\u3ci\u3eBeowulf\u3c/i\u3e: The Monsters and the Critics Seventy-Five Years Later

Scholar Guest of Honor speech, Mythcon 42. A discussion of the continuing influence of Tolkien’s famed Beowulf essay on its seventy-fifth anniversary. Shows how the essay both opened up and limited later Beowulf scholarship, and draws some interesting parallels with the current state of Tolkien scholarship. Along the way, questions the wisdom of believing everything an author says about his own work, and asserts the value of familiarity with critical history

Lexomic Tools and Methods for Textual Analysis: Providing Deep Access to Digitized Texts

This project hybridizes traditional humanistic approaches to textual scholarship, such as source study and the analysis of style, with advanced computational and statistical comparative methods, allowing scholars "deep access" to digitized texts and textual corpora. Our multi-disciplinary collaboration enables us to discover patterns in (and between) texts previously invisible to traditional methods. Going forward, we will build on the success of our previous Digital Humanities Start-up Grant by further developing tools and documentation (in an open, on-line community) for applying advanced statistical methodologies to textual and literary problems. At the same time we will demonstrate the value of the approach by applying the tools and methods to texts from a variety of languages and time periods, including Old English, medieval Latin, and Modern English works from the twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance

The Author and the Authors of the 'Vita Ædwardi Regis:' Women's Literary Culture and Digital Humanities

Commissioned by Queen Edith in the 1060s, the Vita Ædwardi Regis (hereafter VER) has recently received substantial scholarly attention, including focus on identification of the author of this putatively anonymous text; the quest for authorial identification has until now proceeded with the assumption of sole authorship of the text. Lexomics, an open-access vocabulary analysis tool, adds digital strategies to more traditional literary and historical analyses; the Lexomic evidence indicates that the VER is a composite text built by multiple contributors under the direction of the queen. Not only did Edith's patronage cause the VER to be written, but her knowledge, and her personal and political interests, shaped the Life's content. Hers was the active, guiding intellect behind the entire text, and in two passages the VER appears not only to communicate the queen's intentions but also to preserve her voice. If any one person is to be identified as the 'author' of the VER, therefore, it is Edith, guiding a team of writers and scribes to tell her story

Astronomy and Literature | Canon and Stylometrics

This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige

Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger

International audienceOn 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of $\sim 1.7\,{\rm{s}}$ with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg(2) at a luminosity distance of ${40}_{-8}^{+8}$ Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 $\,{M}_{\odot }$. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at $\sim 40\,{\rm{Mpc}}$) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One-Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ∼10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position $\sim 9$ and $\sim 16$ days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC 4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta