What are patterns in the humanities?

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with patterns in past human behaviour, what they are, and how this relates to the detection of patterns in data by means of computation. Theorists have not given patterns the attention they deserve. Therefore it is far from clear what patterns are and to what purpose scholars may use them. This paper presents eight propositions on patterns which hold true for patterns found ‘by hand’ and patterns found ‘by computation’. One such is that a pattern is discernible in behaviour when we subject it to the intentional stance, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues. Here behaviour is part of an intentional system. This paper’s argument is that the patterns found ‘by computation’ too are part of an intentional system. To substantiate this claim this paper discusses two important examples of detecting computational patterns in the domain of the humanities.     

Book-in-a-box to Xbox: materiality and the contemporary textual object

Book-in-a-box to Xbox is a discussion of developments in the material form of contemporary textual objects and of the impact this has on user/reader experience. The article formulates itself as a contemporary book history, situating the texts in question within the broader sphere of digital culture, and analyses textual function, reception, form and user interaction, presenting a cultural theorising of contemporary textual objects. The article conducts these discussions via a consideration of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 (a key example of materially experimental literature); recent developments in e-reading and the implications of these developments; designing interactivity in massively multiplayer online gaming; and emerging forms of sociality, or shared experience, in virtual reading and playing communities.     

历史性的地理陈述与阅读

我们基本上是通过对文本或文献的阅读,才可能重构关于历史时期的地理景观和地理知识,才可能理解历史时期地理景观与地理知识对于古人和今人的意义。因此本文考察了历史文本或文献中地理陈述与地理景观和地理知识之间的各种关系,以及当前对这些地理陈述的不同阅读方法。     

The Legacy of Ian Hunter's Work on Literature Education and the History of Reading Practices: Some Preliminary Remarks

Summary

Ian Hunter's early work on the history of literature education and the emergence of English as school subject issued a bold challenge to traditional accounts that have in the main focused on English either as knowledge of a particular field or as ideology. The alternative proposal put forward by Hunter and supported by detailed historical analysis is that English exists as a series of historically contingent techniques and practices for shaping the self-managing capacities of children. The challenge for the field is to advance this historical work and to examine possible implications for English teaching.     

前景化的“新装”

前景化手法给现代文学创作带来了叙事手法的新颖和阅读认知的革新。弗吉尼亚．伍尔夫的短篇小说“新装”将其手法成功地引进其意识流创作,为揭示语篇的整体效果和作者意图带来了不同的阅读思路和文体的多维效应,并用其展示了第一次世界大战后英国中产阶层所特有的社会心态,即构成了作者所寻求的个体心灵的真实及历史的真实的合一。     

The Technologization of Literacy

Currently,it is acknowledged that literacy is closely connected with technology,since technological literacy has fundamentally changed the ways to learn and teach.This paper aims at exploring the utilization of technology in literacy both inside and outside classroom and implication that how to take advantages of technology properly in daily teaching.     

Andrea's Baggage: Reading (in) Laforet's Nada

One overlooked feature of Andrea's arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of Nada is the old and battered suitcase that she drags with her to her relatives’ apartment. It is filled almost entirely with books, books that—we may assume—she has read and plans to read again. Reading, it is clear, has played a large part in her intellectual and psychological formation as a teenager, but one of the strands of her overall maturation process during the forthcoming year will involve achieving a greater understanding of the distortions involved in how people (including her) see life through the optic of literature and literature through the optic of life. Gradually disabused of her overly literary adolescent imaginings, then, she eventually becomes a writer—of the text that is Nada—who is well aware of the traps that reading and writing hold.     

Reappraising Victorian Literacy through Prison Records

Since the Registrar General began to count the signatures and marks made by brides and grooms in parish registers across England in 1839, contemporaries and later historians have used this data to describe rates of literacy during the Victorian period. Evidence from the marriage registers only tells us about the literacy of the marrying population at any given point in time. Moreover, by distinguishing between those who could read and write and those who could not, the marriage registers have helped to draw an artificial line between those who were literate and the rest of the population, ignoring the large number of semi-literates who played an important role in a society progressing towards mass literacy. This article uses data collected on the separate skills of literacy and the experience of schooling of those men, women and children who passed through the criminal justice system between c.1840 and c.1870 in an attempt to reconstruct patterns of skills acquisition among the lower classes during the Victorian period. Not only does this evidence further dispel myths about the existence of a so-called ‘criminal class’ with specific characteristics in Victorian England, but, even more importantly, it shows that the path towards mass literacy was uneven, far less predictable than previously allowed, and often only loosely tied to developments in formal schooling.     

《西游补》所附“杂记”考辨

《西游补》所附《读西游补杂记》一文的写作时代和作者历来模糊不清,致使不少研究者误用作明末材料。本文对其写作时间及其作者详加考辨,指出该文作于清朝咸丰年间,从而纠正了学术界的长期误用情况。