Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower’s Middle English Corpus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature. This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing to reexamine the Confessio’s themes, adding data analysis to the more traditional close reading strategies of Gower scholarship. We use Gower’s work as a case study both to help reduce the potential variants across textual versions and to more deeply investigate the corpus than distant reading normally allows. Here, we share our initial findings as well as our methodologies. We hope to share resources that will allow other scholars to engage in similar types of projects

Contemplations on sport, complexity, ages of being and practice

From my experience of working alongside coaches, I would say that they are complexpeople. The people they coach are complex too. In the present paper, I considercomplexity as an underlying dynamic to (coaching) practice, something that might beunderstood, not only through one's own life, but through the notion of shared lives.The central thematic of the story to follow is that we live and practice through different‘ages of being' and that our complication changes as we age. These ideas and theirrelevance to critical thinking and personal practice are illustrated through a personal story,a father and son story. The tale begins, as many sporting father and son stories might, asthey run together on a windswept beach. From that childhood memory, a meandering taleof growth, companionship and critical reflection unfolds. By charting this particularrelationship, one shaped and sustained by a shared history, yet defined by different ‘agesof being', I contemplate often fractured and sometimes shared relationships betweenourselves and with sport. It is a story described partly in parallel, across generational andworking contexts and in life-long terms. The story telling ends with an attempt at definingmyself, my complexities and my own practice in the present day. Through this, I urge al lcoaching practitioners to reflect on their work and on the intentions and scope of theirresearch and, finally, the associations of such thinking with their own ages of being

One Voice, Ancient and Resigned

While we know, or at least can imagine, what Gower looked like in his old age, it is hard to imagine or hear his voice. And yet, given what we know about his old age and visual impairments, his voice necessarily was important to his old age and continuing revisions of his texts. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct from some of his later poetry what that voice might have sounded like, at least in-text, and piece together how later authors heard that voice of old age

Battle of the Blockbusters: Joss Whedon as Public Pedagogue

This article discusses the concept of public pedagogy and the reasons for considering it relevant to the work of the writer/ director/ producer Joss Whedon, creator of numberous TV programmes, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, and Films Serenity, Marvel's The Avengers and The Age of Ultron. It analyzes Marvel’s The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) and Christopher Nolan’s (2012b) The Dark Knight Rises as competing public pedagogies.It suggests that popular films can be seen as important educational projects; filmmakers have tremendous resources at their disposal and their creations have a global reach that cannot be matched by individual teachers or national education systems. Whedon can be seen as a radical educator; he enables his audiences to experience ways of looking at the world that challenge aspects of neo-liberal hegemony, and also encourages them to become critical thinkers who have to reflect on their own feelings and perspectives and resist simplistic perspectives on morality and the difficult political choices facing global society

Reaching In, Reaching Out: A Tale of Administrative Experimentation and the Process of Administrative Inclusion

Universities often have a variety of academic programs and initiatives dedicated to the goal of helping students achieve effective communication skills, but these programs and initiatives can change quickly during different moments of institutional and administrative shifts. Our writing center at a mid-size, fouryear institution serves as a primary support program for enhancing students’ literacy in writing and critical thinking, so when our administrators and faculty engage in conversations concerning retention, general education reform, and writing in the disciplines, the writing center becomes a central component in supporting students through these curricular changes. To that end, the administrative goals involved in writing center work may change or evolve frequently and quickly as the university community seeks to enhance the educational experience of our students. The question becomes how do writing centers “survive” in the ever-changing tides of university administration and curriculum reform? And how do these changes present opportunities for tutors to acquire leadership skills transferable to contexts outside of the writing centerUniversity Writing Cente

The Cowl - v.83 - n.4 - Sep 27, 2018

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 83 - No. 4 - September 27, 2018. 24 pages