Contextualism and the History of Philosophy

In this paper, I seek to advance the thesis that if we are to come to a better appreciation of the historical rootedness of philosophical thinking, we must strive to encourage the contextualization of philosophical texts and support this goal by developing methods and tools for research that are facilitative of this contextualist goal

Comparing Grounded Theory and Topic Modeling: Extreme Divergence or Unlikely Convergence?

Researchers in information science and related areas have developed various methods for analyzing textual data, such as survey responses. This article describes the application of analysis methods from two distinct fields, one method from interpretive social science and one method from statistical machine learning, to the same survey data. The results show that the two analyses produce some similar and some complementary insights about the phenomenon of interest, in this case, nonuse of social media. We compare both the processes of conducting these analyses and the results they produce to derive insights about each method\u27s unique advantages and drawbacks, as well as the broader roles that these methods play in the respective fields where they are often used. These insights allow us to make more informed decisions about the tradeoffs in choosing different methods for analyzing textual data. Furthermore, this comparison suggests ways that such methods might be combined in novel and compelling ways

The role of humanities computing: experiences and challenges

Dieser Beitrag wurde anlässlich des dreißigjährigen Bestehens der Abteilung Literarische und Dokumentarische Datenverarbeitung an der Universität Tübingen verfasst. Er gibt einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der Datenverarbeitung auf dem Gebiet der Geisteswissenschaften in diesem Zeitraum. Zunächst werden Erfahrungen mit der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften referiert und aktuelle Entwicklungen auf diesem Gebiet vorgestellt. Dann werden Herausforderungen diskutiert, mit denen sich die Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften konfrontiert sieht. Abschließend stellt der Verfasser die Bedeutung der Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften in den kommenden Jahren aus seiner Sicht dar. (ICEÜbers)'Due to the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Department for Literary and Documentary Data Processing in Tuebingen this article is written. It gives an overview of humanities computing developments since the formation of this Research-Department. The paper is divided into three parts. First, the experiences in humanities computing are reviewed. For three purposes the author points out various aspects of the development and exploitation of scholarly materials using computers, considering some of the current work to create new tools for research. This chapter is followed by the discussion of some of the key challenges of this century, by that humanities computing and the scholarship, of which it is a part, are faced with. Finally, the author gives a summary of what in his opinion would be the key rotes of humanities computing in the future.' (author's abstract

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

'I became a man in a military camp' : negotiating a transmasculine identity in Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)’s personal documents and literary fiction

Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy, 1836], an autobiographical narrative by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (born Nadezhda Durova) (1783-1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, has been popular with readers since its first publication in 1836. Despite the obvious gender ambiguity of the narrator in this text, most adaptations and biographies interpret ‘Nadezhda Durova’s’ grammatically female gender as proof that her army service was a brief instance of military cross-dressing in the otherwise conventional life of a patriotic woman. However, Aleksandrov’s legacy includes not just Notes and other published fiction, but also a substantial corpus of personal documents, some of which have only recently been recovered from the military archives. These texts form a record of Nadezhda Durova’s documented transition to Aleksandr Aleksandrov and, I argue, testify that from 1808 Aleksandrov consistently identified as a man until his death in 1866. In this article, I focus on Aleksandrov’s military and civil correspondence, to compare his transmasculine voice in personal documents to the more ambiguously gendered voices of his narrators in fiction. Using the narratological category of ‘autofiction’, I argue that even though Aleksandrov had to choose between two binary gender identities in everyday life, literary fiction created a space for him to inhabit the personas of both ‘Nadezhda Durova’ and ‘Aleksandr Aleksandrov’.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Who’s Blogging Now? Linguistic Features and Authorship Analysis in Sports Blogs

abstract: The field of authorship determination, previously largely falling under the umbrella of literary analysis but recently becoming a large subfield of forensic linguistics, has grown substantially over the last two decades. As its body of research and its record of successful forensic application continue to grow, this growth is paralleled by the demand for its application. However, methods which have undergone rigorous testing to show their reliability and replicability, allowing them to meet the strict Daubert criteria put forth by the US court system, have not truly been established. In this study, I set out to investigate how a list of parameters, many commonly used in the methodologies of previous researchers, would perform when used to test documents of bloggers from a sports blog, Winging It in Motown. Three prolific bloggers were chosen from the site, and a corpus of posts was created for each blogger which was then examined for each of the chosen parameters. One test document for each of the three bloggers which was not included in that blogger’s corpus was then chosen from the blog page, and these documents were examined for each of the parameters via the same methodologies as were used to examine the corpora. Once data for the corpora and all three test documents was obtained, the results were compared for similarity, and an author determination was made for each test document along each parameter. The findings indicated that overall the parameters were quite unsuccessful in determining authorship for these test documents based on the author corpora developed for the study. Only two parameters successfully identified the authors of the test documents at a rate higher than chance, and the possibility exists that other factors may be driving these successful identifications, demanding further research to confirm their validity as parameters for the purpose of authorship work.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

Transcribing Medieval Manuscripts for Machine Learning

In the early twentieth century, many scholars focused on the preparation of editions and translations of texts previously available only to the few specialists able to read archaic hands and privileged enough to travel to work in person with them in manuscript. Valuable scholarship in its own right, the preparation of these editions and translations for particular texts deemed important enough to justify the effort and time, laid the foundation for generations of scholarship in medieval studies. On the other hand, for many materials in historical archival collections, including already digitised collections, medievalists have only had the time to create partial transcriptions, if any at all. Access to textual material from the medieval period has increased greatly in recent years with digitisation, and we are able to imagine many new research projects in decades to come. What challenges do new frontiers of automation in the archives raise with respect to medieval studies and in particular to the ways we transcribe? In this article, we argue that if medievalists hope to pursue the kinds of analysis that goes on in advanced computational research, we will need new kinds of transcriptions, intentionally theorized not only for human reading, but also for machine processing. We already have mature methods for remediating generations of editions of medieval works such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but we can ask ourselves if these are the kinds of text we want to use for future computational analysis. We suggest instead that one way forward is by going back to the scriptorium

Traducir géneros, crear transgéneros: Los espacios intermedios textuales como innovaciones sistémicas enraizadas en las situaciones

Este artículo trabaja la noción de transgénero (Monzó-Nebot 2001a, 2002a, b), sus usos y posibilidades en el estudio de la traducción como mediadora en la cooperación intercultural. Los transgéneros son patrones discursivos que se desarrollan en situaciones interculturales recurrentes y son reconocidos y utilizados por una comunidad. Sobre la base de la reiteración de los propósitos comunicativos y las funciones de los individuos en las situaciones traducidas, las interacciones se convencionalizan para racionalizar la cooperación entre los grupos culturales y sociales, lo que genera un conjunto distintivo de supuestos asumidos, signos y mecanismos de creación de significado que son particulares de una situación traducida. En el artículo se argumentará en primer lugar que este concepto va más allá de las propuestas existentes de los enfoques culturales, sociales y lingüísticos, especialmente el tercer espacio, los modelos de normas y leyes de la traducción, y los universales y el lenguaje de la traducción (translationese), al centrarse en el carácter arraigado en una situación de las pautas textuales, de interacción y culturales; por ello, proporciona un medio para modelar y medir el desarrollo de la traducción como práctica discursiva, influida por cuestiones históricas, culturales, sociales, cognitivas, ideológicas y lingüísticas. A continuación, se identifican y exponen las aplicaciones existentes del concepto y nuevas posibilidades. Los resultados de los estudios existentes muestran que las traducciones construyen un tercer espacio de prácticas discursivas interculturales que muestran las tensiones con los sistemas de origen y de destino. En ese tercer espacio, resultante de sus propias prácticas culturales vinculadas a la función específica de los traductores en un sistema multicultural más amplio, el traductor jurídico se siente en su propio medio.This paper works on the notion of transgenre (Monzó-Nebot 2001a, 2002a, b), its uses and possibilities in the study of translation as mediating intercultural cooperation. Transgenres are discursive patterns that develop in recurring intercultural situations and are recognized and used by a community. Based on the reiteration of communicative purposes and individuals’ roles in translated situations, interactions are conventionalized to streamline cooperation between cultural and social groups, thereby engendering a distinctive set of taken-for-granted assumptions and meaning-making mechanisms and signs which are particular to a translated event. The paper will first argue how this concept takes a step beyond the existing proposals from cultural, social, and linguistic approaches, especially the third space, the models of norms and laws of translation, and universals and the language of translation (translationese), by focusing on the situatedness of textual, interactional, and cultural patterns and providing a means to model and measure the development of translation as a discursive practice, as such influenced by historical, cultural, social, cognitive, ideologic, and linguistic issues. Then existing applications of the concept and new possibilities will be identified and discussed. The results of existing studies show translations build a third space of intercultural discursive practices showing tensions with both source and target systems. The legal translator is at home in this third space, resulting from their own cultural practices, which are linked to translators’ specific function in a broader multicultural system

Creating Lexical Resources in TEI P5 : a Schema for Multi-purpose Digital Dictionaries

Although most of the relevant dictionary productions of the recent past have relied on digital data and methods, there is little consensus on formats and standards. The Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology (ICLTT) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been conducting a number of varied lexicographic projects, both digitising print dictionaries and working on the creation of genuinely digital lexicographic data. This data was designed to serve varying purposes: machine-readability was only one. A second goal was interoperability with digital NLP tools. To achieve this end, a uniform encoding system applicable across all the projects was developed. The paper describes the constraints imposed on the content models of the various elements of the TEI dictionary module and provides arguments in favour of TEI P5 as an encoding system not only being used to represent digitised print dictionaries but also for NLP purposes