Postgraduate education

This paper reports on the Postgraduate Education research project which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA)series of demonstrator research projects. The project was born from the need to connect the IVRLA digital resource more closely with its target audience of students, researchers, and teachers. Three target groups were identified within the UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies: doctoral digital humanities students, general postgraduate students, and lecturers of undergraduate students. These three target groups are representative of academic institutions elsewhere and the materials developed for these groups will therefore be applicable to users throughout Ireland and internationally. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials, but could also present material in new ways and suggest possibilities for further research. This project does so by making available seminars, sample exercises and a seminar blog, all of which demonstrate how the digital resources contained within the IVRLA may be applied by teachers and researchers. The paper outlines issues arising from the proliferation in and use of digital resources, explains the approach taken in the seminar materials, and discusses specific aspects such as metadata, copyright, and the design of digital research projects. Finally, it suggests ways in which this project could be extended by the development of teaching materials for specific groups and detailed modules in order to enhance the engagement of users with the IVRLA digital repositor

English Bards and Unknown Reviewers: a Stylometric Analysis of Thomas Moore and the Christabel Review

Fraught relations between authors and critics are a commonplace of literary history. The particular case that we discuss in this article, a negative review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel (1816), has an additional point of interest beyond the usual mixture of amusement and resentment that surrounds a critical rebuke: the authorship of the review remains, to this day, uncertain. The purpose of this article is to investigate the possible candidacy of Thomas Moore as the author of the provocative review. It seeks to solve a puzzle of almost two hundred years, and in the process clear a valuable scholarly path in Irish Studies, Romanticism, and in our understanding of Moore's role in a prominent literary controversy of the age

Irish patriots and Scottish adventurers: the Irish Penny Journal, 1840-1841

Periodicals were the mass-media of the nineteenth-century. Numerous studies have focused on the central role played by popular “penny” periodicals in the development of a mass reading audience in Britain from the 1830s. Their success, however, seems not to have been replicated in Ireland. Dublin publishers Robert Gunn and John Cameron decided to exploit the market opportunity for an Irish-themed penny magazine when they began the Irish Penny Journal in 1840. They recruited scholar and veteran editor George Petrie, and solicited contributions from the leading Irish writers of the day. However, when they curtly rejected a play from John Banim, the Kilkenny author retaliated by leaking their entire correspondence to the nationalist press. The article examines the ensuing dispute as an example of the challenges faced by periodicals in the contested cultural climate of 1840s Ireland

Algorithmic criticism, Distant Reading and the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>

Death of the Human Author, Birth of the Machine Reader? The centrality of authorship in literary studies has been under attack for the last few decades. Yet Digital Humanities methods such as computational authorship attribution or “stylometry” seem to herald a rebirth of the author as a key interpretative category and can give rise to fears of a corresponding death of the reader, substituted by the machine. This paper will present a critical interrogation of the use of Digital Humanities methods to study Romantic periodical authorship. It presents a case study based upon the project A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-20, funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development grant. We assess the claim that nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse” (Klancher 1987), a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text. This paper will examine the following questions: Can we “operationalise” (Moretti 2013) the practice of authorship in the Edinburgh Review, selecting textual features that can be measured empirically with methods such as stylometry, corpus stylistics and Natural Language Processing? Which aspects of authorship are brought into focus through such a computational analysis of periodical literature? Which are instead elided, and must be recovered through other methods, such as close reading and archival research? Finally, can we successfully combine computational methods and literary interpretation in “algorithmic criticism” (Ramsay 2011)? Do these “distant reading” methods represent an improvement, a complement or a distortion of research into Romantic periodicals and their practices

Hidden Authors and Reading Machines: Investigating 19th-century authorship with 21st-century technologies

The centrality of authorship in literary studies has been under attack since at least the publication of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and of Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”. Yet Digital Humanities methods such as computational authorship attribution or “stylometry” seem to give new prominence to authorship as a critical category. There is an understandable unease among book historians and literary scholars about the emergence of these technology-driven methods. Some see the recent rise to prominence of stylometry and other “distant reading” methods as heralding a rebirth of the author as a central interpretive category and a corresponding death of the reader, substituted by the machine. This paper will present our interrogation of the study of authorship in the era of Digital Humanities through a case study based upon our project A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-20, which is funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development grant. According to Jon Klancher, nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse”, a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text (Klancher 1987). In our project, we test whether 21st-century digital tools and methods can be used to further evaluate this interpretation of 19th-century authorship and publication practices. Our paper will reflect critically on the following aspects of our research: Can we, in Franco Moretti’s words, “operationalise” the practice of authorship in the Edinburgh Review, selecting features of its published texts that can be measured empirically with the help of 21st-century technologies such as TEI, Python and R, and of methods such as stylometry, corpus stylistics and Natural Language Processing? Which aspects of authorship are brought into focus through such a technology-assisted analysis of periodical literature? For example, can Foucault’s concept of the author as “a stylistic uniformity” be studied through stylometry? Do authors in the Edinburgh Review retain an individual style, or are they subsumed in a larger “house style”? Which aspects of authorship are instead elided through computational analysis, and must be sought through other methods, such as close reading and archival research? Finally, can we successfully combine the use of computational methods for the empirical measurement of textual features with the synthesis and literary interpretation of these results? Can the resulting “algorithmic criticism” (Ramsay 2011) reveal patterns that enable new readings of the complex practice of authorship within the Edinburgh Review

A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820

We present our project, A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820, which is funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant running until October 2017. We want to assess the assumption that early nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse”, a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text (Klancher 1987). We are creating a sample corpus of approximately 500,000 words comprising 325,000 words from the Edinburgh Review and 175,000 from its competitor, the Quarterly Review, for a total of about 80 articles. To assist our OCR correction, metadata creation and textual markup, we are developing a suite of Python scripts, based on our previous work with post-OCR correction (King 2013) and semi-automated TEI markup (Willis et al 2010). We employ methods from periodical studies, book history, computational linguistics and computational stylistics to “operationalise” our definition of style in order to select features that can be measured empirically, transforming concepts into a set of operations (Moretti 2013). We will focus on features at the level of words and sentences such as: vocabulary richness, length of articles, length of sentences, length of quotations from text under review, distribution of parts of speech, distinctive vocabulary of each journal, distinctive vocabulary of each author, distinctive vocabulary in each type of review (literature, travel, politics etc.), using methods such as term frequency: inverse document frequency, Burrows’ Delta and Zeta methods, Moretti’s Most Distinctive Words Method, and Principal Component Analysis. Finally, we will qualitatively describe the results of this stylistic analysis and evaluate them within the context of both literary scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals and computational linguistics scholarship, using our literary and historical interpretation to generate critical knowledge out of our measurements

Innovations in Digital Comics: A Popular Revolution

The success of popular webcomics (comics produced and read entirely digitally) is the greatest revolution in the comics medium of the last two decades. Webcomics exploit a socio-technical convergence between digital platforms and participatory cultures, enabling global authors to work together with global audiences to transcend established print comics structures. After defining digital comics, webcomics and webtoons, this book presents a case study of Korean platform WEBTOON, which achieved 100 billion global page views in 2019. The study analyses data from their website, including views, subscriptions and likes, to quantify and assess whether WEBTOON’s commercial and critical success is connected to its inclusion of a wider range of genres and of a more diverse author base than mainstream English-language print comics. In so doing, it performs the first Book Historical study of webcomics and webtoons, outlining their communication circuits and establishing the parameters for their full inclusion within the field

Collaborative Digital Humanities Training: the CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age Programme

No abstract available

Developing a Community of Practice: The CHASE Model for Digital Humanities Researcher Training

The provision of digital humanities training to graduate students who have no previous experience of the field is a challenging task. In the United Kingdom, such training is still unevenly distributed across universities, varying from dedicated Masters and Doctoral programmes to more informal seminars and research groups. For smaller or less research-intensive institutions, the establishment of a digital humanities programme usually begins with the recruitment of a single specialist lecturer, who may however struggle to cover the breadth of expertise required to provide suitably wide-spectrum teaching. This paper will address these challenges in relation to a specific training programme, including our pedagogical approach to addressing these challenges, and how we can develop DH syllabi that simultaneously address the individual needs of the learner alongside a broader understanding of DH as a field of practice

Una reflexión sobre las sanciones civiles

El ensayo examina la noción de sanciones civiles desde la perspectiva del Derecho comparado.&nbsp; Tras examinar la cláusula penal, se centra en los daños punitivos.&nbsp; En la valoración de la figura ocupan un lugar central los fines que se persiguen. Sobre todo, adquiere importancia la función social. Es necesario determinar los casos, las garantías que deben aplicarse y los criterios de cuantificación