moving humanities - ru.nl · moving humanities 2014 is organized by the graduate school for the...
Post on 22-Aug-2019
217 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
Moving Humanities
Programme & Abstracts
ReMA/PhD conference
Graduate School for the
Humanities
Gymnasion, Radboud University
Nijmegen
Thursday, 23 October 2014
We are delighted to welcome you to the
Moving Humanities conference. Moving
Humanities spans a wide range of
disciplines within the Humanities. The focus
of this year’s event is on bringing ideas and
practice together in an exchange that should
be both challenging and constructive.
28 PhD candidates and Research Master
students will present their research in
parallel sessions, while Prof Wijnand
Mijnhardt (Utrecht University) will deliver a
keynote lecture entitled 'Why Science Does
Not Work as It Should, And What To Do
about It'. The conference will be kicked off by
three VENI grant recipients, who will hold
workshops on their experiences with the
application process.
We hope that today’s programme will give
you new ideas, and we wish you an inspiring
day!
The organizing committee:
Ruud van den Beuken
Jeroen Dera
Kobie van Krieken
Brenda Mathijssen
Mijntje Peters
Welcome to Moving Humanities 2014
Moving Humanities 2014 is organized by The Graduate
School for the Humanities. The Graduate School for the
Humanities unites the graduate programmes of the three
research institutes in the Humanities at Radboud University
Nijmegen: Centre for Language Studies, Institute for
Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, Research Institute
for Philosophy, Theology & Religious Studies.
What the GSH has to offer
The Radboud University
Graduate School for the
Humanities offers the best
possible research training and
supervision to young academic
talent from the Netherlands and
abroad in the Humanities
disciplines. Our Research Ma
and PhD programs are closely
tied to the outstanding research
institutes within our faculties.
We offer our Research Ma
students and PhD students an
inspiring and multidisciplinary
setting, in which world-leading
scholars collaborate in the
areas of linguistics, language
and speech technology,
communication studies,
literature and literary theory,
cultural studies, history, art
history, archeology, philosophy
and religious studies. Much of
this collaboration is focused in
two multidisciplinary research
themes:
- Europe and its Worlds
- Language in Mind and
Society
The Graduate School for the Humanities
We guarantee intensive
academic training and personal
coaching for each PhD student,
as part of a tailor-made training
and supervision plan. The
training course includes local
course work, and may also
include participation in the
teaching activities organized by
specialized inter-university
research schools.
We offer personalized career
planning courses and training
courses aimed at personal
development. In their daily
research environment, our PhD
students are part of interaction
intensive research peer groups
supervised by outstanding
senior researchers.
Conference venues: Gymnasion & Cultuurcafé
10.00-10.15 Registration with coffee and tea
Foyer
(Noordvleugel
Gymnasion)
10.15-10.30 Opening
GN3
10.30-11.30 Workshops by VENI grant recipients: their roads to success
GN1 Dr Lisette Mol (Tilburg University) CLS
GN2 Dr Floris Overduin (Radboud University) HLCS
GN4 Dr Delphine Bellis (Radboud University) PTRS
11.30-12.45 Parallel sessions 1
Session 1.1 Chair: Dr Anneke de Graaf
GN1 Wendy Jacobs, Enny Das & Sanne Schagen (Communication and Information
Sciences)
Reducing Self-Perceived Cognitive Problems after Breast Cancer Treatment: The
Role of Stereotype Vulnerability
Ferdy Hubers (Linguistics)
Emotional responses in reading groter als ‘bigger as’: An fMRI study
Annemarie Weerman (Communication and Information Sciences)
You did what?! An examination of argument quality manipulations in advertising
research
Session 1.2 Chair: Dr Joost Rosendaal
GN2 Maaike Derksen (History)
Educating and civilising the Javanese: Catholic mission schools in Java 1904-1942
Koen van Zon (History)
In Search of Purpose. The European Parliament in search of alternative repertoires of
legitimacy, 1950-1960
Thomas Smits (Literary and Cultural Studies)
Doing digital humanities: readers of 19th century illustrated newspapers
Conference Programme
Session 1.3 Chair: Prof Peter Nissen
GN4 Ruti Vardi (Theology)
The conceptualisation of emotions in Biblical Hebrew
Ezra Delahaye (Philosophy)
The power of the powerless: the Bartleby case
Jorn Ackermans (Philosophy)
Thomas Aquinas on the Embodied and the Disembodied Soul: An Inquiry into
Thomas’ Accounts of the Soul’s Cognitive-Psychological Functioning in its Embodied
and Disembodied State
12.45-13.30 Lunch
Foyer
(Noordvleugel
Gymnasion)
13.30-14.45 Parallel sessions 2
Session 2.1 Chair: Prof Carla Rita Palmerino
GN1 Frank van Caspel (Open University, Philosophy)
On Proprification
Carli Coenen (Open University, Philosophy)
Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement: from Cartesian dualism to Embodied
Cognition?
Gauwain van Kooten Niekerk (Religion Studies)
Forging meaning in the interaction between viewer and film
Session 2.2 Chair: Dr Stefan Frank
GN2 Lieke Verheijen (Dutch Language and Culture)
The Linguistics of Computer-Mediated Communication – A Register Analysis of Dutch
Youngsters’ Written CMC
Huib Kouwenhoven (Communication and Information Sciences)
Register variation and communication strategy use by Spanish users of English
Lisa Morano & Mirjam Ernestus (Linguistics)
Learning reduced words in a foreign language
Conference Programme
Session 2.3 Chair: Prof Alicia Montoya
GN4 Lieke van Deinsen (Dutch Language and Culture)
Collecting Culture and the Culture of Collecting: Forging Cultural History in
Eighteenth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities.
Jordy Geerlings (History)
Catholics in Leiden sociability (1750-1800)
Floris Solleveld (History)
What happened to the Republic of Letters?
14.45-15.00 Coffee and tea
Foyer
(Noordvleugel
Gymnasion)
15.00-16.15 Parallel sessions 3
Session 3.1 Chair: Dr Maarten de Pourcq
GN1 Meta Links (English Language and Culture)
Correlative Constructions in Earlier English
Isabel Kimmelfield (History)
Byzantine History and Heritage in Tophane, Istanbul: A New Approach to Studying
the Suburbs of Constantinople
Eveline Rutten (Greek Language and Culture)
A very short introduction to digital editing for Humanities
Esmée Bruggink (Greek Language and Culture)
Variation in Plato’s Quotation of Homer: an illustration
Session 3.2 Chair: Yvette Linders MA
GN2 Nienke Fortuin (Religion Studies)
Interpreting death from a cultural context
Christa van Mourik (German Language and Culture)
Poetics and catchwords
Conference Programme
Guusje Jol & Wyke Stommel
‘How do you know?’ Questions about sources of knowledge in police interviews with
child witnesses
Session 3.3 Chair: Dr Martine Veldhuizen
GN4 Christel Theunissen (Art History)
Medieval choir stalls on the move: solving an art historical puzzle
Kor Bosch (History)
Not all roads lead to Rome. Descriptions of travel by visitors to the papal court(s) in
an age of schism, 1378-1449
Bernardien van den Berg (Religious Studies)
The religious of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in Helmond (1462-1543): choir or
converse sisters?
16.15-17.00 Keynote lecture by Prof Wijnand Mijnhardt (Utrecht University)
GN3 Why Science Does Not Work as It Should, And What To Do about It
17.00 - … Drinks and snacks
Cultuurcafé
Conference Programme
A
Jorn T.G. Ackermans
Thomas Aquinas on the Embodied and the
Disembodied Soul
An Inquiry into Thomas’ Accounts of the Soul’s
Cognitive-Psychological Functioning in its
Embodied and Disembodied State
In the thirteenth century a turning point in the
philosophical discourse in the Latin West can be
distinguished. The Augustinian-Platonic tradition
that dominated this discourse seemed to part for
Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotelianism, however,
proved to be difficult to integrate within the
existing Augustinian-Platonic philosophical
discourse. Creating a synthesis between
(dominant) Christian doctrines and Aristotelian
thought was most difficult. One notoriously
difficult issue proved to be the immortality of the
soul. It seemed nearly impossible to prove the
continued existence of the soul after the
corporeal death using a true Aristotelian
framework that views humans as a hylomorphic
compound of body and soul.
In the midst of these issues, Thomas Aquinas
seemed to succeed in reconciling Christian
doctrine with Aristotelian philosophy, also on this
topic. In investigating Thomas’ views on the
cognitive-psychological functioning of the soul,
one of my foci of interest was comparing
Thomas’ account of the embodied soul (which
can be found in his Summa Theologiae) and the
disembodied soul (which, for the most part, can
be found in his Summa Contra Gentiles). From
this investigation I draw the conclusion that
Thomas’ account of the embodied soul is indeed
of a very Aristotelian nature. His account of the
disembodied soul however, seems to be using an
Augustinian-Platonic framework. Various
underlying mechanisms could be the cause of
this apparent ambiguity.
B
Bernardien van den Berg
The religious of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in
Helmond (1462-1543): choir or converse sisters?
The subject of my research project is the
production, ownership and use of the books of
the convent of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in
Helmond (1462-1543). This convent was a
member of the Chapter of Venlo, a group of
convents that stemmed from the Devotio
Moderna. Most of the manuscripts have been
passed down through the Soeterbeeck
Collection, which was loaned to Nijmegen
University Library in 2014.
The corpus of manuscripts consists of, at least,
two devotional books in Dutch, a book of hours
and eleven liturgical manuscripts in Latin. Except
for a psalter, all of the liturgical manuscripts
contain texts for the canonical offices of Vespers
and Compline. A manuscript containing what
appear to be the statutes of the convent has also
survived.
An article on lay sisters of St. Augustine by Koen
Goudriaan (2008) casts doubt on the status of
the Helmond sisters as choir sisters. By
comparing the Helmond sisters’ liturgy in
practice, as derived from the manuscripts, with
their liturgy in theory, as described in the
statutes, I would like to clarify Goudriaan’s
doubts, in order to get a better understanding of
the manuscript’s actual use.
Abstracts
Kor Bosch
Not all roads lead to Rome. Descriptions of travel
by visitors to the papal court(s) in an age of
schism, 1378-1449
In the late medieval period, large numbers of
visitors from all over Europe – and beyond –
flocked to the papal court. They went there to
petition the pope for legal support and to receive
justice, to seek employment or promotion denied
to them at home, or to gain permission to travel
to the Muslim-held Holy Land. But from 1378
onwards, two – and later three – men claimed to
be pope, each with their own court. Due to the
popularity of the journey to the papal court, a
fairly standardized way of describing it had
developed by the fourteenth century. But with
multiple papal courts competing for attention
after 1378, this standard way of describing the
spatial reality of Europe and the position of the
papacy in it was no longer straightforward. If the
papal court had been the centre of Europe, how
did travellers respond to the existence of multiple
coexisting courts? Did the redirection of travel
affect descriptions of topography and space?
And what narrative strategies did visitors employ
in their writing to make sense of the complex
religious reality of Europe during the Western
Schism?
Esmée Bruggink
VARIATION IN PLATO´S QUOTATION OF HOMER: AN
ILLUSTRATION
Homer should be denied any chorus, Socrates
concludes in the Republic of Plato (c. 427-347
BC). Yet by singling him out for criticism, it is
Plato himself who grants Homer a platform.
Throughout the philosopher’s oeuvre, his verses
are quoted. Whereas with some of these
references Plato criticizes Homer and all who
appropriate Homer in his time, he seems to take
part in precisely this culture with others: just like
the bards and sophists, he makes use of the
epics to strengthen his argument and share his
ideas. And this is not the only level on which the
Homeric influence is sensed: to judge from the
form, content and style of his dialogues, Plato is
indebted to the authoritative poietes. In his own
appropriation of Homer, Plato felt free to adapt
passages to his own purposes, presenting them
in a different version than his audience knew
from ‘their’ Homer. Sometimes, the quotations
themselves differ significantly from the Homeric
text as it is known to us. How can these
variations be accounted for? Were the citations
deliberately manipulated in line with Plato’s
fashion? Or do they reflect an Athenian edition of
the Iliad and Odyssey? What do these witnesses
tell us?
C
Frank van Caspel
On Proprification
Step right up to hear all about a new concept:
proprification! It signals cases in which
phenomena are made into, or thought of as,
properties. Specifically, I focus on the
proprification of processes, which yields a class
of properties which cannot be causally
efficacious. I will therefore make a case against
proprifying processes, and for eliminating
properties defined as a process or causal role.
The payoff comes last, when I argue why we
should care about proprification: in philosophy of
mind proprification of processes is a very real
problem,
which drives the debate on mental causation.
Carli Coenen
Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du component:
from Cartesian dualism to Embodied Cognition?
My research is guided by an interest in the
following two closely interrelated philosophical
problems. First, the mind-body problem: the
problem of how to understand the relation
between our ‘mind’ (our cognition, our
consciousness, our subjectivity) on the one hand,
and our ‘body’ on the other. Second, the problem
of intentionality: the problem of how to
understand how our cognition (bodily or not) is
related to the world it cognizes.
One of the most famous, but highly
unsatisfactory answers to these problems has
been that of René Descartes (1596-1650):
substance dualism, which combines both a mind-
body dualism and a representationalism that
separates mind from world. Even though this
Cartesian starting point has been severely
criticized in the past 400 years, and ‘mind’ has
been reduced to ‘brain’ or replaced by
‘phenomenal consciousness’, the dualism has,
arguably, hardly been overcome. In recent years,
the so-called programme of Embedded
Embodied Cognition (EEC) in cognitive science
and philosophy has aimed to formulate a more
proper anti-Cartesian alternative by emphasizing
the intrinsic, constitutive and indispensable role
of the body and world in our cognition.
Importantly, some philosophers find a protagonist
of anti-Cartesian embodied cognition in the
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908-1961), who has often been championed as
the philosopher of the body.
A closer examination of Merleau-Ponty, however,
shows that his treatment of
Descartes is more subtle and rather different
than EEC-proponents assume. In my research I
combine an historical-exegetical investigation into
the constitutive role of Descartes’ thought in the
development of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the
relation between cognition, body and world, and
a critical investigation into the way the EEC-
programme relies on Merleau-Ponty, in the hope
of showing how a historically more accurate
understanding of Merleau-Ponty might contribute
to the contemporary debate.
At the conference, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s
first book La structure du comportement (1938,
published 1942), which was part of his
dissertation.
D
Lieke van Deinsen
Collecting Culture and the Culture of Collecting:
Forging Cultural History in Eighteenth-Century
Cabinets of Curiosities.
Collecting became extremely fashionable in early
eighteenth-century Europe, and especially so in
the Dutch Republic, where the trade routes of the
Dutch East India Company had brought
countless objects to the Republic only to fall in
the eager hands of numerous collectors. Building
on the achievements of the scientific revolutions
of the late seventeenth century, these collections
not only created interest in unknown and exotic
cultures, but at the same time fueled
Abstracts
debates on the domestic cultural heritage. In this
paper, I will investigate how popular early modern
collections played a role in the formation of
cultural traditions.
More specifically, I will focus on one of the most
popular literary collections of the eighteenth
century: the Panpoëticon Batavûm. In this
wooden cabinet, the portraits of more than two
hundred Dutch men and women of letters were
brought together as early as 1720. As it grew
over the years, this collection evoked numerous
reactions of contemporaries, inspiring them to
articulate their strongly affective reactions to
beholding this groundbreaking depiction of Dutch
literary history. As one contemporary stated,
then, this cabinet was not a sealed-off
‘mausoleum’ in which the literary heroes of the
past had been entombed; the Panpoëticon
Batavûm should rather be considered as an
open, active and – above all – tangible memory
which served the burgeoning formation of a
Dutch literary canon.
Ezra Delahaye
The power of the powerless: the Bartleby case
Melville’s novella Bartleby, the Scrivener serves
as a philosophical playground. Many
philosophers have commented on it and they
emphasize a variety of different aspects. For the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben Bartleby is a
truly political figure. Bartleby makes the order of
things inoperative by his utter refusal to take any
action. Agamben understands Bartleby’s
inactivity in terms of the Aristotelian division
between potentiality and act. Bartleby makes all
actuality inoperative, thereby restoring
potentiality.
On the political stage Bartleby’s inoperativity
inverts power-relationships. What is powerful is
made powerless. The authority, the one who has
the power can do nothing against Bartleby.
Power is bound up with actuality. The one in
power is always the one who determines what is
actual. Think of any regime, they remain in power
by marginalizing their opposition. They take away
their actuality. By refusing this logic, Bartleby
opens a way to potentialize the actual and give
power back to the marginalized.
In this paper I will analyse Bartleby as a political
figure. I will show how Bartleby makes all
actuality inoperative and how this gives power
back to the powerless.
Maaike Derksen
Educating and civilising the Javanese: Catholic
mission schools in Java 1904-1942
The word "mission" speaks to many people's
imagination; men or women, who go to remote
and inhospitable areas with a cross in their hand
to convert heathens. The romance of this
missionary image was not the reality for many
Dutch Catholic missionaries in Java. Half of them
worked for the European colonists and the other
half worked in the mission under the Javanese.
Which in practise meant that the missionaries
were teachers in the schools for higher
indigenous education. In this paper I will discuss
the encounters that missionaries had in their
Javanese mission, especially in the schools. I will
do this by presenting a case study which is taken
from my PhD-project. It concerns two major
educational institutes for Javanese in
Central-Java, which were led by Dutch
missionaries.
In this paper I will make two main arguments.
Firstly: In the Catholic mission under the
Javanese, encounters were organised along lines
of gender, ethnicity, class and religion.
Furthermore, in these encounters, local
(Javanese) cultural intermediaries played a vital
role. Not only in meeting a Javanese flock but
also in converting and educating them. Secondly:
I will show the practises of a gendered ideology
in these encounters, arguing that the
missionaries played a large part in the export of
the European ideal of (Christian) femininity and
masculinity to the colonies.
F
Nienke Fortuin
Interpreting death from a cultural context
This paper presents a biocultural theory of
signification, that has been applied to the
interpretation of approaching death. Central to
this theoretical framework is the concept of
affordance. Gibson defined the affordances of the
environment as ‘what it offers the animal, what it
provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’.
Gibson defined the niche of an organism as ‘a
set of affordances’. However, the human niche
consists not only of natural affordances, but also
of cultural affordances. We view cultural
affordances as culturally supported beliefs and
norms, that influence perception, that are related
to certain intentions and that may result in certain
actions. We have applied our theory of
signification to the process of interpreting death.
Since death poses the ultimate existential threat,
human culture provides many cultural
affordances for interpreting death. A qualitative
analysis of 86 interviews with people confronted
with imminent death indicated 39 cultural
affordances for interpreting death, that were
classified in a religious, secular and spiritual
cultural niche. Interviewees primarily applied
affordances from the spiritual niche (60%). While
religious affordances were also common (30%),
secular affordances were applied less (10%).
Interviewees applied affordances from multiple
cultural niches, demonstrating the entrenchment
of individuals in multiple cultural niches.
G
Jordy Geerlings
Catholics in Leiden sociability (1750-1800)
Although both its economy and its university
were in decline during the 18th century, the city
of Leiden continued to receive significant
numbers of students from all over the known
world. The university thus boosted the religious
diversity of the local population, drawing students
and residents from Calvinist, dissenting
Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and even Russian
Orthodox backgrounds. It also continued to serve
as the main centre of education for the Dutch
Republic’s political and religious elite. These
unique conditions greatly boosted the
development of new forms of sociability from
1750 onwards, creating a wide range of scientific,
cultural and political societies as well as Masonic
lodges and associations for public welfare.
In spite of all this, Enlightenment-era sociability in
Leiden was not a
Abstracts
celebration of interconfessional collaboration
under the influence of Enlightenment ideals. Nor
did academic cosmopolitanism reign
unchallenged. Instead, a variety of exclusionary
practices existed, and the presence of religious
minority groups in organized sociability was not
by definition a sign of emancipation. This paper
explores the entry of Catholics into Leiden
sociability, with a special focus on how, why and
with what results they were able to join.
H
Ferdy Hubers
Emotional responses in reading groter als ‘bigger
as’: An fMRI study
In Dutch, sentences like Hij is kleiner als zijn
zusje ‘He is smaller as his little sister’ and Wat
maken hun een vreselijk lawaai! ‘Them are
making a terrible noise!’ are quite common in
daily language. According to prescriptive
grammar, however, these sentences are
incorrect. Instead of als ‘as,’ dan ‘than’ is
prescribed in comparatives of inequality and
instead of hun ‘them’, zij ‘they’ or ze
‘they.REDUCED’ should be used as the subject
of a sentence.
Many people, often highly-educated, claim that
for them these grammatical norm violations are
truly ungrammatical, since they are taught at
school that these constructions are not allowed.
Those people, therefore, often experience
negative emotions (e.g. repugnance) when
getting exposed to these constructions.
To investigate whether these negative emotions
are truly present in the processing of grammatical
norm violations I am currently conducting an
fMRI experiment. I will examine whether these
negative emotions cause any differences in
processing between grammar norm violations,
truly ungrammatical sentences, and grammatical
ones. I will also compare the processing of
grammatical norm violations with the processing
of sentences about socially unacceptable
situations to see whether overlap is present.
J
Guusje Jol & Wyke Stommel
‘How do you know?’ Questions about sources of
knowledge in police interviews with child
witnesses
In this presentation we will report of our
conversation analytic research into police
interviews with child witnesses. The child
witnesses are boys and girls in the age of 6-11
years old. In order to avoid suggestion and
pressure on the child, police officers have to
comply with rules written down in a manual.
One of the rules is that police officers have to ask
for the ‘reasons of knowledge’. It is thought that
specific questions are required to reveal ‘the
source of information and acquire insight in
causal relations’ (Dekens & Van der Sleen 2013:
92). A question that seems to be employed for
this task is ‘how do you know?’. Interactionally,
this question challenges the child’s preceding
answer, which is remarkable because police
officers are not supposed to show belief or
disbelief regarding the child’s answer.
We will show examples and we will discuss the
various kinds of occurrences and functions of
‘you do you know’-questions .
Dekens, K. & Sleen, J. van der (2013).
Handleiding Het kind als getuige. Amsterdam:
Stapel & De Koning.
Wendy Jacobs, Enny Das & Sanne Schagen
Reducing Self-Perceived Cognitive Problems
after Breast Cancer Treatment: The Role of
Stereotype Vulnerability
Being informed about side effects of medical
treatment can increase the occurrence of these
side effects. Previous research has documented
that negative expectations play a role, but
evidence regarding when and how these
information-effects come about is scarce. This
study uses insights from stereotype threat
literature to examine (a) the conditions under
which information-based side effects occur, (b)
the role of stereotypes, and (c) whether an
intervention can reduce these effects among
breast cancer patients.
In an online experiment, 175 women diagnosed
with breast cancer were randomly assigned to
one of three experimental conditions that
differentially informed them about treatment
related side effects: (a) ‘some patients treated
with chemotherapy experience memory- and
concentration problems’, (b) additional reassuring
information explaining that ‘there is still a group
of patients that scores well on memory tests’ or
(c) no reference to chemotherapy-related
cognitive problems. Main dependent measure
was frequency of self-perceived cognitive
problems (SPCP). Moderating (e.g., stereotype
vulnerability) and mediating processes (e.g.,
worry) were also examined.
Findings suggest that adverse effects of
treatment information are especially prominent
among patients vulnerable to stereotypes, and
that adding positive and reassuring information is
not sufficient to reduce stereotype threat effects.
Future studies should examine interventions that
have the potential to reduce these effects.
K
Isabel Kimmelfield
‘Byzantine History and Heritage in Tophane,
Istanbul: A New Approach to Studying the
Suburbs of Constantinople’
While the Historic Peninsula of Byzantine
Constantinople is a key tourist site in modern
Istanbul, in the former Constantinopolitan
suburbs few Byzantine remains are preserved or
investigated. Urbanisation and limited textual
sources further hinder research into these
regions, leaving historians with little
understanding of how the intramural city
interacted with and conceived of its suburban
regions.
This paper will present early findings from a PhD
project which seeks to construct a new method to
study Constantinopolitan suburbs through
evidence such as legends, liturgy, and imperial
ceremonial books, using these sources to
understand changing Byzantine
conceptualisations of these regions throughout
the city’s history. At the same time, it will consider
modern perceptions of these regions’ Byzantine
history and heritage as well as the future of such
heritage in a rapidly changing modern city.
Focussing specifically on the neighbourhood of
Tophane, this paper will demonstrate the
application of this methodology and the types of
results it yields. It will briefly discuss the
Abstracts
extension of this approach to other suburban
regions of Constantinople. Lastly it will consider
how their history and heritage does or does not
have a place in the modern neighbourhoods
today.
Gauwain van Kooten Niekerk
Forging meaning in the interaction between
viewer and film
You exit the cinema with an indefinable, but
inconvenient feeling. You have just seen a film
and feel there are many uncovered layers which
you can’t manage to peel. Being inconvenient is
perhaps the biggest possible compliment for a
film because it conveys a certain amount of
tension that can lead to meaning making. But we
avoid inconvenient films: ‘films are for relaxation,
not meditation!’
Films with great opportunity to forge personal
meaning do not reach large enough audiences,
and the meaning hooks in blockbusters are not
often enough found. I want to change that. Film
has the power to change people, it can cause
transformations in the personal narrative. When
does it? What mechanisms are at work? What
does crisis have to do with this?
I want to research the interaction between viewer
and film to discover how personal meaning is
forged in this interaction. What elements of the
film trigger this? What processes in the personal
narrative call for this? When does ‘meaning’ lead
to ‘transformation’?
These insights will be the basis of a manual for
conversations about films which maximises the
potential for personal meaning making in a way
that the conversations are both educational and
entertaining.
Huib Kouwenhoven
Register variation and communication strategy
use by Spanish users of English
Non-native speakers often use English as a
lingua franca (ELF), both in formal (e.g.
academic lectures) and informal (e.g.
international student parties) speech situations.
Previous studies have documented native
speakers' adaptation of language to the speech
situation (register variation), but little is known
about non-native register variation. We
investigated non-native register variation in the
Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English (NCSE) at
a general discourse level (e.g. amount of
laughter, amount of overlapping speech), the
level of linguistic variables characteristic of
'involved' and 'informational' language (Biber,
1988) and in speakers' use of communication
strategies (e.g. paraphrases, approximations;
e.g. Dörnyei & Scott, 1997) that serve to
overcome linguistic difficulties.
Our results show that the Spanish speakers in
the NCSE show variation at all three levels. First,
the informal speech situation was more casual,
marked by more laughter and more overlapping
speech. Secondly, the informal recordings were
more interactive, whereas the language in the
formal recordings showed a higher information
density. Thirdly, in the formal setting, speakers
used more informative communication strategies
than in the informal setting. All in all, we conclude
from our findings that non-native speakers show
register variation.
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and
Writing. Cambridge University Press.
Dörnyei, Z., & Scott, M. L. (1997).
Communication strategies in a second language:
Definitions and taxonomies. Language learning,
47(1), 173-210.
L
Meta Links
Correlative Constructions in Earlier English
A special property of Verb-Second (V2)
languages is the ability to exploit the position
before the finite verb for discourse linking
properties. This characteristic is especially
utilised by correlative constructions of the so-
called then-then type as in (1).
Þa he þa to him cwom, þa wæs he forht geworden.
Then he then to him came, then was he fearful
become
‘When he then came to him, he had become fearful.’
(Bede_2:9.128.17.1222)
Example (1) – with the finite verb in second
position preceded by a discourse linking adverb –
is perfectly grammatical in Dutch, a V2 language,
but not in Present-day English, a non-V2
language, which has to use different outward
trappings to convey the same message.
Interestingly enough, structurally similar
constructions to that in example (1) were once
grammatical during the earlier stages of English
as can be seen in (2).
Toen hij haar John zag kussen, toen stortte hij
helemaal in.
Then he her John saw kiss, then broke he completely
down
‘When he saw her kissing John, he completely broke
down.’
This presentation will focus on the development
of correlative constructions in earlier English over
time (using the YCOE and PPCME2 corpora),
investigating how its discourse properties are
reflected in its correlative syntactic form. I will
concentrate especially on 1) the use of
conjunctions and their specific combination with
resumptive adverbs and 2) the use of the first
constituent position in the main clause.
M
Lisa Morano & Mirjam Ernestus
Learning reduced words in a foreign language
In casual speech, native speakers speak faster,
reduce words, and enunciate less well than in a
formal context, which makes it difficult for non-
natives to understand them. For example,
learners of French have less problem
understanding ministre when it is pronounced in
full than when it is reduced to [miz].
One of the reasons for this is that learners are
typically not exposed to these variants at school.
We are investigating how learners of French
understand reduced variants when they have
been equally exposed to both the full and the
reduced forms of a word. We focus on Dutch
students who studied French in high school for
maximally three years.
We taught 24 schwa words, such as semoule,
both in full form ([səmul]) and reduced form
([smul]) to 32 participants during two half-hour
sessions. After the second session, we tested
how well they recognized the variants of a word,
by asking them to indicate for 264 words whether
they are real words of
Abstracts
French. Of the taught schwa words, 90% and
87% of the full and reduced forms, respectively,
were recognized correctly, suggesting that mere
exposure to reduced forms during learning would
suffice to enhance learners' perception of such
forms.
Christa van Mourik
Poetics and catchwords
In my (second) thesis I explored the poetics and
posture of the Dutch art critic Jan Kalff (1873-
1954). He was one of the most productive
contributors to the Dutch weekly De Kroniek
(1895-1907) between 1895 and 1899, publishing
over 120 articles during this period.
For the analysis of Kalff’s poetics I worked with
catchwords. At first glance one might think this
method to be rather straight forward: one has to
select catchwords, find them in the corpus and
then use the passages one finds to describe – in
this case – Kalff’s poetics.
However, since working with catchwords as a
method in the humanities is barely described in
secondary literature, I had to overcome
numerous problems I came across when trying to
operationalize this method. Because I am
convinced that working with catchwords can be a
very helpful method in the humanities, especially
when exploring poetics, I will discuss some of the
problems I came across, focussing primarily on
the process of selecting catchwords.
R
Eveline Rutten
<title> A very short introduction to digital editing
for Humanities </title>
<p> Are you a real humanist? A humanist that
passed A-levels in five languages, but dispensed
with mathematics as soon as possible? Then you
are probably scared of these <hi>pointy
brackets</hi> inserted in my text. You don’t have
to! I will provide you with a short but illuminating
introduction to what these things mean, and what
you can actually do with them.</p>
<p> My current project focuses on fragmentary
texts of a Greek poet named Tyrtaeus. Because
the texts are preserved in many different sources
and in different stages of completeness, I wanted
a method which enables me to display the
fragments as separate as well as combining
them into one edited text. On my search through
different possibilities, I came across the TEI: the
Text Encoding Initiative. The TEI is an
international group of scholars which produces
guidelines for digital editing for Humanities. In
my short presentation, I will explain to you what
the TEI is, how their guidelines work, and how
you could make use of these in producing a
digital edition. </p>
S
Thomas Smits
Doing digital humanities: readers of 19th century
illustrated newspapers
In my Phd-project I focus on the simultaneous
and interconnected formation of national and
transnational identity, by researching seven
European illustrated newspapers between 1842
and 1870. I’m currently researching the colonial
and international readers of the Illustrated
London News, one of the most successful
publications of the nineteenth century. Large
open-access databases of digitalized nineteenth
century newspapers, like Delpher (Netherlands),
Trove (Australia), Paper Past (New Zealand),
Anno (Austria) and even the digital newspaper
collection of Bermuda, are a valuable resource
for this kind of research. By looking at articles
and advertisements, both by the ILN as by their
international representatives, I hope to shed light
on the colonial and international readers of this
publication.
In my contribution to the conference I want to
focus on methodological questions surrounding
these databases. How do they differ from one
another? How do their options and user-
interfaces influence historical research? What is
the most effective way to search trough OCR-
generated texts? How can we effectively combine
the ‘hits’ in large datasets with more traditional
historical methods like close reading? I hope to
both give and get input on working effectively
with these new kind of digital archives.
Floris Solleveld
What happened to the Republic of Letters?
What happened to the Republic of Letters?
Throughout the early modern period, an
imagined community of scholars and ‘men of
letters’ all over Europe was regularly invoked in
scholarly work and correspondence as audience,
judge, and substitute family. With the decline of
Latin and the rise of French and other
vernaculars as the language of culture, that
republic already began to compartmentalize; by
1750, according to Kasper Eskildsen, “to most
German and Scandinavian scholars the Republic
of Letters was nothing more than a comical relic
from a distant humanistic past”.
Two developments seem to coincide: while the
Republic of Letters dissolves, the ‘public sphere’
takes shape; the 19th century has intellectuals
where the 18th had gens de letters. The obvious
question is: to what extent is this a break or a
continuity? The hypothesis which I will present in
this paper is that the Republic of Letters diluted
rather than ended: with the increase of scholarly
production and specialization, it became too big
for everyone to still be one correspondent away.
Also, with the increase of the reading public, one
no longer writes for ‘the learned world’: one either
writes for fellow specialists or for the educated
public at large.
Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, “How Germany Left
the Republic of Letters”, Journal of the History of
Ideas 65:3 (2004), pp. 421-432
T
Christel Theunissen
Medieval choir stalls on the move: solving an art
historical puzzle
Choir stalls were part of the church furniture in
medieval cathedrals, collegiate and cloister
churches. Most of the time the clergy were the
sole users of the stalls during the offices held in
the church. To give them some relief, during the
time whilst praying and singing, the seats were
provided with misericords. These are small
brackets underneath the seat which they could
lean on when the seat was upright. Hidden away,
the misericord was the ideal place for profane
woodcarvings.
Abstracts
Reformation, wars and secularization have
destroyed many medieval choir stalls which were
spread around Europe. And many more were
dismantled, moved and sold to other churches or
private collectors. This dissolution took mainly
place at the end of the eighteenth till late in the
nineteenth century. We find the remains of
ensembles scattered over different places and
countries in the world. Regularly, parts of choir
stalls show up at auctions where they are being
offered for sale again. The provenance of these
offered items is often unknown. They become
objects which are sold time and again, and have
lost their original context completely.
In this paper I will focus on a set of five
misericords which came onto the art market a
couple of years ago. Offered by a British auction
house the misericords are described as
originating from Spain. The exact provenance is
however not known. The quest for their origin will
lead through some European countries. With the
help of art historical methods, the results of this
research will be presented in this paper.
V
Ruti Vardi
The conceptualisation of emotions in Biblical
Hebrew
Emotions in Biblical Hebrew (BH) are expressed
by emotion- and related terms, as well as
metaphors and idiomatic constructions. By
applying a corpus study to the examination of
affection and sadness, I aim to explore
underlying concepts that may drive the use of
linguistic constructions, and the relations
between these emotions and social order in the
Hebrew bible. In addition to the grammatical
forms used to express and narrate love-events in
BH, social-cultural aspects such as the social
identity/status of participants, the relationships
between them, and the context in which love-
events occur (e.g. kinship, deity), are thoroughly
examined and analysed. In my talk I will describe
the theoretical framework and the methodology
of the study and will present preliminary
observed patterns in, and implications of, the use
of love-constructions.
Lieke Verheijen
The Linguistics of Computer-Mediated
Communication – A Register Analysis of Dutch
Youngsters’ Written CMC
Recent decades have seen an explosive growth
in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as
a means of communication. Because the
language of CMC can deviate from standard
language conventions, many parents and
teachers fear that CMC degrades youngsters’
reading, writing, or spelling skills. Before studying
the actual impact of CMC on traditional literacy,
one has to establish in what ways CMC language
is different. Thus, I have conducted a corpus
study examining the register of Dutch youngsters’
written CMC, revealing the differences between
their informal ‘CMC language’ and their more
formal ‘school language’. My register analysis
includes linguistic features of three dimensions of
writing: orthography (‘textisms’: non-
conventionally spelled words), syntax (in terms of
reductions and complexity), and lexicon (e.g.
English borrowings, type-token ratio). A diverse
range of CMC modes is investigated, also using
data from SoNaR (‘STEVIN Nederlandstalig
Referentiecorpus’)—text messages,
chats, tweets, WhatsApp messages, and
Facebook posts. This yields linguistic profiles
characterizing the language of different CMC
modes. The extent to which CMC users deviate
from standard language depends on various
factors, including user characteristics. Therefore,
the influence of youngsters’ age on the linguistics
of their CMC writings is also explored, by
distinguishing between CMC by adolescents
versus by young adults.
W
Annemarie Weerman
You did what?! An examination of argument
quality manipulations in advertising research
Using strong arguments is important in the
persuasion process. However, not much is
known on what constitutes a strong argument. To
analyse this, a systematic literature review has
been conducted to collect material that
manipulates argument quality. Many researchers
have used strong and weak arguments to
examine different psychological processes and
this material is a potential goldmine for
information on the active ingredients of argument
quality.
Four databases were searched using the
keywords “argument quality”, “argument strength”
and “strong argument” and “weak argument”.
This search lead to a total of 213 studies
manipulating argument quality. Articles were
searched to obtain material, when it was not
reported, the authors were emailed with the
request to send us the material.
We started analysing a subset of material in the
domain of advertising, because these claims and
arguments are the most straightforward: It is
clear what the claim is and what the arguments
are and more importantly; these studies use
mainly pragmatic argumentation, manipulating
one of the key elements of argument quality:
desirability of the consequences. Analysing these
materials will provide insight into this concept and
will aid us in developing a coding system that can
be used for other materials as well.
Z
Koen van Zon
In Search of Purpose. The European Parliament
in search of alternative repertoires of legitimacy,
1950-1960
In analysing the political landscape of post-war
Western Europe, historians generally stress the
unprecedented stability of its democratic
regimes. They perceive the rise of a new political
order, founded on consensus and concord, often
achieved at the expense of parliaments.
Illustrative of the diminished role of parliaments in
European post-war politics was the parliament of
the newly founded European Community. It was
virtually powerless and its members were
appointed, not elected. Many of them realised
that if they were to improve the European
Parliament’s standing, they needed electoral
backing from a European electorate.
For all its imperfections, the new European
Parliament was a natural target of initiatives for
democratisation, with European elections as its
most tangible goal. In 1952 and again in 1958,
the European Parliament undertook attempts to
fulfil its purpose: becoming a true people’s
representative. The first European
Abstracts
elections weren’t organised until 1979, however.
With their plans, European parliamentarians not
only pioneered electoral democracy on a
supranational level, they also implicitly
challenged the technocratic discourse that had
up to then legitimized European integration. This
paper analyses the political rhetoric surrounding
the debates on European elections, asking what
ideas the involved parliamentarians had about
legitimacy in the European Community.
top related