41,883 research outputs found
The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks
This essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand, and digital humanities, on the other. The data-oriented character of the Bechdel Test, which a text rigidly passes or fails, stands in sharp contrast to identification- or recognition-based evaluations of a text’s feminist orientation, particularly because the former does not prescribe the content, but merely the social form, of women’s agency. This essay connects the Bechdel Test and a lineage of feminist and early queer theory to current work on social network analysis within literary texts, and it argues that the Bechdel Test offers the beginnings of a measured approach to understanding agency within actor networks
English for Students of Philology (Англійська мова для студентів-філологів)
Методичні рекомендації містять матеріал, необхідний для проведення практичних занять та організації самостійної роботи з англійської мови студентів-магістрантів ННІ філології та журналістики. Тексти, вправи, тести та рекомендації методичного характеру подані у послідовності, окресленої Програмою (затвердженою у 2013 році), для виконання чотирьох основних змістовних модулів. Матеріал розрахований на поглиблення фахових спеціальних та загальних комунікативних навичок студентів у процесі професійно спрямованого вивчення англійської мови.
Для денної та заочної форм навчання
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
Computational Models (of Narrative) for Literary Studies
In the last decades a growing body of literature in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive
Science (CS) has approached the problem of narrative understanding by means of computational
systems. Narrative, in fact, is an ubiquitous element in our everyday activity and
the ability to generate and understand stories, and their structures, is a crucial cue of our intelligence.
However, despite the fact that - from an historical standpoint - narrative (and narrative
structures) have been an important topic of investigation in both these areas, a more
comprehensive approach coupling them with narratology, digital humanities and literary
studies was still lacking.
With the aim of covering this empty space, in the last years, a multidisciplinary effort
has been made in order to create an international meeting open to computer scientist, psychologists,
digital humanists, linguists, narratologists etc.. This event has been named CMN
(for Computational Models of Narrative) and was launched in the 2009 by the MIT scholars
Mark A. Finlayson and Patrick H. Winston1
Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs
Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to
each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles
and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in
their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of
coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such
as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation
mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to
become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this
question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social
benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant
coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script
corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender
and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters
adapt more to females than to males.Comment: data available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/movie
Temporal Network Analysis of Literary Texts
We study temporal networks of characters in literature focusing on "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) by Lewis Carroll and the anonymous "La Chanson
de Roland" (around 1100). The former, one of the most influential pieces of
nonsense literature ever written, describes the adventures of Alice in a
fantasy world with logic plays interspersed along the narrative. The latter, a
song of heroic deeds, depicts the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 A.D. during
Charlemagne's campaign on the Iberian Peninsula. We apply methods recently
developed by Taylor and coworkers \cite{Taylor+2015} to find time-averaged
eigenvector centralities, Freeman indices and vitalities of characters. We show
that temporal networks are more appropriate than static ones for studying
stories, as they capture features that the time-independent approaches fail to
yield.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure
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