Social shaping of digital publishing: exploring the interplay between culture and technology

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing

Digital History and Hermeneutics

For doing history in the digital age, we need to investigate the “digital kitchen” as the place where the “raw” is transformed into the “cooked”. The novel field of digital hermeneutics provides a critical and reflexive frame for digital humanities research by acquiring digital literacy and skills. The Doctoral Training Unit "Digital History and Hermeneutics" is applying this new digital practice by reflecting on digital tools and methods

Beyond Narrative: Exploring Narrative Liminality and Its Cultural Work

This book calls for an investigation of the 'borderlands of narrativity' - the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the 'beyond' of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of "narrative liminality," which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Beyond Narrative

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

The Web as a Historical Corpus: Collecting, Analysing and Selecting Sources on the Recent Past of Academic Institutions

The goal of this thesis is to understand the impact that the transition from analogue to born-digital sources will have on the way historians collect, analyse and select primary evidences. This thesis aims in particular at addressing the simultaneous scarcity and abundance of digital materials and at dealing with these issues by combining the historical method with methodologies from the fields of internet studies and natural language processing. The case study of this work is focused on recollecting sources on the recent past of Italian academic institutions, with specific attention to the University of Bologna. The dissertation is organised in three main parts. Part I offers an extensive overview of the academic background where this thesis is settled. Next, the so-called scarcity issue is addressed, by considering university websites as primary sources for the study of the recent past of academic institutions. With a combination of traditional sources and methods together with solutions from the field of internet studies, Part II presents how the digital past of the University of Bologna has been reconstructed. The collected resources allowed to address the second issue, namely the large abundance of born-digital sources. Part III focuses on collecting, analysing and selecting materials from large collections of academic publications. In particular, it is remarked on the importance of adopting methods from the field of natural language processing in a highly critical way. This point is stressed by presenting a case-study focused on identifying interdisciplinary collaborations through the analysis of a corpus of Ph.D. dissertations. Based on the case-studies presented, the final part of the dissertation describes how this work intends to be a contribution both to the research in digital humanities and in historiography

Dating Victorians: an experimental approach to stylochronometry

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ofthe University of LutonThe writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided

Beyond Narrative

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Intertextual Readings of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa on Buddhist Anti-Realism

This two-part dissertation has two goals: 1) a close philological reading of a 50-page section of a 10th-century Sanskrit philosophical work (Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyabhūṣaṇa), and 2) the creation and assessment of a novel intertextuality research system (Vātāyana) centered on the same work. The first half of the dissertation encompasses the philology project in four chapters: 1) background on the author, work, and key philosophical ideas in the passage; 2) descriptions of all known manuscript witnesses of this work and a new critical edition that substantially improves upon the editio princeps; 3) a word-for-word English translation richly annotated with both traditional explanatory material and novel digital links to not one but two interactive online research systems; and 4) a discussion of the Sanskrit author's dialectical strategy in the studied passage. The second half of the dissertation details the intertextuality research system in a further four chapters: 5) why it is needed and what can be learned from existing projects; 6) the creation of the system consisting of curated textual corpus, composite algorithm in natural language processing and information retrieval, and live web-app interface; 7) an evaluation of system performance measured against a small gold-standard dataset derived from traditional philological research; and 8) a discussion of the impact such new technology could have on humanistic research more broadly. System performance was assessed to be quite good, with a 'recall@5' of 80%, meaning that most previously known cases of mid-length quotation and even paraphrase could be automatically found and returned within the system's top five hits. Moreover, the system was also found to return a 34% surplus of additional significant parallels not found in the small benchmark. This assessment confirms that Vātāyana can be useful to researchers by aiding them in their collection and organization of intertextual observations, leaving them more time to focus on interpretation. Seventeen appendices illustrate both these efforts and a number of side projects, the latter of which span translation alignment, network visualization of an important database of South Asian prosopography (PANDiT), and a multi-functional Sanskrit text-processing web application (Skrutable).:Preface (i) Table of Contents (ii) Abbreviations (v) Terms and Symbols (v) Nyāyabhūṣaṇa Witnesses (v) Main Sanskrit Editions (vi) Introduction (vii) A Multi-Disciplinary Project in Intertextual Reading (vii) Main Object of Study: Nyāyabhūṣaṇa 104–154 (vii) Project Outline (ix) Part I: Close Reading (1) 1 Background (1) 1.1 Bhāsarvajña (1) 1.2 The Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (6) 1.2.1 Ts One of Several Commentaries on Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyasāra (6) 1.2.2 In Modern Scholarship, with Focus on NBhū 104–154 (8) 1.3 Philosophical Context (11) 1.3.1 Key Philosophical Concepts (12) 1.3.2 Intra-Textual Context within the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (34) 1.3.3 Inter-Textual Context (36) 2 Edition of NBhū 104–154 (39) 2.1 Source Materials (39) 2.1.1 Edition of Yogīndrānanda 1968 (E) (40) 2.1.2 Manuscripts (P1, P2, V) (43) 2.1.3 Diplomatic Transcripts (59) 2.2 Notes on Using the Edition (60) 2.3 Critical Edition of NBhū 104–154 with Apparatuses (62) 3 Translation of NBhū 104–154 (108) 3.1 Notes on Translation Method (108) 3.2 Notes on Outline Headings (112) 3.3 Annotated Translation of NBhū 104–154 (114) 4 Discussion (216) 4.1 Internal Structure of NBhū 104–154 (216) 4.2 Critical Assessment of Bhāsarvajña's Argumentation (218)   Part II: Distant Reading with Digital Humanities (224) 5 Background in Intertextuality Detection (224) 5.1 Sanskrit Projects (225) 5.2 Non-Sanskrit Projects (228) 5.3 Operationalizing Intertextuality (233) 6 Building an Intertextuality Machine (239) 6.1 Corpus (Pramāṇa NLP) (239) 6.2 Algorithm (Vātāyana) (242) 6.3 User Interface (Vātāyana) (246) 7 Evaluating System Performance (255) 7.1 Previous Scholarship on NBhū 104–154 as Philological Benchmark (255) 7.2 System Performance Relative to Benchmark (257) 8 Discussion (262) Conclusion (266) Works Cited (269) Main Sanskrit Editions (269) Works Cited in Part I (271) Works Cited in Part II (281) Appendices (285) Appendix 1: Correspondence of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (286) Appendix 1D: Full-Text Alignment of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (287) Appendix 2: Prosopographical Relations Important for NBhū 104–154 (288) Appendix 2D: Command-Line Tool “Pandit Grapher” (290) Appendix 3: Previous Suggestions to Improve Text of NBhū 104–154 (291) Appendix 4D: Transcript and Collation Data for NBhū 104–154 (304) Appendix 5D: Command-Line Tool “cte2cex” for Transcript Data Conversion (305) Appendix 6D: Deployment of Brucheion for Interactive Transcript Data (306) Appendix 7: Highlighted Improvements to Text of NBhū 104–154 (307) Appendix 7D: Alternate Version of Edition With Highlighted Improvements (316) Appendix 8D: Digital Forms of Translation of NBhū 104–154 (317) Appendix 9: Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 by Shodo Yamakami (318) Appendix 10.1: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Overall) (324) Appendix 10.2: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Detailed) (325) Appendix 11D: Skrutable Text Processing Library and Web Application (328) Appendix 12D: Pramāṇa NLP Corpus, Metadata, and LDA Modeling Info (329) Appendix 13D: Vātāyana Intertextuality Research Web Application (330) Appendix 14: Sample of Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (331) Appendix 14D: Full Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (333) Appendix 15: Vātāyana Recall@5 Scores for NBhū 104–154 (334) Appendix 16: PVA, PVin, and PVSV Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (338) Appendix 17: Sample Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (349) Appendix 17D: Full Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (355) Overview of Digital Appendices (356) Zusammenfassung (Thesen Zur Dissertation) (357) Summary of Results (361