Tag Archives: diversity

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.)

Digital Humanities 2016, Kraków

Conference reflections jointly written with Justyna Robinson

Four members of the LDNA team—Marc Alexander, Justyna Robinson, Brian Aitken, and Fraser Dallachy—attended this year’s Digital Humanities (DH) conference in Kraków, Poland. With over 800 attendees, the conference is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, learn of new areas of potential interest, and network with academics from around the world. The team presented a version of the project’s poster at the event (attached to this post), giving an overview of the project, the technical steps which have been taken so far, and introducing the research themes.

Digital methods of textual analysis are an important subject for the DH attendees, and there were several papers outlining approaches and results from such research. One of the most relevant of these for us was the paper by Glenn Roe et al. on identification of re-used text in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). After eliminating re-printings of texts, this project used a specially developed tool which found repeated passages, indicating where an author had re-used their own or another’s words. The results are available and searchable on their website. In the same session, a team led by Monica Berti at Leipzig described a method of identifying and labelling fragments of text quoted from ancient Greek authors. These projects represent something like a parallel research track to ours, tracing the history of ideas through replication of passages rather than through more abstract word clusters. Early English Books Online (EEBO) also received some attention, with Daniel James Powell giving an overview of its history and importance to digital research on historical texts.

Discussion with other attendees at the poster session was especially productive, and resulted in several strong leads for the team to follow up. A subject which was mentioned to us repeatedly was that of topic modelling. Multiple panels were dedicated to the use of these methods to extract information about the contents of texts, an approach which LDNA has considered employing. The team at Saarland studying the Royal Society Corpus (with whom LDNA is already in contact) use topic modelling to study the development of scientific concepts and terminology. Their results were encouraging, allowing them to identify word groupings which represent scientific disciplines such as physiology, mechanical engineering, and metallurgy. Following these topics through time showed that the number of topics increases whilst their vocabulary becomes more specialised. Although LDNA has reservations about how useful topic modelling is for our purposes, the work being conducted at Saarland refines and implements its methodology in a way which we would seek to learn from if we do choose to pursue it further.

Poster

At the poster session

Visualising big data is of central interest to the LDNA project, especially in the context of the upcoming LDNA Visualisation Workshop. With this view in mind, we paid particular attention to projects that presented new and interesting ways of seeing large data. A number of presentations focused on network visualisations. These often link metadata, e.g. around social networks of royal societies or academies as based on letter correspondence. An interesting visualisation that present unstructured linguistic data was presented by the EPFL team. Vincent Buntinx, Cyril Bornet, and Frédéric Kaplan visualised lexical usage in 200 years of newspapers on a circle with the radial dimension representing the number of years a word has been in use, and the circumferential dimension showing a period of use of words. [1]

Stylometrics, with its interest in being able to identify and measure aspects of language which contribute to the impression of authorial style, produced some interesting papers. One of the common themes for stylometrics and other DH strands of research is the way concepts are operationalised.  The varied approaches to concepts taken by DH researchers were noticeable, for example, whether each noun can be considered to be a concept, or a concept can be defined as “a functional thing”. This suggests that the work on concept identification undertaken by the LDNA team will be of interest to the wider DH community. Also amongst the stylometric papers was a look at historical language change by Maciej Eder and Rafal Górski which used bootstrap consensus network analysis on part of speech (POS) tagged texts to contrast syntax and sentence structure between time periods. The paper used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to reduce POS tagged texts to a single value which could then be plotted against time, allowing them to show that a gradual change in the MDS results can be discerned between the earliest and latest texts. The paper both highlighted how useful a visualisation can be for identifying a change, and how difficult it can be to quantify exactly what the visualisation shows.

However, on a different but very important note, a strong theme of the conference was that of diversity, with a thread of panels discussing the different ways in which this subject is applicable to the digital humanities. From a personal point of view, I think LDNA has a strong awareness of both the scope and the limitations of our interests and approaches, (although we can never afford to be complacent). We’ve considered what our textual resources represent, and the RAs are soon to explore this subject from different angles in future blog posts. EEBO and other text collections are more expansive, inclusive, and diverse than prior research has been able to access, and this feels like a part of an enormously positive movement in academia to open up more and more data for new kinds of study. As extensive as our resources are, however, they still have limitations reflecting the (mostly Western, mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-to-upper class) societal groups who were able to read, write, and print the words which ended up in these collections. The resources open to academia are continually growing, and hopefully this expanding diversity will open up ever more of the world’s knowledge to ever more of its population. Whilst the discussions at this conference have made clear that there is a long way to go in fully embracing diversity in the digital humanities, there are indications that the situation is improving, and it is incumbent upon us all to ensure that this continues.

For another view of the conference, Brian Aitken, Digital Humanities Research Officer at Glasgow, has written about his own experience on his blog.

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1. Studying Linguistic Changes on 200 Years of Newspapers, Vincent Buntinx, Cyril Bornet, Frédéric Kaplan (EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland)