Contextual Interpretation

I am trying to put together lists of examples that show why munging together large amounts of textual data can often run afoul of tricks and traps that do not assist in historical analysis, or perhaps other digital humanities as well.

• Shifts in the Meaning of Words 
• "mother-in-law" in Pride and Prejudice actually means the stepmother (Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, p.53)
• "making love" means for a man to be talking with an unmarried woman in Victorian England (e.g. Ginger Susan Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England, 1995, p69) with the intent of espousing her

• Humorous/Insulting/Derogatory uses of Words
• "nunnery" in Hamlet means a brothel in Elizabethan slang
• "bitch" in rap music

These specific cases are instances of the discourse being not identified properly, e.g. in its mode or in its temporal delineation. But there are more detailed comments we can make about the discursive nature and the context of statements give a suitable example.

The problem of the range of the Discourse

During a discussion of couples' interactions in the New Yorker, the author reminded the reader that the range of a discourse in presidential politics and the presidential White House extends to the previous occupants and their actions as well.

On Tuesday, after Melania [Trump] appeared again to reject the President [Donald Trump], this time on the tarmac in Rome with a slick “down low, too slow” move, Pete Souza, President Obama’s official photographer, posted a photo to his Instagram account of Barack and Michelle tenderly holding hands in Selma, Alabama, a gesture that needed no interpretation.

This is an example of the kind of interaction that is difficult to track or detect without establishing the precise discourse that the item belongs to. Here models of layers of discourse that need to be attended to are crucial.

Eventually, the Washington Post made it clear at a description level, by linking to these (and other) clips and photos, providing the interpretation for those that had missed the discourse contributions. So the hope of large scale ingesting of documents for interpretation is that discourse contributions that are clever in the way that Souza's was will eventually have the kind schoolmaster who spells out what the others suspected. (In some sense, the historians often end up in that role.)

Of course, not every hand-holding couple posted that day is a commentary on the Trumps' situation, but most likely, the George W. Bushes' holding hands would have been, within a specific window of time, of course.

Appendix

Lishi Website

Completely forgotten that I used to work on this (here my polyptique interests took their departure).
Probably would need to request a password again at this point in time.

IDP Reasoning System

IDP is a reasoning system of the DTAI at the University of Leuven. There is a web-interface that can be used for experimentation. The system differs from the ASP format in specific ways, though it competes in the tri-annual ASP competitions (for a download of problems see here) It supports representations such as Abstract Dialectical Frameworks.

Some Mamluk Details and Natural History Details

Been researching history of the Mamluks for a collaboration with some people in the Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Found some cool resources on the web:

• Reuven Amitai-Preiss' book on the Ilkhanid Mongols and the Mamluks
• An old German History of Islam

In communicating with my collaborators, I revisited the Timbersnake argument from my dissertation, and found some additional resources for that, including

• Mark Catesby's Natural History of  the Carolinas,Florida, the Bahamas etc etc with a cool depiction of a rattlesnake from volume 2, published in London in 1756.
• The travels of Linneus student Peter or Pehr Kalm of Sweden, who helped classify rattlesnakes for Linneus (as did Catesby's drawings)
• An analysis of his journal (including on rattlesnakes)
• His three volume travel journal is available here in German for the First Part. Indubitably other parts are on Archive.org as well.