Place is a key concept in environmental studies and criticism. However, it is often overlooked as a dimension of situatedness in social studies of information. Rather, situatedness has been defined primarily as embodiment or social context. This paper explores place attachments in Big Data by adapting close and distant approaches for reading texts to examine the accessions data of the Arnold Arboretum, a living collection of trees, vines and shrubs established by Harvard University in 1872. Although it is (...) an early and unconventional example of the phenomenon, there are several reasons that the Arboretum is a useful site for investigating the relationship between Big Data and place. First, the category of place is embedded in a range of data fields used in the Arboretum’s records. Second, the Arboretum has long sought to be a place in which scientists and citizens alike can encounter large collections of data firsthand. Third, the place has shaped fluctuations in the daily production of data over the course of the Arboretum’s 144 year history. Furthermore, Arboretum data can help us see place in ways not necessarily tied to geolocation. Each of these place attachments suggests a different way in which data can be environmental: by being about, in, from, or generative of place. Taken together, these attachments offer a model for examining other data in relation to their environments. Moreover, the paper contends that rather than being detached from place, as prevailing discourses suggest, Big Data bring together more and further reaching place attachments than data sets of smaller sizes. (shrink)

In 19th century Germany, the number of publications in the history of philosophy increased dramatically. According to Ulrich Schneider’s calculations, from 1810 through 1899, 148 original textbooks by 114 authors were published in German. The aim of this article is to analyse how the documented in these publications canonic vision of 19th century German philosophy evolved. An analysis of 66 treatises published from 1802 through 1918 allows dividing 19th century philosophers into groups based on the frequency of their names across (...) the tables of contents, describing the changes in the leading group composition and in the share of attention received by a given philosopher over time. The paper presents thus a formal analysis of how historical reputations of philosophers were made, how they stabilised, or faded. The authors claim that the current understanding of the history of 19th century philosophy differs significantly from the one recorded in the German textbooks of the era. (shrink)

James Klagge aims to shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy by situating it in its biographical–cultural context. While Klagge is not alone in pursuing this aim, his claim to originality lies in his thematic focus on Wittgenstein’s relationship to his time and culture as one of “alienation” (3), expressed by the metaphor of being “in exile” (61). A central concern of Klagge’s is how we, as modern readers living in a “civilized” culture not dissimilar to the one from which Wittgenstein felt (...) himself estranged, can hope to understand the philosophical writings of such a radically distant “other.” Klagge’s suggestion is that through acknowledging and engaging with just how different Wittgenstein was, we can .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Distant Encounters:The Prometheus and Phaethon Episodes in the Argonautica of Apollonius RhodiusCalvin S. ByreOn several occasions in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, the Argonauts casually encounter figures from other myths or from the divine world. These incidents do not affect the further development of the plot, and there is typically no communication or interaction between the two parties of the encounter.1 Thematic and structural parallels suggest that two of these (...) encounters form a pair. Both concern the punishments inflicted upon a mythological figure by Zeus, and by their placement they serve as a sort of frame around the Colchian portion of the poem. The first occurs in 2.124659, when the Argonauts sail within view of the crags of the Caucasus as they draw near to Colchis. There, they catch sight of the eagle that torments Prometheus, and they hear the Titan's cries of agony. The second occurs in 4.596626, shortly after Jason and Medea, in possession of the Golden Fleece, have killed her brother Apsyrtus in order to free the Argonauts from pursuit by him. Sailing on the river Eridanus, the Argonauts come near the place where nauseous vapors emanate from the smoldering body of Phaethon, who had been blasted from the chariot of Helios by a thunderbolt and had fallen into the outfall of a nearby lake.Guido Paduano has recently sought to explain the rather haunting effect of the Prometheus and Phaethon episodes as the result of the suspension of the fixed regularity of the temporal framework within which most of the events of the Argonautic expedition take place: the Argonauts confront a distant, mythic past that impinges upon the present, and experience something of the perdurability of the mythic figures' pain and suffering ("Apparenze" 166-69). But Paduano does not take into account the poet's handling of point of view in these episodes: the systematic contrasts between the information that the narrator gives his audience about the scenes and what the Argonauts themselves perceive and know about them. These contrasts, I believe, are central to our understanding of the effect of the two episodes. [End Page 275]The Prometheus episode, as Hermann Fränkel observed (Noten 318), is presented from two alternating points of view. In the more precise terms of contemporary narratology, there are alternating "focalizers" in the episode.2 Lines 124647 are a case of what de Jong (Narrators 102-18) would call "explicit embedded focalization": the narrator tells us that the Argonauts themselves see the inmost part of the Black Sea and the steep crags of the Caucasus come into view. Lines 124850 are focalized by the narrator: in an authorial comment apropos of the Caucasus, he tells how Prometheus, bound there with bronze fetters, feeds an eagle with his liver. Lines 125153 are again focalized by the Argonauts, telling how they see () the eagle flying above the ship, near the clouds, making the sails flap by its passage. Lines 125455 are, in Fränkel's analysis, focalized by the narrator, who attempts to explain the fact that the eagle, high aloft, is able to move the sails of the ship; while lines 125659 return to focalization by the Argonauts, telling how they soon afterwards hear () the groans and lamentations of Prometheus as his liver is plucked, until they again perceive () the eagle returning from the mountain by the same way.There is nothing in the text to suggest that the Argonauts see Prometheus himself, nor that they can connect the cries and the eagle with him. Of the reactions of the Argonauts to what they see and hear we are told nothing. It may be, however, that lines 125455 do contain a hint of the thoughts and feelings aroused in the Argonauts: "for it did not have the nature of a bird of the air, but it moved the quillfeathers of its wings like wellpolished oars" ( [End Page 276] ).3 In the immediate context of the narrator's explicit report of the Argonauts' visual perceptions of the eagle in 125153, the comparison of the bird to a ship may be read as a case of what de Jong calls "assimilated" focalization; that is, the narrator may be... (shrink)

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself arising from a field of philosophic and literary experimentation, he challenges previous traditions while demonstrating that his strategy is appropriate to the texts considered. The Distant Relation breaks down the artificial division between philosophy and literature by weaving contemporary philosophic arguments (...) through close readings of Carpentier, Rulfo, Paz, and Garcia Marquez. Thomson draws the reader into the largely uninhabited space between philosophy and literature, providing new critical strategies that allow text and reader to respond to the very distance they share. These strategies involve a reconceptualisation of distance that recognises the productive and affirmative nature of separation. The Distant Relation will attract anyone interested in the ongoing struggle to overcome conventional interpretations of language, time, and identity within the broader context of philosophical trends and Spanish American studies. Eoin S. Thomson is an independent scholar who has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. (shrink)

Reading literature with the aid of computational techniques is controversial. For some, digital approaches apparently fetishize the curation of textual archives, lack interpretative rigor, and are thoroughly ’neoliberal’ in their pursuit of Silicon Valley-esque software-tool production. For others, the potential benefits of amplifying reading-labor-power through non-consumptive use of book corpora fulfills the dreams of early twentieth-century Russian formalism and yields new, distant ways in which we can consider textual pattern-making (Jockers; Moretti, Distant Reading; Moretti...

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather thanas something "fixed." My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter's painting Reader, which is a painting of a photograph that (...) depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an innige by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze and blindness. (shrink)

Political theorists remain divided on the question of Plato's utopianism. Some associate his dialogues with an uncompromising vision of the human good, one that Plato is thought to build into blueprints that he would have humanity implement as far as possible. Others read Plato as a brilliant critic of utopian thinking and insist that his blueprints are not to be understood as normative paradigms at all, but rather as self-destructive parodies. This article develops a third approach to Plato's utopianism by (...) turning to the treatment of 'imitation' (mimesis) in the Laws. I argue that the Laws requires a distinction between three ways in which an imitation might resemble its 'model' (paradeigma). Attending to this distinction adds credence to the view that, for Plato, the good in speech must be 'revised' in order to find satisfactory expression in human deeds. (shrink)

The article delves into the question of Freud’s concept of reading, and the fear of being photographed based on an analysis of the article “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of That Disease” (1915). Freud explicitly guides readers on how to read and not read this text. In alignment with contemporary concepts of paranoid and non-paranoid reading in philosophy, the former encourages suspicion, undermining the integrity of the text, while seeking hidden meanings. In contrast, (...) the latter places trust in the text and its author, focusing on the empirically observable surface of the text. This study poses a key question: how does one non-paranoically read a text that describes suspicion (Freud’s in this case) regarding his patient, a woman supposedly experiencing the fear of being photographed? To address this question, corpus linguistics, science of terminology, and distant reading are employed. Corpus linguistics and terminology help construct the concept of paranoid reading from the body of Freud’s work published before the specified article. Distant reading enables a non-paranoid reading of Freud’s text, situating it within the context of other texts from late nineteenth to early twentieth-century Austria that discuss the fear of being photographed. (shrink)

pt. A. The supreme mind of God -- First origin and final source -- The knowledge of a true beginning -- The mystic pen and the guarded tablet -- pt. B. The universal body of God -- Man against the last horizons -- Inside the world of nature -- Reading the messages of natural symbols -- pt. C The human image of God -- The symbolic image of man -- Man's true nature -- Behind the face of man.

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. (shrink)

The Militant Listener: Reading Mongane Wally Serote's Sikhahlel' u-OR alongside Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History In Sikhahlel' u-OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, Mongane Wally Serote presents an unflinching yet delicate meandering through the questions, reflections and provocations resistance history offers up through O. R. Tambo's life. As Ciraj Rassool points out, in this work Tambo appears not as an individual, but as an integral node in a web connecting various lives.1 This counter-neoliberal interpretation of (...) Tambo's life offers what Michael Löwy calls 'a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation' rebuilding the struggle hero narrative along a decentred framework.2 By radically dislodging this narrative, Tambo is portrayed as the 'non-iconic icon' he was esteemed to embody, and in this move, the poem, notably, points to the dearth of dialectic politics, both in our quotidian praxis, and the commemoration of others.3 Aptly, Serote's work contributes to what Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle describe as a 'total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all "centrisms" and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time'.4 To this end, the poem presents us with a constellation of historical actors who flicker on the horizon, beckoning us to engage in the labour of freedom. (shrink)

Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter propose a method for synchronizing clocks at rest at distant points of an inertial system in Euclidean space, which, they claim, does not depend on Einstein's signalling method and provides a basis for denying the conventionality of distant simultaneity. I am afraid, however, that the new method presupposes that the simultaneity of distant events relatively to the chosen inertial system has been already determined by Einstein's or some other method. Jackson and Pargetter (...) describe their method as follows: Let UA, UB be clocks at A, B, respectively. Let XY be an axis perpendicular to AB, passing through C, the midpoint of AB. Take a rigid straight rod A′B′ with midpoint C′ and length equal to the length AB. Move A′B′ with uniform velocity such that C′ travels along XY towards C, and A′B′ is perpendicular to XY ; then if the reading … on UA just when A′ coincides with A is the same as the reading … on UB just when B′ coincides with B, clocks UA and UB will be synchronous.. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead: each of these individuals is an original and historically important thinker; each is an essential contributor to the period, perspective, and tradition of classical American philosophy; and each speaks directly, imaginatively, critically, and wisely to our contemporary global society, its distant possibilities for improvement, and its massive, pressing problems. From the initiative of pragmatism in approximately 1870 to Dewey's final work after World War II, (...) classical American philosophy has come to represent the critical articulation of attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life imbedded in the culture from which it arose. John Stuhr brings together the works of these foremost thinkers to present a comprehensive collection in American philosophy. Extensive introductory essays, written especially for this volume by leading scholars of the subject, provide not only the bibliographical and cultural contexts necessary to a full appreciation of each thinker, but also original critical and interpretive philosophical observations. (shrink)

The Qur'an depicts fluctuating relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. While at times such relations can be conciliatory and harmonious, at others they are inimical, uneasy, or distant. Still, the Qur'an acknowledges the necessary ontological reality of the human difference. This is evidenced in many verses. Thus, I will argue that an “attentive” and “worldly” reading of the Qur'an is crucial to curb misunderstanding of the way ‘difference’ is perceived in Islam by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. A close (...) class='Hi'>reading is primarily a multiple form of communication. It is needed to resist the networked systems of power and control dominated by images and mass media in the Arab world and Western. It is exceptionally important to free the interpretation of Qur'an from the grip of Muslim and non-Muslim extremists and Islamophobes who read some of its verses as evidence of essentialized enmity harbored by Muslims towards all non-Muslims. (shrink)

Mostly the culture of literacy has taken shape within a realm of freedom, seemingly distant from the needs of the body and the demands of sustenance. At the same time, the world represented within so much of the world’s narrative, both truth and fiction, has been saturated in struggle and deprivation. This article tries to make some sense of this juxtaposition, freedom on one side and necessity on the other: in particular, the pull of past or residual forms of (...) unfreedom in the sphere of literary representation, within and against new or emerging expressions of emancipation, themselves accompanied or countered in modern times by ever-novel styles of exploitation. (shrink)

Much thought is being given nowadays to the ways in which society might continue to substantiate the principle of solidarity in the economic sphere. Predictable cost increases in the social security system stand at the root of a number of problems that have arisen. While those concerned look for solutions, a discussion is emerging concerning the communal scope of solidarity. People are not only asking themselves how they are to remain in solidarity, but also with whom they should share the (...) means at their disposal. The concomitant question ‘with whom?’ is not always as evident as it might seem, since the ethical scope of solidarity appears, in principle at least, to be unlimited.De facto, however, the limits of solidarity tend to coincide with those of the political community. The ongoing unification of Europe should broaden matters in this regard, but whether this process will also broaden our perspective on world-wide solidarity remains to be seen. At the same time, certain groups are calling for a stricter delimitation of our solidarity. The elections in Europe during the past ten years have made it clear that a number of emotional factors play a role in this context, factors which are not infrequently expressed in the slogan ‘our own first’.The intention of this article is to confront, with the Christian principle of solidarity, certain spontaneous and emotional motivating forces which call for a limitation of our solidarity. Solidarity implies both a feeling and a rational decision. In line with any other emotion, the feeling of solidarity is rooted in motivating factors of which we are not always consciously aware. Such factors are rarely thematised in an explicit fashion, partly because they are as such difficult to discuss and partly because they are difficult to make operational at the ‘scientific’ level. As a rule, our attention tends to be focused on the ethical desirability and practical-economical achievabilty of solidarity.Ours is a talkative age. Never before have people talked so much. The telephone, radio, cinema, television, audio and video recording have all increased our opportunities for speaking to one another not only when we are together but across distance and across time as well. This has been the century of chatter .Chattering carries in itself the risk of superficiality. Before we realise it, we are talking without thinking deeply. Messengers of doom, such as Postman and Finkielkraut , warn the western world against the dangers of the television and video culture which they contend constitute a threat to western democracy. As we grow accustomed to the high speed and fleeting character of the ‘new media’, we tend to gradually lose our capacity to think things over and reflect. Ultimately, its cursory and uncritical approach to things becomes the norm.For those who consider television as the summit of idle chatter, reading is not merely a relief but a threatened activity which needs all our support. If we consider thoughtfulness and consideration to be virtues, then the unhurriedness associated with reading must be seen as a virtuous quality. More than at any other time in our history, being literate is of great importance in our industrialised societies. Hence, there is a growing awareness of the need to link critical thinking with literacy skills. More than ever before, we need the writings of others – distant in history, geography and profession – to understand our complex world. Such writings provide information, recommend actions and promote political and philosophical orientations.Discourse analysis proves that the complexity of the discourse is higher in written than in spoken language. Written language integrates more idea units in a clause, making use of nominalisation, embedded constituents, etc. Gaining access to such thorough knowledge is a first step in the long process of asserting control. Being literate creates the opportunity for increasing access to knowledge not generally available in the direct experience of life. Being able to read enables the individual to transcend time and space and to liberate his or her own mind and spirit. It removes the individual from dependence on immediate senses, direct contacts, commonplace talk.All these elements are important in the shaping of one’s personality. Confrontation with challenging, original and even provocative ideas forces the individual to make up his or her own mind. Democracy needs this kind of individualism. (shrink)

Presented as a “speculative manual on pedagogy,” this article seeks to provide praxis to Spivak’s Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization using Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as a reading in Philippine schools. Its aim is to envision pedagogical ways in which a foreign literary text is introduced into a culturally distant setting, thereby prompting educators – the “supposed trainers of the mind” – to resolve: How does one educate aesthetically? How do we imagine the (...) performance of aesthetic education in local classrooms? In demonstrating a theory and its form, the paper first explores Spivak’s conception of aesthetic education and then adapts it in a specific case: in Philippine classrooms where learners are confronted by a literary work of the Other – particularly, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Aesthetic education, as a theoretic idea, is visualized and imaginatively performed through its capacity to realize an “epistemic revolution” happening in local classrooms worldwide. (shrink)

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be (...) impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power may become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks (...) make the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

Virtual reality allows participants to experience immersive perspective-taking which is key to stimulate empathy and emotion sharedness. Immersive interaction performed by the participants is examined in this article as an experience of cultural embodiment. Following a biosemiotic approach to culture, the study examines the virtual reality movie Waves of Grace qualitatively. It seeks to trace how participants’ interaction with the virtual worlds elicits in them a feeling of being embodied in a world of Ebola suffering that is outside the cultural (...) paradigm of their real world. Biosemiotics provides a theoretical platform which helps in deconstructing the complexity of participants’ kinetic interactions within both physical and virtual spaces, and, in a way, reconstructing the concept of cultural embodiment. Correspondingly, the analysis yields that cultural embodiment is instantiated through kinetic movement and rhythmical interaction where participants are not only told about the story of Ebola but inhabit its umwelt and reconfigure it. Enacting an umwelt-to-umwelt interaction, participants not only alter the visual scenes and affect their affordances, but they also model subjective worlds that scaffold how they feel, and how they relate to the virtual situation. The findings suggest to update the metaphors used to understand the ‘viewing’ of suffering and sufferers (most notably among them is spectatorship of suffering and distant suffering). The world of suffering is embodied rather than communicated. The article makes a contribution to biosemiotic cultural studies by introducing the concept of physical-virtual kinetic rhythms to the notion of cultural embodiment. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze's notion of sense, as developed in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, is meant to be a fourth dimension of the proposition besides denotation, manifestation and signification. While Deleuze explains signification in inferentialist terms, he ascribes to sense some very unusual properties, making it hard to understand what sense is. The aim of this paper is to improve this situation by confronting Deleuzian sense with a more or less contemporary, but otherwise rather distant philosophical conception: (...) Gilbert Ryle's theory of categories and category mistakes. The leading idea is that to understand the sense of a proposition regarding X is to know the category of the concept X, which requires that one knows which questions may appropriately be asked with regard to X. Thus, sense, category and questions are intimately related to each other. Finally, it seems to be consistent with Deleuze's views to assume that abstract signification is contextually generated by concrete sense. (shrink)

This paper is my commentary on Raymond Tallis’ book Freedom: An Impossible Reality (2021). Tallis argues that the laws described by science are dependent on human agency which extracts them from nature. Consequently, human agency cannot be explained as an effect of natural laws. I agree with Tallis’ main argument and I appreciate that he helps us understand the systematic importance of a human-scale breadth of view regarding any theoretical investigation. In the main part of the paper, I critically comment (...) on Tallis’ interpretation of several more loosely associated topics from a phenomenological perspective. Firstly, I reconsider Tallis’ account of intentionality as a factor that opens a distance between the cognizer and the world. Whereas Tallis emphasizes that agency requisitions aspects of the world to achieve its goals, I point out that agency does not determine the meaning of things unidirectionally and independently of all context. A self-controlled agency is provisionally reached through a process of ‘deindexicalization’ of our passive intentional capacities, that is, by creating and maintaining new, different worldly contexts. Subsequently, I analyze Tallis’ description of our intentional relation to spatiotemporally distant possibilities. In my view, Tallis underestimates the extent to which our intentional relation to possibilities is pre-reflexive and pre-predicative and hence independent of propositional attitudes. Finally, I consider Tallis’ interpretation of nature and show that it is deeply influenced by the sciences of nature. In contrast, I argue that agency can be properly described only if we understand it as an intervention in a lifeworld already imbued with sense, not merely a physical or material nature. (shrink)

Ignorance of current events is ordinarily treated as a moral failing. In this article, I argue that much of this ire is misplaced. The disengaged are no less positioned to do good or dispense beneficence, no more arrogant or complicit than those glued to the headlines. Nonetheless, I contend that citizens do have moral reason to remain informed – they ought not be indifferent to others. This, I show, provides a standing reason to pay attention to distant strangers: by (...) bearing witness, we avoid indifference. It follows that we should reconsider our media diet and our critiques of the disengaged. (shrink)

The article examines reports of natural disasters in the 18th century Austrian newspaper "Wienerisches Diarium" to gain insights into how people captured the extraordinary sensory experiences of such events in written form. By analysing a digitised corpus of over 300 newspaper issues, the study identifies 302 text passages referring to natural disasters, among them 285 news reports, and explores textual traces of (multi)sensuality present within this material. The close reading and semantic annotation of the textual findings reveals that comparisons (...) to familiar sensations are commonly used to convey the sensory experiences of natural disasters, allowing readers to (better) relate to and understand the extreme events. At the same time, touch and vision constitute the most frequently mentioned senses, while smell and taste only play a minor role in early modern disaster depiction. In addition, the study finds that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more likely to include multisensory descriptions compared to other types of disasters. These and further findings shed light on when and how (multi)sensory impressions of disasters were conveyed in written form within early modern news. (shrink)

Alan Turing’s influence on subsequent research in artificial intelligence is undeniable. His proposed test for intelligence remains influential. In this paper, I propose to analyze his conception of intelligence by relying on traditional close reading and language technology. The Turing test is interpreted as an instance of conceptual engineering that rejects the role of the previous linguistic usage, but appeals to intuition pumps instead. Even though many conceive his proposal as a prime case of operationalism, it is more plausibly (...) viewed as a stepping stone toward a future theoretical construal of intelligence in mechanical terms. To complete this picture, his own conceptual network is analyzed through the lens of distributional semantics over the corpus of his written work. As it turns out, Turing’s conceptual engineering of the notion of intelligence is indeed quite similar to providing a precising definition with the aim of revising the usage of the concept. However, that is not its ultimate aim: Turing is after a rich theoretical understanding of thinking in mechanical, i.e., computational, terms. (shrink)

In this article we explore the relationship between semiotic analysis of images and quantitative analysis of vast image corpora, in particular the work produced by Lev Manovich and the Cultural Analytics Lab, called “Media Visualization.” Media Visualization has been chosen as corpus because of its metavisual operation (images are visualized and analyzed by images) and its innovating way of conceiving analysis: by visual instruments. In this paper semiotics is used as an approach to Media Visualization and taken as an object (...) of study as well, especially visual semiotics. In this sense, a comparison between visual semiotics (close reading of small corpora) and quantitative analyses of images (distant reading of vast collections) are conducted from a semiotic point of view. Post-Greimassian semiotics guides this study with respect to the issue of the image-within-an-image and metavisual visualization; Peircean semiotics is employed to explain and develop the notion of diagram. (shrink)

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to (...) digitize the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine "reading," combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science. (shrink)

Abbildungsverzeichnis 8Abkürzungsverzeichnis 9I Verfahrensentwicklung: Topic-informierte Diskursanalyse zur Analyse von Diskurstransformationen im Zeitverlauf1 Einleitung 112 Forschungsstand 202.1 Wissenschaftliche Dichotomien in der Krise 222.1.1 Big Data und das Aufbrechen etablierter Forschungsparadigmen 222.1.2 Von der Notwendigkeit eines Digitalen Forschungsparadigmas 242.2 Digital Humanities zwischen Transparadigmatischem Forschungsprogramm und paradigmatischer Positionierung 252.2.1 Digital Humanities als eigenständige Wissenschaftsdisziplin? 252.2.2 Digital Humanities zwischen digitalem Forschungsparadigma und methodischer Neutralität 272.3 Methodenstreit 2.0: Digital Humanities zwischen 'End of Theory' und 'Anything goes' 292.3.1 Datengeleitete versus theoriegeleitete Forschung 302.3.2 End of Theory (...) in den Computational Sciences? 332.3.3 Anything goes - Methodenanarchismus als digitales Paradigma? 352.4 Digital Humanities zwischen 'Digital' und 'Humanities' 392.4.1 Der Qualitative Turn in den Digital Humanities 392.4.2 Cultural Turn in den Digital Humanities als mögliche Brückenbildung? 402.5 Bridging the Digital Gap - Dritte Wege für die Digital Humanities 423 Bridging the Paradigm Gap - Grundlegung eines integrativen Forschungsansatzes 433.1 Von inkommensurablen Paradigmen... 443.2...über eine Übersetzung des sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschungsprozesses in die Digital Humanities 463.2.1 Der sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsprozess im Mixed-Methods Design 473.2.2 Vier Positionierungen im Forschungsprozess 473.3...zur Konzeptionierung eines integrativen Forschungsansatzes im Mixed-Methods-Design 494 Epistemologische Ausrichtung und theoretische Perspektive 504.1 Sozialer Wandel als sozialer Konstruktionsprozess 524.1.1 Sozialkonstruktivistische Tradition - Wissenssoziologie nach Berger und Luckmann 534.1.2 Vom Sozialkonstruktivismus zum Diskurskonstruktivismus 554.2 Sozialer Wandel als diskursiver Konstruktionsprozess 574.2.1 Diskursbegriff 584.2.2 Eigenschaften von Diskursen 604.2.3 Regeln des Diskurses 634.3 Diskursforschung meets Digital Humanities 645 Methodologische Ausrichtung 665.1 Bridging the Methodological Gap - Text-Mining meets Diskursforschung 665.1.1 Text-Mining-Verfahren 685.1.2 Text-Mining meets Diskursforschung 705.2 Mixed-Methods meets Digital Humanities 715.2.1 Mixed-Methods-Forschung als Drittes Forschungsparadigma 715.2.2 Mixed-Methods-Forschung innerhalb einer pragmatistischen Ausrichtung 726 Forschungsdesign 766.1 Designs in der Mixed-Methods-Forschung 766.2 Das Exploratory Design 796.3 Erweiterung des Exploratory Design 816.4 Forschungsdesign für eine Topic-informierte Diskursanalyse 826.4.1 Variation 1: Sichtung des Forschungsstandes als qualitative Exploration 826.4.2 Variation 2: Erweiterung um eine quantitative Exploration 836.4.3 Variation 3: Erweiterung um eine dritte, qualitative Phase 836.5 Übersetzung des Forschungsdesigns in die Digital Humanities 846.5.1 Distant Reading 856.5.2 Das Interpretationsproblem im Distant Reading-Verfahren 866.5.3 Blended Reading als Überbrückungsmöglichkeit 866.5.4 Close Reading 876.6 Überblick Forschungsdesign 886.7 Verfahrensablauf 887 Methodik 957.1 Sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse 967.2 Die Kombination aus Diskursanalyse und Text-Mining-Verfahren 987.3 Topic-Modeling-Verfahren 99. (shrink)

Wattpad is a popular online writing website in which individuals write, upload, and comment on original stories. In 2020, the platform had more than a hundred million registered users. In this article, we use a mixture of close and distant reading methods to study how lay authors wrote about the COVID-19 global pandemic during its first year. We examine some of the formal and generic norms these authors used to narrativize this event; how such norms evolved over time (...) as the pandemic dragged on; and how these online COVID stories differ from more established online genres, such as mystery and romance. Overall, this article explores how a large reading and writing public, leveraging the novel affordances of user generated content, came to respond to a massive social crisis in real time, before they knew how it would end. This exploration allows us to accomplish two things. First, we are able to situate real-time pandemic stories against the retrospective narratives that we expect from literary fiction. How does writing crisis in real time and in a collaborative mode produce its own unique plot and narrative structures, and how do stories written in the immediate wake of the pandemic anticipate later mainstream cultural productions (fiction, film, television)? Second, we gain a broader understanding of how new genres of writing emerge within a cultural ecosystem increasingly defined by generic predictability and the recycling of familiar cultural intellectual property (IP), such as The Avengers and Harry Potter. COVID-19 dramatically disrupted global economic, political, and health systems. How did it also disrupt cultural systems? (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article, invited for presentation to the North American Nietzsche Society at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, is a commentary on Mark Alfano's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. It focuses, first, on the method adopted in the book (a particular combination of “distant reading” through the use of digital tools with close reading) and, second, on two key substantive issues: the analysis of the Nietzschean concepts of drive and virtue respectively.

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a ‘hybrid’ natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction (SF) seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs (...) ‘cli-fi’. It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that ‘catastrophic’ SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of ‘apocalyptic’ fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audio-visual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

This article offers an innovative perspective on the literary landscapes of the 1960s in France, Ukraine, and the USA serving as exemplars of a global literary project that views literary works as heterotopias that, while being distinct, collectively constitute a cohesive whole. Using a comparative approach, complemented with distant reading techniques, the study examines how these literary realms are interconnected, revealing shared aesthetic foundations guided by an overarching law. This law, rooted in Theodor Adorno’s concept of negativity, becomes (...) evident in in countercultural movements and consequential shifts in literary form, content, and canon. While not the primary focus of analysis, other unifying elements in this global literary panorama include dissent as defined by Jaques Rancière, and a Sartrian-infused interpretation of existentialism. The article suggests that this global phenomenon may have emerged due to the confluence of two factors: the seismic global impact of events like WWII and the evolving postmodern trajectory of the era. (shrink)

One of the most controversial issues that divided Islamic philosophers and theologians during the Middle Ages was whether human beings would have a spiritual or bodily existence after death. The idea of a world of image was conceived as a solution, suggesting that there exists a world of non-physical bodies, beyond our earthly existence. This world may be reached in sleep, in meditation or after death.From the embryonic conception by Ibn Sina, to the radical rethinking by Suhrawardi and Shahrazuri into (...) a sophisticated system, L. W. C. van Lit unravels the history of this idea. Using a distant reading approach for measuring the transmission, he further shows how the idea remained relevant for Muslim thinkers through the centuries, up until today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society by Riccardo PozzoRobert R. ClewisPOZZO, Riccardo. History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. vi + 231 pp. Cloth, $94.99In a forward-looking proposal, Pozzo lays out his vision for a multidisciplinary history of philosophy "from a global perspective." This book is "a long position paper, an extended essay dedicated to twenty-first century policies of philosophical research from (...) a global perspective." The chosen format is a Denkschrift, that is, a memorandum in the sense of a document that experts lay out for their government to ponder. Perhaps, Pozzo suggests, the history of philosophy could even have an impact on economic authorities and policymakers. Indeed, the work seems driven by the laudable aim of promoting access and equality around the world. The author reveals a just concern for migrants in particular, since they bring [End Page 156] with them their intellectual traditions and philosophical texts, which can be translated and thereby foster intercultural dialogue.The book consists of an introduction (chapter 1) followed by nine chapters. It has a thirty-page references list as well as subject and name indexes. In part one, Pozzo argues for the need for new narratives in the history of philosophy (chapter 2), in order to establish its role in addressing migration (chapter 3). The second part concerns reflective society (chapter 4). It considers societal readiness (chapter 5) and cultural innovation (chapter 6). Part three explores the paradigm shift from a close reading of texts to a "distant" reading of corpora (chapter 7), a shift Pozzo endorses. It examines implications for the translation of languages (chapter 8) and the translation of studies (knowledge) and competencies (chapter 9). Chapter 10 concludes by briefly reflecting on the notions of the "fluidity" of peoples and their ideas, biodiversity (and food), and spiritual humanism based on dignity.Scholars in the history of philosophy "should be open to the idea of a pluriversum of a history of facts and places, whereby history of philosophy finds its grounding in spatial heterogeneity." Nowadays, when people migrate and transfer competencies at increasing velocity, the "history of philosophy can be usefully reinvented on the basis of its consideration of intercultural dialogue." Pozzo considers the World Digital Library to be "one of the most exciting examples of corpora that talk to each other"—an idea he uses not merely metaphorically. By "corpora" is meant not just the sum of separate books, but XML-accessible complete collections of traditions of texts, with corresponding dictionaries, thesauri, and reference works, which make it possible to analyze a number of original texts as well as transliterations into other alphabets or hanzi characters. The result would be a "data-driven" history of philosophy.Given that history of philosophy is a product of culture, it is influenced by migrating peoples, who bring philosophical ideas and religious traditions with them. Research on migration thus ought to also consider translations of texts and competencies from one to another context, be it linguistic, economic, political, or cultural. The humanities, and a reflective society more generally, might provide a partial basis for intercultural dialogue. The history of philosophy might even thereby improve the quality of life of citizens.Pozzo rightly emphasizes that we need multilingual philosophers and historians of philosophy. History of philosophy ought to also be based on robust lexical and historical considerations, and historians of philosophy should be trained in a number of the world's languages as well as face the challenge of dealing with multilingualism and with validating translations. Pozzo's proposed methodology, informed by computational techniques, relies on tools such as vocabularies, ontologies, concordances, frequencies, or the analysis of texts and corpora, which integrates quantitative and formal methods into the portfolio of the methods of history of philosophy and intellectual history. Since Pozzo has published [End Page 157] widely on Kant, it is fitting that he explores Kant on migration as well as the editorial contexts and translation projects concerning the philosopher's writings.As for aesthetics, Pozzo notes that the history of philosophy can reflect on migrants' cultural and artistic creations. Historians of philosophy should thus start observing and interpreting phenomena created by... (shrink)

Topic modeling—a text‐mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts—has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we (...) group the content‐based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine‐grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the “prominence” of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAdopting a temporally distant perspective on stressors reduces distress in adults. Here we investigate whether the extent to which individuals project themselves into the future influences distancing efficacy. We also examined modulating effects of age across adolescence and reactive aggression: factors associated with reduced future-thinking and poor emotion regulation. Participants read scenarios and rated negative affect when adopting a distant-future perspective, near-future perspective, or when reacting naturally. Self-report data revealed significant downregulation of negative affect during the distant-future (...) condition, with a similar though non-significant skin conductance pattern. Importantly, participants who projected further ahead showed the greatest distress reductions. While temporal distancing efficacy did not vary with age, participants reporting greater reactive aggression showed reduced distancing efficacy, and projected themselves less far into the future. Fi... (shrink)

In his widely read earlier dissertation, "Treasury of names and poetic language," the author explained that the structural form of the two-part Germanic first name dates back to a distant Indo-German past. Thus, the Germanic examples (of the type "Wolfram," which means "wolf raven") emerge from composed designations of men in epic poetry, that is, from the poetic vocabulary for princes and warriors. He argues that the same is probably true for a much earlier treasury of names (one that (...) goes back to the 2nd millennium B.C.) as a specific legacy from the Indo-Aryan war chariot culture. From there, it went on to be disseminated to the rest of Indo-Germania, including the Celts and the Germanic peoples. In his new book, the author subjects his theory to testing, revision, and extension. Thus, the volume will be an indispensable resource for name researchers as well as academic experts in medieval and Nordic literature, and for students of the social history of the medieval world. (shrink)

Reading Henry Greely's wonderful book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, while riding public transport sparked awkward looks and equally awkward discussions. I thought of removing the dust jacket, yet I was reminded that Greely's stated purpose in writing the book was to spark conversation. The title is, of course, intentionally provocative. Greely does not, in fact, believe that humans will stop having sex for the multitude of reasons that we do already. Quite the contrary; (...) he proposes that sex for reproduction will become a technical endeavor, while sex for pleasure or other purposes beyond reproduction will remain as it is. In a not-too-distant future, advances in genomics and assisted reproduction, especially preimplantation genetic diagnosis, will allow us to control the genetic makeup of embryos. To a limited degree, PGD already makes this possible, but what Greely proposes is slightly different. His vision of the future depends on the potential for further advances of today's already fairly complex biotechnology. Greely does an excellent job of making this cutting-edge science easy to understand. (shrink)

In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups (...) and persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remembrance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?). (shrink)

In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups (...) and persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remembrance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?). (shrink)

Résumé L’analyse quantitative de l’histoire culturelle a été ouverte par la mise à disposition de corpus de masse tel que celui de Google fbooks (500 milliards de mots, 5 millions d’ouvrages, soit environ 4% de la littérature mondiale) et a été popularisé sous le nom de « culturonomics ». Elle s’ouvre désormais aux chercheurs, en promettant un accès profond aux faits culturels et à leurs évolutions qui affleurent à travers leurs traces textuelles dans les corpus textuelles numérisées. Encore faut-il pouvoir (...) interroger ces corpus dont la taille et la nature posent des problèmes scientifiques nouveaux, leur dimension les rendant illisibles directement et mettant échec les méthodes de fouille et les outils traditionnels d’analyse statistique des données en imposant des méthodes statistiques nouvelles et le saut vers des formes d’intelligence visuelles originales. Dans le cadre d’un projet mené entre le Labex « Obvil » de Paris-Sorbonne et le Literary Lab de Stanford sur l’histoire de l’idée de littéraire (la définition de la littérature comme mot, comme concept et comme champ), et visant à produire une histoire empirique de la littérature, nous avons mené depuis deux ans des expériences de fouille d’un corpus de critique littéraire de 1618 titres, 140 millions de mots (dont plus de 50 000 occurrences du lemme « littérature ») de la fin de l’Ancien Régime à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. En présentant des exemples développés dans cette première expérimentation à grande échelle de mesure de l’histoire des idées, on présentera les méthodes de text mining contemporaines en essayant d’éprouver leur pertinence heuristique et de leur capacité à faire remonter des données signifiantes pour l’histoire et la théorie littéraire. On fera l’hypothèse que toute enquête quantitative sérieuse mobilise désormais non une échelle intermédiaire standard et immédiatement lisible, mais le maniement d’outils statistiques dont l’interprétation en sciences humaines pose des problèmes particuliers qui, paradoxalement, ne peuvent être résolus que par leur articulation étroite à du close reading et à des mesures fines. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production (...) of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

History of Love What is love? We all wish to have the answer to one of the most universal, mysterious, and all-permeating phenomena on this planet. And even if we perhaps have a special feeling and intuitive insight that love “is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things,” as … Continue reading Love, History of →.

We analyse seven research papers from the last twenty years that have studied North African genetic traces in Iberia and which consistently report that the highest concentrations of genetic characteristics associated with the Maghreb are found in northwest Iberia, a region both physically distant from Africa and under Andalusi political control for a shorter period than practically any other. Attempts to historically contextualise such a seemingly anomalous distribution have, we believe, been undermined by a simplistic reading of the (...) historiography, leading to the marginalisation of any early-medieval explanation for these results, in favour of other more historically tenuous alternatives. Accordingly, these studies have been largely ignored by medievalists, further exacerbating a lack of dialogue between disciplines. We suggest that the perceived paradox between length of political control and genetic legacy should be used to challenge the orthodoxy surrounding events in the eighth century, and thus explore the possibility of a more profound Berber influence on northwest Iberia than has hitherto been contemplated, rather than being marginalised by historians interested in said period. (shrink)

Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans (...) benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes, and: Horace: Behind the Public PoetryKenneth ReckfordRonnie Ancona. Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1994. xii + 186Cloth, $39.95.R. O. A. M. Lyne. Horace: Behind the Public Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. viii + 230 pp. Cloth, $30.Horace’s love poetry has generally been undervalued, if not actively disliked. In (...) the bad old days, as Ancona reminds us, he was simply charged with not being Catullus or Propertius; and although the New Critics appreciated his refined irony and playfulness, they still treated him as somewhat of a kinsman of the fairy queen in Iolanthe, who proclaims,On fire that glows with heat intense I turn the hose of common sense.Ancona doubly disturbs the stereotype. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, she traces the recurrent Horatian figure of the (male) poet-lover whose drive for autonomy and control leads him to resist any form of desire that enforces immersion in temporality; and she argues, too, that (mostly male) scholars have privileged that attitude by identifying with it and taking it for granted. The thesis is challenging, it is well argued, and it serves Horace well.Throughout her careful, often elegant analysis of fourteen odes, Ancona traces the poet-lover’s “desperate refusal to situate his own identity in any real relation to the uncontrollable temporality of the beloved” (13). I summarize, baldly, a few results. (1) His desire as he ages is a private sorrow, or even a bid for power (Odes 4.1); hers is a public embarrassment and disgrace (Odes 1.25). (2) He tries vainly to defeat time through imaginings of permanence in nature, or self-identification with youthful eroticism (Odes 1.4) or fantasies of erotic domination (Odes 1.9, 2.9). Or (3): the beloved woman or boy must not be seen as quite real, if the poet-lover’s integrity is to be maintained (Odes 1.22, 2.5). Only in Odes 1.13 and, more compellingly, in the duet of Odes 3.9 does Horace envisage the (to be sure, very distant) possibility of a genuinely evolving love, with both lovers submitting equally to the challenges of time and change.If her results are challenging—and I shall not read Integer Vitae, or Cum tu Lydia, Telephi, or Donec gratus eram tibi so complacently ever again—Ancona’s argument is built from the ground up in ways that reassure the philologist. Her readings are precise and accurate. She is sensitive to Horace’s poetic strategies, his indirections of technique. Ancona acknowledges her debt to earlier critics. Her analyses of Odes 1.23, 1.25, 2.8, 2.9, 3.7, and 4.13 should be required reading for the next generation.Two minor caveats. Ancona’s reading of Odes 1.13 hinges on the interpretation of irrupta... copula as, not “an unbroken bond,” but “an interrupted bond” that yet holds over time and change: a philologically and humanly daring oxymoron. At Odes 3.9.10 I see a strong sexual challenge inscribed in dulcis [End Page 657] docta modos et citharae sciens. Sex and music go together, and Chloe plays well. All the more reason for Lydia, in the next stanza, to turn up the heat.More generally, I wonder whether behind such controlling Horatian personas as the erotodidaskalos of Odes 3.23—a more sensitive, Roman Anacreon—we may not sense the person of a Horace who is remarkably open to the same mysteries of time and change from which his “Horace” so often, and so vainly, struggles to escape? This Horace of mine (let me, this once, be controlling) recognizes Venus as an irreducible power in life and responds to “time and the erotic” with more self-awareness, more passion, and more poetic excitement than has ordinarily been heard in the Odes. To have revived that sense, which I think we share, of ongoing excitement and challenge in the odes on love—though the aesthetic can itself (as in Odes 2.5) be a refuge from life’s changes—is Ancona’s last, best... (shrink)

William Bartram would accompany his botanizing father, John, into the wilderness and he would famously memorialize his own explorations with an account that mixed romantic conventions with natural history and Quaker theology. William’s interior life corresponds to the spirit of Virgil’s Eclogues with its promise of the resto­ration of a Golden Age, replete with bucolic scenes of shepherds tending their flocks and singing nature’s praises. This paper addresses some of the political interpretations that Bartram’s work has received and argues that (...) William was focused on a distant past which he was introduced to through the classical curriculum at the newly founded Academy of Philadelphia. William’s curriculum guaranteed an introduction to the conventions of the sublime and the picturesque, since Addison’s Spectator was also required reading and he was well-versed in Linnaean nomenclature, but wherever William botanized his observations of the natural world were framed by classical literature. His tour of ancient Indian ruins where he imagined an Areopagus and a space free of strife and bloodshed is a dramatic example of William’s habit of importing a place defined by classical literature into his natural history. (shrink)