Interactive visualization provides valuable support for exploring, analyzing, and understanding textual documents. Certain tasks, however, require that insights derived from visual abstractions are ...verified by a human expert perusing the source text. So far, this problem is typically solved by offering overview-detail techniques, which present different views with different levels of abstractions. This often leads to problems with visual continuity. Focus-context techniques, on the other hand, succeed in accentuating interesting subsections of large text documents but are normally not suited for integrating visual abstractions. With VarifocalReader we present a technique that helps to solve some of these approaches' problems by combining characteristics from both. In particular, our method simplifies working with large and potentially complex text documents by simultaneously offering abstract representations of varying detail, based on the inherent structure of the document, and access to the text itself. In addition, VarifocalReader supports intra-document exploration through advanced navigation concepts and facilitates visual analysis tasks. The approach enables users to apply machine learning techniques and search mechanisms as well as to assess and adapt these techniques. This helps to extract entities, concepts and other artifacts from texts. In combination with the automatic generation of intermediate text levels through topic segmentation for thematic orientation, users can test hypotheses or develop interesting new research questions. To illustrate the advantages of our approach, we provide usage examples from literature studies.
The term ‘Euro Noir’ has been recently proposed to account for the emergence of a shared, cosmopolitan koinè in the current production of crime fiction across Europe (Forshaw 2014, Hansen et al. ...2018). While the characterization of the specific aesthetic and narrative features of this production is currently underway and constitutes one of the objectives of the DETECt project, the study of the role of translation in the circulation of crime fiction can contribute to better understand the emergence of such cosmopolitan form of expression. Inspired by the methodology proposed by Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel (1999), this article throws light on how both forms of translation – extranslation, or the exporting of literary works into another language, and intranslation, or the importing of foreign works into a given country by way of translation – are products of economic and cultural competition (Sapiro, 2008 and 2010). The research results are in line with both Moretti’s conclusions about the past concurrence for hegemony between the dominating poles of English and French publishing and Pascale Casanova’s work on the geopolitics of The World Republic of Letters (1999 and 2015).
This issue of the journal presents a selection of the papers given at the AIUCD2017 Conference (12-18 January 2017, Sapienza University of Roma), whose theme was “The Reverse Telescope: Big Data and ...Distant Reading in the Humanities”. The numerous and high-quality talks presented at the conference have given an important contribution to the reflection on the epistemological and methodological impact of those methodologies in the various fields of the Humanities. The selection of articles derived from the conference papers here published is enriched by an important theoretical article by Mike Kestemont and Luc Herman entitled Can Machines read Literature? This selection witnesses the overall thematic variety and depth of elaboration that characterizes the scientific community gathered around AIUCD.
This article describes the use of “Voyant Tools”, an open access text analysis application, to examine a corpus of articles from open access journals, dealing with the topic of digital humanities. ...The corpus consisted of 404 articles recorded in the “Clarivate Analytics Web of Science” and “Scopus ScienceDirect” databases. The authors discuss how “Voyant Tools” aids to identify the dominant fields of research through quantitative methods and to reveal the main discourse themes using distant reading and interactive reading capabilities. They also identify some problems encountered during the analyses, and also discuss the usefulness of data visualization for research and interpretation. Computer tools can be useful for experienced researchers who are interested in quantitative text analysis, as well as for beginners, as it provides an opportunity to acquire basic knowledge that will lead to a deeper interest in textual analysis methods.
Think Small PIPER, ANDREW
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Literary studies continues to have a penchant for great men. In 2015, for example, 20% of authors listed as subjects in the
MLA International Bibliography
accounted for just under 60% of all articles ...or book chapters published that year. Just the top 1% of authors, or 33 in total, accounted for 1,302 works, or 20.8% of the total. Four of these authors were women, and one was not white (W. E. B. Du Bois). Those numbers are even slightly more concentrated than in 1970, when 1% of authors accounted for 15.9% of all articles and book chapters. In that year, only one of the most frequently mentioned authors was a woman (George Eliot), and all were white.
In this article we discuss the benefits of applying a mixed methods approach to the history of ideas. The article is based upon two cases of different character, applying methods from the field of ...digital textual analysis, and from the field of digital spatio-temporal map visualization. One case concerns all churches and prayer chapels in the Diocese of Luleå, and comprises 1200 entry points. The project originates in the question of whether a Bible belt exists in the north of Sweden; what it (if there is one) looks like, what its characteristics are, and how it has evolved over time. The spatio-temporal visualization both clarifies general patterns of religious fervor, but also reveals “white spots” and areas of conflicting interests, creating questions for further research. The second case stems from a larger project investigating contemporary online use of the concept “Creativity”. Here, distributional concept analysis is performed using Sketch Engine on the corpus English Web 2020 (enTenTen20), consisting of 38 billion English words gathered in 2020 from Wikipedia, blogs, online magazines and journals. Lists are assembled over which words are most often used together (co-locates) with creativity. Then, the research process is outlined, where use of such distant reading tools encourages returns to close readings of other materials (for instance speeches by American presidents) in an iterative process. The two cases illustrate the possibilities inherent in the process of moving between overarching, “distant”, levels, where digital methods can show large patterns, and more specific and detailed, “close” levels, with focus on particular places or points of interest. The mixed method approach we propose is not new, but we argue that by using digital (instead of analogous) methods this can be done at a much larger scale, with less effort. Furthermore, we will show how this oscillation between on the one hand distant, large-scale, computer aided methods, and on the other close readings and interpretations, generate new, interesting historical questions in an iterative process. Finally, we discuss our experiences of multidisciplinary approaches to digital history, describe setbacks and unexpected wins, and argue that the benefits and potential of this approach outweigh the risks.
This article explores diverging ways of accounting for methodological questions in the history writing digital history on one hand, and Swedish history of ideas (idéhistoria) on the other. By ...highlighting differences in how the two fields treat these central historiographical issues, I aim better to understand some of the difficulties of conducting and publishing research in the history of ideas, based on digital-history methods. The study is separated into two sections: first, I make a qualitative analysis of texts containing reflexive discussions on method, produced during the early discipline-forming phases of each field. Then, I do a distant reading of peer-reviewed articles in Lychnos published 2005–2020, as well as of a recent edited volume in digital history. This analysis provides an overview of recent discussion of method in these two fields, while it at the same time serves as an example of such methods shape the way we write history.
In this paper, we investigate the common narrative in literary history that the inner lives of characters became a central preoccupation of literary modernism - a phenomenon commonly referenced as ...the "inward turn". We operationalize this notion via a proxy, tracing the use of verbs relating to inner life across 10 language corpora from the ELTeC collection, which comprises novels from the period between 1840-1920. We expected to find an increase in the use of inner-life verbs corresponding to the traditional periodisation of modernism in each of the languages. However, different experiments conducted with the data do not confirm this hypothesis. We therefore look at the results in a number of more granular ways, but we cannot identify any common trends even when we split the verbs into individual categories, or take canonicity or gender into account. We discuss the obtained results in detail, proposing potential reasons for them and including potential avenues of further research as well as lessons learned.
The aim of this paper is to say something significant about Stanley Cavell's style. To accomplish this task, we adopt a distant reading approach, quantifying what seems to be an idiosyncratic use of ...parentheses. After outlining our methodological approach and the choices of texts from Cavell's corpus, we will present the results of our quantitative analysis. Two kinds of results will be presented and interpreted: the result of a comparison between Cavell and other authors (i.e. why Cavell's use of parentheses is exceptional) and the result of a quantitative analysis of Cavell's texts (i.e. how Cavell uses parentheses throughout his books). For both results, we will provide our own interpretation. In the conclusion, we will draw the moral of this parenthetical story, hoping to open future parentheses.
The article for the first time tests some methods of distant reading on the material of KarachayBalkarian novels. The object of the study is the texts of 55 fiction works in the Karachay-Balkar ...language (mainly novels). Based on the analyzed texts, as well as some related meta-information, conclusions are drawn about the dynamics of publication activity in relation to Karachay-Balkarian novels - in particular, an unprecedented decrease in such activity since 2011 is indicated (only two published novels were found during this period). For the first time, the method Delta for calculation of intertextual distances (together with tree-like clusterization) was applied to the samples of Karachay-Balkarian literature, once again confirming its high efficiency. In addition to the unmistakable attribution of the analyzed texts, the generated tree structure is characterized by the presence of two branches (Karachay and Balkarian), as well as two sub-branches within the Balkarian branch. At the same time, intraBalkarian dialects are not revealed on the tree. The chronological principle has been found: the work located the furthest on the tree from the other works of the same author is always published either earlier than all the others, or later than all the others.
