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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 329.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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[1] From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.323: toward a theory of the corpus (46)
[2] From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.318: toward a theory of the corpus (164)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-01-12 17:54:07+00:00
From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.323: toward a theory of the corpus
A brief moment below.
> Date: 2019-01-11 15:32:43+00:00
> From: Henry Schaffer
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.318: toward a theory of the corpus
>
> This discussion is fascinating, but not at all within my general interests
> - but one small point makes me want to comment:
>
> Date: 2019-01-10 15:17:01+00:00
>> From: Jim Rovira
>> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.311: toward a theory of the corpus
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Is he working with the Latin text or in English?
>>
>> Would the paths work themselves out differently in different languages?
>> Suppose he were working in Russian or Chinese?
>> ...
>>
>> My interest in how translation can change meaning was sparked by essays by
> John Ciardi and, thank goodness, has given me less worries in scientific
> translations than it produces in humanistic materials. (Hmm, what does
> Commandment VI mean? :-) Another scholar in this area, Everett Fox, deals
> with the impact of the sounds of material in addition to the meaning.
>
> Is machine translation an area of DH?
Basically, no. But some of the computational techniques we've been discussing
are used in machine translation. Keep in mind that machine translation was one
of the seminal application areas for computational research back in the 1950s.
Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com
917-717-9841
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-01-12 17:42:54+00:00
From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.318: toward a theory of the corpus
Comments inserted below.
[snip]
> Date: 2019-01-10 15:17:01+00:00
> From: Jim Rovira
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.311: toward a theory of the corpus
>
> Many thanks for your follow up, Bill.
>
[snip]
> One of the examples in the working paper comes from Andrew Piper's
>> computational work on conversion narratives (pp. 23-26). He uses
>> Augustine's Confessions as his primary text. He conducts a statistical
>> analysis of the text and discovers that each of the 13 books is located
>> in a specific region of a high dimensional space, which he projects onto
>> two dimensions. I reproduce his Figure 2 in the paper (on p. 23).
>> Piper points out that the books seem to occupy two distinct regions in
>> that space, books 1-10 in one region and 11-13 in another region.
>> That distinction is quite evident in the graph. Since he's
>> numbered the points in his graph according to the books they represent, I
>> connect those points together into a path (pp. 25 & 26). I'm claiming that
>> is a path through mental space, through the mind. When we read Confessions
>> our attention is following that path.
>>
>> When I talk of motions of mind, that's the kind of thing I mean, attention
>> along a path. Those two regions are regions in the mind. What else could
>> the be?
>>
>
> At this point I don't think I should respond further without reading more
> of your work, but the questions that come to mind here --
>
> Is he working with the Latin text or in English?
I believe, Jim, he' working from the Latin text.
> Would the paths work themselves out differently in different languages?
> Suppose he were working in Russian or Chinese?
He is working at a fairly aggregate level, treating each of the 13 books as a
single chunk of text. I'd imagine the result would be the same regardless of
language. At this level, nuances of word meaning disappear.
> Either way, "attention along a path" sounds a lot more reasonable to me.
> But rather than producing a map of the mind, might we say it's describing
> what might be happening in the "mind" while it's reading?
From my POV these are pretty much the same thing.
> But even then, I
> can't help but think different minds would follow somewhat different paths.
Assuming readers read straight through, with no looking back or ahead, the paths
would be pretty much the same because they paths are going to be tightly coupled
to the string of words that is the text.
> The facts of the text described by the graph, and I am willing to accept
> them as "facts," might be navigated differently by different readers as
> attention is drawn more strongly to some points of the text than others,
> depending upon the reader. Assuming the points are fixed, might the way we
> connect the dots work out differently? Might some readers drop some of
> those data points altogether and make other really, really fat? It sounds
> like what's being described is an ideal model that would exist in a reader
> that gave equal weight to all points in the text, but I don't think such a
> reader exists.
I'm happy with an ideal model. And, yes, no such reader exists. I'd rather
work with an ideal model whose construction I understand than with no model at
all.
Also, I think we tend to exaggerate differences among readers. Except that
'exaggerate' implies some sense of measure, and I don't think we have any.
We just know that people differ. Keep in mind that language couldn't function
at all if there weren't substantial interpersonal agreement about word
meanings and syntax.
And we work in a professional environment that tends to prize and reward
original interpretations of texts. So that' what we produce. But those
interpretations are always the product of a fairly sophisticated procedure it
takes years to master. (David Bordwell writes about this in his 1989 The Making
of Meaning, which is a study of the cognitive underpinnings of film criticism.)
Whatever an interpretation is, it isn't even remotely close to an account of
what happens in the critic' mind as they read a text.
I note as well that there has been a fair amount of neuroscience research in the
last decade or two in which researchers observe the brain activity of people
involved in a common enterprise, whether making music, engaging in
conversation, or watching movies, etc. They find substantial synchronization
between activities in different people' brains during these activities.
> I can't escape the thought that there needs to be some kind of theoretical
> or empirical framework between the data you're working with and the claims
> we might want to make about the "mind" because of it. Would Chomsky help?
> Some other linguistic approach? I don't doubt neuroscience is too difficult
> a path right now.
Chomsky has little to nothing to say about semantics and so would be of little
use.
During my graduate word I studied computational semantics with the late David
Hays, who was a first generation researcher in machine translation at RAND in
the 50s and 60s. We used directed graphs as a way of notating semantic systems,
which was fairly common at the time (mid-70s). That' where I first got the
idea of a text as a path through a network. That was at the center of my
dissertation and some of my early publications (where I used Shakespeare'
Sonnet 129 as my example text).
One might ask: What' the relationship between those semantic or cognitive
networks, as they're called, and the models I discuss in my working paper?
That' a very good question and to some extent that' partial motivation
behind that paper. But at the moment I can't do much more than put the
question. A good answer will likely require mathematical and computational
sophistication that I don't have.
> Different metaphors for interpretation beyond "hidden meaning"? They are
> many. C.S. Lewis used a forensic metaphor in the 1960s, saying the text
> only provides the evidence that our questions require of it. Many ask
> undergraduates not to look for "hidden meanings" in a text, but to engage
> in a process of pattern recognition, which I think resonates with your
> approach.
And pattern recognition is an important and useful idea in various domains.
FWIW, a decade or so ago J. Hillis Miller gave an interview to the Minnesota
Review where he remarked that what he most admired about Derrida, even above his
theoretical ideas, was his ability to spot patterns in texts. Miller also
recommended Kenneth Burke on this basis.
> Cultural approaches to texts might be said to begin with
> externally (culturally)-derived patterns that are sought for within the
> text at hand: once a pattern is approximated, we can ask ourselves what
> significance the individual text's deviations might have. Out of vogue now,
> but myth criticism was a remarkable compendium of pattern recognition
> exercises in its day, all derived from environmental phenomena. Reading
> Frye's *Anatomy of Criticism *can leave the impression that all literature
> has already been pre-interpreted. I suggest also the metaphor of "filters,"
> which suppresses some details to emphasize others: what do we see when we
> look at an object with red, green, or blue filters? What do we see when we
> look at a text with different interests and concerns? What constitutes a
> "hidden" meaning varies by reader, as what is obvious to one reader may be
> invisible to another, so that metaphor doesn't help much. I would say the
> majority of instruction in literature these days, deliberately or not, is
> an attempt to teach students pattern recognition in literary texts. Most
> instructors don't even care what pattern is followed -- develop a system
> and follow it, and see what you get. Let's hear your (the student's)
> rationale for it. Present your evidence.
As I can tell, that' pretty much the profession' default stance on
practical criticism and has been since whenever.
Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com
917-717-9841
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1
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