Research and Innovation

This article on Neapolitan humanism in fifteenth century Italy examines the notion of majesty as it is described in rhetorical terms by Giovanni Pontano in his De principe liber. It shows the important role that humanist education played in the Kingdom of Naples in the construction and articulation of the public image of the prince, illustrating the close link between rhetoric and morality, and between ideal models of human conduct and the realistic world of politics.

This article examines the relationship between the magazines Cadernos Brasileiros (1959 - 1970) and Mundo Nuevo (1967 - 1971) in the 1960s and 70s. It problematizes the processes of South-South exchange by examining the triangulation of Brazilian and Hispanic American cultural relations, which in the case studied, relied on material and logistical support of the United States. If on the one hand the support of the United states undermined the credibility of Latin American cultural magazines, on the other hand, it also opened opportunities for editors, cultural producers, and writers to advance their own agenda of literary internationalization and the cultural integration of Latin America.

Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2021. (accepted)

The article addresses circulation and exchange in the Global South by examining the case of Biblioteca Ayacucho (1973), a transnational collection of over 500 books from several Latin American countries. It discusses Ayacucho’ strategies of transnationalization which, in addition to book publishing, also relied on networks of intellectual collaboration and exchange. By engaging Latin American specialists and relying on local scholarship, Ayacucho offered an inclusive model of world literature that allies both distant and close reading in the construction of a transnational literature. As such, it defied established assumptions about literary circulation and center-based conceptions of world literature.

DOI: 10.1163/24056480-20210001

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for printed classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines. These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for printed classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software called Kraken (developed by Benjamin Kiessling, LU), thus enabling us to make this Arabic-script OCR technology freely available to the broader Islamicate, Persian, and Arabic Studies communities in the near future.

This study presents the results of a qualitative metasynthesis conducted on teaching-oriented research publications for Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The main goal of this metasynthesis is to provide teachers and researchers with a panoramic view of SHL pedagogical research in its current state and identify its blind spots in order to promote and favor its progress. Based on the analysis of studies published between the years 2000–2017, trends, approaches, variables, results, and limitations of SHL pedagogical research are identified. Moreover, relevant gaps in the research that need to be addressed are underscored, and possible future pedagogical trends are posited.

In the last decade tremendous advances have been made in the tools and platforms available for the digital study of manuscripts. Much work, however, remains to be done in order to address the wide range of pedagogical, cataloging, preservation, scholarly (individual and collaborative), and citizen science (crowdsourcing) workflows and use cases in a user-friendly manner. This study (1) summarizes the feedback of dozens of technologists, manuscript experts, and curators obtained through survey data and workshop focus groups; (2) provides a “state of the field” report which assesses the current tools available and their limitations; and, (3) outlines principles to help guide future development. The authors in particular emphasize the importance of producing tool-independent data, fostering intellectual “trading zones” between technologists, scholars, librarians, and curators, utilizing a code base with an active community of users, and re-conceptualizing tool-creation as a collaborative form of humanistic intellectual labor.

L’article se penche sur la problématique de la secondarité dans une œuvre considérée comme secondaire dans le corpus nervalien – son premier récit en prose, paru en 1832 sous le titre de « La Main de Gloire, histoire macaronique ». Trace de l’éphémère camaraderie du bousingo, ce conte, où dominent l’autoparodie et la dénégation, laisse deviner un jeune Nerval aux prises avec les préoccupations de sa génération et représentant génial de « l’école du désenchantement ».

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a non-discrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in 8 conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and non-humorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence of humorous events across conversations, thus confirming the value of smiling as a marker of humor. The results show that the occurrence of humor correlates positively with an increase of smiling intensity relative to the baseline of the conversation and it is foreshadowed by a localized increase of smiling both generally and when humor is predictable. Moreover, during humorous events, participants displayed framing smiling patterns, often preceded or followed by smiling accommodation or inverted smiling gestures, which are representative of the conversational dynamics of the dyad and the ongoing negotiation of meaning.

The Invention of the Eyewitness examines the links between the witness of the law courts (where procedures were undergoing rapid transformation within the increasingly centralized and bureaucratic French judicial system at the end of the 15th century), the figure of the witness in theological writings (highlighting the importance of this figure for Calvinist theology in 16th-century France), the eyewitness narrator of travel literature (again a privileged yet controversial figure in the age of the American encounter), and the use and representation of the witness-as-narrator in literary and philosophical texts like François Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. The book’s arguments bring to the fore the extreme tension in this period between traditional ethical models of witnessing (for which a witness’s reputation and social standing were paramount), on the one hand, and a more strongly epistemic conception of witnessing (according to which eyewitnessing gained special prestige as a depersonalized, quasi-objective form of testimony), on the other.

This study of Japanese business discourse adopts Bakhtin’s notion of speech genres as an heuristic in order to analyze groups of spoken texts which display similar constellations of compositional, thematic, and stylistic features. Drawing upon a corpus of over 540 naturally-occurring telephone conversations collected in the Kantō and Kansai areas of Japan, Yotsukura demonstrates how Japanese business professionals present, negotiate and clarify their identities and intentions and enlist and offer assistance with respect to a variety of transactions such as ‘toiawase’ inquiries, merchandise orders, shipping confirmations, and reports of delivery problems. In the process, she highlights the critical deictic function of linguistic devices such as the ‘no desu’ (extended predicate) construction in producing formulations, and politeness expressions that index the dynamic ‘uchi/soto’ (inside/outside) continuum. She also illustrates some of the ways in which these ‘negotiating moves’ are consonant with a number of Japanese folk metalinguistic concepts and expressions in order to underscore the importance of shared assumptions and expectations developed through experience in performing these genres of ‘talk at work’ on a regular, collaborative, basis. Yotsukura’s findings represent a unique and significant contribution to the discourse and conversation-analytic literature on business negotiation because the field had previously focused almost exclusively on English and other Western languages. The study therefore provides an entirely different but equally important ethnographic perspective on the culturally nuanced, rhetorical strategies used by a non-Western community of speakers for the presentation and resolution of problems in business transactions.