Rabbinic Literature and Roman-Byzantine Legal Compilations

It remains uncertain whether interest and influence or ignorance and indifference are the right words to describe the relationship between rabbinic literature and Roman-Byzantine legal compilations. The chapter surveys the mostly separate study of the Talmud Yerushalmi and Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis and discusses scholarly theories about their compositional history. It argues that comparative (machine-assisted) analysis may be more likely to reveal structural and conceptual similarities rather than direct impact or mutual dependence. It proposes to ask questions for which sufficient evidence exists and to refocus on the analysis of the texts

A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest

Traditional philological methods in Roman legal scholarship such as close reading and strict juristic reasoning have analysed law in extraordinary detail. Such methods, however, have paid less attention to the empirical characteristics of legal texts and occasionally projected an abstract framework onto the sources. The paper presents a series of computer-assisted methods to open new frontiers of inquiry. Using a Python coding environment, we have built a relational database of the Latin text of the Digest, a historical sourcebook of Roman law compiled under the order of Emperor Justinian in 533 CE. Subsequently, we investigated the structure of Roman law by automatically clustering the sections of the Digest according to their linguistic profile. Finally, we explored the characteristics of Roman legal language according to the principles and methods of computational distributional semantics. Our research has discovered an empirical structure of Roman law which arises from the sources themselves and complements the dominant scholarly assumption that Roman law rests on abstract structures. By building and comparing Latin word embeddings models, we were also able to detect a semantic split in words with general and legal sense. These investigations point to a practical focus in Roman law which is consistent with the view that ancient law schools were more interested in training lawyers for practice rather than in philosophical neatness.</jats:p

How Data Papers Present a Unique Contribution To Open Research In The Humanities And Social Sciences

The open research movement and initiatives like the FAIR principles have been critical in establishing the importance of data in research, particularly within the sciences. Alongside the sciences, attention to openly available data in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) research has gradually grown. This growth is largely attributed to the increased availability of digital collections, the development of new data-intensive methods, an increasingly solid infrastructure, increased pressure from funders, the requirement of data management plans for preservation purposes, and the involvement of research libraries in data curation. In this context, attention to how data is produced, how it is openly and transparently shared, and how it can be reused has generated great interest, accompanied by an inevitable need for reputable data sharing outlets. One such outlet is the data paper – a peer-reviewed publication that focuses on describing a curated dataset. Data papers can be shared in traditional research journals as one subtype of article publication, or, more recently, in data journals which are dedicated to the publication of data papers. This presentation focuses on the work done by the open access Journal of Open Humanities (JOHD) in promoting the practice of publishing data papers with their accompanying open access datasets. JOHD was established with Ubiquity Press in 2015 to promote awareness, use, and reuse of humanities data. JOHD data papers promote the comprehensive description of how a dataset was assembled, where it may be accessed, and any crucial context including the research questions that framed the data gathering, including limitations to the original methods or scope of sources included. JOHD data papers suggest potential future reuses of data, which recent analytics seem to suggest has helped increase the visibility of datasets, and therefore their research impact (Marongiu et al., forthcoming; McGillivray et al., 2022). In addition, an overview of the three key elements (the “golden triangle”) that assess the impact of open research efforts as represented by different research outputs (datasets, data papers and research papers) will be presented, along with proposed initiatives for linking these. In doing so, we aim to (a) find a programmatic way to identify these links by extracting information from available metadata of datasets and verifying their accuracy, and (b) create a “ground truth” in a manual and/or machine-assisted way which would enable the training of more sophisticated NLP-based methods as a next step. We hope to illustrate the importance of including data papers into the research conversation given that they present a unique contribution to addressing global challenges within the open research arena

Epistēmē, virtud y posesión en los diálogos socráticos

In this article I propose an approach to the little known Socratic epistēmē that reveals the inadequacy of explaining it from just one cognitive point of view. I also show how the Socratic epistēmē allows for different approaches, moving beyond traditional views of its meaning. I further suggest a characterization of virtue in terms of the states possessed by the agent that are generated when the virtue is exercised.Propongo en este artículo una aproximación a la epistēmē socrática, poco explorada, que permite mostrar las insuficiencias que se generan si ésta se explica solamente desde un punto de vista cognitivo, y que muestra, a su vez, que la epistēmē socrática permite acoger aproximaciones diferentes a partir de las que tradicionalmente se ha establecido su sentido. La caracterización de la virtud que se propone es su consideración desde los estados determinados que genera su ejercicio, y que el agente posee

Canadian Perspectives on the Clinical Actionability of Neuroimaging in Disorders of Consciousness

Background: Acquired brain injury is a critical public health and socioeconomic problem in Canada, leaving many patients in vegetative, minimally conscious, or locked-in states, unresponsive and unable to communicate. Recent advances in neuroimaging research have demonstrated residual consciousness in a few exemplary patients with acquired brain injury, suggesting potential misdiagnosis and changes in prognosis. Such progress, in parallel with research using multimodal brain imaging technologies in recent years, has promising implications for clinical translation, notwithstanding the many challenges that impact health care and policy development. This study explored the perspectives of Canadian professionals with expertise either in neuroimaging research, disorders of consciousness, or both, on the potential clinical applications and implications of imaging technology. Methods: Twenty-two professionals from designated communities of neuroimaging researchers, ethicists, lawyers, and practitioners participated in semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed for emergent themes. Results: The five most dominant themes were: (1) validation and calibration of the methods; (2) informed consent; (3) burdens on the health care system; (4) implications for the Canadian health care system; and (5) possibilities for improved prognosis. Conclusions: Movement of neuroimaging from research into clinical care for acquired brain injury will require careful consideration of legal and ethical issues alongside research reliability, responsible distribution of health care resources, and the interaction of technological capabilities with patient outcome

Dominant Patterns of Information Flow in the Propagation of the Neuromagnetic Somatosensory Steady-State Response

Methods of functional connectivity are applied ubiquitously in studies involving non-invasive whole-brain signals, but may be not optimal for exploring the propagation of the steady-state responses, which are strong oscillatory patterns of neurodynamics evoked by periodic stimulation. In our study, we explore a functional network underlying the somatosensory steady-state response using methods of effective connectivity. Human magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data were collected in 10 young healthy adults during 23-Hz vibro-tactile stimulation of the right hand index finger. The whole-brain dynamics of MEG source activity was reconstructed with a linearly-constrained minimum variance beamformer. We applied information-theoretic tools to quantify asymmetries in information flows between primary somatosensory area SI and the rest of the brain. Our analysis identified a pattern of coupling, leading from area SI to a source in the secondary somato-sensory area SII, thalamus, and motor cortex all contralateral to stimuli as well as to a source in the cerebellum ipsilateral to the stimuli. Our results support previously reported empirical evidence collected both in in vitro and in vivo, indicating critical areas of activation of the somatosensory system at the level of systems neuroscience

Neuromagnetic activation and oscillatory dynamics of stimulus-locked processing during naturalistic viewing

Naturalistic stimuli such as watching a movie while in the scanner provide an ecologically valid paradigm that has the potential of extracting valuable information on how the brain processes complex stimuli in realistic visual and auditory contexts. Naturalistic viewing is also easier to conduct with challenging participant groups including patients and children. Given the high temporal resolution of MEG, in the present study, we demonstrate how a short movie clip can be used to map distinguishable activation and connectivity dynamics underlying the processing of specific classes of visual stimuli such as face and hand manipulations, as well as contrasting activation dynamics for auditory words and non-words. MEG data were collected from 22 healthy volunteers (6 females, 3 left handed, mean age – 27.7 ± 5.28 years) during the presentation of naturalistic audiovisual stimuli. The MEG data were split into trials with the onset of the stimuli belonging to classes of interest (words, non-words, faces, hand manipulations). Based on the components of the averaged sensor ERFs time-locked to the visual and auditory stimulus onset, four and three time-windows, respectively, were defined to explore brain activation dynamics. Pseudo-Z, defined as the ratio of the source-projected time-locked power to the projected noise power for each vertex, was computed and used as a proxy of time-locked brain activation. Statistical testing using the mean-centered Partial Least Squares analysis indicated periods where a given visual or auditory stimuli had higher activation. Based on peak pseudo-Z differences between the visual conditions, time-frequency resolved analyses were performed to assess beta band desynchronization in motor-related areas, and inter-trial phase synchronization between face processing areas. Our results provide the first evidence that activation and connectivity dynamics in canonical brain regions associated with the processing of particular classes of visual and auditory stimuli can be reliably mapped using MEG during presentation of naturalistic stimuli. Given the strength of MEG for brain mapping in temporal and frequency domains, the use of naturalistic stimuli may open new techniques in analyzing brain dynamics during ecologically valid sensation and perception

Electrophysiology of Inhibitory Control in the Context of Emotion Processing in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an increasingly common developmental disorder that affects 1 in 59 children. Despite this high prevalence of ASD, knowledge regarding the biological basis of its associated cognitive difficulties remains scant. In this study, we aimed to identify altered neurophysiological responses underlying inhibitory control and emotion processing difficulties in ASD, together with their associations with age and various domains of cognitive and social function. This was accomplished by assessing electroencephalographic recordings during an emotional go/nogo task alongside parent rating scales of behavior. Event related potential (ERP) N200 component amplitudes were reduced in children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children. No group differences were found, however, for task performance, P300 amplitude or latency, or N170 amplitude or latency, suggesting that individuals with ASD may only present conflict monitoring abnormalities, as reflected by the reduced N200 component, compared to TD individuals. Consistent with previous findings, increased age correlated with improved task performance scores and reduced N200 amplitude in the TD group, indicating that as these children develop, their neural systems become more efficient. These associations were not identified in the ASD group. Results also showed significant associations between increased N200 amplitudes and improved executive control abilities and decreased autism traits in TD children only. The newly discovered findings of decreased brain activation in children with ASD, alongside differences in correlations with age compared to TD children, provide a potential neurophysiological indicator of atypical development of inhibitory control mechanisms in these individuals