This thesis analyses the "debate on the spirit of the Humanities", a discussion on cultural and political issues that unfolded throughout mainland China from 1993 to 1995. It examines a corpus of articles from a critical discursive perspective, integrating a close reading of the texts with critical theory and historical contextualisation. The study also relies on insights from interviews with participants in the debate. Its structure draws on Raymond William' "keywords approach". While the literature depicts the debate as an elitist reaction to mass culture, this thesis shows that participants focussed on the definition of their jobs as scholars, authors and intellectuals. The core issue at stake was their relationships with the market, the state and "the nation". This study investigates how they represented China's transformation in the 1990s and identifies recurrent discursive strategies that reveal a process of depoliticisation. It argues that because they viewed "marketisation" and "commodification" as inevitable processes, they focussed on the ethical choices in their own field. It explores the conflicting ideals about humanist work that emerge from their reflections. It shows the importance placed on criticality, but also suggests that the sense of moral superiority towards the rest of society that often underlies their ideals bears similarity to the style of governance of the CCP leadership. The thesis also analyses the role of geographical concepts in the debate and highlights the dominance of the "China/west" binary opposition. It reveals that the participants employed this binary as the main criterion to categorise theoretical resources and links this observation with the subsumption of class discourse in post-1992 China. Finally, the analysis shows the argumentative use of patriotism in support of opposed standpoints. In conclusion, this thesis sheds new light on intellectual discourse in China during a crucial phase of its contemporary history.

There is substantial anecdotal and quantitative data to suggest that males and females make different behavioural choices with regards to studying and pursuing a career in science or the arts.  Despite a clear pattern of sex differences, with males showing a preference for sciences and females showing a preference for arts, there has been little attempt to rigorously investigate anything other than social and societal factors on determining these differences.  This thesis investigated the potential impacts of a number of individual differences on explicit and implicit science and arts attitudes.  Seven studies are reported that looked at the effects of cognitive style, cognitive abilities, gender, social desirability and persuasion on individual differences, and in particular the pattern of sex differences, in attitudes towards science and arts.  Study 1 found the expected sex differences in explicit science and arts attitudes, with males having more positive attitudes towards science and females having more positive attitudes towards the arts; there was also a strong association between attitude preferences and degree choice (MA or BSc) behaviours.  In addition to sex differences there was also evidence that individual differences in Need for Cognition (NFC: Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were associated with differences in how positive people’s attitudes were towards both sciences and the arts.  Studies 2 and 3 found no evidences that individual differences in fluid and crystallised intelligence (Cattell, 1963) were important factors in determining science and arts attitudes; there was no evidence of sex differences in either intellectual ability.  Study 4 found that the pattern of sex and NFC differences found among the relatively specialised population of undergraduate psychology students was also prevalent in a representative sample of the general population.  Study 5 found that implicit science and arts attitudes (measured with the Implicit Association Test: IAT, Greenwald, McGhee & Schwarz, 1998) showed a similar pattern of results to those of explicit attitudes, with males showing a preference for science over arts and females showing a preference for arts over science; implicit attitudes were also closely related to degree choice behaviours.  Studies 6 & 7 explored the possibility of explicit and implicit attitude change using a statement generation of self-persuasion task.  In study 6, it was found that explicit science attitudes became more positive and explicit arts attitudes more negative, following a positive/science and negative/arts persuasion task.

Humanities researchers are faced with an overwhelming volume of digitised primary source material, and "born digital" information, of relevance to their research as a result of large-scale digitisation projects. The current digital tools do not provide consistent support for analysing the content of digital archives that are potentially large in scale, multilingual, and come in a range of data formats. The current language-dependent, or project specific, approach to tool development often puts the tools out of reach for many research disciplines in the humanities. In addition, the tools can be incompatible with the way researchers locate and compare the relevant sources. For instance, researchers are interested in shared structural text patterns, known as \parallel passages" that describe a specific cultural, social, or historical context relevant to their research topic. Identifying these shared structural text patterns is challenging due to their repeated yet highly variable nature, as a result of differences in the domain, author, language, time period, and orthography. The contribution of the thesis is a novel infrastructure that directly addresses the need for generic, flexible, extendable, and sustainable digital tools that are applicable to a wide range of digital archives and research in the humanities. The infrastructure adopts a character-level n-gram Statistical Language Model (SLM), stored in a space-optimised k-truncated suffix tree data structure as its underlying data model. A character-level n-gram model is a relatively new approach that is competitive with word-level n-gram models, but has the added advantage that it is domain and language-independent, requiring little or no preprocessing of the document text unlike word-level models that require some form of language-dependent tokenisation and stemming. Character-level n-grams capture word internal features that are ignored by word-level n-gram models, which provides greater exibility in addressing the information need of the user through tolerant search, and compensation for erroneous query specification or spelling errors in the document text. Furthermore, the SLM provides a unified approach to information retrieval and text mining, where traditional approaches have tended to adopt separate data models that are often ad-hoc or based on heuristic assumptions. In addition, the performance of the character-level n-gram SLM was formally evaluated through crowdsourcing, which demonstrates that the retrieval performance of the SLM is close to that of the human level performance. The proposed infrastructure, supports the development of the Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Language Archives), which provides humanities researchers digital tools for search, browsing, and text mining of digital archives in any domain or language, within a single system. Samtla supersedes many of the existing tools for humanities researchers, by supporting the same or similar functionality of the systems, but with a domain-independent and languageindependent approach. The functionality includes a browsing tool constructed from the metadata and named entities extracted from the document text, a hybrid-recommendation system for recommending related queries and documents. However, some tools are novel tools and developed in response to the specific needs of the researchers, such as the document comparison tool for visualising shared sequences between groups of related documents. Furthermore, Samtla is the first practical example of a system with a SLM as its primary data model that supports the real research needs of several case studies covering different areas of research in the humanities.

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The present work represents the first attempt to compose a comprehensive study of the Palace of Sitt al-Mulk which is known as the 'Fätimid Western Palace' because of its geographical situation opposite the Eastern Palace. It was built by order of the second FAtimid Caliph in Cairo, al-'Aziz (365-386 A. H. / 975-996 A. D. ) for his daughter Sitt al-hulk. The first section attempts (through Arabic literary sources) to construct a picture of this princess who played an important role in the direction of Fätimid politics. The second section examines the the architecture of the Palac, survived and brings to light which demonstrate that part incorported into the Häristän of the site in the Mamlük period. belief that nothing of a of Sitt al-hulk has architectural remains of the Palace was Sultan Qalä'Gn built on The third section studies the rich imagery in the wooden panels that used to decorate the Palace of Sitt al-hulk within the wider context of Fätimid figural Art.The fourth section details the connections and similarities between the Fätimid style of these woodcarvings and Coptic Art of the same period. The fifth and final part covers the problem of dating, attempting to situate chronologically, through stylistic and comparative study the extensive range of woodcarvings from the Palace.

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