The Faculty Notebook, April 2018

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Computing the Affective-Aesthetic Potential of Literary Texts

In this paper, we compute the affective-aesthetic potential (AAP) of literary texts by using a simple sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt. In contrast to other established tools, SentiArt is based on publicly available vector space models (VSMs) and requires no emotional dictionary, thus making it applicable in any language for which VSMs have been made available (>150 so far) and avoiding issues of low coverage. In a first study, the AAP values of all words of a widely used lexical databank for German were computed and the VSM’s ability in representing concrete and more abstract semantic concepts was demonstrated. In a second study, SentiArt was used to predict ~2800 human word valence ratings and shown to have a high predictive accuracy (R2 > 0.5, p < 0.0001). A third study tested the validity of SentiArt in predicting emotional states over (narrative) time using human liking ratings from reading a story. Again, the predictive accuracy was highly significant: R2adj = 0.46, p < 0.0001, establishing the SentiArt tool as a promising candidate for lexical sentiment analyses at both the micro- and macrolevels, i.e., short and long literary materials. Possibilities and limitations of lexical VSM-based sentiment analyses of diverse complex literary texts are discussed in the light of these results

Combining quantitative narrative analysis and predictive modeling - an eye tracking study

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (Jacobs et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2017), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning- based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials (cf. Jacobs, 2015c)

The Faculty Notebook, September 2008

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

The Eighteenth Century

This chapter has three sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry. Section 1 is by Eliza O’Brien; section 2 is by Elles Smallegoor and Sandro Jung; section 3 is by David E. Shuttleton

The genesis of organisational aesthetics

Organisational aesthetics is a burgeoning field with a growing community of scholars engaged in arts-based approaches to research. Recent developments in this field have their origins in the works of early Enlightenment writers such as Vico, Baumgarten and Kant. This paper examines the contributions of these three philosophers and in particular focuses on Vico’s awareness of history and myth; Baumgarten’s notion of sensation and its relationship to rationality; and Kant’s investigations into form and content. By drawing on these ideas, the contemporary aesthetic researcher is informed by qualities such as an alert imagination, comfort with the chaotic, backward thinking, and attention to inner sensations and perceptions, which all work together to provide a coherent view of the organisation as a gestalt

Languaging the embodied experience

Original article can be found at : http://www.informaworld.com/ Copyright Taylor & FrancisThis article is based on a study (Panhofer, 2009) which explored ways of verbalizing the embodied experience and inquired into the essentially subjective undertaking of yielding meaning in the movement. In Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP), movement observation and analysis generally serves as a tool to understand, classify and interpret human movement, providing practitioners with a language for how to speak and describe movement. The study drew attention to the possibilities and limitations of wording the embodied experience, or, as Sheets-Johnstone (2007, p.1) referred to it as ‘ the challenge of languaging the experience’. Underlining nonlanguaged ways of knowing the study showed how movement replaces words in many ways and illustrated valuable possible methods of communicating the embodied experience such as the use of metaphors, images and poetry. It is suggested, as a result of the study, that the embodied word needs to be linked to a personal, emotive vocabulary rather than any technical movement observational language when practitioners communicate their practice to others.Peer reviewe