Sam Hames

Research Directions

I've been thinking a bit lately about what direction my research is going. I want to say I'm focusing on building tools for computational analysis for non quantitative purposes. This has both a practical component in the sense that I make software for this, but also has more abstract components: I don't want to just build stuff, but I want to dig deeper into the various methodological and epistemological problems of using computational approaches in this kind of work.

In relation to this I've been thinking through what my discipline actually is. So far I don't really have an answer yet, except to say that:

A. I'm interested in areas where computation cuts across multiple discipline areas and B. I think I'm more interested in the sitautedness that comes from working with specific people on specific problems, rather than what discipline they or their problem "sit" within

Reading Areas

Currently I'm reading through some work on:

• philosophy of science approaches to models, especially more recent work criticising the representational frameworks to models
• agency, both human and non human (especially recent materialist work on the agency of things)
• new materialist stuff
• approaches to the knn join or knn graph construction problem. If pairwise document similarity could be computed speedily I think I could find some interesting applications of the results.