The increasing capacities of large language models (LLMs) present an
unprecedented opportunity to scale up data analytics in the humanities and
social sciences, augmenting and automating qualitative analytic tasks
previously typically allocated to human labor. This contribution proposes a
systematic mixed methods framework to harness qualitative analytic expertise,
machine scalability, and rigorous quantification, with attention to
transparency and replicability. 16 machine-assisted case studies are showcased
as proof of concept. Tasks include linguistic and discourse analysis, lexical
semantic change detection, interview analysis, historical event cause inference
and text mining, detection of political stance, text and idea reuse, genre
composition in literature and film; social network inference, automated
lexicography, missing metadata augmentation, and multimodal visual cultural
analytics. In contrast to the focus on English in the emerging LLM
applicability literature, many examples here deal with scenarios involving
smaller languages and historical texts prone to digitization distortions. In
all but the most difficult tasks requiring expert knowledge, generative LLMs
can demonstrably serve as viable research instruments. LLM (and human)
annotations may contain errors and variation, but the agreement rate can and
should be accounted for in subsequent statistical modeling; a bootstrapping
approach is discussed. The replications among the case studies illustrate how
tasks previously requiring potentially months of team effort and complex
computational pipelines, can now be accomplished by an LLM-assisted scholar in
a fraction of the time. Importantly, this approach is not intended to replace,
but to augment researcher knowledge and skills. With these opportunities in
sight, qualitative expertise and the ability to pose insightful questions have
arguably never been more critical.

利用大型语言模型 (LLMs) 的增强功能，扩展人文社会科学领域的数据分析，用于量化、自动化以前需要人工进行的定性分析任务。本文提出了一种系统的混合方法框架，结合了定性分析专业知识、机器可扩展性和严格的量化分析，同时注重透明度和可复制性。通过 16 个机器辅助案例研究作为概念验证，展示了该框架的应用，涉及的任务包括语言和话语分析、词汇语义变化检测、访谈分析、历史事件因果推断和文本挖掘、政治立场检测、文本和思想重用、文学和电影的流派构成、社交网络推断、自动词典编纂、丢失的元数据补充以及多模态视觉文化分析。与现有 LLM 应用文献的英语重点不同，这里的例子涉及较小语言和易于数字化失真的历史文本场景。除了需要专业知识的最困难的任务外，生成 LLMs 可以作为可行的研究工具。LLM (和人工) 标注可能包含错误和变化，但协议率可以在后续统计建模中考虑；文章还讨论了一个引导式方法。案例研究的复制实验证明，以前需要团队努力和复杂计算管道才能完成的任务，现在可以由辅助 LLM 的学者在更短的时间内完成。重要的是，这种方法旨在增强研究者的知识和技能，而不是取代它们。鉴于这些机会，定性专业知识和提出有深度问题的能力无疑变得更加关键。