Pir Sultan Abdal : Encounters with persona in Alevi lyric song

In his 1997 Nobel Prize lecture, Contra jogulatores obliquentes, Italian dramatist Dario Fo makes an oblique reference to a famous medieval Ottoman "jester."1 The "jester" is not mentioned by name but rather in the context of the murder of 35 artists and writers in July 1993 when religious bigots set alight the Madimak Hotel in the eastern Turkish city of Sivas.2 Those killed were there to participate in the Pir Sultan Abdal etkinlikleri (festivities).3 The "jester" Fo refers to is the eponymous identity in whose memory the festival is held, the Alevi dervish, poet, rebel, and martyr Pir Sultan Abdal. Fo's reference to the Sivas massacre was a significant statement about this incident in an international forum; but it also demonstrates the misunderstanding of the persona of Pir Sultan Abdal when refracted through time, language, and the chasm that beckons when peering askance into the opaqueness of an esoteric culture. Pir Sultan Abdal's persona, as perceived and expressed by contemporary intellectuals and artists, was fundamental to the Sivas events,4 but Fo's commendable reference gives no sense of this potent and complex persona. Indeed it even distorts and trivializes it./

The DSA Toolkit Shines Light Into Dark and Stormy Archives

Web archive collections are created with a particular purpose in mind. A curator selects seeds, or original resources, which are then captured by an archiving system and stored as archived web pages, or mementos. The systems that build web archive collections are often configured to revisit the same original resource multiple times. This is incredibly useful for understanding an unfolding news story or the evolution of an organization. Unfortunately, over time, some of these original resources can go off-topic and no longer suit the purpose for which the collection was originally created. They can go off-topic due to web site redesigns, changes in domain ownership, financial issues, hacking, technical problems, or because their content has moved on from the original topic. Even though they are off-topic, the archiving system will still capture them, thus it becomes imperative to anyone performing research on these collections to identify these off-topic mementos. Hence, we present the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit, which allows users to detect off-topic mementos within web archive collections. The mementos identified by this toolkit can then be separately removed from a collection or merely excluded from downstream analysis. The following similarity measures are available: byte count, word count, cosine similarity, Jaccard distance, Sørensen-Dice distance, Simhash using raw text content, Simhash using term frequency, and Latent Semantic Indexing via the gensim library. We document the implementation of each of these similarity measures. We possess a gold standard dataset generated by manual analysis, which contains both off-topic and on-topic mementos. Using this gold standard dataset, we establish a default threshold corresponding to the best F1 score for each measure. We also provide an overview of potential future directions that the toolkit may take

Creating Structure in Web Archives With Collections: Different Concepts From Web Archivists

As web archives' holdings grow, archivists subdivide them into collections so they are easier to understand and manage. In this work, we review the collection structures of eight web archive platforms: : Archive-It, Conifer, the Croatian Web Archive (HAW), the Internet Archive's user account web archives, Library of Congress (LC), PANDORA, Trove, and the UK Web Archive (UKWA). We note a plethora of different approaches to web archive collection structures. Some web archive collections support sub-collections and some permit embargoes. Curatorial decisions may be attributed to a single organization or many. Archived web pages are known by many names: mementos, copies, captures, or snapshots. Some platforms restrict a memento to a single collection and others allow mementos to cross collections. Knowledge of collection structures has implications for many different applications and users. Visitors will need to understand how to navigate collections. Future archivists will need to understand what options are available for designing collections. Platform designers need it to know what possibilities exist. The developers of tools that consume collections need to understand collection structures so they can meet the needs of their users.Comment: 5 figures, 16 pages, accepted for publication at TPDL 202

I am Pir Sultan Abdal : a hermeneutical study of the self-naming tradition (mahlas) in Turkish Alevi lyric song (deyiş)

The lyric songs of Turkish oral tradition broadly understood by the term deyiş provide one of the richest perspectives on the historical construction, communal perceptions and creative impetus of Turkish Alevi culture. One of the most evident defining characteristics of the deyiş is the convention in which the poetic persona to which the lyric is attributed, known as the mahlas, is incorporated in the final verse. While this convention is ubiquitous in this lyric form it has received little scholarly attention particularly in regards to is role in expressive culture. This study approaches Alevi expressive culture by means of focusing on the interpretive force of the mahlas. The theoretical basis for this study is the tripartite model proposed for ethnomusicological study by Timothy Rice in 1987, by which musical experience may be understood as being historically constructed, socially maintained and individually applied. In applying this model my study pursues an interpretive approach both in terms of identifying interpretive practice and in suggesting interpretive perspectives. This approach follows Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical perspective as an encounter that seeks not to understand the inner experience of people of another culture, but rather to understand the world that is suggested by music sounds, performance and contexts. The structure of this study follows this hermeneutical epistemology in terms of pre-understanding (encounters in text), explications (the analysis of the form and structure of the text and music) and experiences (interpretive encounters with expressive culture that suggest new understandings). Methods employed for this study include a broad reading and familiarity with Alevi related and initiated publications and scholarship (in Turkish and English); observation of Alevi (and more broadly Turkish) public expressive culture through audio and visual recordings and attending festivals and other events; and participation in Alevi expressive culture and critical reflection through learning the bağlama (Turkish lute) and performing Alevi deyiş informally and in public. This study begins by considering ‗pre-understandings‘ through the way the persona of the most influential of the Alevi poets, Pir Sultan Abdal, is presented in the pursuit of a historical identity as the lyrics or oral tradition attributed to him have become the basis of canonical textual collections. This chapter suggests the limitation of this approach to understanding while revealing the centrality of the mahlas as the object of study. The second part of the study focuses on explicating the deyiş lyric form and the mahlas as a defining characteristic of that form. These explications suggests the mahlas is more than merely a convention used to identify the author of the lyric but is, rather, a subtle and adaptable traditional textual integer that, while inherently meaningful, is not fixed in its meaning or purpose; and with its immanent associations provides interpretive and creative potential. The third part of the study considers the interpretive and creative potential of the Alevi deyiş and the immanent qualities of the mahlas in performance. Firstly, a context to Alevi public expressive culture is provided by examining a series of commercial recordings produced in the 1980s by Arif Sağ, a formative period when Alevis began to be more open and assertive in the articulation of Alevi culture. This is followed by an examination of the interpretive potential of performance through the description and analysis of a performance by Tolga Sağ at the 2002 Pir Sultan Abdal festival in the village of Banaz in central Turkey. The study further considers the application of the interpretive potential provided by the immanent and associative qualities of the mahlas through a critical reflective analysis of my performances of Alevi deyiş. Finally, this study includes the largest collection of lyrics by the major Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal yet to appear in English translations. These translations are included to demonstrate and reveal the hermeneutical challenge presented by this material as well as providing broader scholarly access to a substantial representative sample of the lyrics associated with this major Alevi figure. This study concludes that the mahlas is a richly meaningful textual integer that conveys, with communicative economy, immanent aspects of authority, lineage, communal identity and inclusion. As such, rather than being a simple convention to identify authorship, it is an adaptive yet critical element in the creative and interpretive expression of Alevi culture. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of a rich oral lyric tradition and creative expressive culture that has received relatively little scholarly attention, especially in the English language scholarship, and to reveal the mahlas in the context of oral and expressive culture as a subject deserving of further scholarly study