Digital Commons Network^™

Toward An Empirically-Generated Typology Of Weblog Genres, Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, Maciej Kidawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Empirically-generated Typology of Weblog Genres" Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, and Maciej Kidawa propose a typology of weblog genres based on empirical data, namely on the analysis of metadata and the study of blogs' content. In Study 1 they explore 287 categories used by Polish bloggers to classify their blogs. The analysis shows that most categories are topical, but some could be useful for genre analyses. In Study 2 they analyse "syntagma" combinations of 2-3 categories assigned to 88 252 blogs on one of the Polish blog platforms. Through quantitative analysis and clustering 3 main groups …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Fictionality And The Empirical Study Of Literature, Torsten Pettersson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Fictionality and the Empirical Study of Literature" Torsten Pettersson surveys three types of studies and argues for research which disentangles fictionality from other aspects of literariness. Pettersson conceptualizes the basic paradoxical phenomenon that made-up stories can influence readers' perceptions of the real world and presents an empirical study of the impact of fictionality based on a five-page narrative presented to two groups of young Swedish readers as an extract from an autobiography and a novel, respectively. A questionnaire elicited reactions to the narrative, as well as attitudes to fictionality and to literary reading in general. Results include …

Introduction To New Work In The Empirical Study Of Literature And Culture, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Empirical Research And Practice-Oriented Physics For The Humanities And Sciences, István Berszán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Empirical Research and Practice-oriented Physics for the Humanities and Sciences" István Berszán proposes an empirical approach for the humanities and sciences he designates as "practice-oriented physics." He bases his argumentation on Albert-László Barabási's network theory applied and question tenets of complexity, networks, and spaces. Further, Berszán elaborates on the affinity between the spaces of practical orientation and the spaciousness of parallel worlds as explicated in Brian Green's string theory. Berszán posits that because the universe as "symphony" of string oscillations leads to parallel rhythms of happenings and their different spaces of motion and argues that this kind …

Teaching Literature Through Online Discussion In Theory And Practice, Monica Manzolillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Teaching Literature through Online Discussion in Theory and Practice" Monica Manzolillo focuses on the teaching of literature at the university through on-line discussion. Integrating discussion-based techniques with the predominant lecture mode is necessary because we need to modify students' merely receptive attitude, and help them develop the fundamental skills of reading, interpreting, and criticizing literary texts. Compared to live discussions, electronic communication has the advantage of providing a more relaxed atmosphere where social conventions are less important and this encourages positive interaction among students. Manzolillo illustrates the experimental use of the website Learning Literature http://www.learningliterature.it/ as support …

Toward An Aesthetics Of Adaptation In Empirical Research, Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, Pascal Nicklas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning …

The Indirect Path To The Literary Canon Exemplified By Shelley's Frankenstein, David Fishelov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues and echoes that certain works initiate or inspire in other authors and artists in the form of allusion, homage, parody, and adaptation. The data introduced in the article suggest that the popular cinematic versions of Frankenstein probably not only played a mediating role but …

Methodological Reflections On Investigating The Reception Of Fiction In Public Spaces, Katarina Eriksson Barajas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring …

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …

Paratexts In Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, And Medial Format Usage, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Paratexts in Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, and Medial Format Usage" Stefano Calzati compares a number of contemporary travel books and travel blogs. Calzati's objective is to promote a bridging approach between the digital and the analogue that goes beyond their differences. He posits a critique socio-linguistics where online multimodal texts are analyzed by identifying layers of analysis. Against these compositional models, Calzati suggests a double move: on the one hand, he applies Gérard Genette's notion of "paratext" to travel blogs and on the other he extends the concept of "hypertextuality" to travel books. From his analyzis …

Picture Storybooks In Teaching Chinese As A Second Language, Elizabeth K.Y. Loh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Picture Storybooks in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language" Elizabeth K.Y. Loh presents a case study of the use of picture storybooks written and illustrated by ethnic minority students who participated in a government-sponsored Chinese as a Second Language project. The one-year teaching experiment suggests that picture storybooks as teaching materials played a significant role in enhancing students' motivation in learning Chinese. The research project resulted in students' proficiency in Chinese as a second language particularly in reading and writing.

A Mid-Range Episode Reading Of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama, Slobodan Sucur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Mid-range Episode Reading of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama" Slobodan Sucur argues that a focus on David S. Miall's theories of foregrounding and the mid-range episode may help to minimize ambiguities and contradictions that often emerge in readings of Gothic literature. The example focused on in the article is Vladimir Odoevsky's 1839 novella The Cosmorama. Sucur elaborates on the idea that the fantastic and sublime are naturally reader-receptive and anticipate some aspects of Miall's theory. In relation to this Sucur also discusses the possibility that mid-range episode reading may help bridge the gap between some tenets …

Challenges Experienced By Korean Medical Students And Tutors During Problem-Based Learning: A Cultural Perspective, Hyunjung Ju, Ikseon Choi, Byoung Doo Rhee, Jong Tae-Lee

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

How people learn is influenced by the cultural contexts in which their learning occurs. This qualitative case study explored challenges Korean medical students and tutors experienced during their PBL sessions from a cultural perspective using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Twelve preclinical medical students and nine tutors from a large Korean medical school participated in interviews. The interview data were analyzed using the constant comparative method and classified according to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Twenty-two themes emerged within the following overarching categories: large power distance (6 themes), high uncertainty avoidance (6), individualism (3), collectivism (4), and masculinity/short-term orientation (3). This article discusses culturally …

Technical Communication In Place-Making Professions: Exploring The Network Pictures Of Urban Designers, Fernando Sanchez

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses how professional writing as a field can pay attention to broader definitions of design in order to help further conversations of spatial justice (the act of helping to promote equity in matters of development in urban spaces). I begin by noting the conversations that have circulated regarding the relationship between urban design and rhetoric, noting that professional writing can help add a unique lens to the conversation. The second chapter provides an overview of how design is discussed in technical communication scholarship. Here, I showcase how most of these discussions regarding research in design have centered on …

Why Are Some Aggressive Adolescents Popular: Subgroups Of Chinese Aggressive Youth, Li Niu

Open Access Theses

This study examined the heterogeneity of Chinese aggressive adolescents to assess why some aggressive youths are popular and others are not. The sample included 1548 adolescents from eighth and eleventh grade in China and data were obtained from self-reports, teacher reports, and peer assessments. Results from a subgroup analysis in which aggressive youths were classified into high, average, and low popularity subgroups and a k-means cluster analysis indicated that there were two heterogeneous subgroups of aggressive youths who exhibited distinct behavioral profiles. Popular aggressive youths differed from less popular aggressive youths in their higher levels of aggression, prosocial behavior, …

Enhancing The Campus Experience: Helping International Students To Adapt To North American Campus Life, Qiaoying Wang

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates how culture adaption topic can be applied to a design solution by enhancing international students experience on North American campus. Each year more than half a million international students enroll in American colleges and universities. Many will spend several years on a campus working toward their degree. Most of them arrive with clear academic goals, but they may have no clue what their social lives will be like. In that case, a common phenomenon that most of the international students need to get along with is called “Culture Shock”, which involves culture and academic adapting difficulties, limited …

Influence Of The 3d Microenvironment On Glioblastoma Migration And Drug Response, Ruth Marisol Herrera Perez

Open Access Dissertations

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly invasive brain cancer characterized by poor prognosis. Despite significant efforts by the basic and clinical research community our understanding of GBM progression and recurrence has been incremental. Improvements in therapeutic response have been dismal, and GBM continues to be the deadliest tumor of the central nervous system, with patient average survival rate of 12 months. Synergistic relationships that the tumor cells establish with the brain microenvironment have been proven fundamental for successful tumor progression and maintenance. Yet, many in vitro GBM studies are performed in formats that fail to recapitulate the most essential component of …

From A University Press--Wandering The Stacks, Leila W. Salisbury

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering The Emergence Of The Gay Novel In English And German, James P. Wilper

Purdue University Press Books

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the …

Laying The Foundation: Digital Humanities In Academic Libraries, John W. White, Heather Gilbert

Purdue University Press Books

Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries examines the library’s role in the development, implementation, and instruction of successful digital humanities projects. It pays special attention to the critical role of librarians in building sustainable programs. It also examines how libraries can support the use of digital scholarship tools and techniques in undergraduate education.

Academic libraries are nexuses of research and technology; as such, they provide fertile ground for cultivating and curating digital scholarship. However, adding digital humanities to library service models requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. Integrating digital scholarship into existing models calls …

World War I And The Idea Of Progress In Powers's Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many U.S. neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history conceived as linear progression, …

Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Said and the Mythmaking of Auerbach's Mimesis" Hyeryung Hwang revisits critical debates on Edward W. Said's unwitting participation in the mythmaking of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and analyzes the degree to which critical discourse overlook what Said actually wanted to revive, namely the spirit of philological methodology. Hwang argues that before Said worked on Mimesis, the book already acquired a sort of myth. Hwang attempts to go beyond the commonly held understanding of philology and suggest it as a methodology for historical synthesis whose dialectical tension between texts and history amounts to the synthesis of "fact" …

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

Anthropological Inquiry And The Limits Of Dialogue, Kathleen M. Gallagher

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anthropological Inquiry and the Limits of Dialogue" Kathleen Gallagher analyzes the epistemological and ethical implications created by representations of Self and portrayals of Other in two apparently different ethnographic texts, R.F. Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu and Kevin Dwyer's Moroccan Dialogues. Specific attention is paid to the authors' portrayal of themselves and the observed and the ramifications of such portrayals in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Dwyer's work was a reaction to what he perceived as anthropology's traditional muting of other voices, an alternative to such denigration being the incorporation of dialogue into one's methodology. Gallagher describes …

Golding's The Spire As An Architectonic Novel, Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Golding's The Spire as an Architectonic Novel" Stephan Schaffrath analyzes William Golding's work as an excellent example of one of Mikhail Bakhtin's early critical concepts. In contrast to most literary entertainment which thrives on the readers' suspension of disbelief, The Spire challenges readers to actively and consciously interpret its text, thus raising readers' awareness as participants in the reading act. The Spire achieves this by presenting readers with a novelistic world seen more or less through the eyes of a pseudo narrator, a third-person narration style that consistently and regularly — yet subtly — delves into the …

Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections, Urszula Anna Pawlicka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections" Urszula Pawlicka discusses the development of electronic literature by visualizing material available in the Electronic Literature Collection <http://collection.eliterature.org/>. Her visualization of electronic literature presents a timeline with tag clouds of keywords related to works classified chronologically by dates of publication. Pawlicka's visualization includes also all keywords of the Collection (two date there exist three Collections) separately without division in the publication dates of works. Pawlicka argues that keywords turn out to be important data to demonstrate changes occurring in the history of electronic literature. Further, in her visualization of electronic literature …

Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, And Knowing Joy As The Unknown, Ruth Karin Lévai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, and Knowing Joy as the Unknown" Ruth Karin Lévai analyzes the concept of joy in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Georges Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest. Lévai follows five main aspects of the experience of joy common to the characters of both novels: 1) joy as prerequisite to true freedom, 2) joy as risk, 3) joy as the ability to love, 4) joy as the ability to give and receive prosaic gifts, and 5) joy as community. Lévai argues that in both works joy is portrayed as a starting point rather than …

(Im)Migrant And Ethnic Minority Literature In Education Curricula In Slovenia, Marijanca Ajša Vižintin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "(Im)migrant and Ethnic Minority Literature in Education Curricula in Slovenia" Marijanca Ajša Vižintin argues that there is a need to develop in the educational system of Slovenia a comprehensive theoretical and applied approach for the inclusion of (im)migrant and ethnic minority students: in addition to writers who represent the Slovenian majority population, school curricula should include members of Slovenian (im)migrant and ethnic minority members of the country irrespective of the language in which they write. In accordance with this objective and recommendation, the reading and study of the cultural production of (im)migrant and ethnic minority texts ought …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.