Ubiquitous Place Names Standardization and Study in Indonesia

Place names play a vital role in human society. Names exist in all languages and place names are an indispensible part of International communication. This has been acknowledged by the establishment of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). One of UNGEGN's tasks is to coordinate International efforts on the proper use of place names. Indonesia supports this effort and through its National Geospatial Agency (BIG). Place names are also of interest as an object of study in themselves. Academic studies into place names are found in linguistics, onomastics, philosophy and a number of other academic disciplines. This article looks at these two dimensions of place names, standardization efforts under the auspices of International and national bodies, and academic studies of names, with particular reference to the situation in Indonesia

Digitally deconstructing a pícaro: examining the role of the Digital Humanities in the L2 learning and teaching of Lazarillo de Tormes

Master of ArtsDepartment of Modern LanguagesRebecca BenderThis paper addresses different digital strategies taken from an L2 perspective in the analysis of the classic picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). I combine the strengths of two digital humanities tools in order to better bridge the cultural divide that may stand between the L2 learner and the narrative’s pícaro. This study aims to blend the use of LIWC, a digital sentiment analysis tool, with Storymap, a digital mapping software from Knightlab, in order to create a robust linguistic, historic and geographic analysis. The combination of software platforms will quantify and display the emotional associations that Lázaro, the protagonist of the novel, expresses towards each physical landmark he mentions. This analysis aims to reveal the strategies used in the first-person narrative to tie emotions, either positive or negative, to each specific location mentioned in central Spain. By plotting each place that appears in the narrative and reviewing the data of the sentiment analysis, my project is designed to better understand why the protagonist is so specific when mentioning, sites, towns, and cities both in Spain and abroad. This study effectively blends Digital Humanities tools and traditional literary analyses in order to show how the inclusion of advanced technologies in the L2 classroom has the potential to unlock cultural, historical and geographical information hidden in the target culture’s literature

Accent in digital humanities and language studies: the case in Hong Kong

This paper argues for the importance of the awareness of “DH accent” and demonstrates with examples in English studies how a localised variation of the curriculum facilitates students’ learning in the classroom and at the curriculum level. This study identifies the problem that studies in digital humanities have focused on the Anglo-American world. We demonstrate with an example in the Hong Kong context that even a curriculum of English language studies requires adaptation for the local needs, such as focus on second language learning and knowledge of contrastive grammar with the local language. To achieve these goals, instructors integrate materials that are tailored for students of language studies, who are typically proficient in humanistic argumentation and concepts but less fluent in digital skills. Use cases in teaching and examples of student projects are shown to illustrate the outcome of learning. The study presents important educational implication and direction for future research and education of the digital humanities

A Social Network Analysis of Twitter: Mapping the Digital Humanities Community

Defining digital humanities might be an endless debate if we stick to the discussion about the boundaries of this concept as an academic "discipline". In an attempt to concretely identify this field and its actors, this paper shows that it is possible to analyse them through Twitter, a social media widely used by this "community of practice". Based on a network analysis of 2,500 users identified as members of this movement, the visualisation of the "who's following who?" graph allows us to highlight the structure of the network's relationships, and identify users whose position is particular. Specifically, we show that linguistic groups are key factors to explain clustering within a network whose characteristics look similar to a small world

From intersubjectivity to interculturalism in digital learning environments

The paper presents the work of the research program “Studies on\ud Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation” a joint international venture that seeks\ud to provide blended-learning -both online and in-classroom- methodologies for the\ud development of interculturalism and associated emotional empathic responses\ud through the study of art and literary fiction.1\ud Technological development is consistent with human desire to draw on\ud previous information and experiences in order to apply acquired knowledge to\ud present life conditions and, furthermore, make improvements for the future.\ud Therefore, it is logical that human agentive consciousness has been directed\ud towards encouraging action at a distance by all possible means. The evolution in\ud media technologies bears witness to this fact.\ud This paper explores the paradoxes behind the growing emphasis on spatial\ud metaphors during the 20th-century and a dynamic concept of space as the site of\ud relational constructions where forms and structural patterns become formations\ud constructed in interaction, and where the limit or border becomes a constitutive\ud feature, immanently connected with the possibility of its transgression. The paper\ud contends that the development of mass media communication, and particularly the\ud digital turn, has dramatically impacted on topographical spaces, both sociocultural and individual, and that the emphasis on „inter‟ perspectives, hybridism,\ud ambiguities, differences and meta-cognitive articulations of awareness of limits\ud and their symbolic representations, and the desire either to transgress limits or to\ud articulate „in-between‟, intercultural „third spaces‟, etc. are symptomatic of\ud structural problems at the spatial-temporal interface of culture and its\ud representations. Finally, the paper brings into attention research on the\ud neuroscientific basis of intersubjectivity in order to point out the material basis of\ud human knowledge and cognition and its relationship to the archiving of historical\ud memory and information transfer through education. It also offers and brief\ud introduction to the dynamics of SIIM

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)