Exploration Of Texts Research Articles

Enduring Places and Excavating Memories: Biographical Narratives of Delhi in Malvika Singh’s Perpetual City (2013)

ABSTRACT This article explores the narrative and memory patterns that underlie the evolution of city biography as a genre in the Indian literary context. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a ‘spatial turn’, emphasising the ‘re-assertion of space’ across disciplines. This paradigmatic shift was characterised by a renewed focus on the concept of space in various fields of study. Besides, the publication of Nora’s lieux de mémoire marked the second wave of memory studies, and enabled the world to remember and reconstruct the national history tied to ‘sites’ of memory. However, in the Global South, especially in India, the memory lens did not affirm national history. This study delves into common thematic tropes within city biographies, contending that they offer narratives of resistance to mainstream city writings. Biographers draw on autobiographical memory, shaping narratives of reconstruction, marginality, and absence/presence as everyday forms of resistance. Furthermore, by analysing Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi (2013), the article posits ‘superposition’ alongside the prevalent way of approaching the city as palimpsest. This textual exploration shifts the focus from the city’s physical or represented aspects to the city biographer’s simultaneous awareness of several historical layers, presenting Delhi in a continuum marked by both ruptures and continuities.

“You Know There’s No ‘It’ Right? ‘It’ Was Just Us”

“You Know There’s No ‘It’ Right? ‘It’ Was Just Us”

Objects of mestizo memory

This visual essay explores the relationship of racialization and family archives based on an inquiry into my Guatemalan father’s collection of media artifacts. The media objects include VHS tapes, photographic prints, and legal documents. All of the images presented are from my father’s media archive, and they are presented in relation to a series of textual reflections. These reflections are drawn from my own experiences producing oral histories with my tía Marta in Guatemala, my father’s reflections on his archive of media objects, and a review of colonial texts that elaborated the descriptions of ethnoracial categories related to “mestizaje” in Central America. Taken together, this image-based and textual exploration presents the reader with an opportunity to reflect on the contingent, fraught, and open-ended process of racialization, as well as on moments of foreclosure where boundaries of ethnoracial identity are demarcated and reified. The essay meditates on ways that utterances and dialogue about family archives constitute sites of racialization. There is a corresponding video essay featuring my father’s narration along with his interaction with his archive at the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPmMwBJc-k .

Fleshing Out the Embodied Potentialities of Positionality

Through this pulsating textual exploration, I viscerally uncover the potentialities of positionality and reflexivity in the context of research and pedagogical practice by tending to the emergent tensions of my own lived/living body. I weave in and out of the interstitial intimacies of embodied, performative, and living inquiries in situating myself amid my multi-identities and social locations to unearth how embodied arts-based approaches cultivate sensorial, cultural, and critical consciousness and invite multidimensional representations of human experience that transgress fixed dichotomies of insider/outsider status in qualitative research. This sensorial inquiry dwells in the in-between sites of breath and bone, ambiguity, and paradox, to reveal how embodied arts-integrated inquiries offer transformative possibilities for (re)humanization, healing, and social justice in arts-based and qualitative research and educational practice.

A Study on the ‘Western Imagination’ Appearing of Wu Tianming’s Films

Purpose: As a pioneer of Chinese western cinema, Wu Tianming played an important leading role in the development of cinema in the new era. This study focused on the local spirit, personality, aesthetic thinking, realism style, etc. that appeared in his creation through the movie works to which the ‘Western Imagination’ was given, and explored the interest in the spirit of the times and the archer against traditional culture. Methods: The research method of this paper is divided into three aspects: it is a cultural analysis research method, a historical analysis research method, and a comparative analysis research method. Result: Through the textual exploration and interpretation of Wu Tianming’s films, we can see through the spirit of the times, national culture and social psychology embedded in western films, analyze the constant conflict and integration between traditional culture and modern civilization, and reflect on the cultural metaphors between films and society. Conclusion: Wu Tianming broke the sense of reality and humanistic implications conveyed through films, and the bondage between Chinese film images and real life. The spiritual value of Chinese cinema was reconstructed by presenting a certain realistic reference to the development of Chinese Western films.

Being grateful to Georg Simmel. Emotions, gratitude, and the relational concern of sociology in the globalized society

This paper argues for a sociological and relational concern of “gratitude” in Simmel’s thought as a key feature of human interaction as well as a key “emotive disposition” (Stimmung) to engage with the challenges of modern society. Georg Simmel is undoubtedly one of the most crucial theorists and a pillar in the social sciences, and his theoretical contribution also stands as the foundation of relational sociology stricto sensu. He taught that interactions supporting social processes must be investigated as forms of relations. A relation is a precise mode of being connected to others; it is a tie emerging from reciprocal action and acquires its consistency by generating causal effects on involved actors. Among his main insights within the sociological tradition, Simmel’s excellent concepts and arguments engage emotions as a sociological matter, that is, under a relational aspect. Not only do emotions have sociological relevance (that is, they are a worthy subject for sociologists), but they also characterize the precise manner of interaction among individuals. Emotions are the relational effect of being associated in an increasingly differentiated society, which apparently only neutralizes individuals’ emotive sides, or else instrumentally drives or “colonizes” them. Simmel explored gratitude as a particular emotion that is a form of relation and interaction: it has an eccentric position among the other emotions that he investigated in his many essays. Gratitude represents a non-symmetrical or economic (exchangeable) “transactive” emotion: it puts the giver and receiver in a peculiar socio-emotional form of reciprocity. By considering relations, emotions, and gratitude through rigorous textual exploration, this paper tackles Simmel’s view and challenges a globalized world and hybridized digital society. Finally, gratitude could be regarded as a demarcation criterion for identifying and distinguishing social interaction forms from other kinds of non-social processes or transactions.

A hierarchical topic analysis tool to facilitate digital humanities research

PurposeThis study aims to develop a hierarchical topic analysis tool (HTAT) based on hierarchical Latent Dirichelet allocation (hLDA) to support digital humanities research that is associated with the need of topic exploration on the Digital Humanities Platform for Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings (DHP-LCLW). HTAT can assist humanities scholars on distant reading with analysis of hierarchical text topics, through classifying time-stamped texts into multiple historical eras, conducting hierarchical topic modeling (HTM) according to the texts from different eras and presenting through visualization. The comparative network diagram is another function provided to assist humanities scholars in comparing the difference in the topics they wish to explore and to track how the concept of a topic changes over time from a particular perspective. In addition, HTAT can also provide humanities scholars with the feature to view source texts, thus having high potential to be applied in promoting the effectiveness of topic exploration due to simultaneously integrating both the topic exploration functions of distant reading and close reading.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a counterbalanced experimental design to examine whether there is significant differences in the effectiveness of topic inquiry, the number of relevant topics inquired and the time spent on them when research participants were alternately conducting text exploration using DHP-LCLW with HTAT or DHP-LCLW with Single-layer Topic Analysis Tool (SLTAT). A technology acceptance questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were also conducted to understand the research participants' perception and feelings toward using the two different tools to assist topic inquiry.FindingsThe experimental results show that DHP-LCLW with HTAT could better assist the research participants, in comparison with DHP-LCLW with SLTAT, to grasp the topic context of the texts from two particular perspectives assigned by this study within a short period. In addition, the results of the interviews revealed that DHP-LCLW with HTAT, in comparison with SLTAT, was able to provide a topic terms that better met research participnats' expectations and needs, and effectively guided them to the corresponding texts for close reading. In the analysis of technology acceptance and interview data, it can be found that the research participants have a high and positive tendency toward using DHP-LCLW with HTAT to assist topic inquiry.Research limitations/implicationsThe Jieba Chinese word segmentation system was used in the Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings Database in this study, to perform word segmentation on Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s writing texts for topic modeling based on hLDA. Since Jieba word segmentation system is a lexicon based word segmentation system, it cannot identify new words that have still not been collected in the lexicon well. In this case, the correctness of word segmentation on the target texts will affect the results of hLDA topic modeling, and the effectiveness of HTAT in assisting humanities scholars for topic inquiry.Practical implicationsAn HTAT was developed to support digital humanities research in this study. With HTAT, DHP-LCLW provides hmanities scholars with topic clues from different hierarchical perspectives for textual exploration, and with temporal and comparative network diagrams to assist humanities scholars in tracking the evolution of the topics of specific perspectives over time, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the overall context of the texts.Originality/valueIn recent years, topic analysis technology that can automatically extract key topic information from a large amount of texts has been developed rapidly, but the topics generated from traditional topic analysis models like LDA (Latent Dirichelet allocation) make it difficult for users to understand the differences in the topics of texts with different hierarchical levels. Thus, this study proposes HTAT which uses hLDA to build a hierarchical topic tree with a tree-like structure without the need to define the number of topics in advance, enabling humanities scholars to quickly grasp the concept of textual topics and use different hierarchical perspectives for further textual exploration. At the same time, it also provides a combination function of temporal division and comparative network diagram to assist humanities scholars in exploring topics and their changes in different eras, which helps them discover more useful research clues or findings.

The Influence of Visual Provenance Representations on Strategies in a Collaborative Hand-off Data Analysis Scenario.

Conducting data analysis tasks rarely occur in isolation. Especially in intelligence analysis scenarios where different experts contribute knowledge to a shared understanding, members must communicate how insights develop to establish common ground among collaborators. The use of provenance to communicate analytic sensemaking carries promise by describing the interactions and summarizing the steps taken to reach insights. Yet, no universal guidelines exist for communicating provenance in different settings. Our work focuses on the presentation of provenance information and the resulting conclusions reached and strategies used by new analysts. In an open-ended, 30-minute, textual exploration scenario, we qualitatively compare how adding different types of provenance information (specifically data coverage and interaction history) affects analysts' confidence in conclusions developed, propensity to repeat work, filtering of data, identification of relevant information, and typical investigation strategies. We see that data coverage (i.e., what was interacted with) provides provenance information without limiting individual investigation freedom. On the other hand, while interaction history (i.e., when something was interacted with) does not significantly encourage more mimicry, it does take more time to comfortably understand, as represented by less confident conclusions and less relevant information-gathering behaviors. Our results contribute empirical data towards understanding how provenance summarizations can influence analysis behaviors.

How the mission of Jesus in Hades expanded during the first three centuries (2021)

My short Letter explores three distinct phases within the mission of Jesus in Hades following his death on the cross. At the end of my textual exploration, these are the questions that emerge: Q1. Why do the Gospels and Paul never mention that Jesus

‘Dirt and the child’: a textual and visual exploration of children’s physical engagement with the urban and the natural world

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth century city child rescuers developed ‘a taxonomy of space’ in which geography determined destiny. The privatised spaces of the middle classes were contrasted with the ‘dirt, disease and delinquency’ of the slums. Yet at the same time as ‘dirt’ was viewed as ‘destructive’ and proof of urban neglect it was also accepted in the form of rural soil to be ‘fertile’ and central to helping sustain life. This paper explores the emergence of this spatial taxonomy of destiny and its associated vocabulary of descriptors; it documents the visual duality of ‘dirt’ as a signifier of both ‘risk’ and of the ‘pastoral’; and finally it examines some of the ways in which activists in one city sought in the twentieth century to bridge the divide and bring ‘nature’ into the city.

Medea the Refugee

AbstractThis essay reads Euripides'sMedea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as aphugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt thephugasas a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency: A Review of Naomi Morgenstern's Wild Child

Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency:A Review of Naomi Morgenstern's Wild Child Jen Harrison (bio) Morgenstern, Naomi. Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. U of Minnesota P, 2018. 280 pp. $25.00 pb. ISBN 9781517903794. Posthumanism and the posthuman have become increasingly popular theoretical lenses in children's literature and culture studies with their growing focus on embodiment, which Maria Nikolajeva identified in 2016. Scholars such as Zoe Jaques, Victoria Flanagan, and Elaine Ostry have all produced convincing arguments for "the child" as a symbol of both human embodiment and humanist values, and as a site for the contestation of that symbolism. Of particular concern to such studies has been the depiction of "the child" in various historical and contemporary works of fiction and the reading of such interpretations as symptomatic of a growing social, critical, and philosophical disillusionment with humanist ideals. Wild Child, therefore, enters a discourse which is already producing rich and provocative material. Morgenstern takes parenting and the parent-child relationship as the focus for her study, arguing that the depiction of "wild" children within extreme parent-child relationships in literature works to contradict humanist ideas about autonomy and agency. Such depictions, Morgenstern argues, help to "precipitate a posthumanist encounter with the ethics of reproductive choice and with the figure of the wild child" (2). The lack of clearly conceptualized definitions, norms, and perspectives for key concepts such as "wild," "child," "extreme parenting," and "parenting ethics" as they relate to posthumanism limits the scope of this fascinating contribution to current discourse. Morgenstern builds specifically on Cary Wolfe's work, which blurs the demarcation between humanism and posthumanism to posit the child as a liminal figure in humanism, hovering between the "animal" state of uncivilization [End Page 168] and the ideal, rational humanist subject. She argues throughout the volume for an understanding of the child as "situated precisely in [the] unstable, or wild, terrain" theorized by Wolfe to lie "between the humanist and the posthumanist" (6) and uses both psychoanalytical and deconstructive theory alongside posthumanist theory to argue that this liminal child figure serves as a locus for textual explorations of posthumanist parenting fears. Interestingly, the collection engages with ideas of the posthuman as well as posthumanist theory, exploring how modern political and technological complications—from the "designer babies" famously described by Francis Fukuyama to changing conceptions of who and what can be a parent, which Morgenstern explains is fundamentally dependent on ideas about agency—contribute to a destabilization of humanist ideologies. The volume begins with a long introduction, laying out the theoretical framework for the application of posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction to representations of reproduction, parenting, and ethics. Five theoretical chapters then provide close textual analysis of representations of posthuman reproduction and parenting: Emma Donoghue's Room (chapter 1), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (chapter 2), Toni Morrison's A Mercy (chapter 3), Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (chapter 4), and Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners and Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (chapter 5). An afterword works to pull these close analyses back within the theoretical framework and explain the theoretical significance of the "wild child" as a focus for representations of extreme parenting. The fundamental weakness of this volume appears immediately in the introduction. This long, multi-section chapter draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, from feminist writers like Judith Butler and posthumanist feminists Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad to Derridian deconstruction and the psychoanalysis of Laplanche and Winnicott, to support an exploration of parent-child relationships within posthumanist contexts. The introduction attempts to cover the basic tenets of these theories and how they work together in the analysis, while simultaneously exploring their application to the primary texts analyzed in the rest of the volume. With its focus not only on the posthuman and posthumanism, but also on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, and Levinasian ethics, [End Page 169] the theoretical framework informing the analysis of these texts can be difficult to follow—both in the chapters themselves and in the explanatory subsections of the introduction—and at times the argument about posthumanism becomes lost. Even more problematically, there is no clear articulation of the concept of the "wild child...

In Search of Sylhet—The Fultoli Tradition in Britain

This article presents a case study of the Fultoli tradition, an expression of Islam dominant amongst Bangladeshi migrants to the UK, but which in general terms has failed to communicate itself to British-born Muslims. It is also a denominational identity that has been overlooked in academic literature on British Muslims, and regularly mischaracterized. To correct this, the article presents an overview of Fultolir Sahib, the late founder of the tradition, and the theological distinctiveness of his teachings, before considering its movement to Britain. A varied methodological approach is adopted in order to explore the topic, combining a textual exploration of Fultoli sources with qualitative interviews with members of the Fultoli tradition, and also autoethnography drawing upon the authors’ (who were both raised by Fultoli parents) experience of the tradition. The article argues that Fultolir Sahib’s authority is constructed in an idiom that is inaccessible to British-born Muslims and that Fultoli institutions have failed to create leaders capable of preserving the tradition. It concludes that despite the diminishing numbers of Fultolis in Britain, it is still important for academics to recognize their unique role in the landscape of Muslim denominational diversity.

Acknowledging/denying LGBT+ difference: Understanding homonormativity and LGBT+ homogeneity in Flemish TV fiction through production research

Premised on the lack of in-depth engagements with television professionals’ views as a unit of analysis in queer television studies, this essay presents the results of expert interviews with seven respondents employed in the Flemish television industry. Television professionals consider it commonsensical and even necessary to textually reflect sexual and gender diversity as a component to socio-cultural verisimilitude. On the other hand, they rely on a homonormative conception of LGBT+ representation that emphasizes assimilation and conformity. Closer analysis reveals that this strategy is informed by unwillingness to engage in stereotyping. Accordingly, the noted homonormativity of Flemish television fiction is a product of benevolence and paradoxical dispositions towards televising difference on the level of production. Consequently, the paper calls for scholars to engage with the industry as a supplement to critical textual explorations of LGBT+ portrayals on television.

Das ‚Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch‘ als Lesekorpus. Grammatisch annotierte und mit Wörterbüchern verknüpfte Texte für Lehre und Selbststudium

Abstract Working with Old High German and Old Saxon texts has become rare in German language and literature studies. Nowadays, the brief introductions to historical linguistics and philology do not suffice to enable students to explore the oldest German texts in significant depth. A new tool could at least help move closer to this dept of textual exploration: an on-line publication of all Old High German and Old Saxon texts with a morphological word-by-word annotation. The data has been collected by the research project ‘Old German Reference Corpus’ (‘Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch’ / ReA) and can already be used for complex database queries. Within the framework of the ‘eHumanities Centre for Historical Lexicography’ (eHumanities-Zentrum für Historische Lexikographie / ZHistLex), it has been converted into a clearly arranged format, focusing on the information needed for comprehending the texts: the ‘Lesekorpus Altdeutsch’ (LeA). This tool can of course not replace the work with text editions, translations and commentaries, but will help pave the way from the first insight into the language to a profound understanding. Additionally, a supplemental both-way linking between every word token and the corresponding entry in the on-line dictionaries of historical German is being prepared.

Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard

Reviewed by: Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard Casely E. Coan Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy Eric Darnell Pritchard Southern Illinois UP, 2017. 306 pp. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard inhabits the intersection between African American, feminist, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literacy, composition, and rhetoric research where Pritchard hopes to call forth a field of study called Black Queer Literacies. "Literacy" takes on a capacious and shifting definition in this text, reaching far beyond simple reading and writing. Pritchard's definition of literacy is rooted in the work of Sojourner Truth and Paulo Freire: literacy is understood as the myriad ways of meaning-making that are contextualized by sociocultural conditions. Among the literacy activities employed toward that meaning-making are more traditionally regarded ones such as a reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as other literacy performances that occur alongside or external to those traditional literacy activities. These 'other literacy performances' refer to literacies that emerge off the page as well, such as sense-making, discernment, and methods of encoding and decoding various signs and symbols we encounter in our everyday lives. (19) The expansiveness of this approach is apparent from the prologue wherein Pritchard offers five vignettes which narrativize his own life experience as a Black, queer, feminist, cisgender man who makes meaning as "a learner, teacher, scholar, artist, activist, and advocate" (1). These vignettes signal the importance of life stories in this text's exploration of literacy and the ways in which literacy and meaning-making emerge off the page. As Pritchard turns to the life stories of his Black LGBTQ research participants, he specifically examines literacy through the twin poles of literacy normativity and restorative literacies. Literacy normativity is used here to describe those uses of literacy that "create and impose normative standards and beliefs onto people whom are [End Page 84] labeled alien or other through textscapes" (28). Through these standards and beliefs, literacy normativity inflicts harm, "steals emotional resources from people, wounding them through texts" (24). We see literacy normativity in the ostracization of young Black queers whose reading habits render them simultaneously queer and 'not black enough;' within rigid interpretations of the Bible which condemn LGBTQ identities; and in the estrangement of Black LGBTQ people from texts and resources that would educate them about their histories and communities. The damage and violence done by literacy normativity highlight the danger of "treat[ing] African American, LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies as mutually exclusive" (33). Indeed, one of Pritchard's most meaningful interventions into the field of literacy, composition, and rhetoric here is his critical attention to the intersectional nature of literacy, its acquisition, its utility, and its role in identity formation, affirmation, and expression. By channeling discussions of raced, sexualized, or gendered experiences with literacy as separate and distinct issues, much scholarship in literacy, composition, and rhetoric neglects the compounded experiences of Black LGBTQ people whose lives are impacted by the racialized nature of their gender and sexual identities. This separation of race, sex, and gender from literacy is challenged here by Pritchard's attention to the creation of restorative literacies in the face of the damage caused by literacy normativity. Restorative literacies are those practices that Black queers employ "as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination" (24). These practices foster self- and communal love within and among the Black LGBTQ people who utilize them to counter messaging that might otherwise make such love feel undeserved or out of reach: Restorative literacies are the way in which one creates a space outside of oppressive institutional structures and individual acts of violence. … Restorative literacies do not seek to reconsolidate power; rather, restorative literacies occur when one displays or asserts control over one's life and voice through various literacy acts. Restorative literacies are very much dependent on one's self-identification and positionality, which means that individual and communal acts of restorative literacies are situated differently and evolve across time and place. (33–34) This negotiation of power, like the participants' subjectivities, shifts in response to changes...

Marginality and Social Rejection in Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship

Marginality and social rejection are the most influential matters exploited by Baraka to intentionally criticize the American society. More often than not, these two matters have become the scenes of major or minor acts of humiliation and dehumanization that threaten to violate the ethical rules of living. This paper aims at investigating the impact of marginality and social rejection on a number of black characters in Baraka's Slave Ship who are brought to America to be sold as commodities. It is divided into two sections and conclusion. Section one deals with Amiri Baraka’s dramatic thought and experience of marginality within the American society. The textual analysis of Slave Ship is investigated in section two. The significance of the study lies in its textual exploration of the impact of marginality and social rejection in subverting the American dream of democracy, freedom, and equality in Baraka’s Slave Ship .

Lumen Gentium’s Pneumatological Renewal

Yves Congar famously stated that Vatican ii ‘has begun to restore to us the pneumatological dimension of the Church .… [but] stopped halfway’. Focusing on Lumen gentium (lg), this article explores what its pneumatological renewal consists of. Two aspects in particular are studied: the number of references to the Holy Spirit, and the activities that the Spirit is said to undertake. lg is more consistent in referring to the Spirit than earlier drafts and the preconciliar encyclical Mystici corporis (mc), but not in all instances. Further, lg articulates the Spirit’s active contribution to the Church in a more specific manner than mc, but not always. Thus lg’s pneumatological renewal is a work in progress. As a fruit of the conciliar discussions, lg develops a more theological and trinitarian view of the Church, yet textual and redactional exploration suggests lg sometimes still uses the preconciliar Christ-focused and hierarchy-focused framework.

James H. Charlesworth, Ed. Jesus and Temple: Textual and Archaeological Explorations

No abstract is available.

Jesus and Temple: textual and archaeological explorations

Jesus and Temple: textual and archaeological explorations