Digital Humanities and AI in the Social Sciences: Datafication in Practice

What is decided, and by whom, when a source becomes data? Most of the work in digital research goes into datafication: turning social life, objects and records into machine-readable data. Analysis comes after.

This presentation starts from two workshops prepared at ZMO and the position paper they produced, “For Whom and For What Purpose?”. The first, “Charting New Territory”, was a VolkswagenStiftung scoping workshop held in Hanover in February 2026; the second, a DFG Point Sud workshop, met at STIAS in Stellenbosch in September 2026.

It then traces datafication through three projects. Global Heshmat maps the works of the Egyptian sculptor Hassan Heshmat. Kalamu, a desktop application, brings AI-assisted text extraction, transcription and entity recognition to researchers who do not write code. The sermons of the Nigerian preacher Albani Zaria travel from DVD to word counts, places and people.

Along the way, the talk asks who digitises what in the Global South and who gains access, and weighs what datafication helps, damages and endangers. It closes with open questions of method, ethics and epistemology for discussion.