scholarly journals Exploring Literary Landscapes: From Texts to Spatiotemporal Analysis through Collaborative Work and GIS

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Alves ◽  
Ana Isabel Queiroz

This article argues that the study of literary representations of landscapes can be aided and enriched by the application of digital geographic technologies. As an example, the article focuses on the methods and preliminary findings of LITESCAPE.PT—Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Mainland Portugal, an on-going project that aims to study literary representations of mainland Portugal and to explore their connections with social and environmental realities both in the past and in the present. LITESCAPE.PT integrates traditional reading practices and ‘distant reading’ approaches, along with collaborative work, relational databases, and geographic information systems (GIS) in order to classify and analyse excerpts from 350 works of Portuguese literature according to a set of ecological, socioeconomic, temporal and cultural themes. As we argue herein this combination of qualitative and quantitative methods—itself a response to the difficulty of obtaining external funding—can lead to (a) increased productivity, (b) the pursuit of new research goals, and (c) the creation of new knowledge about natural and cultural history. As proof of concept, the article presents two initial outcomes of the LITESCAPE.PT project: a case study documenting the evolving literary geography of Lisbon and a case study exploring the representation of wolves in Portuguese literature.

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Amy Cross ◽  
Cherie Allan ◽  
Kerry Kilner

This paper examines the effects of curatorial processes used to develop children's literature digital research projects in the bibliographic database AustLit. Through AustLit's emphasis on contextualising individual works within cultural, biographical, and critical spaces, Australia's literary history is comprehensively represented in a unique digital humanities space. Within AustLit is BlackWords, a project dedicated to recording Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling, publishing, and literary cultural history, including children's and young adult texts. Children's literature has received significant attention in AustLit (and BlackWords) over the last decade through three projects that are documented in this paper. The curation of this data highlights the challenges in presenting ‘national’ literatures in countries where minority voices were (and perhaps continue to be) repressed and unseen. This paper employs a ‘resourceful reading’ approach – both close and distant reading methods – to trace the complex and ever-evolving definition of ‘Australian children's literature’.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Safoi Babana-Hampton

The essay examines the texts of the two women writers - Leila Abouzeid (from Morocco) and Nawal El Saadawi (from Egypt) - as offering two female perspectives within what is commonly referred to as "feminine" writing in the Arab Muslim world. My main interest is to explore the various discursive articulations of female identity that are challenged or foregrounded as a positive model. The essay points to the serious pitfalls of some feminist narratives in Arab-Muslim societies by dealing with a related problem: the author's setting up of convenient conceptual dichotomies, which account for the female experience, that reduce male-female relationships in the given social context to a fundamentally antagonistic one. Abouzeid's novel will be a case study of a more positive but also realistic and complex perspec­tive on female experience ...


2021 ◽  
pp. 0734242X2110031
Author(s):  
Ana Pires ◽  
Paula Sobral

A complete understanding of the occurrence of microplastics and the methods to eliminate their sources is an urgent necessity to minimize the pollution caused by microplastics. The use of plastics in any form releases microplastics to the environment. Existing policy instruments are insufficient to address microplastics pollution and regulatory measures have focussed only on the microbeads and single-use plastics. Fees on the use of plastic products may possibly reduce their usage, but effective management of plastic products at their end-of-life is lacking. Therefore, in this study, the microplastic–failure mode and effect analysis (MP–FMEA) methodology, which is a semi-qualitative approach capable of identifying the causes and proposing solutions for the issue of microplastics pollution, has been proposed. The innovative feature of MP–FMEA is that it has a pre-defined failure mode, that is, the release of microplastics to air, water and soil (depending on the process) or the occurrence of microplastics in the final product. Moreover, a theoretical recycling plant case study was used to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of this method. The results revealed that MP–FMEA is an easy and heuristic technique to understand the failure-effect-causes and solutions for reduction of microplastics and can be applied by researchers working in different domains apart from those relating to microplastics. Future studies can include the evaluation of the use of MP–FMEA methodology along with quantitative methods for effective reduction in the release of microplastics.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Fenli Chen ◽  
Mingjun Zhang ◽  
Athanassios A. Argiriou ◽  
Shengjie Wang ◽  
Qian Ma ◽  
...  

The deuterium excess in precipitation is an effective indicator to assess the existence of sub-cloud evaporation of raindrops. Based on the synchronous measurements of stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen (δ2H and δ18O) in precipitation for several sites in Lanzhou, western China, spanning for approximately four years, the variations of deuterium excess between the ground and the cloud base are evaluated by using a one-box Stewart model. The deuterium excess difference below the cloud base during summer (−17.82‰ in Anning, −11.76‰ in Yuzhong, −21.18‰ in Gaolan and −12.41‰ in Yongdeng) is greater than that in other seasons, and difference in winter is weak due to the low temperature. The variations of deuterium excess in precipitation due to below-cloud evaporation are examined for each sampling site and year. The results are useful to understand the modification of raindrop isotope composition below the cloud base at a city scale, and the quantitative methods provide a case study for a semi-arid region at the monsoon margin.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110299
Author(s):  
Cong Zhang ◽  
Rui Yuan

The differences of linguistic features between Chang Hen Ge ( Ge) and Chang Hen Ge Zhuan ( Zhuan) have rarely been mentioned in the relevant fields. Nevertheless, these differences can best highlight the specialness of poetry, for the two works were written contemporaneously by two friends on the same subject, in distinct styles. This article employs quantitative methods and indicators to provide empirical evidence for the specialness of Ge through comparisons between the two. The results show that, on the premise of expressing the same subject in different styles, Ge does have certain linguistic characteristics compared with Zhuan. Its particularity is reflected not only in fewer repeat characters and words but also in their richness, as well as in the use of more content words and fewer function words. Moreover, all of these characteristics have had a great influence on Ge’s artistic level and dissemination. Through this study, we hope that our methods provide a new perspective and shed some light on this area.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-333
Author(s):  
Alena Pfoser ◽  
Sara de Jong

Artist–academic collaborations are fuelled by increasing institutional pressures to show the impact of academic research. This article departs from the celebratory accounts of collaborative work and pragmatic toolkits for successful partnerships, which are dominant in existing scholarship, arguing for the need to critically interrogate the structural conditions under which collaborations take place. Based on a reflexive case study of a project developed in the context of Tate Exchange, one of the UK’s highest-profile platforms for knowledge exchange, we reveal three sets of (unequal) pressures, which mark artist–academic collaborations in the contemporary neoliberal academy: asymmetric funding and remuneration structures; uneven pressures of audit cultures; acceleration and temporal asymmetries. Innovations at the level of individual projects or partners can only mitigate the negative effects to a limited extent. Instead this article offers a systemic critique of the political economy of artist–academic collaborations and shifts the research agenda to developing a collective response.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 383-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar Jimenez ◽  
João Claro ◽  
Jorge Pinho de Sousa
Keyword(s):  

2014 ◽  
Vol 513-517 ◽  
pp. 3228-3232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Li Tao ◽  
Yong Ping Bai

Wetlands play a number of roles in the environment, which are also considered the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems. Utilizing RS and the GIS software, remote datum were matched and classified. By these transactions, the temporal and spatial changes of wetland landscape are explored in Wuhu, combining qualitative analysis and quantitative methods. This paper analyzed the time-spatial revolution process which indicated that, firstly the area of wetland reduced rapidly from remote sensing image in 1988, 2001 and 2005, secondly the exterior of urban changed acutely and the interior were protected well in view of spatial pattern. Moreover, driving force factors were pointed out. Human activities, especially urbanization were the main causes of wetlands degradation. Simultaneity, the development of farming, the construction of infrastructure and nature were important factors. Owing to rapid economic development and urban sprawling, wetlands are encountering threaten to be converting to other land uses. Thus, the paper provides policy advices for wetland conservation and urban planning toward sustainable development.


Author(s):  
Lies Wesseling

This article probes the extent to which literary history and cultural history may mutuallyilluminate each other, without neglecting the poetic dimension of literary works. Thispoetic dimension is embedded within the genre repertoires that shape the production andreception of literary works. One should therefore take into close account that the literaryrepresentation of social conflict is always deflected by the prism of genre conventions.Focusing on the case study of the Dutch Gothic novel, I argue that Gothic tales provide aspecific take on the post-war modernization of the Netherlands. As such, they make avaluable contribution to historical debates about the periodization of the sixties andseventies, not in spite of, but because of their specific poetic properties. Thus, it is verywell possible to bring literary works to bear upon the discussion of historical issueswithout either infringing upon the relative autonomy of the literary system or neglectingthe specific expertise of literary studies as a discipline in its own rights.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document