction. His current project, funded by Kone foundation, examines medico-legal decision-making in the context of insurance disputes.

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Automatically Processing Historical Documents without OCR

The digitisation of historical documents has provided historians with unprecedented research opportunities. Yet, the conventional approach to analysing historical documents involves converting them from images to text using OCR, a process that overlooks the potential benefits of treating them as images and introduces high levels of noise. To bridge this gap, we take advantage of recent advancements in pixel-based language models trained to reconstruct masked patches of pixels instead of predicting token distributions. Due to the scarcity of real historical scans, we propose a novel method for generating synthetic scans to resemble real historical documents. We then pre-train our model, PHD, on a combination of synthetic scans and real historical newspapers from the 1700-1900 period. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that PHD exhibits high proficiency in reconstructing masked image patches and provide evidence of our model’s noteworthy language understanding capabilities. Notably, we successfully apply our model to a historical QA task, highlighting its usefulness in this domain. 

Desmond Elliot is an Associate Professor and a Villum Young Investigator at the University of Copenhagen. His group currently focuses on tokenization-free language modelling, and multilingual and multimodal processing. his research output includes widely used resources and tools such as the multilingual image description dataset (multi30K), the multimodal language understanding dataset (How2), and the pixel-based language model PIXEL.

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