Historical text constitutes a rich source of information for historians and other researchers in humanities. Many texts are however not available in an electronic format, and even if they are, there is a lack of NLP tools designed to handle historical text. In my thesis, I aim to provide a generic workflow for automatic linguistic analysis and information extraction from historical text, with spelling normalisation as a core component in the pipeline. In the spelling normalisation step, the historical input text is automatically normalised to a more modern spelling, enabling the use of existing taggers and parsers trained on modern language data in the succeeding linguistic analysis step. In the final information extraction step, certain linguistic structures are identified based on the annotation labels given by the NLP tools, and ranked in accordance with the specific information need expressed by the user. An important consideration in my implementation is that the pipeline should be applicable to different languages, time periods, genres, and information needs by simply substituting the language resources used in each module. Furthermore, the reuse of existing NLP tools developed for the modern language is crucial, considering the lack of linguistically annotated historical data combined with the high variability in historical text, making it hard to train NLP tools specifically aimed at analysing historical text. In my evaluation, I show that spelling normalisation can be a very useful technique for easy access to historical information content, even in cases where there is little (or no) annotated historical training data available. For the specific information extraction task of automatically identifying verb phrases describing work in Early Modern Swedish text, 91 out of the 100 top-ranked instances are true positives in the best setting.

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

Despite the wealth of scholarship concerning the origins of religious beliefs, practices, and cultures, there has been little consideration of the impact of ecological landscapes on the development of ancient religions. Although the influence of the natural environment is considered among the variables in explaining the development of various economic, political, and other social systems throughout history, there is a specific gap concerning its impact on the origins of religious systems. The argument which is taken up in this writing is the correlation between agriculturally marginal landscape and the development of monotheism. Specifically that the religions of the ancient Iranians and Israelites were shaped, in part, by the ecological landscapes in which they developed. Using comparative case studies (primarily: Judaism, Zoroastrianism; and including the religions: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Kikuyu, Maasai, and Lakota) and a dataset of temple sites of the greater Near East through the Iron Age, which are in established archaeological record, digitally mapped in ArcGIS, this argument takes up an examination of the apparent interconnection between mobile societies, monotheism, and a respective lack of temple building culture. Although the primary subjects of the argument are very ancient religious societies, this research is eminently relevant to modern humans because we continue to be affected by natural and built environments. Our modern minds and bodies are shaped, partly, in pragmatic response to spaces in which we develop individually and collectively. This writing is one call for more work to be done to understand the effects of our environments on our minds and ways of thinking. This call for scholarship – for understanding – comes, not accidentally, at a time when the implications of human psychological responses to the environment are particularly unsettling. As the tide of human-caused climate change begins to flood our societies and world, how too might the currents of an unraveling biosphere affect our minds? If the development of a mobile deity and mobile society was the pragmatic response of a people to agriculturally marginal landscapes, what economic, social, and religious constructs might be borne of ecological devastation?

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist. In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, and its spin-off, The Originals—and closely read them to identify patterns in their representations of gender and sexuality and how they connect to the source texts. Taking a dialogic “both/and” approach, I argue that critics claiming that slash is often not subversive are right to a point, but miss a key potential of fan fiction: its ability to evoke possibility—for new endings, relationships, and sexualities. Heteronormativity often asserts itself in endings; queerness plays in the middles and margins. So, too, does fan fiction. While some individual fics may reinforce elements of heteronormativity, many also actively question and transgress norms of gender, sexuality and love. Further, they embrace fluidity and possibility, and engage with the source texts and larger culture around them in a way that provides a subversive interpretation of both and offers insight into the function of the constructed nature of institutionalized heterosexuality.

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into the visible and invisible areas of screens. Such experience, and our plastic identities that reside within, marks a collaborative attempt between designers and audience to establish a new protocol of liquid perspectives functioning within and beyond digital space. Digital plasticity itself is a practice, as well as an inextricable process of understanding and deploying identities in the contemporary media-saturated pluralistic environment.

This thesis investigates women’s geographical movement in medieval England from the perspective of mobility and freedom. It uses pilgrimage accounts from medieval miracle story collections and to gather information about individual travel patterns. The study uses GIS to analyze gendered mobility patterns, and to investigate whether there were noticeable differences in the distance which men and women traveled and the geographical area of the country they originated. It also analyzes the nearness of men’s and women’s respective origin towns to alternative pilgrimage locations, as a means of examining the factors determining gendered travel mobility. The study finds that women’s travel distances were less than men’s, especially in the later medieval period, but that they were in fact more likely than men to come from areas proximate to alternative pilgrimage sites. This suggests the existence of higher mobility capacity for women living in areas with greater contact with other travelers.

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were collected, digitized, and organized into a digital archive and edition. In 1890, Whistler, an American-born, British-based artist known for his arguments with the critics of his day, published The Gentle Art, a collection of previously printed letters and pamphlets. Throughout the book, Whistler refers to people, publications, and events relevant to himself and his work. Persons unfamiliar with those references may find themselves frustrated while reading due to the lost social and historical context referred to on the pages, because those references remain difficult to access. G.A.M.E., makes Whistler’s The Gentle Art more accessible by realizing the proto- hypertextual nature of his book. Like many modern-day websites, The Gentle Art contains numerous references to references – a virtual daisy chain of associations Whistler made to and with his work encircling his artistic philosophy, art for art’s sake. From 1890, when the book was published, until now, Whistler’s “links” have remained dormant on the page. G.A.M.E. activates those links and reanimates The Gentle Art via a hypermediated facsimile text for twenty-first century readers. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a window into the late Victorian art world. G.A.M.E. houses and archives this contextual material in order to resurrect The Gentle Art and reconcile it with the man who created it.

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and certain kinds of children’s literature, calling it lowbrow. Book bloggers, though, demonstrate that such genre fiction is much more than escapist, mixing enjoyment with the literary. In addition, book blogs create space for women who have been systematically excluded from reviewing. The primary way that they do this is by subverting the male gendered language and structure of reviews.

The The’wá:lí Community Digital Mapping Project is a collaborative, scholarly project for which the final product is a digital, layered map of the reserve and traditional lands of the Stó:lō (Xwélmexw) community of The’wá:lí (Soowahlie First Nation). The map, containing over 110 sites and stretching from Bellingham Bay, Washington in the west to Chilliwack Lake, B.C. in the east, is hyperlinked with audio, visual and textual media that tell stories about places of importance to this community. The map is intended to give voice to many different senses of and claims to place, and their intersections, in the The’wá:lí environment, while also exploring the histories of how these places and their meanings have changed over time. It expresses many, often conflicting, ways of understanding the land and waterways in this environment, and presents an alternative to the popular, colonial narrative of the settlement of the Fraser Valley. Thus, the map, intended ultimately for The’wá:lí’s use, is also meant to engage a local, non-Indigenous audience, challenging them to rethink their perceptions about where they live and about the peoples with whom they share their histories and land. The essay that follows is a discussion of the relationship-building, research, writing and map-building processes that have produced the The’wá:lí Community Digital Map. / Graduate / 2017-08-21 / 0740 / 0509 / 0366 / sabinatrimble@gmail.com

Cette thèse se propose d’examiner le concept de « livre augmenté » à partir d’une posture théorique articulée à une pratique de médiateur et d’éditeur multimédia exercée à la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) pendant une vingtaine d’années. Notre recherche pose la question de la reconfiguration du livre dans l’espace numérique à travers les notions de remédiatisation et d’éditorialisation, c’est-à-dire du point de vue de l’évolution des formes médiatiques et des pratiques éditoriales. La conception de deux prototypes — le livre-application Candide réalisé à la BnF et le livre-web Odyssée réalisé à l’Université Paris-VIII — nous a permis d’interroger les frontières du livre et de formuler les concepts d’enrichissement et d’augmentation au regard de la clôture du livre. Nous défendons la thèse d’un objet-livre numérique nécessairement clos, enrichi par l’éditeur et le lecteur, augmenté par des extensions virtuelles sur le web ou en applications. L’expérience de lecture et la transmission des œuvres s’y trouvent renouvelées par des pratiques intermédiatiques et une nouvelle sensorialité des supports numériques. / This thesis proposes to examine the concept of "enhanced book" from a theoretical posture articulated to a practice of mediator and multimedia editor exercised at the French National Library (BnF) during twenty years. Our research raises the question of the reconfiguration of the book in the digital environment through the notions of remediation and editorialization, that is to say, from the point of view of the media forms and editorial practices evolution. The design of two prototypes — the Candide app-book carried out at the BnF and the Odyssey web-book conducted at the University of Paris VIII — enabled us to examine the boundaries of the book and formulate the concepts of enrichment and enhancement regarding to the enclosure of the book. We defend the thesis of a digital object-book necessarily closed, enriched by the editor and the reader, enhanced by virtual extensions on the web or in applications. The experience of reading and transmitting the works are renewed by intermediate practices and a new sensoriality of digital media.