Martin Wynne

Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach

A number of recent studies have argued that the notion of faithfulness to an original should be abandoned in models of discourse presentation, and particularly in accounts of direct speech presentation. This has coincided with a shift of attention in the study of discourse presentation from written to spoken data. This article discusses the arguments that have been made against the notion of faithfulness, and proposes a context-sensitive account of this notion, and of its relation to the various clines of discourse presentation and their categories. Our account is prompted partly by the results of a corpus-based approach to the study of discourse presentation, and partly by a qualitative analysis of a set of newspaper articles on a particular news story from outside this corpus, which we undertook to provide a check on the conclusions we had reached from our corpus study. We believe that if a general account of discourse presentation is to be reached, similarities and differences across a wide range of texts and text types need to be examined. Our corpus work, which involves careful and systematic comparison of a balanced set of written fictional, news and (auto)biographical narratives, is offered as a contribution to the general account referred to above. We also believe that if such a general account or theory is to be reached, scholars will need a clearer and more consistent application of the various descriptive terms which have been used in this area of study during the 20th century, in particular (a) ‘discourse’, (b) ‘speech’, ‘thought’ and ‘writing’ and (c) ‘report’, ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’.

Rule-based visual mappings - with a case study on poetry visualization

In this paper, we present a user‐centered design study on poetry visualization. We develop a rule‐based solution to address the conflicting needs for maintaining the flexibility of visualizing a large set of poetic variables and for reducing the tedium and cognitive load in interacting with the visual mapping control panel. We adopt Munzners nested design model to maintain high‐level interactions with the end users in a closed loop. In addition, we examine three design options for alleviating the difficulty in visualizing poems latitudinally. We present several example uses of poetry visualization in scholarly research on poetry.

Stylistics: Corpus Approaches

This paper is an introduction to current work in the use of language corpora in the study of literature, and an exploration of the potential for further work. Stylistics and corpus linguistics have much in common. Both are empirical approaches which study the real evidence of language usage. There are however there is a lack of good-quality electronic texts and software tools for their analysis. However, there is important work in this field. Two main approaches are described. The first involves the the rigourous and exhaustive analysis of a particular feature in a corpus of texts through the process of annotation. The second involves finding norms of language use in a reference corpus and thus identifying deviations from the norms in a literary text.

Evaluation in the Arts and Humanities Data Service

Purpose. There are a large number of free electronic resources available on the web, from various sources, including the outputs of funded research projects. As yet, there are not well‐established procedures for the evaluation of the quality and usefulness of these electronic resources. This article examines two preliminary approaches to the problem. Approach. An investigation into free e‐books was carried out for the JISC to examine the potential for the use of free e‐books in teaching and learning in further and higher education in the UK. Questionnaires, a dissemination workshop and focus groups were used to obtain the research results. Three possible approaches to evaluation are discussed, involving the collection of high‐quality resources in a trusted repository, large‐scale evaluation of available resources, and evaluation by end‐users. The practical problems of each approach are discussed. The prospect of future large‐scale digitisation projects and their possible impact in this field is also considered. In a separate section, the question of evaluation of electronic resources is briefly considered in the context of collections development in the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Findings. The conclusion is drawn that it is more cost‐effective to intervene early in the lifecycle of a digital resource and to help ensure good practice in the creation of the resource than to attempt to evaluate and enhance a resource at the end of the creation process. Originality. This paper draws on the unique experience of the AHDS as a central, national service for researchers in the arts and humanities creating and using electronic resources.