Meaning in poetry: semantic annotation of verse with the Historical Thesaurus of English

This thesis addresses the current gap in semantic annotation of poetry by presenting the first semantic tagging system specifically designed to disambiguate senses in a diachronic corpus of poetry. The ‘ambiguity tagger’ developed for this purpose utilises the hierarchical taxonomy of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE; Kay 2011: 42) to assign conceptual ‘tags’ to lexical items that denote the meaning of the word in context, with multiple meanings assigned to ambiguous words. The ambiguity tagger encompasses a configurable pipeline for semantic annotation, thus presenting a more flexible alternative to existing applications (Piao et al. 2005a; Rayson 2009a; Piao et al. 2017). To train the tagger, a corpus was curated from the Oxford Book of English Verse, containing poetry from the early 16th to the late 19th century (OBEV; Quiller-Couch 1919/1999). As the ambiguity tagger allows multiple meanings to be assigned to individual words in the corpus, without restricting the maximum number of senses, the semantic metadata produced by the tagger is unique in its breadth. Correspondingly, the analysis sections of the thesis look at different techniques for interpreting the data, using case studies from the OBEV corpus. Both macro- and micro-level approaches to analysing the data are explored, highlighting the benefits of the ambiguity tagger at different levels of critical analysis. To further explore the capabilities of semantic annotation with HTE data, this research extends the interpretative analysis of the semantic metadata gained through the ambiguity tagger by presenting a systematic approach for analysing the significant co-occurrence of concepts in the text. This process borrows the framework for identifying significantly co-occurring words (collocates) and extends this into a measure of ‘semantic collocation’, thus significantly expanding on existing research in this field (Alexander et al. 2015a; Archer & Malory 2015; 2017). By shifting the focus from lexical collocation to the significant co-occurrence of ‘meaning’ in texts, this approach reveals a pattern of previously inaccessible textual data for analysis and marks a further methodological contribution of this research

Semantic density mapping: a discussion of meaning in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

This project attempts to bring together the tremendous amount of data made available through the publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (eds. Kay, Roberts, Samuels and Wotherspoon 2009), and the recent developments in digital humanities of ‘mapping’ or ‘visually displaying’ literary corpus data. Utilising the Access HT-OED database and ‘Gephi’ digital software, the first section of this thesis is devoted to establishing the methodology behind this approach. Crucial to achieving this was the concept of ‘Semantic Density’, a property of a literary text determined by the analysis of lexemes in the text, following the semantic taxonomy of the HT-OED. This will be illustrated with a proof-of-concept analysis and visualisations based on the work of one poet from the Romantic period, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789/1794). In the later sections, these ‘maps’ will be used alongside a more traditional critical reading of the texts, with the intention of providing a robust framework for the application of digital visualisations in literary studies. The primary goal of this project, therefore, is to present a tool to inform critical analysis which blends together modern digital humanities, and traditional literary studies

Pivoting PGT dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations

No abstract available

Targeted Academic Writing and ​Development Classes at Glasgow:​ Rationale, Development, and Engagement

No abstract available

Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Glasgow: Effective Interdisciplinary Collaboration

This paper traces the brief but already accomplished history of Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Glasgow (XPMGla), a postgraduate, interdisciplinary research group. It outlines our rationale for founding the group, and discusses in detail two case study examples of projects we have recently undertaken. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that, through collaborative, interdisciplinary, progressive, technologically-led Humanities-based approaches, we have been able to productively leverage our collective expertise to design, plan, and carry out successful projects with true impact. It argues that, ultimately, without our Humanities-based approaches, these projects would have not been as effective and impactful, or potentially even possible. Our first project case study is XPMGla’s winning pitch to the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) hackathon. We investigated copyright control in the video games industry, with specific regard to user-made modifications (or ‘mods’) to existing games, in order to find and present evidence that protection, high or low, impacts creative production. Our final pitch included academic research, sampling, formulae, data analysis, data curation, and visualisation, and we are in the process of taking this project further with CREATe. Our second project case study is XPMGla’s web design workshop for the Strathclyde Summer Experience programme at Strathclyde University, a part of the Focus West widening participation scheme. The project involved planning, designing, and delivering a web design workshop for pupils from care backgrounds in areas with low percentages of progression to Higher Education. Specifically, this included teaching pupils key principles of web design – such as wireframing, content creation, HTML and CSS – enabling them to build and present their final website. XPMGla was founded in February 2016 as a postgraduate research cluster aiming to draw members from all areas of experimental Humanities-based scholarship, in order to share skills, gain new perspectives on research, and collaborate on interdisciplinary projects. Our group members come from a wide variety of disciplines, including English Language and Literature, Media Theory, The Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), Computer Science, Economics, Film and Television Studies, and Computer Games Studies. However, we are unified through our Humanities-based approaches and progressive process, media-, and technology-based scholarship. The group also runs in parallel with the Experimental Methods in the Humanities group at Columbia University, New York, with whom we intend to collaborate in areas such as publishing, grant work, and symposia

Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Glasgow: Effective Interdisciplinary Collaboration

This paper traces the brief but already accomplished history of Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Glasgow (XPMGla), a postgraduate, interdisciplinary research group. It outlines our rationale for founding the group, and discusses in detail two case study examples of projects we have recently undertaken. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that, through collaborative, interdisciplinary, progressive, technologically-led Humanities-based approaches, we have been able to productively leverage our collective expertise to design, plan, and carry out successful projects with true impact. It argues that, ultimately, without our Humanities-based approaches, these projects would have not been as effective and impactful, or potentially even possible. Our first project case study is XPMGla’s winning pitch to the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) hackathon. We investigated copyright control in the video games industry, with specific regard to user-made modifications (or ‘mods’) to existing games, in order to find and present evidence that protection, high or low, impacts creative production. Our final pitch included academic research, sampling, formulae, data analysis, data curation, and visualisation, and we are in the process of taking this project further with CREATe. Our second project case study is XPMGla’s web design workshop for the Strathclyde Summer Experience programme at Strathclyde University, a part of the Focus West widening participation scheme. The project involved planning, designing, and delivering a web design workshop for pupils from care backgrounds in areas with low percentages of progression to Higher Education. Specifically, this included teaching pupils key principles of web design – such as wireframing, content creation, HTML and CSS – enabling them to build and present their final website. XPMGla was founded in February 2016 as a postgraduate research cluster aiming to draw members from all areas of experimental Humanities-based scholarship, in order to share skills, gain new perspectives on research, and collaborate on interdisciplinary projects. Our group members come from a wide variety of disciplines, including English Language and Literature, Media Theory, The Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), Computer Science, Economics, Film and Television Studies, and Computer Games Studies. However, we are unified through our Humanities-based approaches and progressive process, media-, and technology-based scholarship. The group also runs in parallel with the Experimental Methods in the Humanities group at Columbia University, New York, with whom we intend to collaborate in areas such as publishing, grant work, and symposia

Enhancing Assessment and Feedback Practice: A place to (re)start

No abstract available