Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics

Building on the momentum enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches within Classics, this volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in both Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories developed in cognitive linguistics, revealing the role of human embodiment in determining the meanings of various linguistic phenomena

‘A Singular Cross-cultural Poetics in a Dual Discourse’ A Study of Lin Yutang’s Self-translation of the Little Critic Essays and Between Tears and Laughter

This thesis approaches Lin Yutang’s Chinese-oriented discourse from his two self-translation projects, rendering respectively his Little Critic column essays and Between Tears and Laughter. The research carried out for this thesis aims to analyse Lin’s self-translation changes, to compare the differences in motivational patterns between these two projects, and to offer possible justification for the unique character of Lin’s text decisions. Due to the heterolinguistic nature of this research project, the research is informed by the domain of Translation Studies, borrowing the broad framework from the ‘architectonics of translation analysis’ by Berman that combine a text analysis and a translator study, and also sources analytical tools from some well-established findings based on linguistics. Hence, this research hopes to enrich the research setting of self-translation in Translation Studies, in the sense that the uniqueness of Lin’s text decisions serves as an example of how self-translators’ decisions differ from allograph translators’

A Kind of Construction in Light and Shade : An Analytical Dialogue with Recording Studio Aesthetics in Two Songs by Led Zeppelin

This dissertation examines how the sound of a recording contributes meaning to the song, working in conjunction with the song’s lyrics, harmonic and rhythmic structures, album artwork, and within its cultural context. Two songs by the rock group Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks” and “Stairway to Heaven,” are taken as analytical examples in which special attention is paid to the acoustic properties of the recordings, that is, where the instruments are situated within the stereo sound field; how they are timbrally manipulated with effects such as reverb, echo, distortion, and chorus; their relative levels of prominence; and how these factors interact to create meaning in the song. The intent is to bring into relief the complex and myriad ways that recording studio aesthetics shape both our perception of, and appreciation for, two of the most prominent songs in this group’s rich repertoire. By considering the recorded sound among the other factors that comprise these analyses, I also seek to demonstrate the value of parameters other than pitch and rhythm in analyses of this repertoire in particular. This project requires extremely close listening to the recordings in order to discern how various studio effects are employed in the context of each song’s particular aesthetics. I take as my methodological departure point Albin Zak’s book, The Poetics of Rock, in which are found analyses of studio production techniques in various rock songs, and Susan Fast’s book, In the Houses of the Holy, in which many facets of Led Zeppelin’s music are examined, including semiotics and the relationship between timbre and text

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics

Building on the momentum enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches within Classics, this volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in both Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories developed in cognitive linguistics, revealing the role of human embodiment in determining the meanings of various linguistic phenomena

Cognitive Grammar in Literature

This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice

Critical toponomy

Critical Toponymy: Place names in political, historical and commercial landscapes contains a selection of double-blind peer-reviewed papers from the 4th International Symposium on Place Names that took place 18-20 September 2017 in Windhoek, Namibia. These papers present current thinking on how the critical turn in social sciences is manifested in toponymic research, not only locally but also internationally. As such it includes research on place names from South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Austria, Slovenia, Central America and even the former Czechoslovakia. The contributions show that the etymology of place names are never purely linguistic – social, political, commercial and other factors influence the giving, use and adaptations of these linguistic and cultural artefacts. Furthermore, given their high symbolic content, place names also serve as political and commercial currency. Place names are therefore important symbolic markers in preserving or changing cultural identities, and in marking or facilitating socio-political changes and relations. Critical Toponymy showcases the many ways in which the representational potential of place names can be deployed in different contexts. Scholars as well as practitioners in toponymy and sociolinguistics will find this an illuminating read

Proceedings of “The Healing and Emotional Power of Music and Dance (HELP-MD)” Symposium.

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