This course is closed, registration is no longer possible.
The course touches on five elements:
- Project based: CHA assists problem driven research and the course therefore contains daily exercises, group discussions that are aimed to apply the material to your research projects.
- Exploration and Description: Figuring out what happened is essential for identifying new research questions of updating existing ones. The course discusses exploratory strategies that emphasize description, typologizing and other tools for identifying patterns. These patterns then must be translated into research questions.
- Data Visualization: CHA draws on various visualization strategies to make historical transformation visible. These strategies involve developmental typologies, periodizations, time series trends, tree diagrams, chronologies, or other data visualization tools.
- Temporal Thinking: Problem-driven research often is historical because it is driven by sudden changes (i.e. economic crisis, pandemics, wars) or slower moving trends (i.e. demographic, cultural). CHA employs a refined temporal vocabulary to adequately describe historical processes and cope with the causal complexity that is necessary to explain these processes.
- Theorizing: Theory plays a central role in CHA’s effort to cope with causal complexity. Theories facilitate are close dialogue between existing theories and new inductive insights. And this dialogue updates existing theories. CHA uses theories particularly to identify confounders that existing theories have overlooked. It also employs causal diagrams to translate theories into transparent data gathering strategies.
