Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

Digital document and interpretation : re-thinking "text" and scholarship in electronic settings

The contribution starts from outlining the evolution of the scholarly production flow from the print based paradigm to the digital age and in this context it explores the opposition of digital versus analog representation modes. It then develops on the triple paradigm shift caused by genuine digital publishing and its specific consequences for the social sciences and humanities (SSH) which in turn results in re-constituting basic scholarly notions such as 'text' and 'document'. The paper concludes with discussing the specific value that could be added in systematically using digital text resources as a basis for scholarly work and also states some of the necessary conditions for such a 'digital turn' to be successful in the SSH.Der Beitrag beginnt mit einem Überblick zur Evolution des wissenschaftlichen Informationskontinuums auf dem Weg vom druckbasierten Paradigma in das digitale Zeitalter und geht in diesem Zusammenhang näher auf die Unterscheidung 'digitaler' und 'analoger' Repräsentationsmodi ein. Anschließend behandeln wir den als Folge des Übergangs zu genuin digitalen Publikationsformen erwartbaren dreifachen Paradigmenwechsel und dessen spezifische Konsequenzen für die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften sowie als deren Folge wiederum die Re-Konstitution elementarer Kernbegriffe geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeitens wie 'Text' und 'Dokument'. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Betrachtung des spezifischen Mehrwerts, der sich aus dem systematischen Rekurs auf digitale Textressourcen in den Geisteswissenschaften ergeben könnte und geht dabei auch auf die erforderlichen Vorbedingungen eines solcherart erfolgreichen 'digital turn' in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften ein

"Narrativität" und "Ereignis" : ein Definitionsversuch

Eine Konstante der Diskussion zur Bestimmung von "Narrativität" ist der Versuch, Narrativität als kennzeichnendes Merkmal des erzählenden Textes funktional zu bestimmen: nämlich als eine spezifische Form der symbolischen Ereignisrepräsentation. Dieser Beitrag entwickelt dagegen die These, daß Narrativität keine Frage des Entweder/Oder ist, sondern eine der graduellen Realisation spezifischer logischer Bedingungen, die sich in Form einer sog. "Ereignis-Matrix" definieren lassen. Alles, was die Bedingungen der Ereignis-Matrix erfüllt, taugt zum "Ereignis-Konstrukt" – aber nur jene Ereignis-Konstrukte und damit auch die ihnen zugrundeliegenden Texte sind in sich selbst narrativ, in denen die temporale Ordnung sich nicht auf die reine Sequentialität der symbolischen Zeichen reduziert

DH is us or on the unbearable lightness of a shared methodology

"In practice the Digital Humanities are methodologically defined by the principle of digital conceptualization of the objects and procedures of research. Who embarks upon Digital Humanities considers the objects of study implicitly as a complex of discrete measurable states, to apply, based upon this, computer based procedures: analytical, symbolizing or modeling. This mode of digital conceptualization of humanistic topics of research can in principle be used within all disciplines, as a digital lingua franca. Before this background we formulate two theses: (1) This methodological theoretical claim of universality has to be relativized by the Digital Humanities community through critical reflection of methodology; digital access does not turn out to be appropriate everywhere, when we make the specifically humanistic drive for knowledge the yardstick of a cost-benefit analysis. (2) The trans-disciplinary nature of the Digital Humanities may be politically 'unbearable' by tendency from the perspective of traditional Humanities' disciplines, as it challenges their disciplinary identity. For the Digital Humanities community both of these theses lead to the obligation to engage in a critical self reflexion of their own methods - and open the dialogue with the established humanistic disciplines against its backdrop." (author's abstract

Narratology beyond literary criticism : mediality, disciplinarity ; introduction

A glance at the current situation in literary criticism shows that narratology, pronounced dead twenty years ago, is remarkably alive and well. This fact has been noted repeatedly and with understandable self-satisfaction in the recent literature on research into narrative theory. Just how astonishing this rebirth is, however, becomes apparent only when we step back from literary criticism and the humanities to take a wider historical view of the developments in academic and theoretical circles that preceded it. The deeply symbolic year of 1968 marked the fall of the academic ancient régime. Partly in anticipation of this and partly in response to it, a number of new leading disciplines were raised to power in western Europe as sources of hope for the future. However much they may have differed from one another in political purpose (in theoretical circles or beyond), linguistics, political economy, psychoanalysis, and structuralist semiology—to name but a few of the superdisciplines of the time—clearly belonged to one and the same paradigm in terms of how they conceived of themselves: throughout, they sought to reveal universal, ahistorical regularities in human thought and action in their respective fields