Search

The purpose of this note is to explore the theme of language as an object of reception, to highlight the interrelationship between some key concepts, and to sketch, however briefly, a conceptual thread that will allow us to present some of the points of a philosophical and epistemic map of analysis developed by Marine Picon in her volume Norm and Objects of Knowledge.

Questo articolo presenta il progetto Macchine per leggere, nato dalla collaborazione tra il Dipartimento di Studi letterari, filosofici e di storia dell’arte dell’Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” e il Centro per il Libro e la Lettura del MiC. Scopo del progetto è la realizzazione di un ambiente digitale (desktop e mobile) che introduca gli studenti della scuola secondaria di secondo grado alla conoscenza e all’utilizzo delle tecniche di analisi computazionale dei testi, qui proposte come spunto per accostarsi alla lettura dei classici della letteratura italiana (tra gli altri che saranno resi disponibili sul sito, Il piacere, I Malavoglia, Il fu Mattia Pascal…). L’approccio del distant reading e gli strumenti informatici per l’analisi e la rappresentazione dei corpora e per il text mining (word cloud, indici di frequenza di termini e sintagmi, topic modeling, sentiment e network analysis), uniti ad altre risorse come la geolocalizzazione su mappe digitali dei luoghi letterari, saranno presentati sia come metodo per simulare in ambiente virtuale reading strategies, che come modelli per integrare le prassi ermeneutiche tradizionali – close reading. In una sezione del sito dedicata, gli algoritmi di cui si darà dimostrazione saranno a disposizione degli studenti in forma di web app, così che possano sperimentare in autonomia e su altri testi in loro possesso l’approccio distant proposto nell’ambito del progetto.

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since Franco Moretti coined the successful term distant reading, quantitative/computational text analysis methods have gained wide circulation in literary studies. The diffusion of distant reading approaches has raised a lively debate and has attracted various criticisms, both from “traditional literary scholars” and from self-critical adopters. One important reason underlying these critical positions is the fact that it lacks sound and coherent rationales from the point of view of the theory: distant reading is the first methodology in literary studies that does not come with a theory of literature embedded in it. Consequently, all distant reading studies derive their theoretical frameworks and terms from literary theories that mostly rely on the notion that literary texts can be explained only by the way of interpretation. On what grounds, then, can we construct a theory of literature amenable to distant reading methods? I think that the better theoretical frameworks are the cognitive and bio-evolutionistic approaches to literature and cultural evolution studies. These theoretical approaches require a change in the level of description of the literary domain and justify the move from "interpretation" to "explanation" as the real aim of the scholarly inquiry.

This article analyses rubrics in Middle High German miscellany manuscripts of short texts in rhyming couplets (Reimpaargedichte). A corpus consisting of 1433 rubrics from 68 manuscripts was created to be able to perform this study. As rubrics in medieval manuscripts were not authorial, but composed by scribes, they offer insights into the reception of the texts. This paper analyses their features and functions as a proxy to interrogate the standing and status of Reimpaargedichte between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main methodology is distant reading, i.e. the application and interpretation of statistical methods on a textual corpus. The features analyzed include the length of the rubrics, their level of variation, the presence of author names, and vocabulary. Although no general patterns regarding length nor level of variation were detected, some important conclusions can be drawn: 1. there were no clear markers of literary genre in rubrics; 2. authorship was mostly absent, except for some specific cases of famous authors; 3. relatively stable keywords were used to identify particular texts, but they were more common in manuscripts with narrative texts (Erzählungen) and less common in later manuscripts dominated by the genre known as Minnereden. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that rubrics used a series of linguistic procedures to show that they participated in a different speech act than the main text – they embodied an interaction between scribes and readers, in which the former framed the reception of the work.

Any expansion of the TEI beyond its traditional user base involves a recognition that there are many differing answers to the traditional question “What is text, really?” We report on some work carried out in the context of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History (CA16204), in particular on the TEI-conformant schemas developed for one of its principal deliverables: the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC). The ELTeC will contain comparable corpora for each of at least a dozen European languages, each being a balanced sample of one hundred novels from the period 1840 to 1920, together with metadata concerning their production and reception. We hope that it will become a reliable basis for comparative work in data-driven textual analytics. The focus of the ELTeC encoding scheme is not to represent texts in all their original complexity, nor to duplicate the work of scholarly editors. Instead, we aim to facilitate a richer and better-informed distant reading than a transcription of lexical content alone would permit. At the same time, where the TEI encourages diversity, we enforce consistency by permitting representation of only a specific and quite small set of textual features, both structural and analytical. These constraints are expressed by a master TEI ODD, from which we derive three different schemas by ODD chaining, each associated with appropriate documentation.

The paper focuses on the role of operationalization (i.e., the building of models and the setting down of rules of annotation) in quantitative research in the humanities, and especially in the history of ideas. On the one hand, the presence of fully explicit annotation rules and fully operationalized concepts allows one to formulate claims that are clearly verifiable, or falsifiable, or in any case testable. On the other hand, full operationalization seems to have some controversial aspects: is it practically feasible? Is verifiability what we always want to achieve in the humanities? Are operationalized concepts semantically “well-anchored”?

In this contribution, we developed a Linked Open Dataset, more specifically an OWL ontology, about the history of the renovation of the Catania’s Benedictines Monastery by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo. We considered a wide subset of public and private documents collected from 1977 to 2006 during the process of restoration and adaptation of the monastery to a campus for the University of Catania. The task of modelling and population of the ontology have been carried out from the analysis of documents stored in the “Archivio del Museo della Fabbrica”, in the new archive of professor Giuseppe Giarrizzo, in the private collection of Antonino Leonardi, and from the conceptual map of the locations of the monastery.

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.

In this essay, we reflect on distant reading as one of the various takes on reading that currently prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. We focus on three concepts of reading which for various reasons can be considered inter-related: close reading, surface reading and distant reading. We offer a theoretical treatment of distant reading and demonstrate why it is closely related to the concept of machine reading (part of artificial intelligence). Throughout, we focus on the role of the individual reader in all this and argue that Digital Literary Studies have much to gain from paying closer attention to the so-called “natural” reading process of individual humans.

[The future of Humanities in the era of Big Data]. This article proposes a critical enquire about the impact of the new wave of digital technologies on humanistic disciplines. Today humanists are called to accept the challenge of redefining their role in the age of globalization of culture. In the last twenty years, the widespread diffusion of the world wide web, search engines and social networks has definitively fostered a crisis of confidence about the idea of a purely instrumental use of the computer in order to facilitate the traditional humanistic research. More recently, the introduction of Big Data, remote reading, machine learning resources, products and tools have begun a process of radical transformation of the very practices of the Digital Humanities. In a more and more web-based digital environment, the humanistic research requires a high level of specialization, scientific expertise and technology infrastructures as well as massive funding. *** This article has been published Online First on 15.06.2018 and later included in the full 2018 journal issue ***

Questo articolo si propone di affrontare criticamente, i fondamenti teorici di una nozione e di un metodo che sono oggi molto diffusi negli studi letterari computazionali: quella di topic modeling, ovvero l'individuazione statistico/probabilistica dei cluster lessicali che caratterizzano un insieme di testi, e l'analisi delle loro distribuzioni. Quando parliamo di fondamenti teorici ci riferiamo al ruolo che tale nozione può giocare nel contesto di una teoria del testo e di una metodologia della critica letteraria, e non ai suoi aspetti puramente matematici, che sono ovviamente saldamente basati sulla statistica e sulla teoria della probabilità bayesiana. Dopo una descrizione dei fondamenti tecnici della nozione di topic modelling si procederà a confrontare tale nozione con alcuni suoi possibili correlati in ambito teorico letterario, evidneziando i limiti di ogni possibile identificazione.

Das neue interdisziplinäre Methodenfeld der Digital Humanities (DH) hat bisher jenseits spezifischer DH-Studiengänge noch kaum Eingang in die Lehre gefunden. Der Essay beschreibt den Versuch, innerhalb der Romanistik im Rahmen einer curricularen Vorlesung eine praxis- und anwendungsnahe Einführung in die Digital Humanities zu vermitteln und will die dabei gewonnenen Erfahrungen mit allgemeineren Reflexionen über den Stand der DH zu verknüpfen. Den Verächtern der DH wird die These entgegengesetzt, dass dieser Bereich die Chance zu fruchtbaren neuen methodologischen Debatten und entsprechenden Innovationen bietet, den Anhängern, dass man zur erfolgreichen Verankerung der DH in der universitären Lehre es mit dem Bemühen um ‚harte‘ normierte Standards im Umgang mit den Daten auch nicht übertreiben sollte und Querköpfe wie Franco Moretti für eine breite interdisziplinäre Akzeptanz der Methoden unverzichtbar sind.

Romanzo Criminale is one of the few recent Italian media products that has emerged as a societal phenomenon and as a vehicle for the exportation of a national culture. It is a complex narrative which extends in time and space due to its various adaptations and intermedial crossovers. Following the path of complexity, drawing on Edgar Morin’s work, Romanzo Criminale will be thought of as a complex system. As precedent studies on the intertwining of official and grassroots discourses show, Romanzo Criminale becomes a complex world, with its boundaries and internal organization. This paper will show that Romanzo Criminale can be studied as a semiosphere (Lotman 2005), or a semiotic space defined by and which encourages the intertwining of texts and audience appropriations, creating an epic process. Some methodological perspectives used for mapping this phenomenon will be discussed, namely Franco Moretti’s distant reading.