Insights into Six Decades of Scientific Practice

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to introduce university archives as valuable sources for document-centric historical research. That comprises the history of science as well as the history of society. With the example of Leipzig as a university city with an outstanding wealth of archived academic material we want to stress on the great and in many cases not yet digitally explored potential of such sources. We then focus on a collection of annual administrative speeches called "Rektorasreden", that span over 60 important years of Leipzig’s university life. We discuss some of the possibilities for content analysis using methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The focus lies on facilitating the access to larger corpora. We present a minimalist process chain for a distant-reading, explorative approach on the Rektoratsreden-corpus. For more general considerations we also highlight some of the digitization efforts that took place in Leipzig and reflect on how archive material as well as archival workflows can benefit from research infrastructure and vice versa