CFS lecture by Don Kuiken: Numerically Aided Phenomenology: Balancing Empirical Rigor with Sensitivity to Expressive Language

Lecture by Don Kuiken, University of Alberta, CA.

Programme

10:00-12:00:  Don Kuiken (University of Alberta, CA):
Numerically Aided Phenomenology: Balancing Empirical Rigor with Sensitivity to Expressive Language

Abstract

Numerically aided phenomenology is a set of procedures for systematically describing categories of lived experience. Across a set of experiential narratives, (1) recurrent meaning expressions are identified and paraphrased; (2) judgments about the presence or absence of these expressions are used to create matrices representing the profiles of meaning expressions in each experiential narrative; and (3) cluster analytic algorithms are used to group these experiential narratives according to the similarities in their profiles of meaning expressions. Whereas an earlier version of these procedures (Kuiken & Miall, 2001; Sikora, Kuiken, & Miall, 2011) was limited to literal assertions of sameness across experiential narratives, this presentation will describe how to facilitate more refined explication of recurrent meaning expressions. The “poetics” of such explication include, for example, metaphoric fusion (Ricoeur) and syntax conversion [Heidegger]). Taken together, these procedures provide categories of similar experiential narratives (morphological essences) for which the distinctive meaning expressions are as richly articulated as possible.

Research Interests

Changes in self-understanding through dreams, especially impactful dreams, and through literary reading, especially poetry;  phenomenological methods for articulating the characteristics of dreaming and aesthetic experience.
Read more at University of Alberta's homepage

The event is free and open to all: everyone is welcome!