I.B. Leemans

Comment: Embodied Emotions From a Dutch Historical Perspective

This comment challenges essentialist “brain biased” interpretations of emotions from a historical perspective. (Digital) humanities research shows that the embodying of emotions is historically contingent. Emotion metaphors do not so much reflect what is happening in our brain or in other parts of the body: they reflect what people think/thought is/was happening in and outside their body.

Lieve Wellust! Erotica in de achttiende eeuw

Dutch eighteenth-century erotic literature has so far not been the object of extensive study, this in stark contrast to contemporary erotic literature in other countries. Although nowadays nobody contests the idea that novels concerning physical love were widely pub-lished in the eighteenth-century, the focus has never been on the contemporary (literary) cri-tique. Rather than to compare eighteenth-century Dutch erotic literature to its French and English relatives, one should try to register what was being written about physical love in the Republic in order to understand how it functioned in Dutch novels. Text editions, bib-liographies and surveys regarding the topic could prove to be useful instruments in deter-mining the role erotic novels played in the eighteenth-century literary and moral discourse.

Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data should bring order and insight, reveal patterns and provide leads for new research questions. However, simple two-dimensional visualizations are often too static and too generic to meet these needs. Visualization tools for the humanities should be able to deal with the observer dependency, heterogeneity, uncertainty and provenance of data and the complexity of humanities research questions. They should furthermore offer scholars the opportunity to interactively manipulate their data sets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Storyteller, an open source visualization tool designed to interactively explore complex data sets for the humanities. We present the tool, and demonstrate its applicability in three very different humanities projects.

HEEM, a Complex Model for Mining Emotions in Historical Text

Recently, emotions and their history have become a focus point for research in different academic fields. Traditional sentiment analysis approaches generally try to fit relatively simple emotion models (e.g., positive/negative emotion) to contemporary data. However, this is not sufficient for Digital Humanities scholars who are interested in research questions about changes in emotional expressions over time. Answering these questions requires more complex, historically accurate emotion models applied to historical data. The Historic Embodied Emotion Model (HEEM) was developed to study the relationship between body parts and emotional expressions in 17th and 18th century texts. This paper presents the HEEM emotion model and associated dataset from a technical perspective, and examines the performance of a multi-label text classification approach for predicting HEEM labels and labels from two simpler models (i.e., HEEM Emotion Clusters and the Positive/Negative model). The results show that labels in the complex model can be predicted with micro-averaged F1 = 0.45, and macro-averaged F1 = 0.24. Labels with fewer samples (<; 40) are not predicted. Overall performance on the simpler emotion models is significantly better, but for individual labels the effect is mixed. We demonstrate that a multi-label text classification approach to learning complex emotion models on historical data is feasible.

Ontwikkelingen in het verlichtingsonderzoek sinds het jaar 2000. Ter inleiding

In the special section EVERYTHING IS ENLIGHTENED three authors present new developments in the Enlightenment research. In this short introduction we determine the boundaries within which the more than thirty books that are discussed by these authors can be placed, en we observe that historians of the Enlightenment have in recent years explored the limits of what can still be considered Enlightened.

Ontwikkelingen in het verlichtingsonderzoek sinds het jaar 2000

In the special section EVERYTHING IS ENLIGHTENED three authors present new developments in the Enlightenment research. In this short introduction we determine the boundaries within which the more than thirty books that are discussed by these authors can be placed, en we observe that historians of the Enlightenment have in recent years explored the limits of what can still be considered Enlightened.

“This Fleshlike Isle”: The Voluptuous Body of the People in Dutch Pamphlets, Novels, and Plays, 1660–1730

It is the year 1680. A Rotterdam bailiff goes on a guided tour of the Amsterdam brothel district. To this end, he has acquired the best guide one could wish for: the devil himself. The devil takes our man from one public stew to another, and they meet the most beautiful and the ugliest whores, with dominant and cunning madams, aggressive pimps, fiddlewielding musicians, and of course the clientele, ranging from the finest gentlemen, via sailors and peasants to the lowest of rakes. In the middle of the night, in a playhouse in an alley, they meet an impressive prostitute. She is dressed “like a servant” and has little locks “curled like those of the Negroes.” Moreover, she is so enormously fat that the bailiff cannot imagine her father had any intention of making a girl “when he started laying the foundations for this fleshlike isle.” “Her arms and her hands were … so thick and fat that one’s taste had to be perverted to fall in love with them.” And yet, immediately, a gentleman, carrying a jug of Rhine wine to get her in the proper mood and win her affection, jumps upon the lady. The bailiff is fascinated. “What charms does this creature possess, I asked my guide, that can infatuate this gentleman with her?” His guide resolutely answers: “In her whole body, as huge and as fat as it is, there is nothing at all that might entice an honest man.” Obviously, all men do not share the devil’s opinion, otherwise she would not be in her profession.1

A Smell of Higher Honey: E-Humanities Perspectives

Is e-humanities ‘The next big thing’ and are we on the verge of a ‘Humanities 3.0’? The field of e-humanities, at this moment, seems to be too diverse and scattered to move in sync. One of the challenges that face e-humanities research at this moment lies in the field of uniting data digitisation/management and data analysis/representation. Here, heritage institutions, libraries, archives and universities should cooperate closely. Existing (digital) humanities data corpora should be connected and integrated through on the basis of question-driven analysis possibilities. However the biggest challenge would be to take hermeneutics as a base for e-science, by developing digital analytical strategies for the knowledge fields unique to the humanities – meaning attribution, interpretation and concept formation in text, image, sound, object or space, and combining these withnumeric data about production, consumption patterns, networks, et cetera. How can we trace complex and essentially contested concepts? Can digital analysis set us on a trail for new interpretations? How can we accommodate the complexity and ambiguity of the sources with which we work and develop digital methods to automate the way humanities scholars look for patterns, interpret and evaluate them? The evaluative aspect of e-humanities could really alter our research field, since for a long time humanities scholars have tended to work with implicit evaluative schemes. The advantage of e-humanities research therefore would lie not only in the fact that hermeneutics are structurally taken into account in digital analysis, and that new patterns and interpretations might be found, but also that we would gain more insight in the kind of questions we pose, the steps that we take during this process and in the validation of the results.

‘Opgezwollen balg’: de literaire cultivering van vaderlandse helden

Bespreking van: Lotte Jensen,De verheerlijking van het verleden. Helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw. Nijmegen:Vantilt ,2008 9789077503928