Bibliography: leaves 225-250 / This study seeks to investigate the use of the Bible in black theology in South Africa. It begins by judging the extent to which black theology's use of the Bible represents a clear theoretical break with white western theology. The use of concepts like the “Word of God", “the universality of the Universality of the Gospel", “the particularity of the Gospel”, “oppression and oppressors" and "the God of the Oppressed" in black theology, reveals a captivity to the ideological assumptions of white theology. It is argued that this captivity accounts for the current political impotence of black theology as a cultural weapon of struggle, especially in relation to the black working class struggle for iberation. Thus while it has been effective in fashioning a vision on liberation and providing a trenchant critique of white theology, it lacks the theoretical wherewithal to appropriate the Bible in a genuinely liberative way. This weakness is illustrated in the thesis with a critical appraisal of the biblical hermeneutics of especialiy two of the most outstanding and outspoken black theological activists in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr Allan Boesak. The fundamental weakness of the biblical hermeneutics of black theology is attributed to the social class position and commitments of black theologians. Occupying and committed to a petit bourgeois position within the racist capitalist social formation of South Africa, they share the idealist, theoretical framework dominant in this class. Thus in order for black theology to become an effective weapon of struggle for the majority of the oppressed black people, it must be rooted in the working class history and culture of these people. Such a base in the experiences of the oppressed necessitates the use of a materialist method that analyses the concrete struggles of human beings in black history and culture to produce and reproduce their lives within definite historical and material conditions. The thesis then undertakes such an analysis of the black struggle and of the struggles of biblical social communities. For this purpose a materialist analysis of the texts of Micah and Luke 1 and 2 and is undertaken. This is followed by an outline of a black biblical hermeneutical appropriation of the texts. It is concluded that the category of "struggle" is a fundamental hermeneutical tool in a materialist biblical hermeneutics of liberation. Using this category one can read the Bible backwards, investigating the questions of which its texts are answers, the problems of which its discourses are solutions. The point of a biblical hermeneutics of liberation is to uncover the struggles of which the texts are a product, a record, a site and a weapon. For black theology, the questions and concepts needed to interrogate the biblical texts in this way must be sought in the experiences of the most oppressed and exploited in black history and culture. What form such an exercise may take is illustrated by a study of the book of Micah and Luke 1 and 2. Two significant findings follow.The class and ideological contradictions of black history and culture necessitate the emergence of a plurality of black theologies of liberation. Similar contradictions in the Bible necessitate a plurality of contradictory hermeneutical appropriations of the same texts.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1979.

This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature's social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux. Within that broad context I examine some of the cultural institutions competing with literature for public attention, as well as some of the cultural developments impacting the availability of public attention for literary concerns. With Wallace, I study his efforts in fiction and essays to establish an anti-ironic mode of literary rebellion, in opposition to the culturally pervasive tone of self-protective irony modeled by television. Franzen opens discussion about the transience of cultural authority, a situation in which the imprimatur of the academy, for instance, confers a cultural significance different in kind but not degree from the imprimatur of a popular televised book club. My study of Franzen in particular demonstrates the impact of proliferating sites of cultural authority, addressing the emergence of middlebrow culture and audiences from contested space to authoritative cultural arbiter. The chapter on Franzen also examines the increasing role of corporate interests in the production of cultural artifacts with an eye toward their financial viability more than their cultural impact. And finally, my study of Powers focuses on the animosity between the sciences and the humanities. Powers produces fiction that serves as an indispensable tool for communicating between disparate and otherwise isolated disciplines, and for helping those specialized fields synthesize their information with others.

This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature's social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux. Within that broad context I examine some of the cultural institutions competing with literature for public attention, as well as some of the cultural developments impacting the availability of public attention for literary concerns. With Wallace, I study his efforts in fiction and essays to establish an anti-ironic mode of literary rebellion, in opposition to the culturally pervasive tone of self-protective irony modeled by television. Franzen opens discussion about the transience of cultural authority, a situation in which the imprimatur of the academy, for instance, confers a cultural significance different in kind but not degree from the imprimatur of a popular televised book club. My study of Franzen in particular demonstrates the impact of proliferating sites of cultural authority, addressing the emergence of middlebrow culture and audiences from contested space to authoritative cultural arbiter. The chapter on Franzen also examines the increasing role of corporate interests in the production of cultural artifacts with an eye toward their financial viability more than their cultural impact. And finally, my study of Powers focuses on the animosity between the sciences and the humanities. Powers produces fiction that serves as an indispensable tool for communicating between disparate and otherwise isolated disciplines, and for helping those specialized fields synthesize their information with others.

Computer science and the humanities seem to belong to two opposite sides within the spectrum of scientific methods and research. In the domain of digital humanities, however, formalization and hermeneutic interpretation have to be integrated. As will be argued in this article, this integration provides a fundamentally new challenge to both disciplines. In particular, researchers from the humanities want to be sure that using the tools provided by computer science (big data, machine learning, etc.) do not change insights in any non-expected way. However, even if this could be partially secured, it cannot be achieved in general for most of the research practices. As will be demonstrated in the context of digital editions in musicology, it is impossible to design technology in a neutral or context-free manner. Due to the interests of different actors and institutions, numerous design conflicts arise where the implementation of requirements violates other, equally valid demands. To balance these conflicting requirements invariably brings some bias to the overall design. Thus, it is important to develop a strategy for identifying potential influences as well as the impact of design decisions throughout the whole process of developing tools and infrastructures. The paper presents an approach for hypotheses driven design of digital tools and infrastructures from a computer science point of view, placing great emphasis on supporting mutual understanding and ensuring a transparent design process.

ABSTRACT In North West British Columbia, First Nations women are playing an essential role in a cultural shift that is positively affecting community health and the education of Aboriginal youth. Historically, the First Peoples of the North West coast were profoundly transformed by European contact. Policies, oppressions and disease disrupted lives and communities that had existed in stasis since time immemorial. The results, described by Thomas Berger as “third world” conditions, are predictable --young and old afflicted with addictions and dysfunctions. Recently, the dominant politics have begun to acknowledge the First Nations as having a legitimate voice in the social and political processes that concern them. This research is one part of the national multi-disciplinary study, Coasts Under Stress: The Impact of Social and Environmental Restructuring on Environmental and Human Health in Canada. In this phase of the larger project, the importance of the educational and community leadership of First Nations women is recognized as they struggle to break cycles of dysfunction that afflict their communities. Increasing enrollment of coastal youth and adults in secondary school and college programs, and in educational programs on reserve over the past decade is one sign of positive change. The main purpose of my study is to explore the role of First Nations women in supporting social and educational opportunities in their villages and in society-at-large. The central research question asks what supports and barriers First Nations women encounter as they assume leadership roles within their villages and without. A purposive sample of seven women joined the research conversation, involved because of the formal leadership roles they have assumed, and because of their perceived influence on the general health of their communities and the region. Their responsibilities represent a wide spectrum of educational and community leadership, and counter a prevailing stereotype of First Nations people generally and women particularly. Carefully chosen qualitative research methods were employed to ensure consistency with Kwakwakawakw practices and protocols. Sustained dialogue was used as a way of drawing on the historical and cultural tapestry framing the research question. Given the hermeneutic nature of the study, the individual narratives became the heart of the study and a voice-centred relational data analysis followed. Analysis based on a theory that characterizes human beings as interdependent, historically and culturally contextual and embedded in a complex web of intimate and larger social relations resonates with First Nations ontology and epistemology. The narratives reveal detailed historical and cultural data, providing for enhanced cultural understanding and knowledge-based theory building. In addition to the contextual material, the narratives provide direction for Aboriginal and cross-cultural research protocols as well as an opportunity for the interested reader to “listen and learn” as Joseph Couture propounds. The stereotypes that continue to confine and condemn Aboriginal women are rightfully eroded by the life histories themselves and their illustration of the process of reclamation of Aboriginal identity. Finally, further evidence is offered for Sylvia Maracle’s assertion that Aboriginal women have been leading community development initiatives for the past thirty-five years. Education and health are the primary beneficiaries of their efforts.

In this paper we investigate the relationship of Information Science (IS) and the Digital Humanities (DH) by means of a scientometric comparison of academic journals from the respective disciplines. In order to identify scholarly practices for both disciplines, we apply a recent variant of LDA topic modeling that makes use of additional hierarchical clustering. The results reveal the existence of characteristic topic areas for both IS (information retrieval, information seeking behavior, scientometrics) and DH (computational linguistics, distant reading and digital editions) that can be used to distinguish them as disciplines in their own right. However, there is also a larger shared area of practices related to information management and also a few shared topic clusters that indicate a common ground for – mostly methodological – exchange between the two disciplines.

The research presented in this thesis is based in the Humanities discipline of Ancient History and begins by attempting to understand the interpretation process involved in reading ancient documents and how this process can be aided by computer systems such as Decision Support Systems (DSS). The thesis balances between the use of IT tools to aid Humanities research and the understanding that Humanities research must involve human beings. It does not attempt to develop a system that can automate the reading of ancient documents. Instead it seeks to demonstrate and develop tools that can support this process in the five areas: remembering complex reasoning, searching huge datasets, international collaboration, publishing editions, and image enhancement. This research contains a large practical element involving the development of a DSS prototype. The prototype is used to illustrate how a DSS, by remembering complex reasoning, can aid the process of interpretation that is reading ancient documents. It is based on the idea that the interpretation process goes through a network of interpretation. The network of interpretation illustrates a recursive process where scholars move between reading levels such as ‘these strokes look like the letter c’ or ‘these five letters must be the word primo’. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates how technology such as Web Services and XML can be used to make a DSS even more powerful through the development of the APPELLO word search Web Service. Finally, the conclusion includes a suggestion for a future development of a working DSS that incorporates the idea of a layer-based system and focuses strongly on user interaction.

No description available.