Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Knowledge Organization WissOrg'17 of theGerman Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO),30th November - 1st December 2017, Freie Universität Berlin

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization.Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen

A Short History and Demonstration of the Dynamic Table of Contexts

This paper presents a brief account of the form and function of the “table of contents” to establish a theoretical framework for understanding the form and function of this common element of book architecture with the aim of informing the development of a dynamic table of contexts for books and reading in the digital medium. This paper will thus theorize the relationship between textual studies and interface design in INKE, a project for Implementing New Knowledge Environments

Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Knowledge Organization WissOrg'17 of the German Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), 30th November - 1st December 2017, Freie Universität Berlin

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization.Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen

Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

Located at the center of Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty, “Self Portrait as Hurray and Delay” crafts a portrait of the artist, poised at a precarious moment in which thought begins to take shape. Like Penelope, Graham entertains the illusion, if only momentarily, of a choice between bringing a creative impulse into form or allowing it to come undone. A weaver of language, Graham subtly, deftly, but unsuccessfully attempts to delay the inevitable moment in poetic creation in which complexity of thought adopts form through language, and so realized is also reduced. In The End of Beauty, the beginning of the creative act signals an inevitable descent into meaning – language’s ultimate impulse. Understanding how topic modeling algorithms handle figurative language means allowing for a similar beautiful failure – not a failure of language, but a necessary inclination toward form that involves a diminishing of language’s possible meanings. However, the necessarily reductive methodology of sorting poetic language into relatively stable categories, as topic modeling suggests, yields precisely the kind of results that literary scholars might hope for – models of language that, having taken form, are at the same moment at odds with the laws of their creation. In the following article, I suggest that topic modeling poetry works, in part, because of its failures. Somewhere between the literary possibility held in a corpus of thousands of English-language poems and the computational rigor of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), there is an interpretive space that is as vital as the weaving and unraveling at Penelope’s loom

Affordances and limitations of algorithmic criticism

Humanities scholars currently have access to unprecedented quantities of machine-readable texts, and, at the same time, the tools and the methods with which we can analyse and visualise these texts are becoming more and more sophisticated. As has been shown in numerous studies, many of the new technical possibilities that emerge from fields such as text mining and natural language processing can have useful applications within literary research. Computational methods can help literary scholars to discover interesting trends and correlations within massive text collections, and they can enable a thoroughly systematic examination of the stylistic properties of literary works. While such computer-assisted forms of reading have proven invaluable for research in the field of literary history, relatively few studies have applied these technologies to expand or to transform the ways in which we can interpret literary texts. Based on a comparative analysis of digital scholarship and traditional scholarship, this thesis critically examines the possibilities and the limitations of a computer-based literary criticism. It argues that quantitative analyses of data about literary techniques can often reveal surprising qualities of works of literature, which can, in turn, lead to new interpretative readings

Transnationalism Undermining the Canon:A Close and Distant Reading of Several Transatlantic Literary Networks in Translation

This essay argues that random acts of poetry translation in transnational context play a significant role in turning any apparently homogenous literary system into a network with many access points. In doing so, they overtly or covertly undermine the idea of a literary canon, since they position, more or less explicitly, such canon against their own literary taste and network of acquaintances. In addition, the lack of financial conditioning makes this kind of translation barters reach literary audiences more easily. Since these exchanges are more commonly initiated by translators working in lesser-known languages, it follows that transnational translation barters level out cultural imbalances by having the translator-poets’ work translated into languages of wider circulation. This contribution presents four kinds of transnational exchanges in Romanian context and argues that more complex translation mechanisms result into a more open, more diverse, and a more dynamic literary scene, in which translators play a prominent role. From a methodological point of view, this essay combines the traditional close reading of the texts and paratexts with quantitative analysis and network visualization to lay out the blueprint of Romanian translations of US and Canadian poetry in periodicals between 2007 and 2017 and quantify the number of random exchanges against a transnational backdrop.Este ensaio argumenta que atos aleatórios de tradução de poesia no contexto transnacional desempenham um papel significativo na transformação de qualquer sistema literário aparentemente homogêneo em uma rede com muitos pontos de acesso. Ao fazer isso, eles minam abertamente ou dissimuladamente a ideia de um cânone literário, uma vez que posicionam, mais ou menos explicitamente, tal cânone contra seu próprio gosto literário e rede de conhecidos. Além disso, a falta de condicionamento financeiro faz com que esse tipo de permutas de tradução chegue mais facilmente ao público literário. Como essas trocas são mais comumente iniciadas por tradutores que trabalham em línguas menos conhecidas, segue-se que as trocas transnacionais de tradução nivelam os desequilíbrios culturais, fazendo com que o trabalho dos tradutores-poetas seja traduzido para línguas de maior circulação. Essa contribuição apresenta quatro tipos de intercâmbios transnacionais no contexto romeno e argumenta que mecanismos de tradução mais complexos resultam em um cenário literário mais aberto, mais diversificado e mais dinâmico, no qual os tradutores desempenham um papel proeminente. De um ponto de vista metodológico, este ensaio combina a tradicional leitura atenta dos textos e paratextos com análise quantitativa e visualização em rede para traçar o plano das traduções romenas de poesia americana e canadense em periódicos entre 2007 e 2017 e quantificar a quantidade de intercâmbios aleatórios em um cenário transnacional

The ‘dying-tale’ as epistemic strategy in Hemans’s Records of Woman

The personal writings of popular nineteenth-century poet Felicia Hemans indicate her desire to alleviate social constraints on women to improve their education, yet her poetry’s female figures often seem overly attached to domesticity or lacking in emotional fortitude. This paper addresses ways in which a study of early modern female writers of history can inform Hemans scholarship, particularly by drawing on Megan Matchinske’s work on the ‘dying-tale’ in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Similarly, Hemans promotes the necessity of women acting to ensure successful political and personal endurance in ‘The Switzer’s Tale’. Furthermore, in the pedagogy of Records of Woman (1828), Hemans responds to the problem of visual dominance in art by adopting a multi-sensory approach to communication that relies especially on the auditory. This strategy takes part in a broader epistemic approach to history that criticises the reliability of memory and the transience of human bodies. Ultimately, Hemans suggests that transcendence occurs through the exercise of the human will, the ultimate representation of which is martyrdom

Computer Vision and Architectural History at Eye Level:Mixed Methods for Linking Research in the Humanities and in Information Technology

Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuableinsights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable forresearch.<br/

Computer Vision and Architectural History at Eye Level:Mixed Methods for Linking Research in the Humanities and in Information Technology

Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuableinsights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable forresearch.<br/