Humanities Scholars Research Articles

ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНЫЕ ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ САЙТА «ПОСТНАУКА» В ИЗУЧЕНИИ ИСТОРИИ ЗАПАДНОЕВРОПЕЙСКОГО СРЕДНЕВЕКОВЬЯ В ВУЗАХ

This article discusses the PostNauka’s educational potential for studying medieval Western European history and describes the main features distinguishing it from other e-learning projects. A new and widely distributing information culture has developed in humanities scholarship because of the rapid Internet evolution. Online research and educational resources have become an integral part of studying in universities, including historical ones. Among such resources, the PostNauka project stands out. It aims to provide access to solid data on a variety of ideas and concepts. Here, we classify and summarize its content on medieval history using the examples of several annotated indexes of the video lectures on the Middle Ages in Western Europe that are arranged based on the chronological, problem- and topic-related, cultural, and personal principles. Possible benefits from using the materials and courses of this project while studying medieval history and historiography are considered. The best ways to organize interaction during seminars on the historiography of the Middle Ages are singled out. The analysis shows that the PostNauka’s lectures are both popular and reliable because of the professionalism of the lecturers who cover a range of urgent topics by telling gripping and evidence-based stories at convenient timing. The conclusion is made that using the PostNauka’s materials for studying is a good chance to gain stable knowledge on the history of a particular period, and it also helps students to develop skills in applying this source (video lectures) for writing their reports, term and graduation theses, as well as for compiling annotated catalogs.

Introducing the Medieval Ass by Kathryn L. Smithies

Reviewed by: Introducing the Medieval Ass by Kathryn L. Smithies Gwendolyn Inocencio Kathryn L. Smithies, Introducing the Medieval Ass ( Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), 163 pp., 7 ills. Kathryn L. Smithies, a medieval historian at the University of Melbourne, presents a concise history of the medieval ass as the second book in the University of Wales Press series on Medieval Animals edited by Diane Heath and Victoria Blud. The series touts itself as the first to mine the "roles and perceptions of individual animals during the Middle Ages" (viii). Smithies follows Thomas Honegger, who contributed the first book in the series, Introducing the Medieval Dragon (2019), and precedes Natalie Jayne Goodison's Introducing the Medieval Swan (2022). Like Honegger and Goodison, Smithies performs the goal of the series, which is to locate a specific animal from the fifth to sixteenth centuries, follow its rich historical and cultural influences, and explore its presence in various theological, philosophical, and political moments. Additionally, she notes the important role that asses play within the tensions of such moments and how they suffuse, deflate, or highlight nuances within cultural frames. Smithies charts lasting resonances and refines and builds knowledge of animals as persuasive symbols, metaphors, and teachers through their illustrative use in a range of textual contexts. Ultimately, this series and Smithies's work on the ass contribute to the "animal turn" in critical theory and humanities scholarship, animality studies, and animal studies. As a result, the ubiquity of animals in the history of rhetoric emerges. In her introduction, Smithies names the paradoxical rhetoric and the "contesting reputations" of the ass featured in four sections that highlight various medieval beast genres (6). She also defines her terms. Though English speakers know the ass as a donkey, "the medieval world knew the ass by its Latin name—asinus" (8). Using this rationale for the term, she then lists the multiple iterations of [End Page 274] the ass for discussion: the domestic ass, the wild ass (onager), the hybrid ass (mule), and the mythical ass (onocentaur). Smithies's first section, "The Natural World of the Ass," situates the ass in nature, showing it removed from the wild and placed within human culture to perform, accompany, and serve. When medieval authors then transfer the domesticated ass into the symbolic structure of communication, its symbolism carries strong cultural resonances. As a result, medieval people knew asses two ways, literally in daily life and theoretically as depicted in encyclopedias and bestiaries (books of beasts) inherited from the classical world. Both genres show medieval authors with an interest in the natural world because medieval culture saw the natural world as arranged by a Christian God, with animals exemplifying "a morally correct life" (21). The first section logically leads to "The Religious Ass" and the ass's natural characteristics—dutiful, humble, hardworking—symbolically linking to the ideal Christian. When associated with Christ, the ass becomes a sign of peace. When it is sometimes gifted with language, it further functions as a didactic exemplar that reflects ideal Christian behavior. However, some examples conversely and paradoxically show wild asses both representing monks voluntarily sequestered from the world as well as the embodied Devil. Their incessant braying ties to the spring equinox, which shortens daylight, increases darkness, and is associated with evil. Thus, the ass closely relates to the medieval vice-virtue cycle, easily accommodating any author-mediated characterization via their versatile nature, wild or domesticated. Ultimately, all framing of the religious ass—biblical, bestial, hagiographical, or festival—evokes "an emotional audience within a Christian paradigm" (59). The third section, "The Scholastic Ass," proves valuable to the history of animal studies and illustrates a prevailing postmodern concern, the arbitrary line drawn between humans and animals. Taking the concept of the ass as a "powerful prop" that enables "medieval Christians to engage with the divine" (61), it introduces "the emerging uncertainty over the animal-human divide" (68). As a powerful example of the ass's mutable nature applied to humans, the figure of the "Ass Playing a Lyre" gives life to both human passivity and bold action. From a Christian perspective, the figure represents the simple Christian. Additionally, from a scholastic and philosophical perspective, it...

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Studying the Heritage of Nikolay Karamzin in Russian Émigré Literature

The article was written in honor of the 255th anniversary of the birth of Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766—1826). Today, when humanities scholars are faced with the task of developing a “Russian project of civilizational development”, it seems important to study the ideas and principles on which the worldview of our great historiographer was built, who, as shown in this article, was the basis for the creation of “Russia humanities”. This can be done most fully by studying in detail the polemics of his supporters and opponents at different periods of the historical development of Russia. This article analyzes the controversy surrounding Karamzin's worldview among the Russian emigration. The ideas of N. M. Karamzin, which can be attributed to the layer of socio-historical and political, shows their connection with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment. The author reveals the ideas of the historiographer that were missed in the analyzed polemics, in particular, those concerning the prospects of the country's historical development.

Employee Entitlement: Is There A Universal Approach That We Can Use in the Organizational Settings?

Employee entitlement has been studied over the years, yet few human resources management scholars and managers expected it to be a common phenomenon, especially among younger employees. Therefore, there is a need for deeper insight into employee entitlement as it has been analyzed in different ways over the last years. Due to dynamically and rapidly changing organizational settings, employee entitlement should be considered as a context-dependent variable. Additionally, it does not have to be perceived explicitly as a negative factor, as there are certain circumstances in which employee entitlement may be beneficial for the organization. Proper understanding of it will be possible through studying the interactions between employee entitlement and other variables, such as organizational identification, identification with coworkers, organizational justice, leader-member exchange, team–member exchange, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive behavior. Factors that might affect the intensity of entitlement are discussed, as well as what we know about methods that can increase or decrease it. This article indicates the gaps and inconsistencies in existing research, simultaneously trying to find solutions and ideas for the difficulties encountered.

In the communication environment of Ukrainian intellectuals in the mid-19th century: Opanas Markovych’s letters to Hryhoriy Galagan

The article for the first time publishes in full four letters of the Ukrainian philologist, folklorist, writer Opanas Vasyliovych Markovych (1822–1867) to Hryhoriy Pavlovych Galagan (1819–1888), one of the most influential landowners of the Left-bank Ukraine and a prominent public figure. Opanas Markovych is one of those representatives of the Ukrainian intellectual community of the middle of the 19th century, whose contribution to the development of National culture has not been yet appreciated. The publication of Opanas Markovych`s correspondence with Hryhoriy Galagan is intended to deepen the understanding of the outlook and ideological priorities and life practices of this person and contribute to an understanding of how the system of networking of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the middle of the 19th century. The letters, dating from 1856–1858, are evident behind a number of issues relevant both personally for the author and the addressee, as well as for the circle of liberally minded Ukrainian nobility, to which these people belonged. Ethnographic search, the recording and publication of Ukrainian song folklore, the appearance of the works of Marko Vovchok, and the discussion of Panteleimon Kulish’s novel “The Black Rada” are the leading themes of the epistolary. References to the family life of the correspondence participants create a domestic-historical context of their communication attention should be paid to the fact that the letters are written in Ukrainian, so in this regard, their publication is important for a wide range of scholars of humanities. Therefore, their publication is important for a wide range of scholars of humanities – not only historians, but also philologists, specialists in sociolinguistics and others. The language of the letters, with a large number of folk idioms, using archaic grammatical forms, represents the way of the Ukrainian literary language in the 19th century.

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Writing Centers

AbstractUndergraduate-staffed writing centers, tutor-preparation courses, and writing center studies have been and continue to be ideally suited for undergraduate research in English studies. Though requiring resources, planning, and a reconsideration of humanities scholarship, the benefits of writing center undergraduate research are many, including enabling students to develop unique and authentic questions and answers while enhancing their research and tutoring skills, reframing students’ roles within higher education, and preparing humanities majors for a range of career paths.

Performing Maternal Suffering on the Operatic Stage: The Case of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust

Performing Maternal Suffering on the Operatic StageThe Case of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust Molly C. Doran (bio) Among the numerous adaptations of Goethe's Faust, Gounod's opera stands out for how it highlights the complex emotional journey of the story's heroine, Marguerite. The demanding role combines challenging music with a traumatic story line that, when taken seriously, invites meaningful, psychologically driven treatment on the stage.1 Throughout the plot, Marguerite faces circumstances that set her apart from many of her counterparts in other nineteenth-century operas: she experiences social ostracization after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and she ultimately kills her infant in an act of extreme desperation and possible insanity. Much of the opera's music and libretto, however, aestheticize and idealize Marguerite's trauma while effectively silencing the maternity-related aspects of her suffering. Furthermore, traditional staging decisions depict neither Marguerite's pregnancy nor her act of infanticide. By omitting visual reminders of Marguerite's pregnancy and violent experience with motherhood, I suggest that directors from the nineteenth century onward have effectively sanitized her maternal trauma. And in excising the aria "Il ne revient pas" (act 4, scene 1), in which Marguerite expresses her pain and isolation after Faust abandons her, they have suppressed her voice and perspective. Conversely, various twenty-first-century productions of Faust have moved in the opposite direction, foregrounding stark depictions of Marguerite's pregnancy and infanticide. While some of these productions present Marguerite's maternity and consequent trauma in an empathetic manner that highlights both her troubled [End Page 74] psyche specifically and women's traumatic histories more broadly, others rely on her painful motherhood for shock value and, to quote Micaela Baranello, "trade on women's bodies for symbolic currency."2 I argue that although many stagings of Faust have eschewed direct representations of Marguerite's maternal suffering, there is scope for operatic productions to explore and bear witness to both individual and collective trauma in relation to the female experience. I examine how the traditional avoidance of Marguerite's traumatic motherhood fails to acknowledge the realities of abandoned mothers in Gounod's own time, when debates about infanticide, abortion, and women's morality held central importance in French legal and political discourses. This still-relevant history provides a rich context for approaching stagings of Marguerite's narrative. In viewing Faust as a work that expresses collective or cultural trauma—in addition to Marguerite's individual maternal trauma—I also expand on theories developed in trauma studies by scholars such as Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Elizabeth Butler Breese.3 Cultural trauma, according to these scholars, comes to exist when a "collective" becomes conscious of an enormous harm enacted on them that has persistently altered their communal identity. The collective then responds to, processes, and maintains the memory of that harm through a variety of means, including storytelling and music.4 Although Faust does not necessarily meet all of Alexander's criteria for "cultural trauma processes," I nonetheless find it useful to consider the opera's potential for expressing the transformation of individual trauma into the collective trauma that women have long experienced around maternity. I contend that contemporary performances of Faust have the potential to become—to borrow from Butler Breese—sites where that trauma is reconstructed and expressed.5 By considering maternity through the lens of trauma theory, I join a burgeoning line of humanities scholars who are challenging traditional conceptions of motherhood. To quote Laura Lazzari and Nathalie Ségeral, "voices of traumatic or non-traditional motherhood experiences are only beginning to be heard."6 [End Page 75] As Lazzari and Ségeral's groundbreaking volume demonstrates, applying trauma studies to motherhood allows for the inclusion of marginalized maternal narratives across contemporary literature, film, and the arts. In the world of clinical research on maternity, too, the effects of trauma on women's experiences with maternity and motherhood is an increasingly popular topic.7 Faust serves as a rich operatic case study for considering historical and contemporary understandings of women's reproductive trauma, and its performance raises ethical questions about opera's representation of maternity. Infanticide and Female Madness in Nineteenth-Century France Marguerite...

From Rights to Women’s Rights: Malaysian Experience

This paper explores the philosophical idea of human rights to consider the meaning of the term ‘rights’. There are huge amounts of work being done in defining the term ‘rights’. ‘Rights’ is defined by most human rights scholars in a four-separate perspective, as a claim, immunity, a freedom and a power. These concrete meaning of ‘rights’ might be revealed from Hohfeld’s idea of ‘rights’ that may be used in a rigid sense of the right-holder’s claim to something with a correlative duty. The emergence of a new consciousness of the patterns of discrimination against women and a rise in the number of organizations committed to combating the effect of such discrimination in 1960s, called the Government of Malaysia to show its support not only by setting up organisations, but also by allocating funds. However, there are critiques that justice for women is impossible to be upheld in Malaysia because the Government reserves few articles of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women due to its inconsistencies with Shariah. Therefore, it is critical to comprehend the Islamic ideals of human rights concept and principles and value the progress of women’s rights in Malaysia.

한국 정신분석의 두 가지 입장에 대한 고찰: 정신의학과 인문학의 사이에서

Similar to any other countries, it is observed in Korea that there are at least two ways for understanding and practicing psychoanalysis: psychiatry for mental health and humanities theory for analyzing arts. Numerous researches and reports have proved this tendency has been a worldwide trend of our age.<BR> However, an exception could be raised in the Korean psychoanalytic scene: it is hard to find out the contact point of psychiatry and humanities, even though they share the name of psychoanalysis. For Psychiatrists, psychoanalysis means a way of treatment which is provided for patients and society under neurotic or psychotic disorder. On the other hand, to the scholars of humanities, psychoanalysis has been the name for understanding the psychologic (or in-depth) meaning in work of art. The quarrel, which determines who is the true descendant of Freud, comes from the difference of view on the theory, and it seems never compromises.<BR> In this paper, I claim that this tendency is a result of movements and practices in the history of psychoanalysis. From Austria to America, America to Japan, and then Japan to Korea, the origin of our problem which we are facing now has always moved and spreaded the seed of the disharmony. Also, this paper examines how the difference of view on the theory has been made and what was the critical point which made them against from each other.

Digital Humanities in Academic Library: Creating Narratives through Spatial Data

A growing trend in digital humanities has been digital scholarship and the emphasis on usage of digital tools and methods in research, teaching, and publishing. Academic libraries as laboratories for humanities scholars (Christine Borgman) need to keep up with these changes. Digital humanities (DH) have become an important area of librarianship and demand for librarians with skills and expertise in metadata creation and control, digital repository management, information organization, intellectual property rights management, research data preservation, and visualization has been on the rise. This paper focuses on the English-language literature presenting visualization of spatial and temporal data in DH projects through rich narratives involving text, interactive maps, and map-enabled spatial data services. Using the examples of digital mapping projects developed and implemented in a large academic library, the article shows a case of big academic library on how spatial and temporal data visualization can be employed to tell stories, promote, and inform about cartographic resources of relevance to DH scholars, and provide self-help tools to empower users.

An Overview of Contemporary Human Rights Scholarship

An Overview of Contemporary Human Rights Scholarship

Bioethics and Gerontology: The Value of Thinking Together.

The interdisciplinary field of bioethics focuses on what it means to be a person, flourish as a person, and be respected as a person in different conditions of health, illness, or disability. Bioethics and policy research considers normative questions such as how a good society, through its priorities and investments, should demonstrate its commitments to the lives of different populations. Bioethics and humanities scholarship, often known as "health humanities," shares affinities with age studies and disability studies and with narrative-based approaches to the study of human experience. Gerontology is concerned with the many aspects of life that affect how people age, including social structures and values that influence the experience of growing old. In this article, we briefly explore the evolution of bioethics, from a discourse that emerged in relation to developments in biomedicine, bioscience, and biotechnology; to research ethics; to broader ethical questions emerging from real-world conditions, with attention to how bioethics has considered the experience of aging. Until recently, most age-focused work in bioethics has concerned age-associated illness, particularly end-of-life decision making. Given the reality of population aging and the ethical concerns accompanying the shift in age for most places in the world, the further evolution of bioethics involves greater attention to the support of flourishing in late life and to social justice and health equity in aging societies. We argue that the discourses of bioethics and critical gerontology, in dialogue, can bring a new understanding of privilege and preference, disparity and disadvantage, and reflection and respect for aging individuals.

Cultural Science Meets Cultural Data Analytics

Abstract For developing Cultural Science as a research field and practice it is worthwhile reconsidering the ways to approach the study of large corpora of digital content and data. In this context, Digital Humanities (DH) has been a success story in the academic world. However, we argue that it is better to consider DH as a transitory phenomenon that needs to be developed into more specific research fields, while at the same time it could benefit from being extended towards an even more multidisciplinary science. To achieve this, it is vital to first transcend the artificial division of cultural inquiry into the qualitative analysis of idiographic phenomena and the quantification of nomothetic phenomena. It is furthermore important to surpass the dichotomy of specific versus general as research objects; for example replacing this with the notion of the semiosphere as a research object, defined as the ‘smallest’ functioning element of culture by Juri Lotman. In this perspective, the singular cultural unit is always conditioned by the whole of the semiosphere, while the whole can be always changed by the singular, both in line with classic hermeneutic inquiry and recent notions of complexity science. Further, the label of ‘humanities’ in DH is at the same time both too large and too restrictive. We instead argue for a study of meaning-making practices in human society, but without confining ourselves to traditional humanities scholarship, but rather, learning from new developments in systems biology, evolutionary economics, complexity science and many more. We think that this new transdisciplinary field of study can help define the scope of the Cultural Science Journal. Indeed, it has already found practical application in a variety of ‘post-DH’ collaborations in ‘Cultural Data Analytics’, often with the aim to explore the dynamics of meaning-making practices by computational means and by looking at a spectrum of materials (textual, sonic, visual, multimodal, etc.) both regarding the longue durée and in real-time applications, if not anticipating the future.

Engaging Employees Through a Virtuous Environment! Does Positive Affect Mediate in the Relationship?

The Problem The high rate of disengagement among the workforce affects the overall functioning of the organizations as disengaged employees are not only dissatisfied but can also spread negativity among their fellows. Therefore, there is an emerging need to ascertain how organizations can contribute in reducing such disengagement. The Solution Findings from this study suggests that an organizational environment of respect, trust, forgiveness, and care and concern can solve the problem of disengagement. Such an environment requires management support in creating a culture that recognizes the role of empathy in boosting positive emotions and reducing employees’ negativity. The Stakeholders Human resource development practitioners, researchers, scholars, managers, and others who are interested in pursuing research in this area.

Sponsoring Academic Integrity: The Role of Human and Informational Sources of Scholarship in Adoption of Plagiarism-Avoiding Techniques among Research Students of Social Sciences

Plagiarism is a serious offense that defies the ethics of scholarship and research. Research students need to pay substantive attention to the dynamics and contours of plagiarism in their creative, ethical, and academic endeavors. Scholarship avenues such as online tutorials and work assignments are important sources of instructions for plagiarism-avoidance among students. The current study explores the frequency of consultation of scholarship avenues and the usage of plagiarism-avoidance techniques among research students in social sciences. The study also recommends a scale to investigate plagiarism-avoidance techniques. Furthermore, it also examines the level of the study in predicting the usage of plagiarism-avoidance. Using the online survey technique, 108 research students from Pakistan were sampled. The questionnaire was uploaded on several student-based research groups of social media, including; Facebook, and Yahoo groups. Bivariate linear regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing. Findings revealed that scholarship avenues lead to greater usage of plagiarism-avoidance techniques among research students (R2=0.065). Supervisors, class-fellows, colleagues, and faculty of the department are prominent human scholarship avenues. Similarly, articles and books from the web, books from the library, the anti-plagiarism policy of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), and lectures delivered in the classroom were leading informational scholarship avenues. Stage of the study and consultation of the scholarship avenues were predictors of usage of plagiarism-avoidance techniques. It is recommended that (i) plagiarism-avoidance is promoted through prevention rather than detection, and that (ii) scholarship avenues (e.g. delivering lectures, institutional policy, and interaction with relevant websites) are used for enhancing awareness about intellectual dishonesty.

Few-Shot Relation Extraction on Ancient Chinese Documents

Traditional humanity scholars’ inefficient method of utilizing numerous unstructured data has hampered studies on ancient Chinese writings for several years. In this work, we aim to develop a relation extractor for ancient Chinese documents to automatically extract the relations by using unstructured data. To achieve this goal, we proposed a tiny ancient Chinese document relation classification (TinyACD-RC) dataset annotated by historians and contains 32 types of general relations in ShihChi (a famous Chinese history book). We also explored several methods and proposed a novel model that works well on sufficient and insufficient data scenarios, the proposed sentence encoder can simultaneously capture local and global features for a certain period. The paired attention network enhances and extracts relations between support and query instances. Experimental results show that our model achieved promising performance with scarce corpus. We also examined our model on the FewRel dataset and found that outperformed the state-of-the-art no pretraining-based models by 2.27%.

Firms' responses to changes in frictions in related human capital factor markets

AbstractResearch SummaryStrategic human capital scholars suggest that firms' human capital rents are greater when labor market frictions are more prevalent. Taking this argument further, we suggest that when frictions for one type of human capital decrease, firms are motivated to place greater emphasis on human capital that is interdependent in production where frictions are unchanged. Empirically, we exploit an exogenous institutional change in the National Football League to demonstrate that coaching (managerial) dismissal and replacement is more likely to occur (and is influenced by a wider variety of information) after frictions for player (production worker) human capital decrease. Our findings suggest adding a new dimension—tradeoffs between related labor market segments—to the scholarly conversation about how firms manage their human capital (and other resources) strategically.Managerial SummaryWe often point to the existence of labor market frictions for different types of human capital as reasons why firms would emphasize one type of human capital over another. But changes in frictions in markets for related human capital, the present focus, can influence this decision as well. In particular, our study demonstrates that when the NFL implemented free agency and a salary cap in the market for player talent in 1993, limiting the ability of teams to stockpile talented players, NFL teams responded by increasing their emphasis on coaching talent in the production of wins. This increased emphasis manifested in more frequent coaching dismissals and a greater influence of different types of information on the desirability of replacing a team's head coach after 1993.

V. S. Nersesyants’ Political and Legal Ideas about the Rule of Law State and Their Reflection in the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia

Since the inception of the idea of the rule of law state, the problems of its formation and development have always been in the focus of attention of progressive countries, as well as humanities scholars. During the years of perestroika, for the purposes of prospective legal construction, V. S. Nersesyants formulated the distinctive features and components of the rule of law state, without which the existence of the rule of law state is impossible. Well-known historical events led to the beginning of the formation of a new legal space on the territory of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Armenia, which is primarily due to the adoption of basic laws - the Constitutions of these countries. This article examines the political and legal views of V. S. Nersesyants about the rule of law state. The analysis revealing the reflection of his ideas in the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia is carried out.