scholarly journals Pierre Lévy and the Future of Internet

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Massimo Lollini

Semantic Metadata, Humanist Computing and Digital Humanities, opens with an important interview with Pierre Lévy that reconstructs the key moments of his philosophical vision of the internet, and the World Wide Web, up to his most recent and highly innovative proposal of the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML). In the “Interventions” section our journal features an important reflection by Dino Buzzetti on the distinction between Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities. The essay, originally published in Italian, critically supports the rationales behind Humanities Computing, characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Buzzetti reconstructs accurately the history of this idea starting from the seminal works of scholars like Jean- Claude Gardin, who underlined the need for an awareness that computation applied to the humanities requires both representation (data structures), and information processing (algorithms). The three projects that are introduced in the third part of the journal respond differently to the theoretical solicitations presented in the first two sections. Following the categories of Pierre Lévy, we should say that, even if in a different way, all three projects are the product of a collective intelligence and at the same time contribute to expand the knowledge of a physical territory (in the case of Noisemakers! and of The Dialogues Bioregional Project) or of a literary tradition (in the case of #LauraSpeaks), making the process of their digital processing transparent.

Author(s):  
Evgeny P. Alekseev ◽  

This review examines Art of Comprehending Art, a collection of scholarly articles based on the materials of the conference Historical and Theoretical Issues of Art Studies: For N. A. Dmitrieva’s 100th Birthday (held on April 24–25, 2017 at the State Institute of Art Studies of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation). The first part of the collection presents colleagues’ memories about N. A. Dmitrieva’s work revealing various facets of her talent. In the second part of the book, scholarly articles by contemporary art historians are devoted to the issues that N. A. Dmitrieva examined, i.e. the history of art criticism and art education in Russia, theoretical and methodological issues (image and word, issues of interpretation, kitsch), the creative work of P. Picasso, M. Vrubel, and A. Chekhov. The third section contains fragments of N. A. Dmitrieva’s diary, as well as two previously unpublished articles.


Author(s):  
Matthew L. Jockers

This chapter discusses the enormous promise of computational approaches to the study of literature, with particular emphasis on digital humanities as an emerging field. By 2008 computers, with their capacity for number crunching and processing large-scale data sets, had revolutionized the way that scientific research is carried out. Now, the same elements that have had such an impact on the sciences are slowly and surely revolutionizing the way that research in the humanities gets done. This chapter considers the history of digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, community of practice, or field of study/theory/methodology, and how revolution in this emerging field is being catalyzed by big data. It also emphasizes the potential of literary computing and cites the existence of digital libraries and large electronic text collections as factors that are sparking the digital humanities revolution.


Author(s):  
Niels Ole Finnemann

<p class="p1">This article discusses digital humanities and the growing diversity of digital media, digital materials and digital methods. The first section describes the humanities computing tradition formed around the interpretation of computation as a rule-based process connected to a concept of digital materials centred on the digitisation of non-digital, finite works, corpora and oeuvres. The second section discusses “the big tent” of contemporary digital humanities. It is argued that there can be no unifying interpretation of digital humanities above the level of studying digital materials with the help of software-supported methods. This is so, in part, because of the complexity of the world and, in part, because digital media remain open to the projection of new epistemologies onto the functional architecture of these media. The third section discusses the heterogeneous character of digital materials and proposes that the study of digital materials should be established as a field in its own right.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline T. Schroeder

Although the study of the Bible was central to early Humanities Computing efforts, now Biblical Studies and Religious Studies are marginal disciplines in the emerging field known as Digital Humanities (English, History, Library Science, for example, are much more influential in DH.) This paper explores two questions: First, what does it mean for Biblical Studies to be marginal to the Digital Humanities when DH is increasingly seen as the locus of as transformation in the humanities? Second, how can our expertise in Biblical Studies influence and shape Digital Humanities for the better? Digital Humanities, I argue, constitutes a powerful emerging field with which Biblical Studies and Religious Studies must engage as critical participants or analysts. Moreover, our own field’s expertise on the history of canon, orthodoxy, and commentary can contribute to shaping a more inclusive and self-critical Digital Humanities.


Author(s):  
Simon Burrows ◽  
Michael Falk

The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.


Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Sexton

Euston Films was the first film subsidiary of a British television company that sought to film entirely on location. To understand how the ‘televisual imagination’ changed and developed in relationship to the parent institution's (Thames Television) economic and strategic needs after the transatlantic success of its predecessor, ABC Television, it is necessary to consider how the use of film in television drama was regarded by those working at Euston Films. The sources of realism and development of generic verisimilitude found in the British adventure series of the early 1970s were not confined to television, and these very diverse sources both outside and inside television are well worth exploring. Thames Television, which was formed in 1968, did not adopt the slickly produced adventure series style of ABC's The Avengers, for example. Instead, Thames emphasised its other ABC inheritance – naturalistic drama in the form of the studio-based Armchair Theatre – and was to give the adventure series a strong London lowlife flavour. Its film subsidiary, Euston Films, would produce ‘gritty’ programmes such as the third and fourth series of Special Branch. Amid the continuities and tensions between ABC and Thames, it is possible to discern how economic and technological changes were used as a cultural discourse of value that marks the production of Special Branch as a key transformative moment in the history of British television.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Hiarnovich

The paper explores the displace of Polish archives from the Soviet Union that was performed in 1920s according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 and other international agreements. The aim of the research is to reconstruct the process of displace, based on the archival sources and literature. The object of the research is those documents that were preserved in the archives of Belarus and together with archives from other republics were displaced to Poland. The exploration leads to clarification of the selection of document fonds to be displaced, the actual process of movement and the explanation of the role that the archivists of Belarus performed in the history of cultural relationships between Poland and the Soviet Union. The articles of the Treaty of Riga had been formulated without taking into account the indivisibility of archive fonds that is one of the most important principles of restitution, which caused the failure of the treaty by the Soviet part.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Rosemary Hicks

A review essay devoted to Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2005. 256 pages. Hb. $29.95/£22.50, ISBN-13: 9780195180817.


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