“A Nondescript Monster”: Fanny Fern in Transatlantic Print Culture

Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.

The Terrorist and the Girl Next Door: Love Jihad in French Femonationalist Nonfiction

This paper explores the theme of Love Jihad in “true sex crime” novels, French mass-market paperbacks where a journalist or author recounts the temoignage of women who suffered sexual violence at the hands of Muslim men. Semiotic analysis of visual and textual representations shows a melodramatic triangle of female victims, Muslim male perpetrators, and heroic readers. These stories reflect, dramatize, and sexualize broader social constructions of the monstrous Muslim; from Far-Right conspiracies of The Great Replacement to femonationalist debates about veils and republican values. In the final section, the paper explores how visual and verbal tropes from these popular discourses reappear in political speech and media from the National Rally.

Women, War and Words: a Verbal Archaeology of Shield-maidens

Scholarly discussions of the question of the participation of women in war in the Viking Age have based their arguments on a variety of evidence, including both archaeology and texts. However, even those scholars who make substantial use of the textual evidence have not paid sufficiently close attention to (a) the vocabulary used in the representations (whether historical or fictional) of women acting in the supposed male role of warrior and (b) the literary-historical contexts in which the texts were produced, including potential relationships between texts. To further these discussions, this paper proposes a method which might be called the ‘stratigraphy of texts’ to demonstrate how a careful sifting of the cumulative textual evidence can enrich discussion about this important question. With close attention to the vocabulary used by the texts, and by considering the date, genre and sources of, and – importantly – the relationships between, texts in Old Norse, the discussion will demonstrate what can and what cannot be deduced from these textual representations of female warriors in the Viking Age. The paper will focus on tracing the development of the Old Norse concept of the skjaldmær, ‘shield-maiden’, through a variety of texts in which this term occurs, and also suggest a probable origin for the concept. There will also be a brief consideration of the term ‘valkyrie’ (ON valkyrja).

Perplexity-based molecule ranking and bias estimation of chemical language models

Chemical language models (CLMs) can be employed to design molecules with desired properties. CLMs generate new chemical structures in the form of textual representations, such as the simplified molecular input line entry systems (SMILES) strings, in a rule-free manner. However, the quality of these de novo generated molecules is difficult to assess a priori. In this study, we apply the perplexity metric to determine the degree to which the molecules generated by a CLM match the desired design objectives. This model-intrinsic score allows identifying and ranking the most promising molecular designs based on the probabilities learned by the CLM. Using perplexity to compare “greedy” (beam search) with “explorative” (multinomial sampling) methods for SMILES generation, certain advantages of multinomial sampling become apparent. Additionally, perplexity scoring is performed to identify undesired model biases introduced during model training and allows the development of a new ranking system to remove those undesired biases.

Evaluation of JATSdecoder as an automated text extraction tool for statistical results in scientific reports

The extraction of statistical results in scientific reports is beneficial for checking studies on plausibility and reliability. The R package JATSdecoder supports the application of text mining approaches to scientific reports. Its function get.stats() extracts all reported statistical results from text and recomputes p values for most standard test results. The output can be reduced to results with checkable or computable p values only. In this article, get.stats()’s ability to extract, recompute and check statistical results is compared to that of statcheck, which is an already established tool. A manually coded data set, containing the number of statistically significant results in 49 articles, serves as an initial indicator for get.stats()’s and statcheck’s differing detection rates for statistical results. Further 13,531 PDF files by 10 mayor psychological journals, 18,744 XML documents by Frontiers of Psychology and 23,730 articles related to psychological research and published by PLoS One are scanned for statistical results with both algorithms. get.stats() almost replicates the manually extracted number of significant results in 49 PDF articles. get.stats() outperforms the statcheck functions in identifying statistical results in every included journal and input format. Furthermore, the raw results extracted by get.stats() increase statcheck’s detection rate. JATSdecoder’s function get.stats() is a highly general and reliable tool to extract statistical results from text. It copes with a wide range of textual representations of statistical standard results and recomputes p values for two- and one-sided tests. It facilitates manual and automated checks on consistency and completeness of the reported results within a manuscript.

Indonesian Mockery of the Dutch during the Indonesian Struggle to Maintain Independence (1945-1948)

Research on the struggle for Indonesian independence (1945-1949) and the harsh response of the Dutch to their former colony is abundant, with most studies focusing on the nature and forms of violence. One neglected area of research is how Indonesian nationalists represented the conflict in the form of mockery. This study intends to fill this gap by examining mocking textual representations of the Dutch, created and disseminated by Indonesians through print media. By 1945, the Indonesians had declared their independence and considered themselves fully capable of taking care of their new country. When the Dutch tried to take back rule in Indonesia, they were sarcastically accused of trying to recolonise Indonesia by cruel means. By contrasting the good ‘us’ with the bad ‘them’, mocking representations became a way for Indonesians to ridicule the Dutch. In these representations, the Dutch were portrayed as the people of a tiny country – compared to a large Indonesia – who were colonial-minded in an equal post-war world. Indonesians moreover emphasised the weak authority of the Dutch in Java and depicted them as perpetrators who falsely arrested innocent Indonesians, as producers of false propaganda, and as people who often boasted to be clever but actually lacked knowledge and were easily deceived by Indonesian fighters. This paper elucidates issues pertaining a type of representations that should be understood as an additional, yet often forgotten form of resistance against occupying foreign forces in the post-World War II era.De Indonesische onafhankelijkheidsstrijd (1945-1949) en de felle response van de Nederlanders op hun voormalige kolonie is veelvuldig onderzocht, waarbij de meeste studies zich richten op de aard en de vormen van geweld. Een grotendeels verwaarloosd onderzoeksgebied is de vraag hoe Indonesische nationalisten het conflict verbeeldden in de vorm van spot. Dit artikel tracht deze leemte te vullen en onderzoekt spottende tekstuele representaties van Nederlanders, gemaakt en verspreid door Indonesiërs via gedrukte media. In 1945 hadden de Indonesiërs de onafhankelijkheid uitgeroepen en achtten zij zichzelf volledig in staat om hun eigen land te besturen. Toen Nederland probeerde de macht in Indonesië terug te grijpen, gebruikten Indonesiërs sarcasme om te wijzen op de wrede acties van de Nederlanders in hun pogingen het land te herkoloniseren. Door de goede ‘wij’ te contrasteren met de slechte ‘zij’, werden spottende representaties een manier voor Indonesiërs om de Nederlanders belachelijk te maken. In deze voorstellingen werden de Nederlanders onder andere afgeschilderd als het volk van een piepklein land – vergeleken met het grote Indonesië – dat in het naoorlogse klimaat van gelijkwaardigheid vasthield aan koloniale gebruiken en denkpatronen. Daarnaast benadrukten Indonesiërs het zwakke gezag van de Nederlanders op Java en schilderden zij hen af als daders die ten onrechte onschuldige Indonesiërs arresteerden, als makers van valse propaganda, en als mensen die er prat op gingen slim te zijn, maar in werkelijkheid dom waren en makkelijk te misleiden waren door Indonesische strijders. Door te focussen op dergelijke humoristische, satirische representaties, analyseert dit artikel een belangrijke, maar vaak vergeten vorm van verzet tegen bezettende buitenlandse machten in het tijdperk na de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

Imagining the Anthropocene with the Wadden Sea

This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocene. The concept of the Anthropocene represents a challenge to the cultural imagination, as it draws together deep, geological time, recent and current events, and long futures; the geographical and generational implications of justice; and the profound entanglement of human progress with ecological decline. We argue that the cultural landscape of the Wadden Sea is a space in which these paradoxes and connections are made visible and material. Literary and artistic works engaged with the Wadden Sea display a critical awareness of Anthropocene entanglements: in our analysis, we explore visual and textual representations of the Wadden Sea and show how it serves as a site for the imagination of the past and future of our planet.

Representations of Museums and Museum Visits in Narrative Picturebooks

Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks to illuminate various aspects of visual and textual representations, this study analyses the ways museums, museum visits, and museum exhibits and activities are represented in contemporary narrative picturebooks featuring a child character going to a museum for a variety of reasons. Analysis of approximately fifty museum picturebooks using a multimodal content analysis tool led to the construction of findings in the following themes: representations of museums; representations of museum exhibits; museum visitors; reasons for museum visits; museum activities and events; children’s attitudes while visiting museums; and metaleptic transgressions in picturebook representations. The findings suggest the potential implications of these multimodal texts in the hands of teachers and young readers.