Finding and Interpreting Arguments: An Important Challenge for Humanities Computing and Scholarly Practice

Skillful identification and interpretation of arguments is a cornerstone of learning, scholarly activity and thoughtful civic engagement. These are difficult skills for people to learn, and they are beyond the reach of current computational methods from artificial intelligence and machine learning, despite hype suggesting the contrary. In previous work, we have attempted to build systems that scaffold these skills in people. In this paper we reflect on the difficulties posed by this work, and we argue that it is a serious challenge which ought to be taken up within the digital humanities and related efforts to computationally support scholarly practice. Network analysis, bibliometrics, and stylometrics, essentially leave out the fundamental humanistic skill of charitable argument interpretation because they touch very little on the meanings embedded in texts. We present a problematisation of the design space for potential tool development, as a result of insights about the nature and form of arguments in historical texts gained from our attempt to locate and map the arguments in one corner of the Hathi Trust digital library

Ordinary Meaning and Consilience of Evidence

In this chapter I note two recent trends, one in experimental jurisprudence and one in experimental philosophy. First, some work in experimental jurisprudence has pushed for moving beyond textual sources, including the use of linguistic corpora, and toward questionnaire methods in analyzing ordinary meaning. Second, some work in experimental philosophy has urged that we should look to move beyond the use of questionnaire methods and toward the use of linguistic corpora in analyzing ordinary concepts. There is a methodological tension here that suggests further investigation. I do so by considering the legal hypothetical of a prohibition on vehicles in a park that has featured prominently in the back-and-forth over the use of corpus methods in legal interpretation. Taking a closer look at this example, including extending previous corpus analyses, I argue that corpus and questionnaire methods in fact paint a remarkably similar picture of the ordinary use of “vehicle.” I hold that this highlights how these methods can compliment each other, and conclude that when it comes to difficult empirical questions—such as those that arise in assessing ordinary meaning and ordinary concepts—we should aim to employ multiple sources of information to arrive at a consilience of evidence

From Secret Knowledge to Mass Production: The Wet Copper Industry of Song China (960-1279)

“Wet copper” refers to refined copper, which is obtained from cupriferous substances by means of solution in water and precipitation on iron (hydrometallurgical methods) rather than by a conventional ore melting process (pyrometallurgical methods). Knowledge about certain parts of this method already existed for many centuries mainly in the secret alchemist literature of China, when towards the end of the 11th century the Song state decided to use wet copper for its coinage. In numerous places in south-east China, large facilities employing tens of thousands of workers and producing more than 1 000 tons of copper annually were established. While during the beginning of the 12th century, still most of China’s copper was obtained with conventional methods, ore deposits soon became exhausted and production numbers declined rapidly. Already by the second half of the 12th century, wet copper accounted for the lion’s share of the urgently needed mint metal and developed into one of the state’s most essential industries. After the Mongol conquests, many parts of the complex system of state-owned industries in China fell into disarray and in particular mint metal production enjoyed no priority anymore because the monetary system of the following Yuan dynasty chiefly relied on paper money. When in the 16th century in Europe the first sources mentioned the appearance of wet copper, in China hardly anything was known about it anymore. Only by the end of the 19th century, facilities operated by the Japanese can be found in Taiwan and only during the second half of the 20th century in Mainland China. In the central focus of this thesis are issues like the circumstances leading to innovation and large-scale application of knowledge about wet copper, the technological details of different hydrometallurgical methods, the administrative integration of the state institutions in charge of wet copper production and the way they managed the operation of wet copper facilities, the correlations between the quantitative developments of wet copper production and the monetary policy of the Song state as well as the attempts to understand and explain metallurgical processes by contemporaries. Beyond this, the decline of wet copper production at the end of the Song period and its development in other world regions as well as in modern China are analysed. As an outstandingly important source for the understanding and integration of questions related to copper production and minting in Song China, a complete annotated translation of the “Rhapsody of the Great Smelting” (Daye fu 大冶賦) is attached to this thesis.Der Begriff „wet copper“ oder „Nasskupfer bezieht sich auf Reinkupfer, welches aus kupferhaltigen Substanzen durch Lösung in Wasser und Ausfällung auf Eisen (hydrometallurgische Methoden) anstelle von konventionellen Schmelzprozessen (pyrometallurgische Methoden) gewonnen wird. Als gegen Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts der Song-Staat entschied, Nasskupfer als Münzmetall zu nutzen, waren zumindest Teile des dafür nötigen Wissens bereits seit Jahrhunderten zumeist in geheimen alchemistischen Schriften vorhanden. An zahlreichen Orten im Südosten Chinas wurden große Anlagen eingerichtet, die zehntausende Arbeiter beschäftigten und mehr als 1 000 Tonnen Kupfer jährlich produzieren konnten. Während noch zu Beginn des 12. Jahrhunderst der großteil des Chinesischen Kupfers mit konventionellen Methoden gewonnen wurde, gingen die Produktionszahlen bald darauf rapide zurück, weil viele der Lagerstätten erschöpft waren. So machte Nasskupfer bereits während der zweiten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderst den Großteil des dringend benötigten Münzmetalls aus und seine Herstellung wurde damit zu einem der wichtigsten Gewerbezweige für den Staat. Nach der Eroberung Chinas durch die Mongolen gerieten viele Teile des komplexen Systems der staatseigenen Produktionsstätten in Unordnung und besonders die Gewinnung von Münzmetallen genoss keine hohe Priorität mehr, weil das Geldsystem der nachfolgenden Yuan-Dynastie hauptsächlich auf Papiergeld ausgelegt war. Als im 16. Jahrhundert erste Quellen in Europa auftauchten, die die Existenz von Nasskupfer belegen, war die Technik in China bereits sehr weit gehend in Vergesssenheit greaten. Erst gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts finden sich Anlagen, die auf Taiwan von den Japanern betrieben wurden und erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts auf dem Festland. Das Hauptaugenmerk dieser Arbeit liegt auf Themen wie den Umständen, die zu Innovation und großangelegter Anwendung von des bestehenden Wissens über Nasskupfer führten, die technischen Details der verschiedenen hydrometallurgischen Methoden, die administrative Einbindung der staatlichen Instutionen, in deren Aufgabenbereich die Produktion von Nasskupfer fiel sowie deren Umgang mit Fragen des Betriebs der Anlagen, dem Zusammenhang zwischen quantitativer Entwicklung der Nasskupferproduktion und Geldpolitik oder die zeitgenössischen Bestrebungen, die Hintergründe metallurgische Phänomene und Prozesse zu verstehen. Darüber hinaus werden auch der Niedergang der Nasskupfergewinnung zum Ende der Songzeit und deren Entwicklung in anderen Weltregionen sowie im modernen China untersucht. Da es seine Quelle von herausragender Bedeutung für das Verständnis des Themas sowie dessen Integration in den Kontext des songzeitlichen Münzwesens darstellt, ist eine vollständige annotierte Übersetzung der „Rhapsodie vom Großen Schmelzen“ (Daye fu 大冶賦) dieser Arbeit beigefügt

Supplemental Materials for "Topic Modeling the Hàn diăn Ancient Classics (汉典古籍)"

The "Handian" corpus ( 汉典 or Hàn diăn, i.e, the "Han canon" or "Han classics") contains over 18,000 classics of ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as documents of historical and biographical significance, and literary works. The versions of the documents presented here are derived from www.zdic.net under their permissive Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. These significant cultural texts are modeled here and published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. The Dataverse repository contains the models for the InPhO Topic Explorer (handian-ca.tez), installation instructions (README.md), and supplemental materials (handian-ca-supplemental.pdf). These works are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)