In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive

The myth of the new: Mass digitization, distant reading, and the future of the book

This article presents the theoretical background to a wider project that is attempting to increase our understanding of the impact and uses of large-scale digitization, being undertaken by the first author at University College London with the working title ‘What is the impact of large-scale digitization upon researchers and the information sector?’ It discusses the controversy surrounding the emergence of mass digitization: the creation and collection of huge resources containing millions of pages of textual cultural content. It demonstrates that the polarized nature of the literature about this technological development is far from unprecedented, and in fact can be traced through the theory of a number of varied fields: the debate surrounding mechanization and digital technologies, our understanding of the role of the sublime in modern representations of technology, the similarities between the sociology of city life and digital information overload, and the way in which innovations are diffused throughout society. It proposes that these theories explain why debates around technological innovation often become so hyperbolic, creating an almost mythological view of technological determination. It concludes that, as a result of the processes outlined in this theory, mass digitization has become stuck between two conflicting rhetorical movements, and that it is therefore necessary to begin working to increase our understanding of this technology and to move the debate onwards using evidence from the real world

Minstrels in the drawing room: music and novel-reading in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Scott, and George Eliot

"Minstrels in the Drawing Room" is an investigation of the representation of musical listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Theoretical accounts of the novel have tended to see it as a universal form, one that opportunistically subsumes all others as its represented content; descriptions of the novel's implied audience often interpret novel-reading as an essentially absorptive activity linking private reading to public belonging through an act of identification. For the writers I discuss here, however, musical listening is interesting because it is a rival mode of shared aesthetic experience that, before the advent of sound recording, was necessarily social. This dissertation draws on recent developments in the history of reading and media theory to describe how novels by three central figures of the European novelistic canon - Goethe, Scott, and Eliot - turn to musical listening to reflect upon the ways in which the absolutely open nature of the novel's mode of address is nevertheless prone to limitation. The dissertation thus complicates often all-or-nothing theories of novel-reading, offering instead a description of how novels model a distanced identification between reader and text

A collective biography study of musicians:patterns, networks and music as a “profession” in the late Ottoman era and the early republican years in Istanbul

This dissertation focuses on the musicians of Istanbul who experienced the transitional period from the late Ottoman to the Early Republican years in Turkey. By focusing on their career trajectories, the thesis seeks to understand the ways in which musicians responded to broader socio-political changes. The thesis offers a wide range of quantitative analyses that were generated in IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The thesis explores the geographical origins, birth dates, family backgrounds, education patterns, language proficiency, occupational distribution with a view to bring the common as well as the distinct features of musicians under investigation to light. The study gives emphasis to the musicians’ mobility in Istanbul in order to enhance the geographical understanding of music. The frequency analysis enabled this study to identify the most frequented neighborhoods by musicians as well as the musical interactions among the neighborhoods. Gephi, which is software to visualize social connections, was used to show the most musically connected neighborhoods to understand how the urban music was generated at the local level. By addressing the issue of music education, the thesis aimed to show that musicians were not monolithic but diverse and reflected different values about music. Many modes of learning music lead to the formation of different musical identities. For the majority of musicians, it was perceived as part of the urban culture, and thereby they built a non-professional (non-profit) relationship with it. The dissertation pays particular attention to the emergence of music schools after 1909 and the radio broadcasts in 1927 to uncover the interactions between state policies and music. The study perceives the role of these two institutions as a turning point in music in terms of the transition from plurality in music-tradition to cultural uniformity, the emergence of music as a “profession”, the re-organization of musicians’ social status, and the remaking of women in music.CONTENTS:Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iv Öz .................................................................................................................................. vi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... viii List of Tables ................................................................................................................ xiv List of Figures ............................................................................................................. xvii List of Photos .............................................................................................................. xvii List of Maps ................................................................................................................. xix Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... xx CHAPTERS 1.INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Thesis Subject and Research Question ............................................................... 1 1.2. Historical Framework .......................................................................................... 4 1.3. Terminological Framework ................................................................................. 7 1.4. Methodological Framework .............................................................................. 12 1.5. Key Sources ....................................................................................................... 16 1.5.1. The Assessment of İbnülemin’s Hoş Sadâ...................................................... 21 1.6. Thesis Structure ................................................................................................. 25 2.HISTORIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 27 2.1. Scholarship on the Late Ottoman Music ........................................................... 27 2.1.1. Literature on the Nationalization of Ottoman Music .................................... 28 2.1.2. Emphasis on Non-Muslim Presence in Music Literature ............................... 31 2.2. What Do the Biographical Dictionaries of Past Mean for Collective Biography Studies? .................................................................................................................... 34 2.2.1. The Biographical Turn and Its Influence on Collective Biography Study ....... 36 2.3. Literature Review on Some Collective Biography Studies in the History of Music ........................................................................................................................ 39 3.THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF MUSICIANS ....................................................................... 44 3.1. Age Composition Characteristics ...................................................................... 44 3.2. Geographical Origins ......................................................................................... 49 3.3. Education Patterns ............................................................................................ 55 3.3.1. Primary Education ...................................................................................... 56 3.3.2. Secondary Education .................................................................................. 57 3.3.3. Higher Education ........................................................................................ 61 3.3.4. Private Tutorage ......................................................................................... 65 3.3.5. Learning a Language................................................................................... 69 3.4. Occupational Continuity.................................................................................... 73 3.5. Musicians’ Profession ........................................................................................ 81 3.6. Musicians’ Career Paths in the Ottoman Bureaucracy ..................................... 86 3.6.1. Education Records of Musicians in the Ottoman State Service ................. 88 3.6.2. Career Patterns of Musicians in the Ottoman State Service ..................... 92 3.7. Causes of Mortality ........................................................................................... 96 3.8. Lives Struck by Poverty ..................................................................................... 99 3.9. Conclusion .......................................................................................................103 4.MUSIC AND GEOGRAPHY: MUSICIANS ON THE MOVE ...........................................105 4.1. The Musical Setting of Istanbul .......................................................................105 4.2. Eyüp: The Sense of Locality .............................................................................118 4.3. Üsküdar: The Composite Structure .................................................................122 4.4. Beyoğlu or an Essential Tour from Pera to Galata ..........................................134 4.5. Fatih: The Musical Stronghold of the City .......................................................147 4.6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................162 5.CULTIVATING MUSIC ...............................................................................................167 5.1. Distribution Based on Musical Instrument .....................................................167 5.2. The Age of Music Education ............................................................................176 5.3. Non-Muslim Musicians and Music Education .................................................187 5.3.1. Musical Specialty Questioned .................................................................188 5.3.2. Who Teaches Whom Among the Non-Muslim Musicians? .....................193 5.4. Social Analysis of Muslim Musicians ...............................................................195 5.4.1. Debating the Religious Character of Music through Sheikh Cemaleddin Efendi (1870-1937) .............................................................................................196 5.4.2. Musicians with Religious School Education and Reciters of Qur’an ........201 5.5. A Sociocultural Analysis of Musicians with Sufi Affiliation .............................206 5.5.1. Mevlevî Musicians Reconsidered .............................................................207 5.5.2. The Sufi Impact on the Music Education .................................................208 5.5.3. A Brief Social History of Ney and the Players...........................................212 5.6. Hamparsum Knowledge Among Musicians ....................................................216 5.7. Exploring Musicians’ Networks: Who Teaches Whom? .................................221 5.8. Conclusion .......................................................................................................227 6.RECONSIDERING CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN MUSIC THROUGH THE CAREER PATHS OF MUSICIANS ................................................................................................229 6.1. Interpreting the Career Changes.....................................................................229 6.1.1. Change in Career Patterns Towards Music ..............................................230 6.1.2. The Consistent Musicians ........................................................................234 6.2. The Social Basis of the Music Schools .............................................................238 6.3. Radio Broadcast: An Opportunity or Threat to Ottoman Music? ...................244 7.CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................251 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................258 APPENDIX ...................................................................................................................278 A. The Full List Of Musicians Under Study (names are listed in date of birth order)278 VITA ............................................................................................................................28

MODELING THE LEADERSHIP OF LANGUAGE CHANGE FROM DIACHRONIC TEXT

Natural languages constantly change over time. These changes are modulated by social factors such as influence which are not always directly observable. However, large-scale computational modeling of language change using timestamped text can uncover the latent organization and social structure. In turn, the social dynamics of language change can potentially illuminate our understanding of innovation, influence, and identity: Who leads? Who follows? Who diverges? This thesis contributes to the growing body of research on using computational methods to model language change with a focus on quantifying linguistic leadership of change. A series of studies highlight the unique contributions of this thesis: methods that scale to huge volumes of data; measures that quantify leadership at the level of individuals or in aggregate; and analysis that links linguistic leadership to other forms of influence. First, temporal and predictive models of event cascades on a network of millions of Twitter users are used to show that lexical change spreads in the form of a contagion and influence from densely embedded ties is crucial for the adoption of non-standard terms. A Granger-causal test for detecting social influence in event cascades on a network is then presented, which is robust to both the presence of confounds such as homophily and can be applied to model both linguistic or non-linguistic change in a network. Next, a novel scheme to score and identify documents that lead semantic change in progress is introduced. This linguistic measure of influence on the documents is strongly predictive of their influence in terms of the number of citations that they receive for both US court opinions and scientific articles. Subsequently, a measure of lead on any semantic change between a pair of document sources (e.g. newspapers) and a method to aggregate multiple lead-lag relationships into a network is presented. Analysis on an induced network of nineteenth century abolitionist newspapers, following the proposed method, reveals the important yet understated role of women and Black editors in shaping the discourse on abolitionism. Finally, a method to induce an aggregate semantic leadership network using contextual word representations is proposed to investigate the link between semantic leadership and influence in the form of citations among publication venues that are part of the Association of Computational Linguistics. Taken together, these studies illustrate the utility of finding leaders of language change to gain insights in sociolinguistics and for applications in social science and digital humanities.Ph.D

Close and Distant Reading Visualizations for the Comparative Analysis of Digital Humanities Data

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field

Street Furniture and the Nation State: A Global Process

In the popular imagination, street furniture has traditionally been understood as evoking a sense of national or local identity. From Paris’ metro entrances, DDR lampposts in Berlin, and London’s york stone pavements, the designed environment has been able to contribute to the unique qualities of a place. In some instances this was deliberate. In postwar Britain for instance, the Council of Industrial Design – a state-funded design organization - often appeared to measure the quality of street furniture on the basis of its national characteristics. On other occasions, the relationship between such objects and identity emerged accidentally. In Britain during the 1980s, for example, the replacement of Gilbert Scott's red telephone box with an alternative BT model provoked considerable debate. For many people, this act was not just a Conservative attack on nationalization and state-ownership, but also on the very fabric of British identity. This understanding of street furniture has retained its currency for many years, and cities across the world have used street furniture to provide a sense of visual coherency for neighbourhoods in need of new identities, strengthening their character and improving the public's relationship to them. In this way, street furniture has been employed as a cipher for the narrative of regeneration, in which - as a means of altering the identity of a space - street furniture can project a new face upon the street. Increasingly however, advertising companies are able to lever themselves into the street furniture market by offering to provide the service to the local authorities for free in return for advertising space. In offering this service, global companies like JC Decaux, Wall and Clear Channel command a huge amount of commercial power within the city. The excessive homogenization of street furniture coupled with the overwhelming presence of advertising which is increasingly sanctioned by local authorities keen to reduce costs, has resulted in the perception of poorer quality streets. Thus, the irony of regeneration is that by seeking to promote the unique identity of a city, many places often end up looking more and more alike. This paper will examine recent developments in the process by which the street is furnished and the agents responsible. It will specifically look at how these changes have affected the relationship between street furniture and identity, and equally the effect this process has had on understandings of national design histories. Clearly, evaluating contemporary street furniture through the lens of the nation-state is of very little value, since the international differences between street furniture are considerably less marked than they used to be. This extraordinary aesthetic convergence is partly linked to economies of scale - after all, just how many different kinds of bus stop can Europe afford to have? Yet it also reflects some of the challenges posed by globalization and privatization of public space. This paper will reflect upon that process, and how these bigger narratives increasingly affect the landscape of the street