The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Benjamin Martin's The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–64)
No full textBenjamin Martin was an itinerant lecturer, instrument maker, and the author of a substantial number of textbooks mainly in the sciences. His biggest project, however, was The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–64), dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge to a broad audience. Rather than study Martin's works with regard to the history of science, this article examines his publications in terms of their highly self‐conscious engagement with form and format. While his textbooks are concerned with economic compression, his periodical General Magazine experiments with a special, unwieldy mode of seriality that brings to the fore the role of format as well as the precarious status of seriality for the purposes of knowledge dissemination.</p
Requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English
No full textAbstractDespite notable exceptions, research on requests in world Englishes has so far largely involved role plays, questionnaires and discourse completion tasks. Moreover, research on requests in South Asian varieties of English is rather scarce. Therefore, the present study employs a multifactorial approach towards requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English as compared to their historical input variety British English by investigating the spoken components of the International Corpus of English, hence involving authentic, non‐intuition‐based empirical data. Based on a conditional inference tree and a random forest extended via the integration of interaction predictors, the present article concludes that quantitative differences in the realisation patterns of requests in British, Indian and Sri Lankan English can be observed.</p
How Morphological Structure Affects Phonetic Realisation in English Compound Nouns
No full textMany studies have shown that syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of morphological structure may have an impact on the phonetic realisation of complex words (e.g. Cohen 2014a,b; Kuperman et al. 2007; Lee-Kim et al. 2013; Lõo et al. 2018; Plag et al. 2017; Schuppler et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2012; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Zimmermann 2016, among many others). The majority of these studies have been concerned with affixes, often focusing on the acoustic properties of segments at a morphological boundary. The present study extends this line of investigation to compounds, exploring the extent to which consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries in English is dependent on morphological structure. Three competing hypotheses about the relationship between fine phonetic detail and morphological structure are tested. According to the Segmentability Hypothesis, greater morphological segmentability, i.e. a stronger morphological boundary, leads to acoustic lengthening (Ben Hedia and Plag 2017; Hay 2003; Plag and Ben Hedia 2018). The Informativity Hypothesis, on the other hand, states that higher informativity leads to lengthening (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001; van Son and Pols 2003). Finally, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis says that stronger paradigmatic support leads to lengthening (Cohen 2014b; Kuperman et al. 2007). To test these hypotheses, an experimental study was carried out using 62 compound types taken from the British National Corpus. The compounds were spoken by 30 speakers, yielding more than 1500 acoustic tokens overall. The data provide no support for the Segmentability Hypothesis, and only limited support for the Informativity Hypothesis. In contrast, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis makes correct predictions: consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries is positively correlated with the probability of the relevant consonant following the first noun, and the duration of compound-internal geminate consonants is negatively correlated with the family size of the first noun. In other words, longer durations are associated with lower paradigmatic diversity.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/50110000165
Hermeneutik und Germanistik – Ansätze, Voten, Diagnosen
No full textVor dem Hintergrund einer allgemeinen Debatte um den derzeitigen Stellenwert der Hermeneutik in den Literatur- und Geisteswissenschaften fokussiert das Statement die Funktion hermeneutischer Verfahren in den digitalen Literaturwissenschaften sowie den Begriff einer ›digitalen Hermeneutik‹. Obwohl dieser ein eigenes Hermeneutikverständnis digitaler literaturwissenschaftlicher Studien suggeriert, zeichnen sich diese vielmehr durch eine verstärkte Formalisierung aus. Neben den traditionellen hermeneutischen Begriffen des ›Verstehens‹ und ›Interpretierens‹ lässt sich daher das ›Modellieren‹ als eine zentrale Aktivität der digitalen Literaturwissenschaften ausmachen.The statement focusses on the function of hermeneutical procedures within Digital Literary Studies and the idea of ›Digital Hermeneutics‹ in the course of a general discussion about the current function of hermeneutics within Literary Studies and the Humanities. Despite the fact that the term of ›Digital Hermeneutics‹ suggests a genuine concept of Hermeneutics within the area of Digital Literary Studies, they are in fact rather characterized by a trend towards increased formalization. Besides the traditional hermeneutical terms of ›understanding‹ and ›interpretation‹, ›modeling‹ can thus be seen as a key activity of Digital Literary Studies.Universität Konstanz (3156
Local Mappers, Humanitarian and Commercial Actors and the Changing Modes of Collaborative Mapping
No full textIn its early days, the geodata and mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM) was widely celebrated for opening up and “democratizing” the production of geographic knowledge. However, critical research highlights that the new socio-technical practices of collaborative mapping often also produce or reproduce patterns of exclusion, not least in the area of relative data density between the Global South and North. These findings notwithstanding, we consider it important to acknowledge the increasing number of contributions of geodata from regions outside the old European core of OSM. This expansion of geodata production in OSM is related to a diversification of OSM actors and socio-technical practices. While OSM has often been described as a crowd-based project bringing together thousands of individual craft mappers, our analysis of OSM metadata indicates new institutional actors are gaining relevance. These developments have not only resulted in new collaborations but also conflicts between local mapping communities and institutional actors. We interpret these processes in two ways. First, the expansion of mapping activities can be viewed as a decolonizing process, whereby quantitative differences in data density between the Global North and South are partly reduced and new groups of local mappers are empowered to produce geographic knowledge. Second, these new developments can also be understood as colonizing processes. The engagement of large commercial actors in OSM raises concerns that the project (and its local mappers) could be used as a new means of data extraction and that in particular new and diverse voices in the OSM community are marginalized by a fixation on economically exploitable, modernistic and universalistic epistemologies. However, this supposedly clear distinction should not obscure the fact that colonizing and decolonizing processes intertwine in complex ways.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (1041
The Americanization of Barbadian English
No full textAbstract
This paper investigates attitudes and perceptions of Barbadians toward British and American English on the one hand, and the degree of structural Americanization of contemporary Barbadian English as documented in a corpus of Facebook comments on the other hand. The results indicate a discrepancy between explicitly formulated preferences and actual production patterns; while American English is devalued by most respondents, the advancement of cross‐linguistic influence of American English on the levels of orthography and lexicon of Barbadian English is undeniable. The findings further suggest a continued linguistic identification with British norms in the perception of many Barbadians, while the awareness of an emerging local standard variety is only slowly gaining ground
Political Ideology Influences the Social Perception of Body Shape
No full textPolitical elections have a profound impact on individuals and societies. Optimal voting is thought to be based on informed and deliberate decisions yet, it has been demonstrated that the outcomes of political elections are biased by the perception of candidates’ facial features and the stereotypical traits voters attribute to these. Interestingly, political identification changes the attribution of stereotypical traits from facial features. This study explores whether the perception of body shape elicits similar effects on political trait attribution and whether these associations can be visualized. In Experiment 1, ratings of 3D body shapes were used to model the relationship between perception of 3D body shape and the attribution of political traits such as ‘Republican’, ‘Democrat’, or ‘Leader’. This allowed analyzing and visualizing the mental representations of stereotypical 3D body shapes associated with each political trait. Experiment 2 was designed to test whether political identification of the raters affected the attribution of political traits to different types of body shapes. The results show that humans attribute political traits to the same body shapes differently depending on their own political preference. These findings show that our judgments of others are influenced by their body shape and our own political views. Such judgments have potential political and societal implications
A Latent Piecewise Growth Curve Approach to Model Publication Numbers from Established and New Literature Databases
No full textGrowth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced, which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. We estimated regression models that included simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. As the comparison of various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, models with four or five segments fit the publication data best. We demonstrated that these segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and/or political developments (e.g., Second World War). In this study, we additionally analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields (Physical and Technical Sciences as well as Life Sciences) and the relationship of scientific and economic growth in UK. The comparison between the two fields revealed only slight differences. The comparison of the British economic and scientific growth rates showed that the economic growth rate is slightly lower than the scientific growth rate
Memories and Expectations
No full textI am now in that phase of life when old people like me tend to reminisce and give account. Since my long academic life was committed to American Studies, I wondered how this came about, and although I am aware of the inevitable mix between coincidence and symbolic self-construction, I believe that my career was rooted in certain moments of experience: a seminar on Melville, the physical exposure to “America,” and the significance America had for me from childhood on. I also believe that a temperamental affinity to an idea of democracy built on communication led me to embrace the democratic belief that is at the core of American Studies. At the same time, my own process of disillusionment ran parallel to the critical redefinition of American Studies that has characterized the development of the field during the last forty years or so. In what follows, I have tried to reflect on my original enthusiasm, and on where I stand now, in an effort to be realistic and optimistic at the same time