Defining Jewish Holiness in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah through Distant Reading: Sanctifying Bodily Practices Vs the Entirety of Proper Performance

The digital humanities (DH) is currently in the phase of the “hype cycle” known as the “trough of disillusionment.” Franco Moretti, perhaps the most prominent practitioner of the most prominent discipline of DH—“distant reading,” the computational analysis of large quantities of literary texts—recently expressed his exasperation with the state of DH, reflecting “our work could have been better” and asking why, “considering the amount of energy, talent, and tools, going into [DH], that we have such difficulty producing great results.” Surveying leading recent work in distant reading by Moretti, Matthew L. Jockers, Laura Mandell, Ryan Heuser, Long Le‐Khac, and Joanna Swafford, this paper provides a twofold explanation to the field's failure to produce “great results.” Both explanations relate to “validation,” the process by which quantitative results are shown to be reliable and trustworthy. Many distant reading projects have produced disappointing results because they have been more interested in validating their tools—showing that their computational methods are able to confirm existing stereotypes—than in pursuing genuine discoveries. Many others, meanwhile, produce provocative results that cannot be meaningfully validated. Although the double bind of validation is real, I propose collaboration and “interdisciplinary adaptation” as promising solutions.

This paper analyses the use of the signifier "dignity" (and others related) in the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the year 2018 in order to detect and show different meanings. To do so, two ways of approaching are used: a distant reading tool (Voyant Tools) that will let characterize the corpus and a database and an app created by a research team that facilitate the graphical visualization and the systematization of literal formulas. The aim is to show how a distant reading and informatics resources may let us to have a quick image of a large number of texts and pages before deciding a deep read. The paper describes: 1) the corpus and the criteria to select documents and the analysis methodology; 2) the description of the corpus according to the distant reading made by Voyant Tools; 3) the uses of the term “dignity” and related 4) frequent formulas that show in context how “dignity” (and related terms) is used. Finally, we discuss the utility of a distant reading for doing research with a large corpus.

The boundaries of literary genres have long been contested. Stylometric investigations of genres — for example, to identify genre through distant reading — is by no means a new area for research. Computational methods are especially useful for large corpora that have not previously been the subject of many enquiries. This might mean the work of a non-canonical author or work that has not been published. Both are true of the primary text used in this paper: a notebook of anecdotes kept by Frances Eleanor Trollope between January 1879 and March 1890. These anecdotes were written in a prose style but were only intended for the consumption of family. While these methods have been used to analyze unpublished works the aim of this research is often to attribute authorship. This paper uses stylometry to compare Trollopewith her published works of both fiction and non-fiction.

By incorporating computational methods into reading literary texts, this study examines the literary implications of the ‘vocabulary density’ and frequency of nouns and adjectives in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. This study analyzes 4,689,655 words from forty-seven poets available on Project Gutenberg, a catalog spanning from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The data illustrate both the continuity and discontinuity found in English and American poetry dependent on conventional divisions between literary movements: eighteenth century, Romanticism, Imagism, and Modernism. The findings shed light on the similarities and differences between Eliot’s poetry and others’, particularly in terms of Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘modern epic’ and his methodology of ‘distant reading’. Through this combined quantitative and qualitative research, this article ultimately upholds the notion that the linguistic distinction of Eliot’s high modernist poetry lies, by and large, in his use of invented and equivocal words that reflects and represents an artistic response to modern human, cultural, social conditions, and experiment with poetic diction and polyphonic voice in the early twentieth century.

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

This paper examines some of the issues surrounding this ‘computational turn’ and proposes a ‘human focused’ approach. It begins by addressing questions concerning whether there is a need empirical evidence in literary studies, and the roles played by human and technical agents in interpretative practices. It adopts Don Ihde Postphenomenological ideas (especially ‘embodiment’ and ‘hermeneutics’ human-technology relations) to expatiate on the nature of relationship that exists between a literary scholar and a computational tool during interpretative practices. On one hand, it uses postphenomenomelogy as a theoretical framework to provides rich conceptual terminologies by which we could interrogate humanists-computer relationship within the practice of computational textual analysis. And on the other hand, uses postphenomenology method to highlight the notion of subjectivity in contrast to the promise of observer-independent objectivity. The research appraise the impact of quantification and visualizations in literary studies using the research output of Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Lit Lab, as well as performs textual experimentation on some corpora using Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell’s Voyant tools and Python NLP packages. But refutes the idea that quantification and visualization of textual data with the use of computational tools and methods could guarantee objectivity of textual interpretation in literary studies. The argument in this paper is divided across its three sections: The first section discusses the goal of reading; it concerns ‘Close reading’ and ‘Distant reading’. The second section questions the possibility of objectivity in textual interpretation using quantifiable and visual evidence provided as the output of the computational analysis of humanistic texts. Then, in the third section defends the following claims: a) the human person is the principal actor in the interpretation process, and all other forms of representation or visualisation of the text are meant to aid humans; b. data in the humanities are not limited to printed texts, but include digitised, born-digital and electronic text in various digital forms (images, sounds, videos, etc.); c. the humanities aim more at interpretive practices than a quest for verifiable knowledge; d. interpretative practices in the humanities focus on humans and their experiences; e. attention must be drawn to human developers' subjectivity whenever we are using computational interpretative tools – on the ground that this will help in bracketing of our biases, prejudices, preconceptions, and theoretical frameworks. The paper concludes with the argument that computational tools used for textual analysis in the humanities need interpretation as they are not neutral in hermeneutic practices. It argues that the humans involved in the creation of those tools are prone to errors, have preferences, and incorporate their subjective ideas into developmental processes. Then proposes ‘Hermeneutical Postphenomenology’ as an ideal lens through which the claim to objectivity could be debunked. Then recommends that our productivity in textual scholarship can be enriched when we understand the true nature of the relationship between the human inquirer and technical agents within the cognitive assemblage.

This chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2019. Key work published this year has grappled with longstanding conflicts at the heart of the field, on whether and how computational methods should be applied to humanities data, and who should validate such methodologies. The chapter begins with new work by Ted Underwood, who makes the case for hypothesis-driven methods and the modelling of humanities data. It discusses how recent work in computational literary studies had appeared to resist the trap into which much previous work had fallen, that is, work that was perceived to fall into the binaries of distant vs. close reading, computation vs. engagement, objectivity vs. subjectivity. The continued friction over the appropriateness of certain computational methodological approaches was amplified by new work that called into question the statistical methods of a number of key works in the field over past years. Nan Z. Da’s critique of computational literary studies through the lens of statistical rigour imploded the uneasy truce between computational methods and the more traditional questions and methods at the heart of literary studies. Da’s article reopens the debate about how digital humanities scholars use statistical methods, and how greater reliance on such methods may demand greater cross-disciplinary oversight to ensure that they are used in a way that is both robust and appropriate. Her contribution is examined alongside the rash of responses to it from key scholars in the field which produced an important snapshot of the fractures and fundamentals of data-driven literary studies. I then turn to new and timely work by James E. Dobson, which argues for a third way, a Critical Digital Humanities that engages critically with computational as well as humanistic scholarship.I survey important contributions on the impact of mass digitization, historicism and the archive, and how to study history in the age of digital archives and the historic web. Ian Milligan’s work provides a much-needed introduction to the potentials and pitfalls of studying recent history through the digital traces left behind. It self-consciously identifies areas in which greater cross-disciplinary scholarship and critical engagement will be needed as this area of study matures. Discussion then turns to work by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on digital waste, which shows how connecting new media theory to waste studies can provide an important frame through which to examine issues of data toxicity and pollution. This work sets the stage for two landmark books on sex and race which implore us to take a more careful look at the toxic technologies we build and the questions we ask of them. Both Caroline Criado Perez and Ruha Benjamin examine the damage done by the reliance of data systems on the ‘default’, frequently a white male, forcing us to see anything that departs from this norm as deviant. These works make a powerful case for reinventing the systems we increasingly rely on, questioning the underlying prejudice that created them, and rethinking the modes of meaning-making ascribed to them, especially when that narrative so often assumes a benign neutrality. Finally, I examine these works alongside a new volume of essays on digital humanities and intersectionality edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam, which serves to amplify and contextualize the need for the approaches taken by Criado Perez and Benjamin, showing how deeply enmeshed within the field these power structures are.

This volume utilizes Catherine Bell’s ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bell’s theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and other early Christian literature. The contributors to this volume illustrate a path away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behaviour. In this volume, as each scholar works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts are consciously employed to guide or challenge the investigation, pushing beyond previous conclusions about ancient rituals. The contributors’ attention to theory, and especially the social context, practical function, and symbolic interpretation, set this collection apart from studies that consider the rituals in more traditional textual ways. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for understanding religions as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating them. Foremost among the ritual theorists of the time was Catherine Bell, whose thinking continues to be used widely to study rituals. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This volume utilizes Bell’s theorizing to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient texts of the biblical world and thus differs from existing, more conventional studies of such rituals. Bell’s theoretical concepts, which she presented in two often-cited volumes (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions), provide the point of departure for this collection of essays, especially her notions of ritualization and the ritual body. Such concepts direct scholars away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behavior. In this volume, as each contributor works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts articulated by Bell are deployed to guide the investigation and move beyond existing understandings of the rituals of the ancient biblical world

This article presents a comprehensive overview of the Intertextual Hub, an innovative digital platform designed to facilitate intertextual studies of 18th-century French literature. The platform leverages sophisticated computational methods such as text mining, natural language processing, or machine learning to enable a comprehensive analysis of extensive textual data, a series of approaches known as ‘distant reading’. The Hub incorporates various digital resources, including a vast collection of 18th-century French literary works, laws, decrees and revolutionary pamphlets, all of which are intended to provide a nuanced understanding of the intellectual and cultural landscape of the era. One of the notable challenges the Hub addresses is the disparity in digitisation quality and the inherent differences among various text collections. These challenges include variations in text formats, inconsistencies in metadata, and the diverse nature of the source materials, which range from literary works to official documents. The Hub’s modular architecture, built on the PhiloLogic text analysis engine, accommodates these variances by providing a unified experience for each collection. Researchers are presented with different entry points to explore the multifaceted nature of intertextuality in the period. The platform’s close reading interface is a pivotal aspect, facilitating an immersive and interconnected research experience through guided text exploration. By combining close and distant reading perspectives, users can seamlessly navigate between individual and larger groups of texts through shared themes, concepts or references, thus bridging the gap between these two different modes of reading. In short, the Intertextual Hub aims to foster a deeply interconnected research experience that enhances the understanding of the 18th-century corpus and the intellectual exchanges that shaped the period.

This chapter examines Emerson’s prose publications using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), a large language model that performs well in Natural Language Understanding tasks. Conventional “distant reading” typically represents a corpus through token frequencies. By contrast, BERT analyzes relationships between words at a granular and contextual level, thus approaching semantic understanding. In applying computational techniques to Emerson’s prose corpus, this chapter considers an array of questions: How do Emerson’s references to people, places, and organizations change over the course of his career? What does the clustering of Emerson’s references to other thinkers reveal about his understanding of intellectual history? How might his references to people and places relate to his views of the slavery crisis and non-Western nations? With an eye toward Emerson’s complex relationship to the rise of quantification in his own era, this chapter tests how well computational methods can illuminate Emerson’s work.

Digital methodologies that revolve around the study of text have become popular in humanities disciplines such as literature and history. The potential for studying large groups of text automatically through techniques like text mining has meant that Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” has found more and more proponents. Art history, however, presents some unique barriers to uptake in computational techniques, not least the resistance of art historians, who have raised legitimate concerns about the relevance of such techniques. Many so-called “digital art history” projects focus only on formal characteristics while ignoring context, which does not reflect the nature of art historical study in the last 60 years. The technical challenges of using digital methodologies in the study of art and visual culture have limited the potential benefits of such techniques as well: the methodologies used for images are more complex than text recognition and there is simply not enough preexisting data that needs to be sorted in this way.

Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-making. We examine different probabilistic topics related to film (and media) that the algorithm within the topic modeling software Mallet extracted from the immense text corpora of all these Official Reports. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Basically, it is a research tool for the discovery of hidden semantic structures, exploring a collection through the underlying topics that run through it. Hence, our article captures a number of film discourses and trends within the SOU material. In conclusion, we argue that topic modeling should be recognized as a method and research aid for gathering an overview of a major material; as a way to pose new and unforeseen research questions; and as a kind of computational support that makes it possible to apprehend major patterns more or less impossible to detect through a traditional archival investigation.

The family institution is one of the most important social institutions that begin with marriage, so marriage has a fundamental and fundamental importance since the foundation's opening ceremony, and the foundation of the family is laid in marriage. If the marriage is successful, it helps a lot in psychosocial development. The success of marriage depends on the level of readiness of individuals for marriage and their realistic understanding of marital relationships. Couples' relationship has unique characteristics that awareness and acceptance of these characteristics by the couple can contribute to the success of marriage (Nazari, 2007). It is not advisable to achieve mutual maturity in marriage and marital satisfaction in most cases, but with regard to factors affecting marital satisfaction, we can expect that by increasing the level of marital satisfaction and mental health, many psychological, emotional and social problems (Mazarei, 2009). The description of the obsessive-compulsive disorder since its inception, by Scirol (1838) has not changed so far. This disorder is introduced with various titles such as obsessive compulsive disorder, Norouz or obsessive compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder is determined by intrusive thoughts, mental images and compulsive behaviors. Mandatory practices include obvious rituals (such as frequent washing of hands & checking behaviors) and subtle rituals; These two types of ritual are considered here as despicable behaviors. Revised Text The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) defines obsessive-compulsive disorder as recognizing the predictive ways that differs from over-concern concerns about real life issues. This refers to the differentiation of obsessive-compulsive thoughts from the concerns that are common in anxiety disorder.Problem statementThe study of the history of mental disorders shows that these disorders have always been and are human beings, and humans resort to appropriate and inappropriate ways to prevent and treat it. One of these disorders is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which has an adverse effect on the psychosocial and economic performance of the individual and even the family, especially marital satisfaction. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): An OCD is a chronic anxiety disorder that is associated with extreme mental employment in the order and the affairs, as well as in perfection, to a degree that results in loss of flexibility, clarity, and efficiency (Kaplan & Saduk, 2010). Another definition of this disorder is that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common heterogeneous mental disorder with thoughts and actions. Obsessive compulsive disorder involves disturbing thoughts, recurrences, and unwanted continuous thoughts.Statistical societyThe statistical population of this study included all paired individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder referring to Shiraz clinics in 2014.MethodThe present research is based on descriptive-cross-sectional research with respect to its objectives and its nature, using correlation method in the form of a pre-design.ParticipantsIn this research, 60 people who referred to health centers were selected using purposeful sampling method. They were selected based on a questionnaire, structured clinical interview and obsessive-compulsory psychiatrist's opinion. Referring to psychiatric centers, Hafez Hospital and Imam Reza Clinic (AS) their statistics were reviewed.Information gathering toolEnrich Marital Satisfaction Inventory (1989): This questionnaire has been used as a valid research tool in numerous surveys to measure marital satisfaction.Information gathering toolEnrich Marital Satisfaction Inventory (1989): This questionnaire has been used as a valid research tool in numerous surveys to measure marital satisfaction. …

The article provides an outline of the prospects for the development of the digital humanities in the context of the work of the Italian-American literary theorist and sociologist Franco Moretti (b. 1950). Moretti’s methodology is given the most at­tention, it is presented as a complex of interrelated methods. The theory of cul­tural evolution, world-systems analysis, cultural geography, computational criti­cism of the digital humanities and distant reading are considered in detail. Moretti takes literary forms as an analogue of biological species and shows what cultural niches they occupy, how certain forms survive, how they interbreed with each other, how “unadapted” forms die off and what influences all these pro­cesses. Modern technologies make it possible to work with big data, and this provides new material for research (quantitative aspect), and also changes the ob­ject of research (qualitative aspect). Using cartographic and statistical methods, as well as the method of world-system analysis, Moretti shows that the study of world literature becomes the study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony in the world. The world-system approach in relation to literature and, more broadly, to culture as a whole makes it possible to understand exactly how the unity of world literature is combined with its unevenness and heteroge­neity. Therefore, the researcher’s field of vision includes not only established cultural forms (canon), but also what has been discarded by cultural evolution (the “Great Unread”), and this significantly changes the entire cultural picture of the world. Distant reading problematizes the value of the literary canon, strives for the maximum and exhaustive coverage of the corpus of texts.

臺灣南島語族的海洋文化，不只達悟人有，阿美人也有，相較之下，阿美人的海洋文化長期是被忽略的。本論文我要處理串連花蓮港口阿美人從過去到現在記憶的「海岸空間」。空間中的記憶是人們持續在空間中互動所產生的歷史結果。港口阿美人與海岸空間互動所產生的記憶，不僅與祭儀有關，也與身體實踐有密切且實質的關係。筆者從以下三大軸線論述港口海岸空間中的記憶，即海岸地名、海祭以及海岸空間中的身體實踐： 首先，海岸空間的歷史化論述，討論的就是海岸空間中的記憶。文獻上未曾出現港口的海岸地名，地名指涉的無論是潛出海平面的礁岩、區段或是地點等，皆是港口阿美人在海岸空間中歷經時間過程，具體體現的記憶標記，這些地名承載著港口阿美人從小到大的共同記憶與情感。 海岸地名，呈現出港口阿美人內在文化邏輯，對於海岸空間的認知、命名與敘事。依據港口阿美人的敘事，進一步顯現出有別於過去文獻，記載著對於海岸地景的文化想像。當地人對於海岸地景的想像，大多是以日常生活經驗指涉具體可見的物。港口阿美人回應當代社會、政治、經濟環境變遷對外發聲時，會使用其中一海岸地名，做為宣告港口阿美人自我認同與文化表徵的現代符碼。 除此之外，海祭舉行的空間不是固定的，早期以具有公共空間功能的集會所為主要舉行場所，然而，隨著傳統集會所建築物的消失。之後，海祭舉行空間曾轉移至海岸多處。舉行海祭的過程往往扣連當地人認為過去是如何進行海祭的記憶。籌備海祭過程的海洋生物分類，反映出港口阿美人對於漁獲物的評價，受到物以稀為貴、不易取得以及市場價格三者影響。日常生活中無論男女都有在海岸空間進行的活動，採集與漁獵活動不受性別的限制。 最後，關於海岸空間中的記憶與身體實踐。筆者從身體的感官認知與身體技能，討論港口阿美人在海岸空間中的身體實踐。阿美人身處於海岸空間發展出不同的感官認知，表現在視覺、聽覺、味覺。日常生活港口阿美人在海岸空間習以從事的採集與漁獵活動，這些豐富且活絡的身體活動，亦即阿美海洋文化的身體技能。港口阿美人日常生活大量食用從海岸處取得的海洋生物，當海岸空間中的海洋生物轉換為日常生活食物，因食物進入身體養成的飲食習慣，牽繫著原鄉或是出外的港口阿美人群與海岸空間產生的共同記憶。