Digital Humanities Commons^™

The Gospel Of Pseudo-Matthew, The Rule Of The Master, And The Rule Of Benedict, Brandon W. Hawk

Faculty Publications

The reliance of the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew on the Rule of Benedict has been long acknowledged. The most significant scene to demonstrate intertextuality between the Rule of Benedict and Pseudo-Matthew is chapter 6, which depicts Mary's ascetic life in a community of virgins. This scene adds much that is not in the main source, the Greek Protevangelium of James, based on the Benedictine life of work and prayer. Recent work on the sources of the apocryphal gospel, however, gives rise to questions about the sources involved in Pseudo-Matthew, especially opening up the possibility that the author of …

Quantitative Fine-Grained Human Evaluation Of Machine Translation Systems: A Case Study On English To Croatian, Filip Klubicka, Antonio Toral, Victor Manuel Sanchez-Cartagena

Articles

This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to- Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different paradigms: pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural. First, we design an MQM-compliant error taxonomy tailored to the relevant …

How To Help When It Hurts? Think Systemic, Corey L. Wrenn Ph.D.

Animal Studies Journal

To resolve a moral dilemma created by the rescue of carnivorous species from exploitative situations who must rely on the flesh of other vulnerable species to survive, Cheryl Abbate applies the guardianship principle in proposing hunting as a case-by-case means of reducing harm to the rescued animal as well as to those animals who must die to supply food. This article counters that Abbate’s guardianship principle is insufficiently applied given its objectification of deer communities. Tom Regan, alternatively, encouraged guardians to think beyond individual dilemmas and adopt a measure of systemic reconstruction, that being the abolition of speciesist institutions (The …

[Review] Creatural Fictions David Herman, Editor. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships In Twentieth- And Twenty-First-Century Literature, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

David Herman has put together a landmark collection of essays in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series. Drawing from the Animal Studies theories of Donna Haraway, John Berger, Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe, for instance, the collection has a lot to offer students new to Literary Animal Studies. Rigorous essays which further debates mean that the collection also has appeal for established scholars in the field. Creatural Fictions takes its title, Herman explains, partly from the creaturely theories Anat Pick turns to in Simone Weil, but the term ‘creatural’ is preferred in order to emphasise continuities between human …

From Disability To Eco-Ability [Review] Anthony J. Nocella Ii, Amber E. George, And J. L. Schatz, Editors. The Intersectionality Of Critical Animal, Disability, And Environmental Studies: Toward Eco-Ability, Justice, And Liberation, Nathan Poirier

Animal Studies Journal

The Intersectionality of Critical Animal, Disability, and Environmental Studies: Toward Eco-ability, Justice, and Liberation (hereafter, Intersectionality), edited by critical scholars Anthony Nocella II, Amber E. George, and J.L. Schatz, is the follow-up collection to an earlier anthology edited by Nocella II, Judy Bentley and Janet Duncan. Published in 2012, Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-Ability Movement was visionary in illuminating entanglements of the struggles that people with disabilities share with environmental and nonhuman animal oppression (similar to the realization of the shared oppression of women, animals and the environment that sparked ecofeminism). This connection is termed …

Animal Utopia: Liberal, Communitarian, Libertarian Or…? [Review Essay] Wayne Gabardi. The Next Social Contract: Animals, The Anthropocene, And Biopolitics, Dinesh Wadiwel

Animal Studies Journal

It would be difficult to be optimistic in the face of the political challenges that confront us. Globally, we have seen stark intensifications of economic inequalities and social stratifications, coupled with the rise of new nationalist and proto-fascist political movements. The environmental challenges are daunting: we now face a future where anthropogenic climate change will inescapably and deeply impact the earth’s systems. As I write, armed conflict continues to shape human affairs, generating continued misery and displacement; and instabilities have posed the possibility of new global conflicts, including a renewed threat of nuclear war. For non-human animals globally, the picture …

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors

‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, And The ‘Alt-Right’, Vasile Stănescu

Animal Studies Journal

This article analyzes why milk has been chosen as a symbol of racial purity by the ‘alt-right’. Specifically, this article argues the alt-right's current use of claims about milk, lactose tolerance, race, and masculinity can be connected to similar arguments originally made during the19th century against colonialized populations and immigration groups. In the 19th century, colonizing populations classified colonized populations as ‘effeminate corn and rice eaters’ because of their supposed lack of consumption of meat and dairy. This article argues that a similar practice continues today. It also argues that there is a relationship between the dietary racism ideas popularized …

From Rice Eaters To Soy Boys: Race, Gender, And Tropes Of ‘Plant Food Masculinity’, Iselin Gambert, Tobias Linné

Animal Studies Journal

Tropes of ‘effeminized’ masculinity have long been bound up with a plant-based diet, dating back to the ‘effeminate rice eater’ stereotype used to justify 19th-century colonialism in Asia to the altright’s use of the term ‘soy boy’ on Twitter and other social media today to call out men they perceive to be weak, effeminate, and politically correct (Gambert and Linné). This article explores tropes of ‘plant food masculinity’ throughout history, focusing on how while they have embodied different social, cultural, and political identities, they all serve as a tool to construct an archetypal masculine ideal. The analysis draws on a …

[Review] Anna Barcz. Animal Narratives And Culture: Vulnerable Realism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Xii,185pp., Sally Borrell

Animal Studies Journal

Anna Barcz’s Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism sets out to answer two related questions: what do animals add when they are realistically included in cultural texts, and what is the role of fiction in particular? As part of the examination of these questions, the book identifies what Barcz terms ‘zoonarratives’ and develops the concept of zoocriticism itself. Barcz explains that a twentieth-century acceptance of what is likely (and not only what is definite) within understandings of realism has allowed increased scope to explore animal perspectives in fiction. The book’s focus on animal vulnerability in particular in one sense seems …

Digitization Of The World: A Phenomenology Of Digitization, Thomas C. Adolphs

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The dissertation analyzes digitization through a phenomenological lens, understanding the digitization as an “outgrowth” of a potential that was always already latent within our being as the human-being. The analysis primarily utilizes the philosophic work of the 20^th century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Through their philosophies, I seek to synthesize Heidegger’s concept of de-severance with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of embodiment and the world as possessing depth. In doing so, I bring these theoretical concepts together to build a phenomenological “picture” of how it is that the digitization of the world came into being. All the while, my ultimate …

Pragmatic Functionality Of Punctuation On Twitter, Elizabeth M. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective …

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors

The Ethics And Politics Of Drones In Animal Activism, Clare Mccausland, Susan Pyke, Siobhan O'Sullivan

Animal Studies Journal

This paper considers the use of drones in animal advocacy and aims to provide a moral and political justification for their use. We focus on animal protection groups who fly drones over farms to take pictures and videos of the way animals are used in agriculture and who then share these images publicly with a view to changing either consumer behaviour, the laws which regulate animal agriculture, or both. We identify unique moral issues associated with drone use and provide an argument to support their use in animal protection, in the ways spearheaded by Will Potter and other animal advocates …

Bodily Encounter, Bearing Witness And The Engaged Activism Of The Global Save Movement, Alex Lockwood

Animal Studies Journal

The global Save Movement, alongside other animal rights organisations and practices, has since 2010 sought to bring the experiences of nonhuman farmed animals into the public domain from privatized, usually hidden spaces of industrial procedure and slaughter. One key mechanism used is to conduct vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passers-by. Central to the practice are the roles played by emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a self-styled ‘love-based’ compassion …

Animals And Humans On Stage: Live Performances At Sea World On The Gold Coast, Rebecca Scollen

Animal Studies Journal

The purpose of this study is to investigate animal and human relations as constructed, and as demonstrated, through the live performances at Sea World on the Gold Coast, Australia. Particular attention is placed upon the meanings generated by the intersection of the starring animals and humans in the two narrative-driven productions. The study employs participant observation at three performances of Fish Detectives and Affinity. Fish Detectives highlights the dangers of overfishing the Earth’s oceans in a play where the sea lions and pelican involved in the show perform alongside human actors. The animals do not perform their species but instead …

Decolonising The Waters: Interspecies Encounters Between Sharks And Humans, Zan Hammerton, Akkadia Ford Dr

Animal Studies Journal

Often portrayed as ‘man–eaters’, sharks are one of the most maligned apex species on earth. Media representation has fuelled public imagination, perpetuating fear and negative stereotypes of sharks and hysteria around human-shark interactions; whilst government initiatives such as beach netting and drum-lines target sharks for elimination. This interdisciplinary article, written from the points of view of environmental science and cultural studies, proposes humans as simply another species when entering the ocean, presenting a decolonising shift in paradigm that supports an interspecies ethics of engagement in understanding shark-human interactions. The shifting environmental, political, social and cultural realities of shark-human interactions are …

The Dairy Issue: ‘Practicing The Art Of War’, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

: This paper offers several stories in response to philosopher Vinciane Despret and sociologist Jocelyne Porcher’s considerations on ‘dairy’ cows and work. These include stories from the cows in the herd that I have lived alongside for 30 years, a kind of auto-ethnographic approach; and stories and a few facts about the dairy industry in Australia. These accounts are informed by another story, told by the feminist philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous. Three works by artist Yvette Watt tell more stories about the lives and deaths of cows. One of my underlying interests is in the possibilities of narrative to …

[Review] Strange Mirrors: Review Of Tessa Laird, Bat, Reaktion, 2018. 224pp., Jacqueline Dalziell

Animal Studies Journal

In the latest text in Reaktion Books’ Animal Series, art critic and theorist Tessa Laird’s Bat provides a cultural history of the species, including a sociological critique of the place of bats in human history. Seeking to correct what she perceives to be inaccurate, yet unrelentingly persistent representations of these animals, Laird covers everything from bat biology, to the bat trope in popular culture, to echolocation and the figure of the bat in European art and literature. Whilst Laird does discuss the perhaps more obvious references, such as Batman and Dracula at length, she also delves into our collective unconscious …

Going Public: How And Why To Develop A Digital Scholarly Identity, Katina Rogers, Lisa M. Rhody, Danica Savonick, Lisa Tagliaferri

Publications and Research

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, personal websites, digital dissertations, and more.