Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities)

The focus of the study is the application of Systemic Functional Grammatics (SFG) to text as a facility of meaning-making. Having provided a wide room for technological devices to read and account for elements of a text, it portrays the exercise within the scope of Digital Humanities (DH). The theory, championed by Halliday, describes a text from its systemic configurations to chain structures and social relationship frameworks. To explain the weight of SFG as an interface between text and technology, the author chose a poem, ‘Area Boy’, in which three perspectives of the mood system, thematic system, and transitivity system are instrumental to expose its nuances. The approach was followed by correlating the three systems together as a comparative analysis. The study reveals that ‘Area Boy’ operates in declarative clauses with heavy utilization of Subject and Finite. These are organized in marked themes. The contents of the text are represented in material processes (e.g. spent) with supports from both mental (e.g. remember) and verbal (e.g. said) processes. Some of the processes along with circumstances (e.g. Of washing …, Now that …) recur as repetitions for emphatic and enhancement purposes. On the one hand, the article concludes that SFG can assist in interpreting textual elements to generate meaning potential. On the other hand, through the SFG’s metafunctional applications to ‘Area Boy’, one can suggest that the society should give a helping hand to the less privileged. Such a behavior can eradicate vices experienced through the ‘Area Boys’ from the society.

Full-text database of 3830 chapters (卷) of Buddhist, Daoist and medical sources up to 589, the end of the Six Dynasties 六朝 period in China. This was the most intense period of medical pluralism and syncretism in Chinese history.
Search results corpus can be filtered (後分類) according to bibliographic criteria, like date range, sect, genre, time, and geographic site of production (the latter can be visualised on the search results page against dynastic maps).  Metadata is based on traditional Buddhist ascriptions, as in CBETA, Kristofer Schipper's Daoist Canon 道藏統考, and a curated set of medical texts.
Daoist and Buddhist texts come from Https://Kanripo.org, medical texts from a variety of sources, including rare unpublished transcriptions of Han and pre-Han excavated texts.

The corpus can be examined in full-text through the Docusky Viewer at
http://docusky.org.tw/DocuSky/webApi/webpage-open-3in1.php?db=DaoBudMed6D&corpus=%5BALL%5D&queryBase=.all&spType=search&snippets=auto

You can perform term distribution analysis using TermStatsTools at:
http://docusky.org.tw/DocuSky/docuTools/TagStatsTool/index.html

Instructions for term distribution analysis, as well as the Daoist and Buddhist metadata, can be downloaded from here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w4ugdyyttyx5dha/AABVQoQR9QNHsSB7iZOGrgrya?dl=1

For more information about the project and links to blogs, papers and datasets, see
https://michaelstanley-baker.com/digital-humanities/

Abstract (ITA):
Prendendo spunto dalle suggestive sensazioni che il celebre racconto breve La Biblioteca di Babele di Jorge Louis Borges evoca, propongo una riflessione sul rapporto tra "digitale" e "biblioteca analogica". Non si intende affatto sostenere in modo oltranzista la convinzione del "digitale" quale miracolosa panacea per le "biblioteche analogiche", bensì riflettere partendo dall'esperienza quotidiana frutto della creazione e della conseguente gestione a 360° di un complesso progetto di digitalizzazione: da questa applicazione concreta emerge una visione smitizzata del "digitale", che tende a porre in evidenza i punti a favore delle tecnologie digitali applicate affinché una biblioteca possa crescere in termini di accessibilità e fruizione libere. Dalle collezioni digitali chiuse, moderni silos tecnologici colmi di dati che rimandano ai silenti "esagoni" della Biblioteca di Babele borgesiana, incapace di comunicare e interconnettersi, alla crescita dell'accessibilità e dell'interoperabilità garantite dall'applicazione di moderni standard. Tutto questo, però, senza mai sottovalutare l'ineluttabile dualismo che le moderne tecnologie digitali portano seco: il rischio sempre presente della frammentazione, del labirinto senza uscita, dello "specchio" borgesiano che illude e confonde.

A one-day workshop to train the contributors of the ALIM project (Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo) in the TEI XML encoding of medieval Latin texts. The workshop was led by Edoardo Ferrarini, Paolo Monella and Roberto Rosselli Del Turco.

The initial lecture provided a theoretical-methodological introduction to Digital Philology, focused on the possible role of the critical text of the editor within the framework of a digital scholarly edition based on a complete representation of the text of each primary source. The second part was a hands-on workshop on the TEI XML encoding of textual variants and JavaScript, providing a practical introduction to the core aspects of digital scholarly editing (modelling, visualization and analysis) and an exemplification of methodological issues discussed in the first part.

This work aims to study the role of Clarice Lispector as a “critic” in the translation of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), translated into French by Denise-Teresa Moutonnier, in 1954.  The  concept  of  “productive  criticism”  developed  by  Berman  (1995)  forms  a  sound theoretical framework for this thesis to analyze the corpus of errors highlighted by the writer in  this  first  French  version.  From  this  perspective,  in  the  first  chapter,  a  comprehensive reading of the article “Translating Attempting not to Betray” (1968), one of Lispector’s main reflections  on  the  craft  of  the  translator,  allowed  the  profile  of  the  writer  to  be  defined  as “theorist”  of  translation  of  dramaturgical  texts  in  the  light  of Think  Aloud  Protocols.  Her translation of the detective story “Three Blind Mice” by Agatha Christie, to which she refers in  the  article,  offers  a  relevant  supplementary  corpus  to  the  analyst,  examined  by  means  of distant reading, performed with the support of computer tools in order to define the effects of “condensation” of the text translated for mass literature (Reader’s Digest). The article further reveals  the  interpretation,  from  the  point  of  view of  Lispector,  of  her  own  works  translated into  German  and  English,  completing  the  Brazilian  writer’s  position  on  translation  and, consequently,  criticism.  This  thesis  focuses  mainly  on  the CRITICISM  OF  TRANSLATIONS,  as well  as,  in  the  second  chapter,  a  comprehensive  review  of  the  theoretical  essays  available  in the  field  of Translation  Studies,  such  as  those  of  Reiss  (1971),  Berman  (1995)  and Hewson (2011),  leading  to  the  establishment  of  an ad  hoc  reflective  model  to  develop  a productive critique  of  translation.  This  model  is  applied,  initially,  to  assess  the  translation  of  “The Missionary”,  by  Claude  Farrère  (1921),  performed  and  published  by  Lispector,  in  1941, contributing towards defining her profile as a translator and, therefore, translation critic. The reception of the translated work represents, in Chapter 3, a fundamental step in the conception of  Bermanian  criticism.  Accordingly,  two  texts  critical  of  the  reception  of  translation  in Switzerland (1954) and in France (1955) are analyzed, as well as those of the major Brazilian literary  critics  of  Lispector’s  debut  work  in  1943 and  1944,  in  order  to  comment,  from  a synchronic  perspective,  on  the  reflections  resulting  from  the  first  readings  of  this  work  in Portuguese and, a decade later, in French.  In Chapter 4, the letters Lispector exchanged with her  sisters  and  the  French  publisher  Plon,  that  invited  her  to  review  the  translated  work  in order  to  ensure  the  “fidelity  of  the  stylistic  structure”,  permitted  the  containment  of  the “scandal”  of  the  translation,  highlighted  by  the  author  herself,  with  the  aim  of  reflecting  on the concept of errors of/in translation. The application of the ad hoc critical model to the first chapters  of Near  to  the  Wild  Heart,  collated  with  the  respective  translations,  contributed towards  assessing  Lispector’s  critique  and  deliberating  the  anathemas  directed  at  the  first translator  of  her  work,  Denise-Teresa  Moutonnier.  To  complete  this  study,  a  reflection  on errors  and  accuracy  in  translation  was  implemented  from  a  philosophical  perspective (Spinoza)  and  from  the  point  of  view  of  professional  Brazilian  translators  in  the  twenty-first century, in order to highlight the relevance of these two concepts to the critique of productive translations. 

KEYWORDS:  Clarice  Lispector;  Brazilian  literature;  Translational  hermeneutics;  Criticism  of translations; Near to the Wild Heart; Digital humanities.

The aim of the study is to analyze the work of military cartographer Joseph Daniel Huber, the author of two important cartographic depictions of Prague in the second third of the 18th century, and to place it within the context of other “visual representations” of the city. In line with the dilemma of early modern cartography, Huber’s work can be seen as a bridge between the pragmatic work of the cartographer and the creative artifact produced by the artist. The study’s first part places his work within the context of Prague cartography at the time. Working on the basis of her previous studies – in which a cartometric analysis led to surprising conclusions as to the relationship between the two
maps that contradict the conclusions of the earlier literature (in particular J. Hofman) – the author provides an overview of hypotheses regarding the possible relationships between Huber’s Pragensia work and 18th-century maps of Prague and Bohemia.
The foundations for a detailed analysis of Huber’s work were laid in the 1920s and ’30s. This unfinished phase of research is no less important and makes Huber’s work attractive from the viewpoint of the historiography of Prague: 150 years after his death, Huber was
the reason for widespread disagreement and less than dignified rivalries that offer insight into the relationships among and working conditions of Pragensia researchers in the first half of the 20th century. This issue, which is important for understanding the significance of Huber’s work, forms the subject of the second part of the study. The study thus looks at Huber’s work from the viewpoint of a historian of cartography
– on the one hand, the author makes use of available analytical methods in order to understand his work; on the other hand, she describes it within the broad historical context of its era, thus emphasizing its social role. The maps cease to be mere sources of information about the city’s construction history and spatial layout, and become original works of art with specific fates of their own.