Popular Texts Research Articles

Astronomical handbooks in 16th-century South Asia: Analysis of mean planetary motions in the 1520 Graha-lāghava of Gaṇeśa Daivajña

The Graha-lāghava (“Easy [computation] of the planets”; epoch date 1520), is an astronomical handbook, authored by Gaṇeśa Daivajña (b. 1507 CE) of Nandigrāma. This work became one of the most popular astronomical texts of the second millennium in India and gave rise to a new astronomical school of parameters, eponymously known as the “Gaṇeśa-pakṣa.” We analyze the first of the 16 chapters that make up this work, which covers planetary mean positions and velocities, providing a translation and technical commentary of the text. In our exposition, we also invoke two substantial commentaries on this work that were composed in the 17th-century by brothers Mallāri and Viśvanātha, which help clarify and contextualize Gaṇeśa’s contributions. An Appendix to the online edition of the Journal gives the Sanskrit text of the quoted passages.

Situated Readings

As we write this, the 10 November 2024 release date of the highly anticipated second half of the fifth, and final, season of Taylor Sheridan’s epic neo-Western drama, Yellowstone, lies on the horizon. Within the space of eight years, Sheridan’s series, initially a niche standalone drama picked up by the Paramount Network, has expanded into a large, shared story universe. The contributions to this issue have coalesced around several focus areas which can loosely be categorised as: branding; gender and race; space and place; and situated readings of the series. This special issue of Journal of Literary Studies is, to our knowledge, the first focused publication to critically consider Yellowstone, and it successfully establishes a first critical discussion about the transcultural exchanges that can be found in popular cultural texts such as this that manage to go well beyond their intended boundaries.

JST and rJST: joint estimation of sentiment and topics in textual data using a semi-supervised approach

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates the performance of the Joint Sentiment Topic model (JST) and the reversed Joint Sentiment Topic model (rJST) in measuring sentiment in political speeches, comparing them against a set of popular methods for sentiment analysis: widely used off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries; an embeddings-enhanced dictionary approach; Latent Semantic Scaling, a semi-supervised approach; and a zero-shot transformer-based approach using a large language model (GPT-4). The findings reveal JST’s superiority over all non-transformer-based approaches in predicting human-coded sentiment in multiple languages and its ability to replicate known sentiment trends in legislative speech. rJST, meanwhile, provides valuable topic-specific sentiment estimates, responsive to political dynamics and significant events. Both models are, however, outperformed by transformer-based models like GPT-4. Additionally, the paper introduces the ’sentitopics’ R-package, designed to facilitate the use of JST and rJST in computational text analysis workflows. This package is compatible with popular text analysis tools, making the models accessible for applied researchers in communication science.

Funkciniai metakalbiniai komentarai skliaustuose Martino Fordo knygoje „Rise of the Robots“ ir jų vertimas į lietuvių kalbą

Research on the translation of metalinguistic comments (MLCs) in parentheses is rather scarce considering the relevance of the topic. The quality of the translation largely depends on the use of translation strategies such as the omission and addition of MLCs in the target texts as well as the retention or displacement of punctuation marks based on the function of the comment in the original language and the pragmatic aspects of punctuation. The aim of the study is twofold: to determine the functions of MLCs in parentheses in a popular science text and the strategies of their translation into Lithuanian. The study is mainly based on the typology of the functions of MLCs in parentheses and the classification of translation strategies, developed by Levin and Ström Herold (2021). The results of the study revealed that MLCs in parentheses in popular science texts were mostly used for the purposes of specification and were always retained in target texts. MLCs in parentheses that appeared only in the target text included cases of additions and shifts that were used to maximise the pragmatic effect, to highlight the author’s subjective opinion or to hide information that was not particularly relevant to the target reader. Omission, on the other hand, was more of a coincidence than a tendency.

Exploring the Affordances of Vernacular Digital Games in Developing 21st-Century Skills

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented surge in technological advancements and an exponential growth in mobile device ownership world-wide. Such transformations have intensified access to digital content, opening up new avenues for non-formal learning. This was particularly true during subsequent crises such as the COVID-19 Pandemic and natural and man-made disasters which have disrupted formal learning and left many learners immobilised. This paper contends that capitalising on the intersection of formal and non-formal learning experiences is integral to innovative planning and value-added education. To dismiss engagement in non-formal leaning transactions is to exclude a significant part of learners’ cognitive processes, preferences and experiences. In particular, this paper focuses on vernacular digital games as an apt example of pervasive technology and a non-formal learning arena. Described as a popular culture text, vernacular games are originally intended for entertainment, as opposed to pedagogical, purposes. However, embedded in their designs are social and developmental affordances that render them potent tools for serendipitous learning and dynamic spaces for developing competencies. In the light of this, this paper proposes a move from gamification, i.e. adding a gaming layer to non-gaming contexts, to adding an educational layer to non-formal digital gaming contexts. To consolidate this proposal, it investigates the 21st-century competencies reportedly acquired and developed through digital gameplay. It also delves into possible design-related paradoxes. More precisely, the paper reflects on how key game design features such as multimodality, adaptivity, cultural narratives and affinity spaces can be harnessed to better cultivate much in-demand 21st-century skills. Although learning skills (in their metacognitive form of higher-order thinking) are part and parcel of 21st-century skills, literacy skills and life skills are equally important. The further longer-term aim is to map development opportunities and optimise learning in ways that are in harmony with today’s changing scenarios, demands and objectives.

Staged Creativity and Co-creation of Meanings: The Commodification of Spaces for Cosplay in Japanese Cosplay Culture

Cosplay is a fan culture that involves dressing up as and performing fictional characters from popular media texts. Since the late 2000s, commercial enterprises in Japan have been creating and exploring new places for cosplay, such as rental studios and real-life locations, and marketing them to cosplayers for profit-seeking purposes. Based on fieldwork at cosplay events and rental studios, as well as interviews with staff, cosplayers, and chiefs of companies, I explore and discuss various ways in which spaces for cosplay are commodified in Japan. I argue that part of cosplayers’ creative spatial experience within rental studios and locations is predicted and staged by place providers. Still, cultural meanings are co-created by both cosplayers’ creative agency and place providers’ attempts to control cosplayers’ consumer behaviours. This co-creation is the result of the power dynamics between cosplayer users and place providers, along with the employment of cosplayers’ subcultural and online social capital by place providers. This study contributes to the understanding of how cultural meanings are co-created between cultural organisations and their users. It also broadens critical discussions on the collaboration between corporations and prosumers.

Pragmatic-Functional Importance of Translation of Titles and Headlines in Popular Science Texts

This article discusses the role and importance of titles and headlines in the structure of the general text, its pragmatic-functional tasks in ensuring the success of the text. The linguistic elements perform pragmatic function. The opinions of famous linguists on the titles and headlines, its structure and pragmatic functions are cited. Functions and syntactic models of titles and headlines are presented. Examples of popular science text titles, headlines and their translations into Uzbek and Russian are presented and analyzed.

Gender Dimension of Comparison in Between Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana Characters in Cartoons

Gender dimension of Comparison in between Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana characters in cartoons researches different dimension of multinational appropriation of Disney pedagogical instruments, in the classrooms. Contemporary Disney studies involve the importance of the socialisation of the Youth, emphasising the sociological perspective on the Youth delinquency complexity plethora, as a crucial in the Walt Disney imaginary: “Disney in the classroom, as critical literacy founds that popular texts should require active engagement” in the classroom (Sandlin, Garlin, 2016:17). Investigation on Gender dimension of comparison in between the Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana characters in cartoons, involved the analyses of theme songs in cartoons, was conducted in group of BA students, of Sociology of Gender I, at Faculty of Political Sciences Sarajevo. Contemporary theory of education, globally, demands use of Disney Cartoons, and films, in Sociology classes.

Fertile Ground

Yellowstone is an American, contemporary Western primetime television series which has evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In this article, we critically read purposive samples from this popular cultural text through the prism of the plaasroman (Afrikaans farm novel), a seminal subgenre in Afrikaans literature. Through an analysis of a range of tropes, we identify similarities between these seemingly disparate genres in terms of the representation of the Boer and Frontier myth, ownership and belonging, centre-periphery dichotomies, and identity. The value of this analysis is two-fold: First, it lies in what such a comparative analysis reveals about the contemporary moment in both a local and transnational context. The resurgence of nostalgic yearning for a particular brand of patriarchal, heteronormative, conservative, rural simplicity in the narratives of Yellowstone is read against the background of farm, and land, as depicted in the plaasroman. This is relevant given that there is a similar propensity for nostalgia in certain South African contexts which takes the form of appropriations of the construct of the Afrikaner Boer imaginary and the concomitant utopian farm ideal. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we argue that analysing Yellowstone from the theoretical vantage point of the plaasroman, which originates from a minor language and literary system, inverts the ways in which Global North genre-lenses are usually used to read Global South genres. The research follows a controlled case comparison approach and, building on a deep description of the plaasroman, presents an analysis and interpretation of Yellowstone’s first season.

Fidelity, focalization and nostalgia: The audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Neil Gaiman’s superhero comic series The Sandman had never officially been adapted to any other medium when Audible released the first instalment of its audio drama series in 2020. This article reads that adaptation in the context of current media nostalgia trends while paying special attention to the production choices guided by fans’ affective engagement with popular texts. I will look at some of the adaptation strategies used to turn the comic’s verbal text and its visuals into speech and sound. The focus will be twofold. Firstly, I will explore how questions of fidelity can be applied to this comic-to-audio case, by investigating how the Sandman adaptation’s faithfulness to its source text relates to the way in which the audio drama taps into the audience’s nostalgic engagement with the text. Secondly, my reading also contributes to narratological debates over the use of focalization in both comics and audio narratives. To unpack the shifts in focalization and narrative perspective that occur between comic and audio play, I will zoom in on the function of the comic’s omniscient narrator as it translates into the audio adaptation.

Cross-gender hijacking of high achievers by translation students: English to Polish

ABSTRACT In Polish, where different inflectional paradigms apply to female and male names, attributing male gender to female referents such as eminent scientists and authors that pass unnoticed in English becomes visible in scholarly as well as popular scientific texts, exposing the society’s gender bias. While gender bias in machine translation has been widely observed and criticised, it is believed that human translation would eliminate factual mistakes of this type. Yet false attributions of male gender to eminent female linguists found in Polish scholarly texts suggest the contrary. A translation experiment conducted with a group of graduate students of translation was conducted in order to test the presence and strength of the bias, differences between male and female student translators, and the impact of earlier teaching on assigning gender in translation from English to Polish. Both male and female students frequently attributed the male gender to linguistic scholars even in the presence of strong evidence to the contrary, and after prior learning. Male students’ choices were slightly but significantly more biased. The conclusions pertain to the social consequences of the bias and the need to include this topic in translation training while attending more strongly to students’ research and sociocultural competence.

CoMix: Confronting with Noisy Label Learning with Co-training Strategies on Textual Mislabeling

The existence of noisy labels is inevitable in real-world large-scale corpora. As deep neural networks are notably vulnerable to overfitting on noisy samples, this highlights the importance of the ability of language models to resist noise for efficient training. However, little attention has been paid to alleviating the influence of label noise in natural language processing. To address this problem, we present CoMix, a robust Noise-Against training strategy taking advantage of Co-training that deals with textual annotation errors in text classification tasks. In our proposed framework, the original training set is first split into labeled and unlabeled subsets according to a sample partition criteria and then applies label refurbishment on the unlabeled subsets. We implement textual interpolation in hidden space between samples on the updated subsets. Meanwhile, we employ peer diverged networks simultaneously leveraging co-training strategies to avoid the accumulation of confirm bias. Experimental results on three popular text classification benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CoMix in bolstering the network’s resistance to label mislabeling under various noise types and ratios, which also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Narrative Analysis of Pañcatantra

Pañcatantra is a widely spread and popular text in world literature. Pañcatantra is available in more than 200 versions in over 50 languages, more than 35 of which are non-Indian languages. Pañcatantra though known as a didactic fable its primary intention is to give the lessons of polity, diplomacy and worldly wisdom. This is well understood when the word tantra is decoded using tools of narrative analysis. ‘Box in box tale’ is a remarkable feature of Sanskrit literature. Pañcatantra skillfully uses this to convey the import but at the same time ‘box in box pattern’ is used in such a manner that stories are bound with each other as well as loose. Due to this, they have become popular in an independent manner as well in different languages. The employment of animal characters in the story is yet another remarkable feature of Pañcatantra which has helped to convey the message effectively. The frame story of Viṣṇuśarman is yet another narrative which is attached to Pañcatantra. It’s worth thinking about whether this story is real or fictitious like other stories of Pañcatantra. This paper is an attempt to analyze the narrative features of Pañcatantra to understand the secret of its popularity.

Two Byzantine Medical Texts in Verse Translated into English: Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease

This article aims to provide an English translation of two particularly popular Byzantine medical texts in verse, focusing on diagnosis by the examination of venesected blood and urine. Furthermore, these texts provide valuable therapeutic advice, especially for the use of drugs. They are composed in the form of liturgical hymns, combining mnemonic techniques. These hymns survive in various recensions and are often ascribed either to Nikephoros Blemmydes or Maximos Planoudes, both late Byzantine intellectuals and renowned teachers of advanced educational programs in Nicaea and Constantinople, respectively.

An improved long short-term memory with denoising autoencoder for solving text classification problems

In the past decade, text classification has been a popular research field for automatically categorizing documents into relevant categories. Predicting classes for input samples based on their features is the goal of classification. To limit the dimension of the feature space for precise text categorization, feature selection approaches are widely used for recognizing important and affective features while ignoring unimportant, weak, and chaotic components. This paper proposes a new model referred to as DAE-LSTM for reducing data dimension through the use of a denoising autoencoder. (Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is one of the popular text classification approaches, particularly when dealing with sequential datasets. Additionally, the Rectified Linear Unit (Relu) activation function was used instead of the hyperbolic tangent activation function (tanh) to improve the accuracy of the model. Four benchmark datasets were used to evaluate the proposed model against 4 cutting-edge text classification methods, including conventional Bidirectional LSTM, Bidirectional GRU, CNN-LSTM, and CNN-GRU. The suggested model has been found to perform much better than current methods using several kinds of performance assessment measures.

DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING POPULAR SCIENCE TEXT IN THE FIELD OF ECONOMY (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE MONOGRAPH A.R. KROEBER CHINA`S ECONOMY: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW)

Background. An adequate translation should fulfill the purpose of communication, which is imbedded in the original. At the same time, it is necessary to take into consideration both the content of the text and its pragmatic function. The translator`s task is using various types of translation transformations to select adequate lexical, phraseological, grammatical structures to maintain the pragmatic function of the translation at the level of the original. The authors of the article study the most interesting examples of translation difficulties based on the material of the monograph A.R. Kroeber China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know and offer their own variants of their translation. Purpose. Analysis of the translation difficulties of a popular scientific text on economic topics. Materials and methods. The main research method is comparative analysis. The article is based on the text of the monograph A.R. Kroeber China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Results. Analysis of the text of the monograph (parts 2.6-3.3 / 30,048 sign.) has revealed more than 200 translation difficulties with the help of which the pragmatic function of the text is preserved. These linguistic phenomena require detailed analysis using logical thinking, linguistic and extensive background knowledge for their adequate translation. The results of the research can be used in the preparation of lecture materials and practical tasks for the program "Translator in the field of professional communication" in disciplines focused on translation studies.

Narrowing or in Kálmán's writings

AbstractThe paper investigates the usage of the Hungarian connective vagy ‘or’. Our starting point is Ariel & Mauri's (2018, 2019) and Ariel's (2020) papers about the use of or, where they argue that its core meaning is ‘alternativity’. Our goal is to describe Hungarian vagy ‘or’ by analyzing various corpus data, and compare the results. We examined the personal subcorpus of the Hungarian National Corpus (MNSZ2), and the Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Database (BEA). In this paper, as a tribute to the memory of László Kálmán, we investigated a third corpus that is constructed from Kálmán's very popular informative texts on Qubit.

A popular text in eastern Turki: Isnad-i Nadi Ali

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the studies on Eastern Turki, as it is called in Western literature, which grew upon Chagatay under the improving influences of Kashgar and Yarkend dialects in the east at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. This written language (Eastern Turki) has been used particularly in manuscripts created by common people. Thus, a manuscript with the title Isnad-i Nadi Ali in the genre of attribution of supplications that has not been discussed in any other papers has been analyzed descriptively in this article. The mentioned manuscript, which is the essential material of this article, is between folios 66a and 71b of the miscellaneous manuscript held in the Bodleian Library under the number MS. Ind. Inst. Pers. This article consists of an introduction and five sections. The introduction provides general information about Eastern Turki and the popular texts in this literary language. The depiction of the manuscript, phonetic (vowel harmonies and phonetic changes), and morphologic (derivational and inflectional suffixes and other morphemes) aspects have been scrutinized in the initial three sections. The fourth section comprises the transcription of the manuscript. This paper's fifth section contains the grammatical index of the vocabulary of the text.

Ouch: Pain, Heard and Referred

The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression and witnessing of physical pain. Instances of what was classified in the nineteenth century as sensation literature, these three texts produce direct sensory effects. Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a horror novel, William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974) a thriller, and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) (film: 127 Hours) an adventure-survival memoir. Reading pain in each of three triple texts—book, film, and the screenplay transmitting pain from one to the other—opens up a new archive of pain texts that promise sensation rather than relief, offering a new perspective on the imaginative—and paradoxically ameliorative—creativity brought into being by the notorious recalcitrance of pain. This essay argues for attention to the protolinguistic pain language of groans and screams; for a poetics of “ouch.”

Howdy Comrade

Abstract American and Western audiences have long come to understand Soviet and Russian womanhood, and thus US womanhood, from representations in popular televisual texts. While there is a long history of popular culture presenting the “othered” women of Eastern Europe, for example as temptress “Bond girls” during the Cold War, these narratives have continued onscreen into the twenty-first century. We examine the myriad representations from both the Cold War and post-Cold War period, noting the typical narrative constructions that focus on femme fatales, psychological and sexual trauma, and economic precarity, and how these have continued in contemporary popular culture to shore up notions of Western cultural and political superiority. The characters and the situations in which they find themselves, as spies, assassins, and double agents, continue to send messages about danger and dominance regarding both gender and geopolitics.