Chapter «Il cybernauta è naufragato». Rappresentazioni del tecnologico nell’opera di Claudio Magris

This essay traces and analyses the various representations of technology in Claudio Magris’ work. From the answering machines of Le voci to the war machines of Non luogo a procedere, a controversial and conflicting relationship has always been established between the protagonists of Magris’ narratives and the various declinations of technological progress. The essay explores the concepts of cognitive sciences and digital humanities (such as the “extended mind” and word embeddings), while also referring to Magris’ own reflections on writing and figureheads, to illustrate the profoundly ethical value of the relationship established between human beings and the tools that they create

History/Histoire e Digital Humanities

This volume reconstructs the birth and evolution of the Italian literary history in France and England during the 19th century. In the French context, a comparative reading of the works by Pierre-Louis Ginguené and Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi confirms that the subject had already reached its maturity at the beginning of the century. On the other hand, in England, the path leading from Ugo Foscolo to John Addington Symonds passes through multiple genres and sources, including collections of biographies, anthologies of translations, travel books, histories of individual literary genres, histories from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At the end of this path, a software pipeline is tested and developed with the aim of expanding the analysis through the computational tools of the Digital Humanities

Ein Schlachtfeld der Zuschreibung von Autorschaft. Musils propagandistische Beiträge in der Frontzeitung «Heimat» (1918): [A battlefield for authorship attribution. Musil’s propaganda contributions in the soldier’s newspaper «Heimat» (1918)]

This study focuses on Musil’s contributions to Heimat, a propaganda newspaper published by the k.u.k. Kriegspressequartier during the last months of World War I. As the authorship of the Heimat articles is controversial, we performed a series of stylometric analyses, which allowed us to attribute ten texts to the Austrian writer. Our approach introduces new elements and data into the debate on authorship, thus opening a productive dialogue between computational, archival and stylistic research

Metamorfosi ovidiane nella cultura medievale

Da Ovidio a Ovidio? L’Ovide moralisé in prosa Anna Maria Babbi (ed.) Edizioni Fiorini, Collana Medioevi Verona, 2013 186 pp

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

Explicit representation of subgrid heterogeneity in a GCM land-surface scheme

Permission to place copies of these works on this server has been provided by the American Meteorological Society (AMS). The AMS does not guarantee that the copies provided here are accurate copies of the published work. © Copyright 2003 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/AMS) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or [email protected] the treatment of subgrid-scale soil moisture variations is recognized as a priority for the next generation of land surface schemes. Here, the impact of an improved representation of subgrid-scale soil moisture heterogeneity on global climate model (GCM) simulations of current and future climates is carried out using Version three of the Hadley Centre Atmospheric Climate Model (HadAM3) coupled to the Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme (MOSES). MOSES was adapted to make use of the rainfall runoff model TOPMODEL algorithms, which relate the local water table depth to the grid box mean water table depth, assuming that subgrid-scale topography is the primary cause of soil moisture heterogeneity. This approach was also applied to produce a novel model for wetland area, which can ultimately be used to interactively model methane emissions from wetlands. The modified scheme was validated offline by forcing with near-surface Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP) data, and online within the HadAM3 global climate model. In both cases it was found to improve the present-day simulation of runoff and produce realistic distributions of global wetland area. (Precipitation was also improved in the online simulation.) The new scheme results in substantial differences in the modeled sensitivity of runoff to climate change, with implications for the modeling of hydrological impacts

Extreme Rainfall in the Mediterranean: What Can We Learn from Observations?

Abstract Flash floods induced by extreme rainfall events represent one of the most life-threatening phenomena in the Mediterranean. While their catastrophic ground effects are well documented by postevent surveys, the extreme rainfall events that generate them are still difficult to observe properly. Being able to collect observations of such events will help scientists to better understand and model these phenomena. The recent flash floods that hit the Liguria region (Italy) between the end of October and beginning of November 2011 give us the opportunity to use the measurements available from a large number of sensors, both ground based and spaceborne, to characterize these events. In this paper, the authors analyze the role of the key ingredients (e.g., unstable air masses, moist low-level jets, steep orography, and a slow-evolving synoptic pattern) for severe rainfall processes over complex orography. For the two Ligurian events, this role has been analyzed through the available observations (e.g., Meteosat Second Generation, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, the Italian Radar Network mosaic, and the Italian rain gauge network observations). The authors then address the possible role of sea–atmosphere interactions and propose a characterization of these events in terms of their predictability

Dermatomyositis in 132 patients with different clinical subtypes: cutaneous signs, constitutional symptoms and circulating antibodies.

We retrospectively studied 132 patients with dermatomyositis; 84 had idiopathic, 30 paraneoplastic, 5 juvenile and 13 amyopathic forms of the disease. The commonest features were macular erythema, heliotropic erythema and Gottron's papules. Flagellate erythema occurred in 5% of patients with idiopathic dermatomyositis and correlated with the disease activity. Necrotic lesions were also found in this group of patients but did not always signal malignancy. The prevalence of malignancy was high (23%). Raynaud's phenomenon occurred in 10.6% of patients, also in those with malignancy. Dysphagia, interstitial lung disease and arthralgias affected 20%, 8% and 40% of patients, respectively. Anti-Jo-1 antibodies were found in 5% of patients with idiopathic dermatomyositis and low titre ANA in 1/3 of patients. ANA did not correlate with the disease activity. We confirmed the data from the literature, but no cutaneous sign, constitutional symptom or circulating antibody was found marking a particular subtype of the disease

Books’ Impact in Digital Social Reading: Towards a Conceptual and Methodological Framework

The aim of this panel is to debate the challenges and opportunities offered by online reviews for measuring the impact that books can have on readers (Boot and Koolen, 2020). The focus is specifically on culture- and language- specificity, thus we will compare insights from the analysis of Korean, English, Italian, German, and Dutch reviews. Digital social reading platforms – like Goodreads, Lovelybooks, or Naver Books – host millions of reviews and, thus, offer unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, and reader response (Rebora et al., 2021; Walsh and Antoniak, 2021). Computational tools are especially relevant, given the large amount of available data, but finding associations between textual features, cultural conventions (e.g. genre), and cognitive, affective, and aesthetic responses is not a straightforward task (Koolen et al., 2020; Pianzola et al., 2020). By comparing research done with different platforms, datasets, and languages, we aim at improving the methods that we employ, in a dialogue involving both data-driven insight and theoretical reflection on literature and readers. Questions that we will address are: what aspects of a book’s impact on readers can reviews help us to measure? What are the limitations of online book reviews for studying impact? How do we know to what extent these review texts reflect the actual reading experiences? What are unwanted, confounding influences (e.g. reviewers projecting a favourable self-image, socially desired responses, aspects of identity formation, fake reviews). How do online book reviews differ from experimentally controlled gathering of reader responses (lab studies, questionnaires, psychologically validated scales) (Lendvai et al., 2020)? How do platforms for reviewing and social interactions around books influence reviewers and their perceptions? How do reviewers compare to other readers? To answer such questions, we will present four case studies dealing with different languages and cultures, followed by an open discussion of the results and methods, reflecting on their generalizability, efficacy and limitations