Miranda Anderson

Palimpsest: Improving assisted curation of loco-specific literature

Text mining and information visualization techniques applied to large-scale historical and literary document collections have enabled new types of humanities research. The assumption behind such efforts is often that trends will emerge from the analysis despite errors for individual data points and that noise will be dominated by the signal in the data. However, for some text analysis tasks, the technology is unable to perform as well as domain experts, perhaps because it does not have sufficient world knowledge or metadata available. Yet, the advantage of language processing technology is that it can process at scale, even if not perfectly accurately. Geo-locating literary works is one example where human expert knowledge is invaluable when it comes to distinguishing between candidate works. This was the underlying assumption in Palimpsest, an interdisciplinary digital humanities research project on mining literary Edinburgh. From the outset, the project adopted an assisted curation process whereby the automatic processing of large data collections was combined with manual checking to identify literary works set in Edinburgh. In this article, we introduce the assisted curation process and evaluate how the feedback from literary scholars helped to improve the technology, thereby highlighting the importance of placing humanities research at the core of digital humanities projects.

The Renaissance extended mind

1. The Extended Mind 2. Extending Literary Theory and the Psychoanalytic Tradition 3. Renaissance Subjects: Ensouled and Embodied 4. Renaissance Language and Memory Forms 5. Renaissance Intrasubjectivity and Intersubjectivity 6. Shakespeare: Natural-Born Mirrors 7. Shakespeare: Perspectives and Words of Glass Epilogue

“Involving Interface”: An Extended Mind Theoretical Approach to Roboethics

In 2008 the authors held “Involving Interface,” a lively interdisciplinary event focusing on issues of biological, sociocultural, and technological interfacing (see Acknowledgments). Inspired by discussions at this event, in this article, we further discuss the value of input from neuroscience for developing robots and machine interfaces, and the value of philosophy, the humanities, and the arts for identifying persistent links between human interfacing and broader ethical concerns. The importance of ongoing interdisciplinary debate and public communication on scientific and technical advances is also highlighted. Throughout, the authors explore the implications of the extended mind hypothesis for notions of moral accountability and robotics.

Fission-Fusion Cognition in Shakespearean Drama: The Case for Julius Caesar

This paper examines how Renaissance notions of the mind and the subject, as constrained and constituted by social means, are narrated and staged in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This analysis is supplemented by a few references to Montaigne’s essays, whose influence on Shakespeare and concern with the nature of the mind and self are long established (Ellrodt). To further ground the case, it begins with two brief overviews: firstly, on narratological approaches to drama and their particular relevance to Renaissance drama, and secondly, on various current approaches to social cognition. I focus on the linked concepts that a multiplicity of agents can operate within a single human being, and conversely that multiple individuals can form a cognitive unit. These related notions of the mind as social, both in Renaissance fictional and factual narratives and in current cognitive science, are understood to be due to human psychophysiological capacities. These capacities both afford and require boundaries and flow between the constituent parts of the self, both as regards those within skull or skin, and as regards those in the world. As I want to highlight the issue of divisions, as well as sharing, between individuals and within an individual I have adopted the

Immersion and defamiliarization: Experiencing literature and world

REF Compliant by Deposit in other institutions Repository: Edinburghs repository by 31/05/2017: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/immersion-and-defamiliarization(1a866d00-e55c-4744-9b72-38b5a43c60b6).html

The Routledge Companion to Spatial History

In this chapter we describe how GIS has been used in recent years to understand why, locally, nationally in Britain and worldwide, the bulk of the population seems destined to live in ‘under-performing’ regions; as they do so, more are poor, and the rich are becoming ever more separate from the rest. This chapter traces changes over time: decades, centuries and in one case millennia; all involve inequality, poverty and wealth.

Extending the Renaissance Mind: ‘Look What Thy Memory Cannot Contain’

The possibility that non-biological resources can act as part of the cognitive system is claimed by Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’s seminal paper, ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998). This hypothesis holds parallels with the history of the book, an area of research that has long been considering the effect on culture and cognition of the technological changes from orality to literacy and from manuscripts to printing. M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record describes literacy as a technology that structures the intellect and Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy argues that the increasing use of texts results in the development of new forms of cognition. More recently a number of scholars have charted how the common Renaissance practices of the annotation and alteration of the books enabled readers to deal with increasing cognitive loads, through reorganising and adding to the textual structures. Furthermore, in the Renaissance the textual was understood as playing a supplementary role to biological memory and historical narratives were understood as supplementing individual experience, with another’s memories or knowledge equivalent to one’s own. In addition, Renaissance accounts of rhetoric explore the notion of language as constitutive of our humanity. These strands form a prevalent notion of language and literacy as a means of extending oneself that is equivalent to the production of biological offspring, and as a means to overcome death and forgetting. This notion infiltrated diverse spheres’ ways of understanding these activities, from literary prefaces, autobiographies, plays and poems, to jest books and medical and scientific texts. These diverse works shape this reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which focuses on the exploration in ‘Sonnet 77’ of the benefits and constraints of a biological versus a textual copy of the subject. ‘Sonnet 77’ evidences the co-existence of an uneasy and yet also a celebratory understanding of the human capacity to reproduce and extend itself through biological and linguistic couplings, the latter of which the reader may experience through their own encounter with the sonnets. This chapter thereby demonstrates that the fertile parallels between the extended mind hypothesis, the history of the book, and Renaissance texts invites a re-evaluation of historical, as well as modern, concepts of what constitutes cognition and subjectivity.

Renaissance Intrasubjectivity and Intersubjectivity

This chapter begins by exploring the notion that a subject was composed of multiple agencies, with the consequent uncanniness of the self as well as the world. This is followed by an exploration of various forms of sharing of agency or identity between multiple subjects, through love, friendship, service and nationhood. Both the need of and a tension about the extent to which our cognitive processes involve other subjects are evident, just as there is a tension about the extent to which multiple agents operate internally in our cognitive processes, with Renaissance thinkers suggesting the delicate balance that is required between internal self-reflection and external social interaction. The next section briefly discusses various modern critical models of Renaissance subjectivity, in order to consider their relation to the position taken in this work and to succinctly evoke an image of the Renaissance subject which appears through this perspective. In the following section there is discussion of a number of issues concerning the Renaissance subject, including: the practice of inferring mental states from behaviour, body and clothes; theatre’s arousing fascination with and anxieties about the composite nature of the subject; the diversity of perceptual and phenomenological experience; and the extent to which such experience occurs in a fissured and extended subject. Finally, the last section considers the nature of the mirror, as a technological instrument and literary conceit for exploring and explaining subjectivity and cognition. Mirroring by a tool or another subject became understood in terms of one another. Extended subjectivity and reflexivity was part of a continuing literary tradition and of a human mode of operation that the mirror was understood in relation to and that the mirror-motif was used to represent. The mirror crystallises many of the issues raised by these chapters through its relation to Renaissance models of perception, the mind and the subject.

Shakespeare: Natural-Born Mirrors

These last two chapters explore the bearing of current and Renaissance ideas about extendedness on the literary through an exploration of how they are revealed and exploited imaginatively in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare is representative of Renaissance writers in that he is influenced by both contemporary and classical literary traditions and material, and his works abound with literary explorations of Renaissance constructions of cognition and subjectivity. The properties and literary tradition of the mirror naturally lend it to the representation of cognition and subjectivity and at this time, when new and improved mirrors were beginning to become more widespread, mirror-motifs in Renaissance discourses are especially prolific and polyvalent. These chapters tackle the relation between forms of social, technological and self-reflexive mirroring, exploring this earlier vision of self-self and self-other relations as variously fluid or opaque, which invokes familiar concerns about firstperson versus third-person access to our own or to others’ subjective cognitive experiences. The particular interest in how EM interacts with understandings of the self relates to this work’s employment of EM as a means of reading Shakespearean selves, having provided a grounding for this by demonstrating Renaissance parallels in their depictions of cognition and subjectivity.

Extending Literary Theory and the Psychoanalytic Tradition

The extended mind hypothesis by its very title assures us that it does not restrict itself to conventional or limited notions of the mind, but incorporates into its focus the subject and the world. For this reason, it is worth considering how EM might interact with theories concerned with the nature of the mind that have more commonly been employed in literary readings. This second chapter is again theoretically motivated, as it sets out to establish the relation of EM to literary studies, in order to suggest a basis for the use of this theory for reading literature, despite resistance in the field of literary studies to making use of scientific knowledge. The primary focus here is on the various intersections of EM related research with the psychoanalytical theories that to a lesser extent influence the reading of texts in this work. Paul Cefalu also recently argued that readings of literature can benefit from both cognitive and psychoanalytic insights, although the grounds for this he places on a distinction between the cognitive ‘as better equipped phyolgenetically to explain how characters think’ and the psychoanalytic as ‘better equipped ontogentically to explain why’, but given the range of work in both areas this is a false dichotomy (267). While EM and 4E approaches tend to optimism about human nature and cognitive extendedness, psychoanalytical theories provide a critical perspective on notions of extendedness, uncovering the dark side of this aspect of human nature: they are commonly concerned with human decentring by the unconscious or by language, and they provide various critical modes of understanding the formation of the subject, sexual identity and social relationships.