Research and Innovation

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.

In this densely written, subtle, often insightful book, Naharro-Calderón takes on the task of localizing the various nuances of the socio-political condition that defined writers within and without Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He sets up Juan Ramón Jiménez as a central figure for readings of Antonio Machado, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Pedro Garfias, Luis Cernuda, and Damaso Alonso that illuminate the weave of texts and intertexts in this period of Spanish poetry that formed the waning years of a Silver Age. The first quarter of the book is given over to a close discussion of the phenomenon of exile: "la pérdida del espacio de origen" (25). After an avalanche of notes, Naharro reaches an aporia (one of the words of postmodernist and deconstructionist discourse of which he is fond), and states resignedly that it is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory "delimitaci6n semantica" of exile but that it is "un fen6meno antiguo y actual conectado con el origen y futuro de la tierra" (58). He establishes his terminology: instead of posguerra, he prefers "'d6cadas de entresiglo' o 'entresiglo' a secas," and to avoid prolonging the myth of "exilio interior," for which he feels Paul Ilie is responsible, he proposes "literatura perseguida, censurada, resistente, o disidente" (93). The rest of the book is less polemical and makes many contributions to enlarging and refocusing the account of Spain's poetry from 1940 to 1960. Naharro's discussion of the fortunes of Juan Ram6n vis-a-vis Antonio Machado shows sharply how politics, ignorance, and censorship combined to create the leyenda blanca about the reclusive Juan Ram6n and the socially committed Machado. The two Andalusians had much in common: they were both anti-moderns concerned about the algebraic spirit of the new poetry; they were both neoromantics in their conception of the poet as prophet and both congenial to Heidegger's ideas about poetry; they both exalted el pueblo ("lo mejor de España," "la aristocracia congénita," Juan Ramón; "el hombre elemental y fundamental," "la aristocracia española está en el pueblo," Machado [172-77]). Machado broke with Ortega's notion of a governing elite, but Juan Ramón was less perturbed, claiming, however, in a discussion of T. S. Eliot's Notes toward a Definition of Culture, that elitism had nothing to do with class. Finally, both Juan Ramón and Machado believed that poets do not write for the masses. Given these parallels, plus Juan Ramón's early and unconditional allegiance to the Republic and his refusal to negotiate, through Juan Guerrero, with the censors, it is a sad lesson in the genesis of legends that Naharro tells. The vexing story of Juan Ramón's relation with younger poets, heretofore anecdotal in nature, Naharro recasts in the language of Harold Bloom: the anxiety of strong poets to overcome their predecessors, means of adaptation and veering away. Ansiedad is the proper word for all parties concerned. The case of Cernuda is enlightening: he attacked, was attacked, responded, then freed himself and went, especially via his dramatic monologues, his own strong way. In "El poeta," Cernuda presented the figure of Juan Ram6n as a precursor of his own poetic devotion, thereby purging himself of his own anxiety of influence. Naharro is right to point out that Cernuda was not an inadaptado, but rather one of the poets of his generation who got beyond solipsism in a convincing way. In a final chapter, Naharro adds to the cultural panorama of the entresiglo through a discussion of the contents of the Juan Guerrero letters in the Juan Ram6n Jimenez collection in Puerto Rico. As early as March 22, 1940, Guerrero was sharing information with Juan Ramón' on the whereabouts of individuals and Blecua began his pursuit of books by Guillén and Juan Ramón'. A copy of "Poeta en Nueva York" was in Blecua's hands in April 1945 (400). In short, although few readers had access to the works of the absent Spanish poets, many individual writers went to great length to acquire now canonical texts. The Guerrero correspondence is, indeed, an invaluable source for the intrahistoria of Spanish poetry. Naharro's book is rich in detail, overlapping on occasion, but thoughtprovoking and illuminating in its effort to go beyond generalizations and ponder cultural details.HOWARD YOUNG

Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. 463 p. ISBN 84-7658-438-5

Many of the articles of this groundbreaking symposium held at College Park in the Fall of 1989 (50 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War) make important contributions and the book as a whole became essential reading to all those working in the Spanish exile field. In his introduction, Naharro-Calderón lists a series of basic questions he trusts the book will go some way towards answering: '”¿Cómo fue la percepción estetica que tenían los exiliados y vice-versa de los españoles del interior? i,Cómo difiere la literatura exiliada de la pensinsular y qué dialogismos se producen con la realidad y la literatura de las Américas ...? iQué textos debemos seleccionar y de qué forma nuestro olvido sobre el exilio ha afectado el canon y su evaluación? ¿Cuáles son las similitudes y contactos del exilio castellano, del vasco, gallego o catalán?

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.