Digital Humanities Colloquium featuring Kevin Durrheim

Join Kevin Durrheim as he explores how public opinions are formed, measured and shaped through everyday conversations and social interaction

Title: Opinions. What are they? How can they be studied?

This paper revisits the concept of public opinion, interrogating both its measurement and its ontology. Traditional approaches- surveys, Likert scales, and correlational analysis- frame opinions as individual attitudes, yet these methods impose constraints: they erase interaction, force bipolar responses, and misconstrue neutrality. Qualitative approaches, while richer, face challenges of representativeness and comparability.

Following Blumer’s critique, the speaker argues that opinions are not merely held by individuals but emerge in interaction, conversation, and group conflict. To capture this dynamic, he introduces computational methods that map “speaker landscapes” using large corpora of naturalistic text. Embedding speaker and word tokens in shared vector spaces can reveal how groups form, differentiate, and polarize through everyday language use. Case studies of land reform debates in South Africa and vaccination debates in the US and SA illustrate how public opinion functions as an information system, shaped by bias, gatekeeping, and polarization across scales.