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Anthology cover

Talk About Change: LDNA at Festival of the Mind

Last weekend, Linguistic DNA & friends took over the Spiegeltent in Sheffield city centre, as part of the University’s Festival of the Mind. Spiegeltents are a Belgian invention–tents decorated internally with mirrors, creating the perfect space to share myriad reflections. 

Over the course of two hours, we hosted a performance of new writing that emerged from collaboration with Our Mel (a Sheffield-based social enterprise dedicated to exploring cultural identity) and novelist Désirée Reynolds. Each of the pieces performed have also been published as part of a limited edition anthology: “Talk About Change: Writing as Resistance”.

The Researchers’ Introduction outlines a little more of the process that culminated in some extraordinary writing (excerpted from the print anthology):


Talk About Change: Writing as Resistance

Funded by the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind, our collaborative workshops used examples of early modern word use (from the Linguistic DNA project and related research) as a starting point to think about language use today. How can the past speak to the present?  How might the present speak to the past

As reflected in the structure of this anthology, the workshops explored four central themes: diversity, feminism, immigration and race. These were selected by Annalisa and Désirée, who also provided the extra focus on “writing as resistance”. In each case, the Linguistic DNA researchers sought to introduce historic material that might prompt conversation about the themes—and perhaps even fuel the resistance. Some input drew on prior research (especially for feminism and immigration sessions, which drew on Iona’s thesis and engaged also with the 500 Reformations project). As often, it was a basic excursion into early modern material—with a beginners’ introduction to linguistics and studying meaning (courtesy of Seth)

The most inventive work happened when we brought this material into the open sessions

Together with all who attended the workshops, we compared the role of diversity in historic texts to its position in modern culture: what once characterised a multiplicity of opinion is now used paradoxically of something individual. We considered aspects of feminist debate before the word feminism existed, exploring how the power of virtue changed as men (mostly) discussed the role of women in sixteenth-century England. Using texts about strangers, we examined parallels between the way people wrote (and complained) about early modern outsiders and modern discourse about immigrants. We reflected on the roots of race, its links to kinship, descent, and community and the relationship between structures of language and structures of power.

In each session, novelist and creative-writing facilitator Désirée Reynolds recommended other writings to bring out different dimensions of the themes. Wide reading was encouraged, and what you will find in the pages that follow reflects the careful crafting of a range of experience and inspiration drawing on at least five centuries of language use.

Anthology coverIt is Writing as Resistance.

It comes from Talking About Change.


If you would like a copy of the anthology (free!), you can register interest (first come, first served) by filling out a short Google form.

(You can also read some words from the Editor, over on the 500 Reformations website.)

Talk About Change

In a time when events seem ever and ever out of our control, writing is resistance.
–Our Mel.

In April (2018), Linguistic DNA began collaborating with local social entrepreneurs Our Mel to do some collective thinking about the power of language. This work is funded by the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind and our work together will culminate in a spoken-word performance in the Festival’s Spiegeltent (pictured) this September.

The collaboration also involves 500 Reformations: exploring stories of change, from 1517 to 2018, a University of Sheffield public engagement project headed up by Linguistic DNA researcher Iona Hine.

Together, our goal is “TALK ABOUT CHANGE”.

More specifically Talk About Change is pursuing conversations about the history and power of language, particularly as experienced by people of colour. The first sessions will incorporate a provocation based on historical research, working through themes including diversity, feminisms, race, and resilience. Talking, sharing, debating, we hope participants will join us and engage in acts of creative resistance—in thought, speech, and writing.

What are we actually doing?

Throughout July and August, novelist and creative writer Désirée Reynolds will be leading a series of workshops, hosted by Our Mel, to discuss words and themes including race, feminisms, and diversity. The July workshops are themed and will each include input from a University of Sheffield researcher. The August workshops continue to explore related ideas, developing creative writing under the common heading “writing is resistance”.

Those who choose may publish their writing in an anthology, and we will also present a collective spoken-word performance (optional!) on Sunday 23 September as part of the Festival of the Mind programme.

Who can participate?

Our Mel issue a collective invite to come along and engage in conversation about “words that affect us every day”. What have they meant, how are they used, and what do they mean to us?

People of all ethnicities are welcome and an embracement of heritage is welcomed. Participation is limited to over 18s.

Visit Our Mel’s website (ourmel.org.uk) for more information about the workshops.


ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS


OUR MEL

Logo for Melanin Fest

Rooted in Yorkshire and based in Sheffield, OUR MEL is a social enterprise dedicated to exploring cultural identity, Black history and what it means to be a person of colour in Britain today. Inspired by two local lasses (Annalisa Toccara & Gabriela Thompson-Menanteaux) on a journey of self-love, Our Mel was born in November 2016 over a pack of caramel biscuits and a cup of tea, Yorkshire of course. Since its birth, Our Mel has grown into a community of people on a mission to support, encourage, teach and build the community through music, film, arts and education. In October 2017, we launched Sheffield’s first collaborative Black History month festival, MelaninFest, and its sister MelaninFest in London. 1300 people attended 43 events in Sheffield and 5 in London. Our Mel has been at the forefront of creating diversity, inclusion and representation in Sheffield since November 2016, working in collaboration with festivals and organisations both nationally and internationally. ourmel.org.uk  @our__mel


ANNALISA TOCCARA is a Marketer & PR professional, Community Activist & Creative Director. Based in Sheffield and founder of the social enterprise Our Mel, Annalisa launched Sheffield’s first Black History Month Festival; MelaninFest® in October 2017, which saw a total of 43 events spread across the month in collaboration with over 40 partners and also launched a sister festival in London. Since then, Annalisa has hosted a number of community events celebrating Black excellence, Black talent and Womanhood. Through her work with Our Mel and previous social justice endeavours, she has developed a passion for arts and culture having seen first-hand how creative mediums can help shape and create social cohesion within our community. Annalisa also has a BA (Hons) in Biblical Study and Applied Theology with a Diploma in Leadership and is currently studying for her Chartered Marketer status. She is also the Vice-Chair of the BAMER Hub – Sheffield’s Equality Hub Network. ourmel.org.uk  @sparklelikegold


DÉSIRÉE REYNOLDS started her writing career in South London as a freelance journalist for the Jamaica Gleaner and the Village Voice. She has since written film scripts, poetry and short stories. Some of her shorts are published on SABLE E-Mag and various anthologies. “Seduce” her first novel was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013, to much acclaim. She continues to work as journalist, teacher, broadcaster and DJ. Desiree is currently working on a collection of short stories, a novel based on the Haitian revolution and her PhD. — “After spending a lot of time, doing lots of things, I’m finally where I’m supposed to be, doing what I’m supposed to do.”
desireereynolds.co.uk  peepaltreepress.com/authors/desiree-reynolds
youtu.be/qkNrQ-HMwLs  peepaltreepress.com/books/closure
@desreereynolds


500 REFORMATIONS

500 REFORMATIONS collaborates with external partners to explore and tell stories of change, from the cultural to the personal. Based at the University of Sheffield, 500 Reformations draws on research from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Activities are united by the theme of reformation, whether writ big (as e.g. churches breaking away from Roman Catholic control in the sixteenth century, ‘the Reformation’) or small (in individual stories of change, development and re-form). 500reformations.group.shef.ac.uk @500Reformations

Looking back, looking forward: Linguistic DNA in 2016 and 2017

As we move into 2017, we’ve been looking back at achievements in 2016, and ahead to what we aim to achieve in the coming year.

2016 was an outwardly busy year as we travelled to Bruges, Essen, Krakow, Lausanne, Leeds, Brighton, Murcia, Nottingham, Paris, Saarbrucken, and Utrecht, sharing more of our thinking and early data with different audiences. Closer to “home”, we benefitted from the exchange of ideas with LDNA-hosted panels at Sheffield DH Congress and our second methodological workshop in Sussex. In 2017, we will be focusing back on our interface development and some more in-depth research, though we intend to be present at DH, SHEL, ICAME and SHARP, in order to continue some fruitful conversations.

On the blog, we have been reflecting on representativeness and the nature of EEBO-TCP. We’ve also documented our decision not to use ECCO’s OCR data to analyse eighteenth century print. You can expect to hear about the alternative 18th century datasets we’re choosing to work with later in 2017.

During the Autumn, the LDNA researchers collaborated on two articles about the project, its theory and praxis, both (hopefully) to be published this year following peer review. Generating examples from each research theme based on our early data and tying these together effectively was an enjoyable challenge, and we have already used the draft of one piece as part of our briefing materials for upcoming MA placements at The Digital Humanities Institute | Sheffield (formerly known as HRI Digital).

In the past six months, the Sheffield team have captured funding for two additional applications of the Linguistic DNA “concept modelling” tools:

  • The ESRC project Ways of Being in a Digital Age combines our quantitative insights with a qualitative literature survey of academic publications. Scheduled to inform the ESRC’s next programme of digital society funding, this impact-full study has compelled us toward rapid prototype development. The interface being put together to serve ‘WoBDA’ colleagues will also form the kernel of the subsequent LDNA workbench.
  • From next month, we are involved in another funded impact-related project, collaborating with the University of Leeds to explore the conceptual structure of millions of YouTube video comments on the theme of militarisation, as part of a larger project funded by the Swedish Research Council. This is a six-month commitment, bringing in a further research associate to theorise what’s involved in applying our measures to some very different data.

We also have three significant applications in place for other pots of funding, including Horizon 2020 collaborations, attesting confidence about our nascent processes and the multifarious opportunities for their application and impact.

Meanwhile, Glasgow has been using the present word co-occurrence data to develop its methodology for investigating processor data from the perspective of key Historical Thesaurus categories. We have continued to develop analysis of Thesaurus categories, looking for those which show abnormal instances of growth or decline; a provisional methodology for establishing statistical ‘baselines’ has been plotted out which is now being implemented and refined. Further possibilities are being tested, such as amalgamating data across whole layers of the HT hierarchy rather than by individual category, and the effects of separating out part of speech within categories or layers.

From Spring to Summer: LDNA on the road

June 2016:
For the past couple of months, our rolling horizon has looked increasingly full of activity. This new blogpost provides a brief update on where we’ve been and where we’re going. We’ll be aiming to give more thorough reports on some of these activities after the events.

Where we’ve been

Entrance to University Museum, UtrechtIn May, Susan, Iona and Mike travelled to Utrecht, at the invitation of Joris van Eijnatten and Jaap Verheul. Together with colleagues from Sheffield’s History Department, we presented the different strands of Digital Humanities work ongoing at Sheffield. We learned much from our exchanges with Utrecht’s AsymEnc and Translantis research programs, and enjoyed shared intellectual probing of visualisations of change across time. We look forward to continued engagement with each others’ work.

A week later, Seth and Justyna participated in This&THATCamp at the University of Sussex (pictured), with LDNA emerging second in a popular poll of topics for discussion at this un-conference-style event. Productive conversations across the two days covered data visualisation, data manipulation, text analytics, digital humanities and even data sonification. We hope to hear more from Julie Weeds and others when the LDNA team return to Brighton in September.

Next week, we’ll be calling on colleagues at the HRI to talk us through their experience visualising complex humanities data. Richard Ward (Digital Panopticon) and Dirk Rohman (Migration of Faith) have agreed to walk us through their decision-making processes, and talk through the role of different visualisations in exploring, analysing, and explaining current findings.

Where we’re going

The LDNA team are also gearing up for a summer of presentations:

  • Justyna Robinson will be representing LDNA at Sociolinguistics Symposium (Murcia, 15-18 June), as well as sharing the latest analysis from her longitudinal study of semantic variation focused on polysemous adjectives in South Yorkshire speech. Catch LDNA in the general poster session on Friday (17th), and Justyna’s paper at 3pm on Thursday. #SS21
  • Susan Fitzmaurice is in Saarland, as first guest speaker at the Historical Corpus Linguistics event hosted by the IDeaL research centre, also on Thursday (16th June) at 2:15pm. Her paper is subtitled “Discursive semantics and the quest for the automatic identification of concepts and conceptual change in English 1500-1800”. #IDeaL
  • In July, the Glasgow LDNA team are Krakow-bound for DH2016 (11-16 July). The LDNA poster, part of the Semantic Interpretations group, is currently allocated to Booth 58 during the Wednesday evening poster session. Draft programme.
  • Later in July, Iona heads to SHARP 2016 in Paris (18-22). This year, the bi-lingual Society are focusing on “Languages of the Book”, with Iona’s contribution drawing on her doctoral research (subtitle: European Borrowings in 16th and 17th Century English Translations of “the Book of Books”) and giving attention to the role of other languages in concept formation in early modern English (a special concern for LDNA’s work with EEBO-TCP).
  • In August, Iona is one of several Sheffield early modernists bound for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Bruges. In addition to a paper in panel 241, “The Vagaries of Translation in the Early Modern World” (Saturday 20th, 10:30am), Iona will also be hosting a unique LDNA poster session at the book exhibit. (Details to follow)
  • The following week (22-26 August), Seth, Justyna and Susan will be at ICEHL 19 in Essen. Seth and Susan will be talking LDNA semantics from 2pm on Tuesday 23rd.

Back in the UK, on 5 September, LDNA (and the University of Sussex) host our second methodological workshop, focused on data visualisation and linguistic change. Invitations to a select group of speakers have gone out, and we’re looking forward to a hands-on workshop using project data. Members of our network who would like to participate are invited to get in touch.

And back in Sheffield, LDNA is playing a key role in the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress, 8-10 September, hosting two panel sessions dedicated to textual analytics. Our co-speakers include contacts from Varieng and CRASSH.  Early bird registration ends 30th June.

Dr Kris Heylen at the Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield

Learning with Leuven: Kris Heylen’s visit to the HRI

In 2016, Dr Kris Heylen (KU Leuven) spent a week in Sheffield as a HRI Visiting Fellow, demonstrating techniques for studying change in “lexical concepts” and encouraging the Linguistic DNA team to articulate the distinctive features of the “discursive concept”.


Earlier this month, the Linguistic DNA project hosted Dr Kris Heylen of KU Leuven as a visiting fellow (funded by the HRI Visiting European Fellow scheme). Kris is a member of the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) research group at KU Leuven, which has conducted unique research into the significance of how words cooccur across different ‘windows’ of text (reported by Seth in an earlier blogpost). Within his role, Kris has had a particular focus on the value of visualisation as a means to explore cooccurrence data and it was this expertise from which the Linguistic DNA project wished to learn.

Kris and his colleagues have worked extensively on how concepts are expressed in language, with case studies in both Dutch and English, drawing on data from the 1990s and 2000s. This approach is broadly sympathetic to our work in Linguistic DNA, though we take an interest in a higher level of conceptual manifestation (“discursive concepts”), whereas the Leuven team are interested in so-called “lexical concepts”.

In an open lecture on Tracking Conceptual Change, Kris gave two examples of how the Leuven techniques (under the umbrella of “distributional semantics”) can be applied to show variation in language use, according to context (e.g. types of newspaper) and over time. A first case study explored the notion of a ‘person with an immigration background’ looking at how this was expressed in high and low brow Dutch-language newspapers in the period from 1999 to 2005. The investigation began with the word allochtoon, and identified (through vector analysis) migrant as the nearest synonym in use. Querying the newspaper data across time exposed the seasonality of media discourse about immigration (high in spring and autumn, low during parliamentary breaks or holidays). It was also possible to document a decrease in ‘market share’ of allochtoon compared with migrant, and—using hierarchical cluster analysis—to show how each term was distributed across different areas of discourse (comparing discussion of legal and labour-market issues, for example). A second comparison examined adjectives of ‘positive evaluation’, using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1860-present). Organising each year’s data as a scatter plot in semantic space, the path of an adjective could be traced in relation to others—moving closer to or apart from similar words. The path of terrific from ‘frightening’ to ‘great’ provided a vivid example of change through the 1950s and 1960s.

During his visit, Kris explored some of the first outputs from the Linguistic DNA processor, material printed in the British Isles (or in English) in two years, 1649 and 1699, transcribed for the Text Creation Partnership, and further processed with the MorphAdorner tool developed by Martin Mueller and Philip Burns at NorthWestern. Having run this through additional processes developed at Leuven, Kris led a workshop for Sheffield postgraduate and early career researchers and members of the LDNA team in which we learned different techniques for visualising the distribution of heretics and schismatics in the seventeenth-century.

The lecture audience and workshop participants were drawn from fields including English Literature, History, Computer Science, East Asian Studies, and the School of Languages and Cultures. Prompted partly by the distribution of the Linguistic DNA team (located in Sussex and Glasgow as well as Sheffield), both lecture and workshop were livestreamed over the internet, extending our audiences to Birmingham, Bradford, and Cambridge. We’re exceedingly grateful for the technical support that made this possible.

Time was also set aside to discuss the potential for future collaboration with Kris and others at Leuven, including participation of the QLVL team in LDNA’s next methodological workshop (University of Sussex, September 2016) and other opportunities to build on our complementary fields of expertise.

 

Dr Kris Heylen: Tracking Conceptual Change

In February 2016, Linguistic DNA hosted Dr Kris Heylen as an HRI Visiting Fellow, strengthening our links with KU Leuven’s Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics research group. This post outlines the scheduled public events.


Next week, the Linguistic DNA project welcomes visiting scholar–and HRI Visiting European FellowDr Kris Heylen of KU Leuven.  

About Kris:

Kris is a researcher based in KU Leuven’s Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics research group. His research focuses on the statistical modelling of lexical semantics and lexical variation, and more specifically the introduction of distributional semantic models into lexicological research. Next to his fundamental research on lexical semantics, he has also a strong interest in exploring the use of quantitative, corpus-based methods in applied linguistic research with projects in legal translation, vocabulary learning and medical terminology.

During his stay in Sheffield, Kris will be working alongside the Linguistic DNA team, playing with some of our data, and sharing his experience of visualizing semantic change across time, as well as talking about future research collaborations with others on campus. There will be several opportunities for others to meet with Kris and hear about his work, including a lecture and workshop (details below). Both events are free to attend.

Lecture: 3 March

On Thursday 3rd March at 5pm, Kris will give an open lecture entitled:

Tracking Conceptual Change:
A Visualization of Diachronic Distributional Semantics


ABSTRACT (Kris writes):

In this talk, I will present an overview of statistical and corpus-based studies of lexical variation and semantic change, carried out at the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) in recent years. As a starting point, I’ll take the framework developed in Geeraerts et. al. (1994) to describe the interaction between concepts’ variable lexical expression (onomasiology) and lexemes’ variable meaning (semasiology). Next, I will discuss how we adapted distributional semantic models, as originally developed in computational linguistics (see Turney and Pantel 2010 for an overview), to the linguistic analysis of lexical variation and change.

With two case studies, one on the concept of immigrant in Dutch and one on positive evaluative adjectives in English  (great, superb, terrific, etc.), I’ll illustrate how we have used visualisation techniques to investigate diachronic change in both the construal and the lexical expression of concepts.

All are welcome to attend this guest lecture which takes place at the Humanities Research Institute (34 Gell Street).  It is also possible to come for dinner after the lecture, though places may be limited and those interested are asked to get in touch with Linguistic DNA beforehand (by Tuesday 1st February).

 

Workshop: 7 March

On Monday 7th March, Kris will run an open workshop on visualizing language, sharing his own experiments with Linguistic DNA data. Participation is open to students and staff, but numbers are limited and advance registration is required. To find out more, please email Linguistic DNA (deadline: 4pm, Friday 4th March). Those at the University of Sheffield can reserve a place at the workshop using Doodle Poll.


Anyone who would like the opportunity to meet with Kris to discuss research collaborations should get in touch with him via Linguistic DNA as soon as possible so that arrangements can be made.