Browsing by Subject "Digital humanities"
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Item Digital Middle Eastern Studies : challenges, ethics, and the digital humanities(2015-05) Fischer, Gayle Renee; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-; Doty, PhilipThis professional report explores the adoption of digital humanities practices in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, focusing on what Middle Eastern Studies contributes to overall digital humanities discussions. An increase in conferences, panels, and workshops since 2013 shows that scholars in Middle Eastern Studies and related fields, such as Islamic Studies, display an interest in the digital humanities and the power of academic digital tools and methods to contribute to their work. Middle Eastern Studies as a discipline faces unique challenges in the adoption of digital humanities practices, arising from its interdisciplinary, geographically-focused nature, problems working with non-Roman scripts in the digital environment, and ethical issues based on the history of colonialism in the region. Due to U.S. foreign policy interests and the unintended applications of digital Middle Eastern Studies research, scholars working with these methods should carefully consider the impact their work may have on individuals currently living in the Middle East.Item Encoding embodiment : poetry as a Victorian science(2015-08) Rosen, Stephanie Suzanne; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; MacDuffie, Allen, 1975-; Moore, Lisa L; Baker, Samuel; Pinch, AdelaThis dissertation is a study of poetry by major nineteenth-century British writers--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne--in the context of major nineteenth-century scientific questions. I analyze how these poets were intellectually connected to contemporary discussions of scientific epistemology, human sensation, and species evolution, respectively, and how their innovations in poetic form constituted one mode of investigating such phenomena. My close readings of major poems--Browning's "An Essay on Mind," Rossetti's "Goblin Market," and Swinburne's "Hermaphroditus"--draw from formalist methods that are attentive to historical forces, and cultural studies methods that are attentive to materiality, thus developing a practice of reading poetry as the product of experimental making. This approach is extended in the companion digital project to this study: an online edition of Rossetti's "Goblin Market" in which users may explore the poem’s irregular rhyme in an interactive interface. This study offers new methods and new texts to scholarship of the mutual influence of Victorian science and literature. It furthermore traces connections between the scientific theories in Victorian poetry and those in more recent critical theory, including especially feminist materialisms, affect theory, and transgender studies. Chapter One reads Browning's understudied 1826 epic poem "An Essay on Mind" to reframe her career-long engagement with debates on scientific method and her particular critiques of scientific materialism. Chapter Two argues that Rossetti's 1861 "Goblin Market" uses irregular rhyming patterns to study the ways in which the relative orientations of its characters may affect each other's experience, a topic of interest to her as a religious educator. Chapter Three argues that Swinburne's poetry plays with words as historically evolved forms capable of unpredictable change and that his sonnet sequence "Hermaphroditus" recognizes the body as capable of similar transformations. Chapter Four examines the potential for poetic form to inform the coding practices used to translate print poetry into digital editions, providing theoretical context for my interactive edition of "Goblin Market."Item From "disentangling the subtle soul" to "ineluctable modality" : James Joyce's transmodal techniques(2011-05) Mulliken, Jasmine Tiffany; Friedman, Alan Warren; Bremen, Brian A.; Hodgson, Justin D.; Staley, Thomas F.; Antokoletz, Elliott M.This study of James Joyce's transmodal techniques explores, first, Joyce's implementation of non-language based media into his works and, second, how digital technologies might assist in identifying and studying these implementations. The first chapter introduces the technique of re-rendering, the artistic practice of drawing out certain characteristics of one medium and, by then depicting those characteristics in a new medium, calling attention to both media and their limitations and potentials. Re-rendering can be content-based or form-based. Joyce employs content-based re-rendering when he alludes to a piece of art in another medium and form-based re-rendering when he superimposes the form of another medium onto his text. The second chapter explores Dubliners as a panoramic catalog of the various aspects involved in re-rendering media. The collection of stories, or the fragmented novel, shows synaesthetic characters, characters engaged in repetition and revision, and characters translating art across media by superimposing the forms, materials, and conventions of one medium onto another. Dubliners culminates in the use of coda, a musical structure that commonly finalizes a multi-movement work. The third chapter analyzes of A Portrait of the artist as a young man, focusing on its protagonist who exhibits synaesthetic qualities and a penchant for repeating phrases. With each repetition he also revises, a practice that foreshadows the form-based re-rendering Joyce employs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The fourth chapter explores the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. In this episode, Joyce isolates the structure of the musical medium and transfers it to a literary medium. This technique shows his advanced exploration of the effects of one artistic medium on another and exemplifies his innovative technique of re-rendering art forms. Finally, the fifth chapter explores how we might use digital technologies to visualize Joyce's techniques of re-rendering. Based on these visualizations, we might identify further connections Joyce makes across his works.Item A game of confidence : literary dialect, linguistics, and authenticity(2011-08) Leigh, Philip John; Barrish, PhillipA Game of Confidence: Literary Dialect, Linguistics, and Authenticity builds a bridge between literary-critical and linguistic approaches to representations of nonstandard speech in literature. Important scholarship both in linguistics and in literary criticism has sought to develop rigorous inquiry into deviations from standard written language to represent features of nonstandard spoken language in literature. I argue that neither field, however, has fully embraced the idea that, by definition, 'literary dialect' necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, neither has successfully integrated the other's very different theories and methods. As a result, 'literary dialect' provides an exciting opportunity for new scholarship connecting recent developments in literary history, sociolinguistics, and digital humanities. The goals of my project are two-fold: First, to analyze within their own cultural and historical contexts previous attempts by authors, readers, and scholars to fix the supposedly empirical accuracy of literary dialect representations; second, to model what I take to be an empirically more valid use of linguistics for analyzing literary artists' representations of nonstandard speech. My work provides a necessary intervention for literary dialect criticism, particularly for the many arguments that have sought a degree of objectivity for assertions about the artistic or socio-political merits of a dialect text based on vague linguistic generalizations. My dissertation's primary focus is on the period that has served historically as the locus classicus for scholarship on American dialect literature: The second half of the nineteenth century when local colorists, regionalists, and realists used 'real' American voices as the foundation for a realistic American literature. By analyzing the production and historical reception of literary dialect texts from this period I show how assessments of 'authenticity' have been a constant in the critical response to these texts for nearly a century and a half. Having underscored the critical problems inherent in linking artistic and political evaluations of dialect texts to the 'authenticity' of their literary dialects, I then draw on recent developments in the digital humanities, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics to employ a methodology for generating and interpreting literary-linguistic data on literary dialects.Item Genre trouble : embodied cognition in fabliaux, chivalric romance, and Latin chronicle(2014-05) Widner, Michael; Heng, Geraldine; Johnson, Michael A., 1976-This dissertation examines the intersection between theories of body and of genre through the lens of cognitive science. It focuses, in particular, on representations of bodies in exemplars of fabliaux in Old French and Middle English, chivalric romance that feature the figure of Sir Gawain, and the Latin Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds. This dissertation establishes genre theory on cognitive-scientific ground by considering how embodied cognition influences both theories of genre and the representations of bodies. It argues that, rather than a container into which works fit, genre is a network of associations created in the minds of authors and audiences. This network finds expression in the bodies of characters, which differ across genres. It argues, moreover, that genre and bodies influence, in fundamental ways, interpretations of literary works. Finally, this work discusses the possibilities for future research using methods for quantitative textual analysis and data visualization common in the digital humanities.Item 'How do we evaluate this?' : Perspectives on evaluation criteria for digital scholarship from the digital humanities community(2013-05) Pfannenschmidt, Sarah Lynn; Clement, Tanya Elizabeth; Galloway, Patricia KSince the advent of the World Wide Web, there has been an increasing influx of digital scholarship. Such scholarship is not always recognized as legitimate, in part because digital work is still in its 'incunabula phase' and also because the staggering variety in tools, user communities, etc. engenders a host of potentially competing evaluation priorities. These concerns have created a pressing need for appropriate evaluation criteria to fairly assess digital projects. Though this topic has received substantial attention in the scholarly literature, discrete solutions and the establishment of firm yet flexible evaluation criteria remain elusive. This paper presents a pilot study that sought to clarify the following: what criteria participants use to evaluate digital scholarship, the place of digital tools in the evaluation of scholarship, who should evaluate digital projects, the role of stated intentions in the formation of evaluation criteria, what role the TEI might play in evaluation of text encoding, and finally how this role would be practically implemented. The study indicated that despite the complex nature of the topic, a number of practical solutions may aid in the legitimization of digital scholarship. In particular, including a statement of intent that explains the methodology of the project goes a long way in establishing the relationship between the content and the tools and the criteria to evaluate both components. Two potential roles for the TEI community also emerged: (1) to provide counsel and formative assistance with ongoing projects in a manner targeted towards project evaluations and (2) to consider including dedicated reviews section in the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative to feature project evaluations and accept submissions for review. This publication is an ideal online platform for the discussion of review guidelines and may help to clarify what evaluation criteria are necessary to promote fair and accurate assessments of digital projects. Determining what to evaluate and how to do so are perennially relevant questions, and as digital scholarship continues to develop, it will become more important than ever to develop a better of understanding of what we value and why we value it.Item Learned by heart : pederastic reading and writing practices in Plato's Phaedrus(2016-05) Emison, Emily Ruth; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-; Boyle, CaseyRather than reiterating the ways in which Phaedrus may be seen as Plato's positive reformulation of rhetoric, this paper focuses on reading the pederastic dynamic between the dialogue's interlocutors (and, by extension, it argues, between Plato and his contemporary audience as well as the text and future readers). Viewed thus, Phaedrus may be less invested than is generally supposed in settling whether rhetoric belongs more properly to the realm of doxa versus episteme or whether there is a clear and steadfast division between a "philosophical method" and a "rhetorical method" of teaching. Closer attention to Plato's pederastic language not only reunites the Phaedrus with its originally stated subject (i.e., the prospective benefits and detriments of the lover versus the nonlover, of mania versus sophrosune), it also clarifies the ways in which Plato contributed to contemporary debates over the Athenian paideia and highlights the ideal relationship between author, written word, and reader that his dialogues sought to foster. The paper begins with a brief description of pederastic practices and pederasty as an aristocratic phenomenon in 5th and 4th-century Athens, drawing on the constructionist approaches of Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault. It then turns to the Phaedrus itself, reading the dialogue's dramatic setting, the intensifying erotic and poetic force of its three speeches, and its denouement with the so-called Myth of Theuth. The matter at hand is twofold: Why pederasty and how pederasty? Why does the dialogue include various references to rape, trickery, or force and how does Plato advocate particular reading and writing practices via the extended pederastic play of Phaedrus? These questions lead to an abbreviated survey of sophistic approaches to rhetorical education in 4th-century Athens, touching on the expanded sense of paideia and the rivalry between Plato and Isocrates. The paper's conclusion carries Phaedrus into the 21st-century classroom, ultimately proposing that learning Plato's dialogue, in more ways than one, may serve as a propaedeutic to rhetorical studies in the digital humanities and adjacent fields.Item Practices of place : ordinary mobilities and everyday technology(2016-05) Gaughen, Brendan Christopher; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven; Adams, Paul; Strover, Sharon; Campbell, CraigThis study examines four distinct ways people have encountered and interacted with place and explores how these experiences are impacted by certain technologies, paying close attention to the human experience of mobility. A fundamental idea in this study is that mobility is a crucial component to human identity and it is too limiting to view mobility as an abstraction absent of lived experience, as many postmodern theorists have done. Viewing mobility as an interrelation between people, place, and technology that shapes human beings and the physical environment, this study seeks to show how certain interactions with place contribute to a sense of self and identity for the individuals and communities discussed therein. The primary attempt in this study is to demonstrate how and why place is used in different ways by different people through various acts of mobility. Many of these practices, I believe, emerge as a response to postmodernity, even if their participants are unaware of larger structural processes. These practices are attempts to create stable meanings, definitions, and identities, to make known the unknown, to provide people with a sense of agency and autonomy, and give aspects of permanence to the ephemeral all in order to resist the destabilization, uncertainty, and powerlessness that exist in the present. Employing strategies such as bricolage and poetics, the human actors described in this study employ various practices of place in order to create meaning for themselves and the places they inhabit. This interdisciplinary project contributes to discourses of human geography, digital humanities, and material culture by locating previously unexplored intersections and relationships between place, practice, mobility, technology, and the human experience of being in place.Item Text-based document geolocation and its application to the digital humanities(2015-12) Wing, Benjamin Patai; Baldridge, Jason; Erk, Katrin; Beaver, David; Mooney, Ray; Lease, MattThis dissertation investigates automatic geolocation of documents (i.e. identification of their location, expressed as latitude/longitude coordinates), based on the text of those documents rather than metadata. I assert that such geolocation can be performed using text alone, at a sufficient accuracy for use in real-world applications. Although in some corpora metadata is found in abundance (e.g. home location, time zone, friends, followers, etc. in Twitter), it is lacking in others, such as many corpora of primary-source documents in the digital humanities, an area to which document geolocation has hardly been applied. To this end, I first develop methods for accurate text-based geolocation and then apply them to newly-annotated corpora in the digital humanities. The geolocation methods I develop use both uniform and adaptive (k-d tree) grids over the Earth’s surface, culminating in a hierarchical logistic-regression-based technique that achieves state of the art results on well-known corpora (Twitter user feeds, Wikipedia articles and Flickr image tags). In the second part of the dissertation I develop a new NLP task, text-based geolocation of historical corpora. Because there are no existing corpora to test on, I create and annotate two new corpora of significantly different natures (a 19th-century travel log and a large set of Civil War archives). I show how my methods produce good geolocation accuracy even given the relatively small amount of annotated data available, which can be further improved using domain adaptation. I then use the predictions on the much larger unannotated portion of the Civil War archives to generate and analyze geographic topic models, showing how they can be mined to produce interesting revelations concerning various Civil War-related subjects. Finally, I develop a new geolocation technique for text-only corpora involving co-training between document-geolocation and toponym- resolution models, using a gazetteer to inject additional information into the training process. To evaluate this technique I develop a new metric, the closest toponym error distance, on which I show improvements compared with a baseline geolocator.Item "Who? to whom listen?" : critical design for authorial voice(2015-08) Guy, Madeleine Faye; Clement, Tanya Elizabeth; Feinberg, Melanie, 1970-Critical design for authorial voice is a research methodology which combines an analytical reading approach with a reflective design approach. This methodology is based upon an object-oriented framework which sees digital objects as equal agents in the design and use of technologies, possessing an "authorial voice" which speaks through infrastructures and privileges certain narratives of use and creation. When scholars see the digital space as the "other" divorced from the biases and assumptions of humans - the digital as transparent, neutral tools - scholars ignore how infrastructures are interwoven with every level of society, and how these structures change the everyday experiences of human life. This thesis combines classification studies and interface criticism with critical design in the reading and making of digital critical editions. My research can be examined in the fields of critical design, digital humanities and knowledge organization as an example of how to merge theory and praxis. Applying questions of authorial voice during the process of reading and designing objects involves constantly questioning pre-held assumptions about the nature of text in a digital space and how to design objects. My framework and methodology suggest a way that all disciplines in the information sciences can broaden their ability to gain knowledge from the technical objects they interact with and create; the voices that speak to them, and that can be heard, are multiplied many times over once objects are recognized to have agency and an authorial voice. Critical design projects are thus a way to develop artifacts in a more holistic, engaged manner, allowing both the creation and understanding of technologies to develop in tandem, rather than as separate processes of design and critique, and to consider the ethical implications of one's design decisions.