Report on the Second International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story 2019)

The Second International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story’19 [http://text2story19.inesctec.pt/]) was held on the 14th of April 2019, in conjunction with the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2019) in Cologne, Germany. The workshop provided a platform for researchers in IR, NLP, and design and visualization to come together and share the recent advances in extraction and formal representation of narratives. The workshop consisted of two invited talks, ten research paper presentations, and a poster and demo session. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2342/info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A "novel" reading therapy programme for reading difficulties after a subarachnoid haemorrhage

Background: Although several treatments for acquired reading difficulties exist, few studies have explored the effectiveness of treatment for mild reading difficulties and treatment for reading difficulties associated with cognitive impairment. Aims: This study explored the effectiveness of an individual strategy-based reading treatment of 11 sessions given to a female participant (IW) who had mild reading difficulties following a subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH). The impact of treatment on reading ability, confidence and emotions associated with reading were investigated. Methods & Procedures: Treatment focussed on the use of strategies to support IW’s memory when reading books, the use of a checklist to select appropriate reading materials, and increasing IW’s confidence in discussing the book she was reading with others. A person-centred approach and personally relevant materials were used throughout the treatment. Reading ability was assessed using the Gray Oral Reading Tests (GORT-4; Lee Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001), and IW’s perspective was obtained using the Reading Confidence and Emotions Questionnaire (RCEQ; see Cocks et al., 2010. Pre-treatment, post-treatment and maintenance (7 weeks post) assessments were undertaken, with an additional exit interview at the final time point. Outcomes & Results: Gains were noted in reading rate, accuracy, comprehension, and confidence, with parallel increased pleasure gained from reading and reduced negative emotions and frustration. Self-reported gains included conversing with others about material read, verbal communication, and re-engagement with the identity of being a reader. Conclusions: Strategy-based treatment resulted in positive gains in reading for pleasure, conversation, and identity, for an individual with mild chronic reading difficulties. Participant self-report and interview reveal the true value of this treatment for the individual. The positive results suggest that further research is warranted that investigates the effectiveness of strategy-based reading therapy approaches for others with acquired reading difficulties

The Mockery of Things: Material Culture and Domestic Ideology in the Detective Fiction of Anna Katharine Green

The Mockery of Things: Material Culture and Domestic Ideology in the Detective Fiction of Anna Katharine Green examines how a popular genre author like Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) uses objects to articulate middle-class identity and social constructions in late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. During that era, the home as both a physical space and an ideological signifier was a central tenet in American middle-class identity. Focusing on domestically situated objects – clothing, household furnishings and domestic architecture – this dissertation considers how such items, which have tended to be read in support of domestic identity, instead function within the context of Green’s detective fiction as a covert critique the period’s prevailing ideologies of gender, class and consumption. Considering these tangible goods in this novel way also serves to illuminate the real-world shifts and social changes that occurred in America over the fifty year period between the end of the American Civil War and its entry into the First World War. Popular fiction such as that written by Anna Katharine Green offers the opportunity to critically trace the consequences of the period’s widespread valorization of domesticity and the home, the changing place of women in society in nineteenth-century America and the implications that new access to material culture offered for social mobility, class identity and criminal culpability

Distributed Agency in the Novel

In this study, I propose to side-step the philosophical complexity surrounding free will, agency, or volition in favor of their linguistic proxy, syntax. Whatever the belief about willful subjects, the English language forces our thoughts into linear propositions, where subject verbs object. As such, nouns in the subject position become semantically the causes of action, and objects their passive effects: pilots fly planes, maintenance crews clean snow, terrorists detonate bombs. Such complex personifications don't need to be mapped out perfectly before observing that actors are those entities that act, and that action manifests itself through verbs. Assuming little more than that, one can ask: What sorts of nouns get to "do" stuff in the novel? Who are the most common syntactical actants? And who or what do they act upon? With this bit of shorthand we can discuss characterization not in terms of contested philosophical categories, such as name or being, but in relation to specific grammatical features. The syntactic points to the philosophical subject. I proceed, then, by developing a computational method for extracting a set of main characters from a novel (or any other collection of sentences in which agency might be implicated). Hailey's Airport bears the brunt of my analysis, where a few other more familiar novels supply comparison for an experiment in formal literary method

Filmden/senaryodan romana: Türkiye'de çeviri sinema romanlar (1944-1957)

Dünyada çeviri üzerine yapılan çalışmalarda, film ve çeviri ilişkisi altyazı ve dublaj konularıyla sınırlı kalmakta; Türkiye'de ise filmler çeviri araştırmalarında çok az yer bulmaktadır. Her iki durumda da çeviri edebiyat ile sinema arasındaki yakın ilişki göz ardı edilmektedir. Bu tezin amacı, çeviri popüler edebiyat ve sinema arasındaki ilişkileri sorunsallaştırmak ve yabancı filmlerin çeviri popüler edebiyatı etkilediğini ortaya çıkarmaktır. Bu çalışmada, erken Cumhuriyet dönemi Türkiyesi'nde özel yayınevlerinin çoğunun seyircinin filmlere olan ilgisinden faydalanmak istediği ve bu amaçla bir çok çeviri sinema roman yayımladığı bulgulanmıştır. Çeviri sinema romanlar ile yabancı filmler arasındaki karmaşık ilişkinin incelenmesi için bir sınıflandırma önerilmiş ve farklı gruplar altına giren, farklı zamanlarda basılmış (1944 ve 1957) iki çeviri sinema roman, barındırdıkları karmaşık çeviri yapılarını analiz etmek için inceleme konusu olarak seçilmiştir. Bu romanları oluşturuldukları bağlamdan soyutlamamak için 1933 ve 1960 arasında yayımlanmış olan çeviri ve yerli popüler sinema romanlardan meydana gelen bir veri tabanı oluşturulmuş ve bu veri tabanının eleştirel incelemesi yapılmıştır. Tüm bunların sonucunda; Türkiye'de ilk defa yapılan bu çalışma, erken cumhuriyet döneminde yabancı filmlerin -Türkiye'de gösterilsin ya da gösterilmesin- çeviri popüler edebiyatı etkilediğini, Türk edebiyatına yeni bir tür ?sinema roman- kazandırdığını ve Türk kültür repertuarına farklı çeviri tanımları getirdiğini ortaya koymuştur. Bununla birlikte, bu tez erken Cumhuriyet dönemi çeviri tarihi ile ilgili Türkiye'de yapılan çalışmaları tamamlayıcı nitelikte olup, çeviri sinema romanları çeviribilimin araştırma konusu olarak sunmuştur. Researches on the relationship between film and translation are mostly restricted to subtitling and dubbing in the world; as for Turkey, films are hardly subjects of translation studies. In any case, the close relationship between translated literature and cinema is disregarded. This thesis, by problematizing the relations between foreign films and novels, aims to reveal that foreign films are influential on translated popular literature. In the present study, it is discovered that in the early republican Turkey, many private publishers wanted to capitalize on the popularity of films and published numerous cinema novels. A classification is proposed for analyzing the complex relations between translated cinema novels and foreign films. Two translated cinema novels which fall under different groups and were published in different years (1944 and 1957), are taken as case studies with a view to explore the complex translation practices they harboured. In order to contextualize the novels, a database including translated and indigenous cinema novels published between 1933 and 1960 is established and its critical analysis is provided. As a result; this study, which will be the first in Turkey, concludes that in the early republican Turkey, foreign films ?whether screened or not- influenced the translated popular literature; introduced a new genre ?cinema novel- to Turkish literature and brought diverse aspects of translation into Turkish culture repertoire. Moreover; being complementary to the studies of translation which focus on the early republican Turkey, this thesis presents translated cinema novels as a reseach subject for translation studies

Human Minds and Animal Stories

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animal

Intersemiotic translation in videogames: an analysis on the characters of persona 5

A presente dissertação focaliza-se na relação hermenêutica entre Tradução Intersemiótica e construção das personagens nas narrativas interacticas digitais, coloquialmente referidas como “videojogos”. É frequente um videojogo apresentar personagens basedas em personagens originais criadas por outros. Ou estas personagens são transposições diretas de uma personagem para o mundo do jogo, ou uma personagem representativa dessa através de simbolismo. Assim, esta tese concentra-se nos processos involvidos na criação das personagens do RPG Japonês, Persona 5, bem como todo o simbolismo que estas contêm.The following dissertation focuses on the hermeneutic relationship between Intersemiotic Translation and the construction of characters in interactive digital narratives, commonly known as "videogames". It is common for a videogame to present characters based on original characters from other authors. Either these characters are direct transpositions of an entire character into the game’s world, or a character meant to represent them through symbolism. Thus, this dissertation will focus on the processes involved in the creation of the characters of the Japanese Roleplaying Game, Persona 5, as well as all the symbolism they contain.Versão final (Esta versão contém as críticas e sugestões dos elementos do júri

Experiments in Decentralization: Suburban Spaces in the Writings of Early Twentieth-Century British Female Novelists

My dissertation examines how Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Vita Sackville-West, and Elizabeth Bowen utilize imagery of suburbia to formulate critiques of patriarchal gender norms. As lower-middle and working-class families relocated to suburbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they colonized a way of life that was specific to the affluent bourgeoisie. That such shifts in urban geography and demographics threatened the bourgeois identity is perhaps best observed through an analysis of the literary texts of the period, which featured suburbs as Gothic spaces of otherness, or as feminized lands of monotonous domesticity. John Carey and Andreas Huyssen argue that various male modernists’ artistic projects were partly a reaction to the perceived femininity and vulgarity of mass culture, which was repeatedly associated with suburban spaces. My project explores the relationship between these misogynistic discursive practices and the innovative representations of urban decentralization in the writings of the British female authors. My first chapter concerns a largely ignored fin-de-siècle literary interest in suburban masculinity, especially in detective Gothic stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen. My other three chapters, which focus, respectively, on the works of Richardson and Woolf, Sackville-West, and Bowen, show how these authors subvert negative stereotypes of suburbia and traditional concepts of subjectivity and gender by portraying specific suburban spaces or the phenomenon of suburban growth as occasioning opportunities for women’s development of self-empowering personal privacy. While Michel Foucault’s ideas of the governmental management of space and deployment of sexuality enable me to study the links between suburban growth and gender, I also utilize Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope or literary space-time; Henri Lefebvre’s differentiation between multiple modes of spatiality; Foucault’s idea of heterotopia; and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “smooth” and “striated” spaces and “becomings” to identify various degrees and combinations of destabilizing and rigidifying energies that exist in selected literary representations of suburbia. My project emphasizes the subversive energies galvanized by urban decentralization; analyzes the mutually productive relationship among spaces, gendered bodies, and class identities; and extracts a range of semantic possibilities from the history of suburbia

You don't have to be a bad girl to love crime: feminity and women's labor in U.S. broadcast crime programming, 1945-1975

You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime uses archival research, textual analysis, and industrial and cultural studies frameworks to re-evaluate women’s representation in post-World War II American radio and television crime dramas. It complicates popular and scholarly understandings that postwar broadcasters simply responded to audience desires by marginalizing women across their schedules and removing recurring female characters from crime dramas altogether. Rather, the three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that dominated the broadcast industry’s transition from radio to television joined conservative religious and anti-communist groups to silence public debate over women’s roles. While late-1940s network radio programming incorporated varied opinions about postwar women’s desire and potential to expand their influence in the workplace and politics, postwar television naturalized a vision of passive housewives embracing husbands’ patriarchal authority. Women who chose to fight crime challenged this authority by claiming the right to enforce the law and judge their fellow citizens. This dissertation is organized into two parts: The first explores the industrial and cultural discourses that set the stage for postwar restrictions on women in crime. Network executives and anti-communist conservatives did not see each other as natural allies, but they mobilized complementary gender discourses emphasizing women as passive consumers rather than public actors. Archival industry research shows network executives ignored evidence female audiences liked crime programming, especially series featuring active, sympathetic women. Instead, executives and vocal conservatives framed such women as a sexualized threat to men, children, and themselves. Networks tolerated crime-curious women on radio and early television, when they struggled to retain and build a female audience. However, by the mid-1950s, executives feared such women would undermine their commercial emphasis on domestic consumption and attract regulation or censorship. Part two explores three major types of crime-curious women who appeared on postwar radio and television programming. Investigative wives and detectives’ secretaries investigated crimes with male husbands or employers. Female detectives, however, directly challenged men’s control over criminal justice, the most overt sign of patriarchal social power. All three types gave female audiences a powerful model of feminine agency within patriarchal society. They also established representational norms that endure in modern crime dramas

Human Minds and Animal Stories

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animal