Dr. Klaus Behnam Shad

My work sits at the intersection of digital humanities, AI-assisted analysis and research infrastructure. I develop methods and tools for analysing qualitative data — interviews, narratives, documents — computationally, without replacing interpretation by automation.

Concretely, this produces rule-based analytical architectures, multilingual evaluation corpora and metadata models for interview-based research, among them DINOH, IMM-Core and tools for local, privacy-compliant processing. Traceability, reproducibility, data protection by design and the FAIR principles guide this work.

Theoretically, it rests on a sociocybernetic foundation: society as a recursive system of distinctions that reproduces itself through feedback, institutional routinisation and cognitive stabilisation. A methodological consequence follows from this: analytical categories are not guessed from the data but theoretically grounded and made explicit.

Empirically, all of this is developed and tested on questions of social differentiation — belonging, exclusion, recognition — in fields such as migration, citizenship and oral history.