Mats Malm

Skalds, Runes, and Voice

The word skald is often explained as deriving from words for ‘abuse’, and the skald would thus have received his name as a ‘defamer’. This paper tests the arguments of that interpretation and arrives at the conclusion that ‘skald’ is more probably derived from words for ‘sound’: the skald proclaims. Through a discussion of the word run, the argument is made that the runes could be understood as sounding in a way analogous to the activity of the skald: in an oral society, writing would have been understood as the carrier of voice. The name of one of the most prolific rune carvers, Œpir, has seemed mysterious: why would anyone call himself ‘the screamer’ or ‘the loud-mouth’? In this paper, it is suggested that if the runes were considered as voice carriers, Œpir in the sense of ‘the proclaimer’ would be a congenial signature for a rune carver — or for several carvers.

Gendered Philology: The Apostle Junia/s in Scandinavian Bible Translation

The history of textual criticism is intimately entangled with the history of translation in several ways, and in the intersections, philological practice can encounter competing arguments not least concerning worldview and dogma. One well-known example is that of the apostle Junia of Romans 16:7, who in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was transformed into the male apostle Junias in many translations and editions. As solid philological arguments for this emendation were lacking, Junia was gradually regendered as a woman toward the end of the twentieth century. This development is an example of the dominance of translation practice over philological analysis and actualizes issues of the institutional development of philology, biblical criticism, and notions of gender. The treatment of Junia differed in the Protestant tradition. In his first translation of the New Testament in 1522, Martin Luther had already made the apostle masculine. However, the Scandinavian translations directly descending from Luther’s translation treated the apostle’s gender in different ways. Here, we first address the general institutional development and then consider the negotiations of textual authority, philological practice, and ideological conviction in the Scandinavian Bible translations.

Gender-Based Vocation Identification in Swedish 19th Century Prose Fiction using Linguistic Patterns, NER and CRF Learning

This paper investigates how literature could be used as a means to expand our understanding of history. By applying macroanalytic techniques we are aiming to investigate how women enter literature and particularly which functions do they assume, their working patterns and if we can spot differences in how often male and female characters are mentioned with various types of occupational titles (vocation) in Swedish literary texts. Modern historiography, and especially feminist and women’s history has emphasized a relative invisibility of women’s work and women workers. The reasons to this are manifold, and the extent, the margin of error in terms of women’s work activities is of course hard to assess. Therefore, vocation identification can be used as an indicator for such exploration and we present a hybrid system for automatic annotation of vocational signals in 19th century Swedish prose fiction. Beside vocations, the system also assigns gender (male, female or unknown) to the vocation words, a prerequisite for the goals of the study and future in-depth explorations of the corpora.

Semantics in storytelling in Swedish fiction

In this paper, we aim to define foundations and research questions for future large scale exploration of various types of semantic relationships in literature, namely Swedish prose fiction. More specifically, we are interested to get an in-depth understanding of storytelling in Swedish fiction by analyzing and mining the narrative discourse in a small sample of such data, focusing on interpersonal relationships and answering various questions such as how to recognize and assess gender patterns. Our intention is to apply our findings into a much larger scale in the near future in order to obtain useful insights about the social relations, structures, behavior and everyday life of characters found in literary works, thus enhancing the use of prose fiction as a source for research within the humanities and social sciences. Our work is inspired by the notions of distant reading and macroanalysis, a relatively new and often contested paradigm of literary research. In order to achieve our goal we strive for a combination of natural language processing techniques and simple visualizations that allow the user to rapidly focus on key areas of interest and provide the ability to discover latent semantic patterns and structures.