Towards a Praxis of Critical Digital Sport History

Exploring praxis as a key construct, this article disputes the understandings of digital history as a relatively recent phenomena by providing an alternative narrative of digital history’s development. Understanding that “digital” history is a constellation of practices drawn from humanities and computing disciplines, this paper argues that digital sport history must demonstrate critical, intentional engagement with interdisciplinary research to achieve its fullest future. Using Michael Oriard’s Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle as a basis for a speculative design exercise, the paper suggests three alternative research methods that scholars could now use to explore Oriard’s sources. The exercise illustrates how digital sport historians must recognize the digital and its multiplicity of forms as historical objects that are produced, interpreted, and contested. As important, the article closes by presenting core values for our consideration as we move toward recognized methodologies for digital sport history

Sentiment Annotation of Historic German Plays: An Empirical Study on Annotation Behavior

We present results of a sentiment annotation study in the context of historical German plays. Our annotation corpus consists of 200 representative speeches from the German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Six annotators, five non-experts and one expert in the domain, annotated the speeches according to different sentiment annotation schemes. They had to annotate the differentiated polarity (very negative, negative, neutral, mixed, positive, very positive), the binary polarity (positive/negative) and the occurrence of eight basic emotions. After the annotation, the participants completed a questionnaire about their experience of the annotation process; additional feedback was gathered in a closing interview. Analysis of the annotations shows that the agreement among annotators ranges from low to mediocre. The non-expert annotators perceive the task as very challenging and report different problems in understanding the language and the context. Although fewer problems occur for the expert annotator, we cannot find any differences in the agreement levels among non-experts and between the expert and the non-experts. At the end of the paper, we discuss the implications of this study and future research plans for this area

SentText: A Tool for Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis in Digital Humanities

We present SentText, a web-based tool to perform and explore lexicon-based sentiment analysis on texts, specifically developed for the Digital Humanities (DH) community. The tool was developed integrating ideas of the user-entered design process and we gathered requirements via semi-structured interviews. The tool offers the functionality to perform sentiment analysis with predefined sentiment lexicons or self-adjusted lexicons. Users can explore results of sentiment analysis via various visualizations like bar or pie charts and word clouds. It is also possible to analyze and compare collections of documents. Furthermore, we have added a close reading function enabling researchers to examine the applicability of sentiment lexicons for specific text sorts. We report upon the first usability tests with positive results. We argue that the tool is beneficial to explore lexicon-based sentiment analysis in the DH but can also be integrated in DH-teaching

An Evaluation of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis Techniques for the Plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

We present results from a project on sentiment analysis of drama texts, more concretely the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. We conducted an annotation study to create a gold standard for a systematic evaluation. The gold standard consists of 200 speeches of Lessing’s plays and was manually annotated with sentiment information by five annotators. We use the gold standard data to evaluate the performance of different German sentiment lexicons and processing configurations like lemmatization, the extension of lexicons with historical linguistic variants, and stop words elimination, to explore the influence of these parameters and to find best practices for our domain of application. The best performing configuration accomplishes an accuracy of 70%. We discuss the problems and challenges for sentiment analysis in this area and describe our next steps toward further research

A New Research Programme for Reading Research: Analysing Comments in the Margins on Wattpad

This paper focuses on Wattpad, a social reading platform on which people can add comments in the margins of books. Analysing these comments enables the comparison between specific parts of the text and the effects they have on readers. We outline a new research programme, discussing both theoretical and practical issues in the study of Wattpad: from the identification of a methodology holding together reader response theory, cognitive literary studies, and computational text analysis, to the definition of a digital mixed method for the recognition of the linguistic and textual cues that trigger certain effects. We describe a dataset built by scraping the Wattpad website: preliminary statistics on the most commented books in the categories “Classics” and “Teen Fiction” are presented and discussed. To provide an example of the possible uses of the dataset, we introduce a simplified experiment with the sentiment analysis software Syuzhet. By comparing the “emotional arcs” produced in parallel by text and comments, we evaluate the approach and show the substantial differences between the intrinsic emotional valence of the text and the effects it produces

‘This book makes me happy and sad and I love it’. A Rule-based Model for Extracting Reading Impact from English Book Reviews

Being able to identify and analyse reading impact expressed in online book reviews allows us to investigate how people read books and how books affect their readers. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of creating an English translation of a rule-based reading impact model for reviews of Dutch fiction. We extend the model with additional rules and categories to measure reading impact in terms of positive and negative feeling, narrative and stylistic impact, humour, surprise, attention, and reflection. We created ground truth annotations to evaluate the model and found that the translated rules and new impact categories are effective in identifying certain types of reading impact expressed in English book reviews. However, for some types of impact the rules are inaccurate, and for most categories they are incomplete. Additional rules are needed to improve recall, which could potentially be enhanced by incorporating Machine Learning. At the same time, we conclude that some impact aspects are hard to extract with a rule-based model. When applying the model to a large set of reviews, lists of the top-scoring books in the impact categories show the model’s prima-facie validity. Correlations among the categories include some that make sense and others that require further research. Overall, the evidence suggests that for investigating the impact of books, manually formulated rules are partially successful, and are probably best used in a hybrid approach

Underlying Sentiments in 1867: A Study of News Flows on the Execution of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in Digitized Newspaper Corpora

This article focuses on the international news flow regarding the execution of Maximilian, the Emperor of Mexico. The execution occurred in June 1867, but it received global attention only at the beginning of July when the news started to spread over the borders, via telegraph, and rapidly through the network of newspapers. The article concentrates on international news on Maximilian's execution between 5 and 20 July 1867. The aim of the study is both empirical and methodological. It explores the sentiments underlying the news about the execution and the regional differences in these sentiments on an empirical level. On a methodological level, the article investigates the strategies to analyze sentiments via newspaper corpora in a multilingual research setting. The study is based on optically recognized historical newspapers in three languages (German, Spanish and English), and four regions (Austria, Germany, Mexico, and the United States). Our analysis shows content variations in the corpora, mainly that news was framed differently in each studied region, indicating that the local perception of the event and political interests shaped the news. In our corpus, the Mexican press –published in the middle of a political crisis– tended towards a neutral stance, the Austrian and German papers mainly were negative, and the United States showed mixed sentiments on the incident.</p

Computational emotion classification for genre corpora of German tragedies and comedies from 17th to early 19th century

This article presents a method of emotion analysis for German drama from the 17th to the 19th century that significantly goes beyond previous research approaches in computational literary studies. It is based on annotations of 17 dramatic texts resulting in 11,939 annotations which were used as training material to fine-tune a German language BERT model that achieves an average accuracy of 73% for the single-label emotion classification of fourteen emotion types in cross-validation. We apply the emotion classification on a corpus of 141 comedies and 92 tragedies to compare these genres. For tragedies, the mean proportion percentages of ‘suffering’ and ‘abhorrence’ are higher than for comedies. Inversely, mean percentages of ‘anger’ and ‘joy’ are higher for comedies than for tragedies. A new finding is the surprisingly high proportion of ‘anger’ in comedies. Emotion distribution of the last scenes in dramatic texts also proves the quality of the classified data in terms of literary studies. In addition, the emotion distribution for several subgenres of comedy is investigated including non-canonical works of wide circulation which reached the recipients directly through the depicted emotions in the Kasperl Plays. Comedies from 1740 to 1770 are characterized by a pairing of higher amounts of ‘friendship’ and ‘love’. Satirical comedies from the same period stand out due to high rates of ‘anger’ as well as ‘suffering’. The very successful Kasperl plays turn out to be characterized by a comparatively large percentage of ‘schadenfreude’ and ‘joy’

Atti del IX Convegno Annuale AIUCD. La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica.

La nona edizione del convegno annuale dell'Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD 2020; Milano, 15-17 gennaio 2020) ha come tema “La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica”, con lo specifico obiettivo di fornire un'occasione per riflettere sulle conseguenze della crescente diffusione dell’approccio computazionale al trattamento dei dati connessi all’ambito umanistico. Questo volume raccoglie gli articoli i cui contenuti sono stati presentati al convegno. A diversa stregua, essi affrontano il tema proposto da un punto di vista ora più teorico-metodologico, ora più empirico-pratico, presentando i risultati di lavori e progetti (conclusi o in corso) che considerino centrale il trattamento computazionale dei dati

Atti del IX Convegno Annuale dell'Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD). La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica

Proceedings of the IX edition of the annual AIUCD conferenc