Personalizing a Concept Similarity Measure in the Description Logic ELH with Preference Profile

Concept similarity measure aims at identifying a degree of commonality of two given concepts and is often regarded as a generalization of the classical reasoning problem of equivalence. That is, any two concepts are equivalent if and only if their similarity degree is one. However, existing measures are often devised based on objective factors, e.g. structural-based measures and interpretation-based measures. When these measures are employed to characterize similar concepts in an ontology, they may lead to unintuitive results. In this work, we introduce a new notion called concept similarity measure under preference profile with a set of formally defined properties in Description Logics. This new notion may be interpreted as measuring the similarity of two concepts under subjective factors (e.g. the agent's preferences and domain-dependent knowledge). We also develop a measure of the proposed notion and show that our measure satisfies all desirable properties. Two algorithmic procedures are introduced for top-down and bottom-up implementation, respectively, and their computational complexities are intensively studied. Finally, the paper discusses the usefulness of the approach to potential use cases

Unknowing the Middle Ages : how Middle English poetics rewrote literary history

textThe concept of the unknown captivated medieval theologians, mystics, lovers, and travelers for centuries, and yet literary scholars too readily reduce this topos to a romance trope. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" reconsiders the grounds of late-medieval literary discourse by showing how canonical Middle English literary texts eschew the historical knowledges that informed them and, instead, affirm impossibility as a productive site for a literary poetics. My dissertation identifies what I call a "poetics of unknowing" as an important component of a budding late-medieval literary discourse that offers a way to discuss not only what can be known, but also that which exceeds exegetical, geographic, historical, and sensory comprehension. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" makes its argument through four chapters, each of which focuses on a narrative tradition extending at least five hundred years. Each chapter follows a figure---Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde---from the texts that established their axiological significance to their appearances in Middle English texts, which attempt to unknow these figures. In their Middle English narratives these figures negotiate between an inherited religious ethics and an intellectual context compelled increasingly by that which eludes comprehension. In each case, material concerns regarding the unknowable infiltrate the formal composition of the text itself, and resonate at the level of a literary ethics. The "poetics of unknowing" that inhabit these texts reveal an epistemology less encumbered by the practical demands of clarity to which other modes of medieval writing are beholden, and also---perhaps of interest to scholars of modern literature and contemporary theory---refute the critical tendency to view the epistemological valorization of the unknown as a distinctly modern phenomenon.EnglishEnglis

The Theatre of Anon: Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf, and the Performance of Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King

Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf: three major figures of British art and letters who have received much critical attention individually, but have not yet been studied together. In this project I consider the valedictory works of these artists at their convergence, first through their obvious geographic, familial, and aesthetic relationships, then in more subtle, deeper, and overarching dimensions. The chief texts that are the focus of this dissertation are Tennyson's Idylls of the King, plus five of the Laureate's most popular poems; Cameron's photographic illustrations of these poems; and a selection of Virginia Woolf's late work, with a focus on "The Searchlight," Three Guineas, Between the Acts, and Anon. The dissertation also makes use of apposite poems, essays, life writing, and fiction created by these artists. Since "The Theatre of Anon" focuses primarily on Cameron's Illustrations, a chapter containing photographs of all the books' pages concludes the dissertation text. An additional selection of images is included as an appendix, in support of the central thesis of this project. The complex friendship between Tennyson and Cameron inspired the latter's only published book, a collection of poetic excerpts accompanied by images of his poems staged as scenes from amateur theatricals. The photos, with the photographer acting as their playwright-director, evoke the literary pageant in Woolf's last novel. In photographing the Illustrations, Cameron took control of the Laureate's poetry, metaphorically assuming the role of Vivien stealing Merlin's poetic spells. This dissertation traces Woolf's perception of her great aunt as it evolved over the decades, beginning with the eccentric, affected, and comical Cameron of Freshwater (1926) and ultimately portraying her as a dynamic, determined, and creative artist who helped provide inspiration for the character of the playwright-director Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts (1940). I argue that her great aunt's work influenced Woolf to create the figure she called Anon as a counterpart to Tennyson's King Arthur, and to place La Trobe's pageant-play at the center of her last novel, Between the Acts, as a final act of homage to Cameron. An aggregate of all anonymous minstrels, artists, and authors who ever lived, Anon appears in the guise of Miss La Trobe, whose communal, participatory art demonstrates how the traditionally monocular "eye" of history can be enlarged in community theatre from a single "I" to a collaborative project accommodating multiple perspectives. The Arthurian chivalry to which the ideology of Anon is set in counterpoint represents a conservative point of view based on the belief in a divinely-ordained social order headed by a monarch, with prescribed roles for each of its members. Valor in combat and devotion in courtly love, chivalry's two chief expressions, are the basis of Arthur's knightly code, which has influenced British national character and identity from the country's founding. Arthur reached his Anglophone apotheosis in the nineteenth-century's Gothic revival, epitomized in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. At the end of her career, at the start of the Second World War, Woolf came to believe that theatrical performance offered a better paradigm for social organization than the chivalric hierarchy at the root of the patriarchal British Victorian culture in which she had grown up. She saw in the community theatre a gathering place that could foster moments of transcendent unity, intellectual freedom, and imaginative inspiration, and in drama an art form resilient enough to withstand an audience's interruption and disillusionment. Performance provided a collaborative alternative to the conservative constraints that were her Victorian legacy; history, she felt, could be more accurately portrayed through the accretion of expressive theatrical performances than by the monolithic, linear narrative it had become as the official transcript of the nation's past. The theatricals scenes of La Trobe's pageant and Cameron's Illustrations - both composed of scraps and fragments of quotidian life rearranged and recombined - offer a new visual conception of the past. Working at the level of what Walter Benjamin has called photography's optical unconscious the dissertation demonstrates how Cameron's photographs reveal a reconstellation or reconfiguration, of the dominant British narrative from defamiliarized versions of the past that resonate with La Trobe's pageant. I propose that Cameron's photos re-envision canonical texts, inspiring a new mythology for Woolf, one that reflects a fluid and elastic version of the British national story. Challenging the received Carlylean conception of history as the biographies of great men, Woolf's counter-history, like Cameron's book of illustrations, features ordinary men and women playing extraordinary roles. The legendary Arthur, traditionally credited with uniting the country's thirteen tribes, founding Britain, and shaping the nation's identity, is but one actor among many in Woolf's pageant of history; his starring role in Tennyson's Idylls of the King is reduced to a few key scenes in the Illustrations and a cameo appearance in Between the Acts. Woolf implies that though there may still be room in history's narrative for heroic men, they will no longer dominate it. With its evolving, democratic nature, the community theatre created by Anon offers a paradigm of citizenship and social organization that Woolf believed could encompass British history, re-envision it, and offer the world's citizens hope for the future

THE GROUNDING OF THE AUTHORITY OF THE SAINTS: A STUDY IN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR’S THEOLOGY OF THE SAINTS

The authority of the saints is, in a sense, presupposed by the tradition, and yet, formulating this presupposition proves to be awkward. This dissertation is an exploration into the nature, the grounding and the limits of the authority of the saints, with reference to the theology of the saints in the work of Hans urs von Balthasar. My argument is that, in his use of the saints, Balthasar does not merely interpret the saints as a resource for theologians and for the Magisterium. For Balthasar, theology and the Magisterium are there to serve the saints, since the saints are the real witnesses whose testimony requires dynamic paraphrase and vigorous rendition. My argument will be that Balthasar wants to avoid the theory of multiple teaching offices, but that – while avoiding the theory of multiple offices – also attributes to the saints an authority that is analogical to that of the Magisterium. Balthasar uses the saints, not only to teach other theologians but also to teach the official Magisterium, thus handling the saints as if they were themselves a Magisterium. Four dimensions – the existential, the epistemological, the pneumatological and the ecclesiological – are identified and used to elucidate the nature, the grounding and the function of the authority of the saints. It will be argued that authority of the saints is grounded within each one of these dimensions and that these are the dimensions within which the saints function authoritatively. I will defend my own construal of Balthasar, argue for the credibility of Balthasar’s defence of the authority of the saints, as well as, locate and criticise some of the contradictions that are found in Balthasar in this regard, and identify some of the consequences of Balthasar’s position concerning the authority of the saints, for his own theology, for theology in general, and for the Church

The Outward Turn: Personality, Blankness, and Allure in American Modernism

The history of personality in American literature has surprisingly little to do with the differentiating individuality we now tend to associate with the term. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture have defined personality either as the morally vacuous successor to the Protestant ideal of character or as the equivalent of mass-media celebrity. In both accounts, personality is deliberately constructed and displayed. However, hiding in American writings of the long modernist period (1880s-1940s) is a conception of personality as the innate capacity, possessed by few, to attract attention and elicit projection. Skeptical of the great American myth of self-making, such writers as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes invented ways of representing individuals not by stable inner qualities but by their fascinating--and, often, gendered and racialized--blankness. For these writers, this sense of personality was not only an important theme and formal principle of their fiction and non-fiction writing; it was also a professional concern made especially salient by the rise of authorial celebrity. This dissertation both offers an alternative history of personality in American literature and culture and challenges the common critical assumption that modernist writers took the interior life to be their primary site of exploration and representation. Instead, it argues for a reassessment of American modernism as crucially concerned--in its literary texts and in its professional literary culture--with surface, blankness, and opacity, all barriers to seeing inside which nonetheless produce an impression of personal power

The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature

“The Ontological Imagination: Living Form in American Literature” proposes a new theory of the imagination as a way forward from the long academic critique of the human subject. It is unclear how we should conceive of the human—of our potential, for example, for self-knowledge, independent thought, or moral choice—after the critiques of self-presence, intentionality, and autonomy that have come to define work in the humanities. This dissertation offers an image of the human responsive to such challenges. I argue that a set of major nineteenth-century American writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, and Walt Whitman) held a paradoxical conception of the imagination as both the mark of human uniqueness—the faculty that raises the mind above the world’s sheer givenness, allowing for creative action—and the space of our greatest intimacy with the nonhuman world. For these writers, the highest human achievements simultaneously differentiate us from the rest of nature and abolish our difference from it. Chapter 1, “Emerson’s ‘Doctrine of Life’: Embryogenesis and the Ontology of the Fragment,” presents an Emerson whose investigations of emotional numbness reveal a disintegrative force immanent to living beings. In the new science of embryology—a model of life at its most impersonal—he finds a non-teleological principle of growth by which a human life or an imaginative essay might attain fragile coherence. Chapter 2, “‘Concrete Imagination’: William James’s Post-Critical Thinking,” claims that James’s multifaceted career is best understood as a quest for an intellectual vitality that would not abandon self-consistency. I argue that an ontology of thinking underlies his seemingly disparate projects: his theory of the will as receptivity, his conception of faith as mental risk, and his late practice of exemplification over sequential argument. Chapter 3, “‘The Novel is a Living Thing’: Mannerism and Immortality in The Wings of the Dove,” argues that Henry James envisions the novel as an incarnation, a means of preserving the life of a beloved young woman beyond her death. Through formal techniques inspired by painterly mannerism, James creates a novelistic universe that unfixes the categories of life and death. Chapter 4, “‘Like the Sun Falling Around a Helpless Thing’: Whitman’s Poetry of Judgment,” emphasizes the figural and perspectival features of Whitman’s poetry at even its most prosaic in order to show how the imagination grounds us in a common world rather than detaching us from it. In opposition to an ethics for which realistic recognition of the world demands suppression of the imagination, Whitman’s realism requires acts of imaginative judgment. In sum, “The Ontological Imagination” hopes to reorient study of nineteenth-century American literature by revising both its traditional humanist reading and its recent posthumanist critique. On the level of the discipline, by defining literary form as a singular space in which the human imagination and impersonal life are revealed as indivisible, I make a case for the compatibility of the new formalist and ontological approaches to literary study

Focus Producing Places

Producing places is a twofold topic. It can refer to places as sites that produce something, that are productive, that have operations unfold, or actions happen, or objects emerge. Or it can refer to the fabrication of places as specific entities themselves. With the extended availability and practicability of digital positioning, locating, and tracking systems, it has become evident that places are not just there, but that they are generated, that they are subject to mediatechnological operations and effects. Nonetheless, and at the same time, the aspect of places as being productive has also attracted considerable attention. Furthermore, in either perspective, a media-theoretical challenge has come up. It invests two different threads within the realm of conceptualizing not only space, but precisely place under conditions of media, both of them leading way back into the evolution of media societies and cultural technologies

The Romance of Community: Form and Ideology in Jonathan Frazen Fiction

Jonathan Franzen (1959) es sin duda uno de los novelistas norteamericanos más importantes de la última década. Ha recibido premios importantes como el National Book Award y disfruta de una poco frecuente combinación de elogios de la crítica y éxito de ventas. Es el autor más reconocido de una generación de narradores formada por, entre otros, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon o Jeffrey Eugenides. Franzen ha publicado ya cuatro novelas y dos volúmenes de no-ficción. Sin embargo, es evidente que aún no ha recibido la debida atención desde el punto de vista académico. Este trabajo intenta contribuir a rellenar esa laguna crítica. La obra de Franzen tiene un marcado componente social que la hace particularmente interesante para abordar una serie de procesos socio-históricos y culturales clave en Estados Unidos y otras partes del mundo dentro del marco del capitalismo tardío y la globalización: fragmentación social, comercialización de la cultura, expansión suburbana, contienda ideológica entre conservadores y liberales, declive comunitario, etc. Por otra parte, en la obra de Franzen se observa una marcada evolución estilística desde sus dos primeras novelas, claramente influidas por autores postmodernistas como Thomas Pynchon y Don DeLillo, hacia una narrativa más tradicional que ha sido asociada por la crítica al realismo decimonónico en las dos siguientes. Esta circunstancia ha sido aprovechada por ciertos críticos para proclamar el fin del postmodernismo narrativo. La pertinencia de un análisis riguroso y exhaustivo, hasta ahora inexistente, de la obra de ficción del novelista norteamericano desde un punto de vista ideológico y formal es evidente. En este trabajo se lleva a cabo dicho análisis enmarcado en un estudio de los aspectos relevantes del contexto histórico, cultural y político de la obra de Franzen

Legibility of Musical Scores and Parallels with Language Reading

Following on the extensive literature within experimental psychology on the reading of natural language texts, I have undertaken a series of experiments on the sight-reading of musical scores that have shown that spacing of information, the structuring of the musical discourse, and the predictability of design in a score can aid its legibility in a manner similar to what has been shown in the language domain. Cultural studies of reading —particularly the works of Saenger— point in the same direction; according to these, the change in Medieval textual scripts from scriptura continua at the beginning of the eight century to the adoption of canonical separations between words, phrases, or paragraphs (which had fully spread throughout Europe by the mid-fourteenth century) significantly decreased the cognitive load and time that had previously been needed to decode a script. Crucially, this eliminated the need for the ancient techniques of the praelectio (initial decoding of the text by reading it aloud) and rote repetition for its comprehension, triggering a whole new culture of private fluent reading. Equally, the literature on music sight-reading (although lacking in systematic research based on objective measurements of legibility of texts) has proposed, based on surveys and studies of expertise, a series of cognitive models of the activity that prime, as factors that distinguish proficient readers from beginners: the integration of discursive elements into higher-order meaning units, the ability to predict upcoming information, and the awareness of the structuring of the text. The experiments reported here compared readings using conventional scores with readings using novel scores where the suggested advantages of information separation, integration and predictability were implemented in the design. Fluency of performance was measured primarily in terms of numbers of mistakes, results showing that readers played more accurately with the novel scores. Other, more qualitative, measurements —such as spectrogram coding of tempo stability, blind expert judgment of performance quality, and participant self-assessments— all showed strong positive correlations with the measurements of numbers of mistakes, with the novel scores producing performances that were more fluent and ranked as more trustworthy and musically satisfactory by experts and readers alike. These results will still need to be extrapolated to many other musical practices, but they serve to open a debate on the conventions of music publishing as they stand, and are well placed to open new lines of research in score legibility and design.Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme (CHESS

King Æthelstan in the English, Continental and Scandinavian traditions of the tenth to the thirteenth centuries

Using close textual analysis, this thesis has identified similarities and differences in the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan, is depicted in narrative sources from England, the Continent and Scandinavia during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries; how historical, cultural, and literary contexts influenced their writers and their patrons and how literary analysis might contribute further to historical understandings of Æthelstan and his reign. Central to my analysis are the concepts of the sources as textual and visual narratives, deriving contemporary meaning from their intertextuality with other sources and fulfilling a function of recording and creating social memories for their own time and for the future. The thesis does not argue for the historical veracity of any one version over another but for the individual narrative ‗voices‘ to be heard and understood as part of their own historical, national and contemporary backgrounds. Based on my literary analysis of the texts I have questioned some generally held historical interpretations, suggested some alternative interpretations of my own and identified further areas for research. The thesis demonstrates that there are similarities but also significant differences in the way Æthelstan is depicted both between and within the English, Continental and Scandinavian traditions. It identifies a number of narratives within the sources that provide the basis for further research on Æthelstan: his Carolingian ambitions, his role as foster-father to Hákon of Norway, the possibility that he had a second coronation to confirm his claim to be King of all Britain and the depictions of him as a king-maker and a friend and ally of the Vikings