Paul Götz

I am a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Zürich (UZH), supervised by Professors Jörg Rössel and Bruno Witzel de Souza (São Paulo). My work is interdisciplinary, drawing on economic history, cultural history, economic sociology, and the digital humanities; my research interests run to historical well-being and standards of living, inequality and elite formation, the history of consumption, and text-as-data.

In my dissertation, From Recipes to Markets, I investigate how European cuisine and foodstuff consumption changed between 1500 and 1900, reading that change off the interaction between consumer preferences as revealed by printed cookery and household books, and other factors such as prices, wages, and further measures of economic development. Its foundation is a corpus of about 450 such books, built with open-source Python tools that use language models to transcribe and structure the sources at scale.

Alongside the dissertation, I teach short workshops on AI for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, most recently at the universities of Göttingen and Zürich. They cover chatbots in everyday scholarly work and AI agents that write and run research code, along with the risks of both. I also digitize source collections for other researchers and institutions. For each collection, I build a pipeline that turns its scans into transcriptions and structured data, using the same open-source tools. If you would like to discuss my research, a possible collaboration, a workshop, or a digitization project, write to me.