Teaching Interdisciplinary and Critical Digital Political Science

The social sciences are, as Gary King (2014) observes, "undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit focused inward to having a major impact on public policy, commerce and industry". Accordingly, "interdisciplinarity" is an important buzzword in the discussion of the study and teaching of real world problems nowadays, especially when "big data" is concerned. Interdisciplinarity and the use of computational methods in order to analyze a great amount of data can be compared to a language game that has to be learnt and practiced as soon as possible to be able to critically reflect upon and take advantage of the transformation described by King. This contribution describes the experiences from an interdisciplinary undergraduate course, that brings together scholars and students from different disciplines (political science, corpus linguistics, English studies and social geography so far). The special thing about this course is that all participants are working with the same empirical dataset that consists of approximately 20,000 texts from the British Guardian and Daily Telegraph that deal with austerity. The common empirical footing is especially helpful in order to enhance students' interdisciplinary understanding in the areas of disciplinary grounding, integration and critical thinking by a) enabling the students to use corpus linguistic methods to answer discipline relevant questions (e.g. the role of parties for political scientists or the articulation of space for social geography), b) by enabling the students to undertake philosophical reflections about the integration of knowledge from different disciplines by discussing the importance of meta-theoretical foundations (ontology, epistemology and methodology) for empirical research and c) by enabling students to critically reflect upon the possibilities and limits of digital methods and interdisciplinarity in the social sciences. The contribution will also describe the quantitative (surveys) and qualitative tools (semi-structured interviews) that will be used to assess the interdisciplinary learning achievements in respect to these broad goals.