The Pit of Ultimate Darkness

Let the examinating begin...

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A New AI Lexicon: Voice

Semel, Beth. "A New AI Lexicon: Voice," in AI Now Institute blog series A New AI Lexicon (2021). https://ainowinstitute.org/publication/a-new-ai-lexicon-voice

Because the apparatuses that enable voice as an audible phenomenon are in constant flux, voice is shifting rather than stable. The ways that people speak are the outcome of contextual, historical, and structural conditions rather than something unchanging or essential to the speaker. 

According to the disciplines foundational to automated voice analysis, voice tends to be associated with physiology, anatomy, and how someone sounds, rather than meaning or intentionality, or what someone says. 

Thus, Lawrence argues that voice assistants can take on a disciplinary role, enforcing assimilation into “standardized” modes of speaking, while fortifying whiteness’s position as the standard.

The trouble arises when research labs and technology companies assert that highly mutable social categories (e.g. race, citizenship, gender, sexuality, disability) are definitively knowable through the voice, as if vocal qualities can be used to classify people into discrete types marked by rigid, acoustic, and, by extension, physiological boundaries.

My research suggests that the ability of AI to identify vocal biomarkers is often oversold, or else glosses over the highly subjective processes involved in building these systems. 

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Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability In American Culture and Literature

 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability In American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 13. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb02826.0001.001. PDF.

To be granted fully human status by normates, disabled people must learnto manage relationships from the beginning. In other words, disabled people must use charm, intimidation, ardor, deference, humor, or entertainment to relieve nondisabled people of their discomfort.

Besides stripping any normalizing context away from disability, literary representation sets up static encounters between disabled figures and normate readers, whereas real social relations are always dynamic.

Not only is the relationship between text and world not exact, but representation also relies upon cultural assumptions to fill in missing details.

The disparity between “disabled” as an attributed, decontextualizing identity and the perceptions and experiences of real people living with disabilities suggests that this figure of otherness emerges from positioning, interpreting, and conferring meaning upon bodies.

The normate subject position emerges, however, only when we scrutinize the social processes and discourses that constitute physical and cultural otherness. Because figures of otherness are highly marked in power relations, even as they are marginalized, their cultural visibility as deviant obscures and...

Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them. If one attempts to define the normate position by peeling away all the marked traits within the social order at this historical moment, what emerges is a very narrowly defined profile that describes only a minority of actual people.

Representation thus simultaneously buttresses an embodied version of normative identity and shapes a narrative of corporeal difference that excludes those whose bodies or behaviors do not conform.

Although these expectations are partly founded on physiological facts about typical humans—such as having two legs with which to walk upright or having some capacity for sight or speech—their sociopolitical meanings and consequences are entirely culturally determined. 

Essential but implicit to this definition is that both “impairment” and “limits” depend on comparing individual bodies with unstated but deter-mining norms, a hypothetical set of guidelines for corporeal form and function arising from cultural expectations about how human beings should look.

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The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb05488.0001.001. PDF.

Third: in common with what is called the study of compara-tive literature, the history of ideas expresses a protest againstthe consequences which have often resulted from the conven-tional! division of literary and some other historical studies by nationalities or languages.

Man must become habitually mindful of the limitations of his mental powers, must be content with that ‘“‘relative and practical understanding” which is the only organ of knowledge that he possesses. ‘‘Men,’’ as Locke puts it in a familiar passage, ‘‘may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their minds with variety, delight and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything.”

‘‘the chain of being’’ implied that it is, provided the chief basis for most of the more serious attempts to solve the problem of evil and to show that the scheme of things is an intelligible and rational one; and that the same belief about the structure of nature lay in the background of much early modern science, and therefore influenced the formation of scientific hypotheses in various ways...

The possession of a power is sufficientwithout the exercise of it —— a strange proposition, but one towhich Fénelon was driven as the only escape from Spinoza’sargument that an omnipotent being must also of necessity beomnificent. This theological paradox was apparently ren-dered more plausible to Fénelon by the undeniable truth that,though the gift of speech presumably makes human beings“more perfect,” their perfection is not necessarily proportionalto their use of that faculty: “il arrive méme souvent que je soisplus parfait de me taire que de parler.”’

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The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies

 St. Pierre, Joshua. 2012. “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies”. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1 (3):1-21. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v1i3.54.

....“broken speech” is constructed by both a speaker and a hearer. (3)

Stuttering is accepted as a problem within the medical model, identified both clinically and medically as something to be managed and fixed. (4)

Technologically, altered auditory feedback devices (AAF) are becoming increasingly popular; the SpeechEasy, which is worn in the ear and echoes the speaker’s words at a slight delay and altered pitch, is advertised as a “discreet anti-stuttering device.”6 Though SpeechEasy has so far resulted in mixed success, technological augmentations can only be expected to increase in usage. (5)

The quantification of disability, commonplace in the medical model, helps shape stuttering “into a concrete individual issue, abstracted from interpersonal interaction and interpretation,” 7 (5)

The process of becoming arduously aware of every deviant syllable as something misspoken and out of place requires and reinforces a paradigm of objectification. (6)

Paralleling the way in which speech has no meaning outside of an interpretive context involving a hearer, so stuttering cannot be understood apart from expectations of “normal” hearing. (6)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson who locates stuttering amongst a range of disabilities that disrupt the normal expectations of human communication: The uncontrolled body does not perform typically the quotidian functions required by the elaborate structured codes of acceptable social behavior. Blindness, deafness, or stuttering, for instance, disturb the complex web of subtle interchanges upon which communication rituals depend.10 (7)

In one sense then, stuttering makes the transmission of information more difficult than “normal” speech. An unaccustomed hearer often works harder to analyze non-verbal cues, to understand the meaning of words which are twisted and stretched beyond their defining phonetic structure, and to decipher syntax from sentences that are halted mid-way only to be backed up to get a running start. This interpretive process is made even more difficult by the frequent discomfort of watching / listening to a stutterer form a sentence with difficulty. However, regardless of the severity of the rupture, the responsibility for this disruption of communicative rituals does not fall singularly upon the stutterer as she deviates from “normal” speech, but also upon the hearer whose ability to pick up upon the “web of subtle interchanges” is heavily conditioned by “normal” hearing. (7)

A homogenous audience does not think to question that a heavy accent presents a communicative difficulty (or is even an accent at all!) because they cannot adequately hear, since, as stated by Iris Young, “the dominant groups need not notice their own group being at all; they occupy an unmarked, neutral, apparently universal position.”12 When hearing does require extra effort, the dominant group is veiled behind its universal and unmarked position. Therefore, not only are communicative norms constructed by speakers and hearers, but deviation in this communicative relation is shouldered disproportionally by the minority group. (8-9)

Since “abled” hearers hold the dominant position within our societynumerically and influentially—they are unmarked and consequently it is taken for granted that to hear normally is to understand clearly recognizable and defined speech patterns. Behind a veil of universality, these expectations solidify into communicative “rules” that stutterers seem to violate. Insofar as dominant “abled” groups hide their constructed normalcy, speech becomes “broken” and the speaker alone is constructed as unnatural, abnormal and therefore disabled. (9)

From this perspective, it is easy to understand why stuttering is seen as an individual problem of a speaker, for a hearer occupies the position of an objective receptacle, whose passivity (which frees her from interpretation) reliably mirrors the objective nature of the “broken” speech. (9)

From this perspective, it is easy to understand why stuttering is seen as an individual problem of a speaker, for a hearer occupies the position of an objective receptacle, whose passivity (which frees her from interpretation) reliably mirrors the objective nature of the “broken” speech. (11)

Bodies not capable of meeting expectations of pace and productivity are therefore disqualified from full participation not only in the economic sector but also in social situations. (13)

...that to participate fully in the capitalist world, people must be normalized and thereby reinforce the identity of the American Ideal: successful, productive and mastered. (16)

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Benefits of pre-trained mono- and cross-lingual speech representations for spoken language understanding of Dutch dysarthric speech

Wang, Pu and Hugo Van Haamme.  “Benefits of pre-trained mono- and cross-lingual speech representations for spoken language understanding of Dutch dysarthric speech,” EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing. 1:2023. 4/7/2023. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13636-023-00280-z

The cause of loss of (fine) motor skills often also leads to speech impairments [1]. Assistive technology is hence beneficial for the quality of life for physically challenged users, however, [2] observes that current voice assistants only reach on average an accuracy of 50–60% on impaired speech while the minimal satisfactory rate is regarded as 90–95%. The primary goal of this manuscript is to design a dysarthric speech vocal assistance system. (2)

First of all, ASR performs poorly on impaired speech [4, 5]. Though state-ofthe-art ASR models with deep learning approaches have advanced greatly, they are challenged by the data scarcity issue when it comes to dysarthric speech [6]. Recording speech from individuals with dysarthria is hindered by greater recruitment efforts as well as speaker exhaustion. (2)

Although this method produces convincing results when dealing with dysarthric speech compared to previous work, as explained in [15], it still fails to obtain the desired performance levels when it comes to only a few tens of training samples. (3)

The SLU model achieved up to 25% performance gain compared to the baseline model with filterbank features as inputs on a Dutch dysarthric dataset, which proves layers extracted from pre-trained ASR models on typical speech can significantly boost the performance of a dysarthric speech SLU model. (3)

SSL speech models, such as Wav2Vec2.0 [26], and Hubert [27], have already been applied to a variety of speech tasks including ASR[26], emotion recognition [28], speaker identification [29], and phoneme classification [30]. Hernandez et al. [31] report that both cross-lingual SSL speech representations, XLSR-53, and the mono-lingual Wav2Vec2.0 outperform the filterbank features on English, Spanish, and Italian dysarthric speech ASR. (3)

Inspired by these, we explore pre-training of a TDNN acoustic model on a publicly available dysarthric speech corpus with ASR targets and then extract layer activations of the well-trained TDNN model as BNFs for dysarthric end-user utterances. (3)

Third, the limited size of existing dysarthric speech databases does not allow to train a large-scale acoustic model from scratch. To augment the size of the pretraining dataset, Vachhani et  al. [42] uses temporal and speech modifications to typical speech to generate synthetic speech that matches the characteristics of dysarthric speech. (4)

Fourth and finally, since dysarthric speech varies greatly between speakers with different impairment severity, there is a concern that the knowledge learned by pre-training on specific speakers may not generalize to other speakers. [46–48] (4)

In this manuscript, we will use the speaker’s intelligibility score (IS) as an approximate metric of the impairment severity for both the pre-training corpus and the evaluation utterances to discuss the extent to which SLU performance is influenced by impairment severity. (4)

The outputs of the decoder are task-specific slot value activations; the decoder is therefore trained on task-specific data. To allow for pre-training, the encoder is generic, i.e., trained on task-agnostic typical and/or disordered speech. (5)

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Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto

Henner, J. & Robinson, O. (2023). Unsettling languages, unruly bodyminds: A crip linguistics manifesto. Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability, 1(1), 737. https://do

The articulation is given focus because it is the ideal articulation of language—other articulations are not considered. (8)

Speech and language therapy emphasizes speech as the ideal mode of languaging. (8)

...voices marked by accents or speech dysfluency are sources of humor and further marginalization, and low print literacy rates do not merit interrogation of the reasons for the low rates. (9)

Speech dysfluency is a disability because abled people want everyone to talk with the same degree of fluency unmarked by difference. Sometimes this difference is marked by race and ethnicity, which is then interpreted as disabled. (9)

Language has long been tied to judgments of a person’s capacity and intelligence, and by extension their humanity (Bauman 2004; Berger 2014; Clare 2017; Edwards 2012; St. Pierre 2015). (9)

The expansive linguistic potential of the human body and mind (“bodymind”) is best understood through a critical disability lens. The term bodymind marks the inseparable relationship between the body and mind. (10)

A Crip Linguistics requires flexibility and creativity about how we define, describe, and discuss language and the bodies that use it. (11)

The artificial limitation of linguistics to speech is an extension of the cultural belief that the most or only valid languaging is speech. (12)

Limited thinking about the expansive possibilities of languages also limits the linguist by imagining that languages in other modalities (e.g., signed languages) only exist in opposition to spoken languages—that is, people use one or the other, rather than a combination of semiotic tools; that languaging can exist outside of conventional spoken and signed languages (e.g., using interaction and language games to co–construct meaning). (13)

Crip Linguistics intervenes in mainstream linguistics discussions to destigmatize, yet center, disability in conversation. (13)

A Crip Linguistics holds three essential truths: a) language is not inherently disordered although impairments may exist, b) social perceptions on disability disorders language use, and c) disability in languaging cannot be separated from normative expectations of language use. (14)

Crip Linguistics is fundamentally a resistance against monomodal, spoken language only policies, and the belief that there is one right way to language. (15)

Accented people are marked as deviants, deficient, and require therapy and adjusting to fit into the expected norms of presumed native (abled) speakers. (18)

Accented people are marked as deviants, deficient, and require therapy and adjusting to fit into the expected norms of presumed native (abled) speakers. (20)

Stuttering, lisping, mumbling, stammering, slurring, or non-speaking are all markers of difference. Those markers signify not only disability but are also interpreted as lack of intelligence, capacity, and agency. Those markers are subsequently used as a rationale for exclusion. (20)

The challenge of reliance on written forms and written modalities for linguistic analysis means that 1) languages without easily accessible or standardized written forms tend to be left out of linguistic analysis (e.g., signed languages), and 2) the bulk of language analysis is done on languages and language materials from dominant languages and cultures (see Bender et al., 2021, for an explanation). (21)

Instead, the audience coconstructs the speech, inserting their perceptions and worked toward mutual understanding. The attendees did not experience the speech in the same order, they received the speech in different parts at different times with meanings that shifted with each group. (25)

The normal timeline is determined by ideals and averages as imagined by academics, medical professionals, and educators. (25)

Abled people expect communication to be quick, efficient, and spoken. (26)

Abled people do not realize nor do they consider what normative expectations cost people in terms of language learning, building relationships, and selfactualization amongst disabled people. Disabled people manifest this loss as collective grief. They grieve language they did not have access to and could not learn or struggled with people’s impatience with us and reluctance to go slow, to repeat, to gesture, and the costs of impatience with communications (Brueggemann, 1997). (26)

Crip Linguistics is therefore about putting the people back in languaging and recognizing that analyzing languaging without considering the languagers separates the language from the work that people put into producing them, especially via disabled bodies. (27)

Crip languaging incorporates practices of access intimacy, adaptions of technology, and relationality. To sum up, disabled people do really cool things with language if people would pay attention. (29)

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AI voice between anthropocentrism and posthumanism: Alexa and voice cloning

NAPOLITANO, DOMENICO. "AI voice between anthropocentrism and posthumanism: Alexa and voice cloning." Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, Volume 7, Issue Posthuman Voices: Channels across Time and Shared Memories, Aug 2022, p. 35 - 49 https://go.shr.lc/3u26EOi

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Infante, Ignacio. After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Even though modernismo is generally regarded as the first poetic movement consciously connecting and bridging both sides of the Atlantic, the critical impact of the movement outside of the field of Hispanic studies remains negligible, literally as though it had never taken place. (180)

See The Inverted Conquest  modernismo as untranslatable and not taken into the Anglo-American canon

In other words, if modernismo has remained “untranslatable,” using Mejias-Lopez’s term, it is not because  of its historical relevance as a transnational poetic movement that articulates a pioneering transatlantic response from Latin America to modernity and colonialism -- clearly affecting the fields of Latin American, European, and world literatures -- but rather, because up until now it has not been deemed worthy of critical consideration and translation within the hegemonic Anglo-American modernist canon produced by scholars and critics of the Anglo-American literature. (181)

...models that trace historically the transcultural circulation and forms of relationability and exchange established between particular writers, journals, publishers, or groups of artists and intellectuals from different parts of the world... the generation of a transnational literary history share the following features: They acknowledge the importance of translation as a foundational hermeneutic and linguistic process; they adopt a multilingual framework of analysis of literary and cultural forms; and they are intrinsically connected to the critical methodology of comparative literature as a scholarly field...(183)

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Zanetti, Susana. “Una revista notable: El Cojo Ilustrado de Venezuela.” CELEHIS-Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas. Año 14/15 - Nro 17 - Mar del Plata, ARGENTINA, 2005/2006; pp 131-160

Los jóvenes venezolanos encuentran buen apoyo des- de el inicio en la difusión que El Cojo Ilustrado hace de la literatura moderna europea: poemas de Leopardi, Leconte de Lisle, los hermanos Goncourt, Verlaine, D’Annunzio, o de cuentos de Coppée, Richepin, Mendès, Loti y más tarde de textos de Camille Mauclair, Gourmont, Mallarmé, Papini u OscarWilde,20 concambiosydistintaspersistenciasalolar- go de los años, como representantes de una poética que con- vive con comodidad frente a la que procede del realismo y del naturalismo, sea Daudet, Maupassant o Turgenieff, Tolstoi o Gorki y por cierto, Emile Zola, cuya significación aumenta notablemente en la primera década del siglo XX. La repro- ducción de poemas, algunas veces en lengua original, se im- pone en toda la primera etapa, mientras hacia fines de siglo aumenta notablemente el número de cuentos. (140)

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Levitt, Sturgis E (ed.) Revistas hispanoamericanas: Indice bibliografico 1843-1935. Santiago de Chile: Fondo historico y bibliografico, 1960.

Introducción

El presente índice de las revistas más representativas de Hispanoamérica, incluye bastantes publicaciones de corta vida, pero de no encaja importancia. El núcleo principal de las revistas catalogadas tuvieron, relativamente, larga duración. En este estudio están representados casi todo los países hispanoamericanos. La omisión de esas pocas naciones fue debida a que el material que tuvo a su alcance el autor no era importante.  (xix)

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Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community

Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

Although James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein develop radically different models for social organization, their narratives consistently place the notion of community at their core. Their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, especially in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. (3)

While these writers were not all radical or even progressive, especially in their real-world politics, the writings of James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. (3)

The notion of cosmopolitanism as a function or outgrowth of a radical deconstructive community loads distinctly different from traditional Kantian versions. Martha Nussbaum’s revised Kantian cosmopolitanism is important in that, as will this book, it recognizes the ethical and political claims of literature as formative of and inseparable from real world relations. Nussbaum places human identity within a series of concentric circles, beginning from self, then moving out through family to neighbors, local groups, fellow countrymen--to which she adds the categories of “ethnic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender, or sexual identities” -- and finally humanity as a whole. Thus we are both local and universal at once. (16)

If as Bruce Robbins contends, “instead of an ideal of detachment, actually existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance,” then the communities commanding such attachment may be describes as cosmopolitan communities. (16)

Drusilla Cornell has recently approached this problem by appealing to the process of translation--that very process evoked by Benjamin in “The Storyteller”--in order to re-cast what she calls “the moral reminder of the universe”;

      The task that cultural difference sets for us is in the articulation of universality through a difficult labor of translation; the terms made to stand for one another are transformed in the process and the movement of that unanticipated transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be achieved and which, in order to resist domestication, may never be fully or finally achievable.” (24)

[Henry] James’ cosmopolitanism, this chapter will argue, arises from a complex interplay of ideas about community and cosmopolitanism which are in circulation both in Europe and the United States from the 1890s through the first years of the twentieth century. The late battle over the meaning and possibility of cosmopolitanism, which hinges, particularly in the United States, on the insistently paradoxical relationship among cosmopolitanism, nativism, and notions of the ideal woman. (32)

The term “cosmopolitan” becomes almost exclusively pejorative in British usage in the first half of the nineteenth century and almost always opposed to national identity and local community...In British usage the definition becomes pejorative precisely at the time that  the conception of the modern nation-state is becoming increasingly dominant. (35)

While Cosmopolitan’s masthead invokes the claim that the “world is my country” the articles that follow make it clear that one is not meant thereby to question one’s American loyalty or citizenship. The use here is figurative or cultural, and not specifically political. 

Nor do we encounter elsewhere even the derogatory use, common in Great Britain at the time, or “cosmopolitan vagrancy,” applied in the realm of cultural identity. American popular use of the term in this period is almost exclusively positive, practical, and seemingly unthreatening to the expanding national consciousness. (37)

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Fiormonte, Domenico. The Digital Humanist

Fiormonte, Domenico, Teresa Numerico & Francesca Tomasi. The Digital Humanist: A Critical Inquiry. Trans. Desmond Schmidt with Christopher Ferguson. New York: Punctum Books, 2015. Print. 

In their studies Bowker and Leigh Star show how the classification techniques (and the standard generated from them) have always played a fundamental economic and socio-cultural role. Current digital technologies standards appear to be the result of a double-bias: the technical one and the cultural one (geopolitical). These two biases are entangled and it is almost impossible to discern where the technological choice begins and where the cultural prejudice ends.(71)

 ...where we are tells often what we do. An example is the structure of the addressing code rules that use the 128 ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange) to describe all the servers on the Internet. The same techno-cultural bias affects most of the services and instruments of the network, such as the domain name. In the last forty years it has not been possible to use accented vowels in the URL address, and in spite of recent IETF  and ICANN efforts the new internationalizing domain names in applications (IDNA) system can only be implemented in applications that are specifically designed for it, and it rarely used in Latin alphabet-based URLs. (72)

Many of the standards were set at the beginning of its history and were obviously conceived by and made for conformance with the small community involved at the time. The character set standard was clearly designed from a legitimate mono-cultural point of view, but today we are still dependent on those choices as an international and multicultural community. The datat for Internet access reveals that users in the Western world (Europe and the US) represent only 34% of the total, while Asian users represent 45%. (72)

 Although today Chinese and Spanish are increasingly used on the Web, access and control of the Internet are firmly in the hands of select Western (and mainly anglophone) authorities. Discussions on identity, ethnicity, gender, etc. on the Internet abound (Siapera 2010, 183-197), but the mix of technical, methodological and linguistic biases of the Internet resources and tools defy current analyses. (73)

José Antonio Millan is a linguist, net analyst and Spanish blogger who left university twenty years ago to dedicate himself entirely to the study of digital textuality and digital media. His blog “Libros y bitios” (http://jamillan.com/librosybitios) is known as one of the best online resources in the Hispanic DH world. Millan in 2001 published an important book, which is still a valuable source of information, and at the same time an effective manifesto of the “digital margins” of the worldxxxvii...According to Millán, there are many products and services which derive from these technologies, all of them of strategic value, and all in “alien” hands: operating systems, search engines, intelligent agents, distance learning, electronic commerce, the copyright industry...Thus at the roots of economic, social, political primacy one does not find “just” technology, but rather the mix of copyrighted algorithms and protocols that manipulate and control languages. Presiding over both natural and artificial codes has become a profitable business: not investing in this sector potentially means being forced to pay to be able to use one’s own language. (73-74) 

 The issue of the over-representation of Anglophone institutions and people in the DH international organizations has been discussed in Fiormonte 2012 and Dacos 2013 (cf. Conclusions). Most of the “international” organizations are monolingual, and the rhetorical structure of their websites and official documents does not leave space for anything except the “inner” Anglo-American rhetoric and academic narrative (Canagarajah 2002, 109-27). All this seems to confirm Millan’s hypothesis of the strict relation between economic hegemony, technological concentration and linguistic impoverishment, and raises the as yet untackled question of the internal and external digital humanities divide in Western countries. (79)

All these new applications of Big Data and intensive information extraction techniques raise enormous social and political issues that should be addressed by digital humanities scholars, considering that they are among the few experts who possess both a humanistic and a technical background. Digital humanities skills provide a unique opportunity to assess the ethical and social constraints placed on information technologies by a society that aims to maintain a consistent and plausible sense to the term “democracy” (82)

It is important, however, that DH maintains a critical attitude and does not become ancillary or subsidiary to the humanities. This is the essence of Liu’s heartfelt claim about the need for DH to become a leading advocate for the humanities (Liu 2012). But the risk is that DH scholars may fail in their goal to deliver tools that increase awareness in the use of digital technologies by only automating existing processes. As suggested by Liu “...the appropriate, unique contribution that the digital humanities can make to cultural criticism at the present time is to use the tools, paradigms, and concepts of digital technologies to help rethink the idea of instrumentality...The goal is to rethink instrumentality so that it includes both humanistic and STEM (science, technology engineering and mathematics) fields in a culturally broad, and not just narrowly purposive, ideal of service (2012). The critical attitude that characterized the study of the humanities for centuries should also be directed inwardly towards their own methods and results. (87)

Digital humanists are responsibility for managing these representations, DH institutions and international organizations should renew their agenda on issues of multicultural diversity. But simply opening conferences to foreign projects and authors is not enough. They must also demonstrate that research in this field can be independent of the interests of industry, from the governmental obsession with control, and that the DH community is able to propose new critical solutions, and not merely reproduce or utilize state-of-the-art software and databases. It is clear what ducking this responsibility might mean. At a time when Western cultures are setting about translating (and transforming) their own knowledge into digital formats, the need today, as five centuries ago, is clearly that of elaborating a new paideia; the creation of a multicultural and multi linguistic community able to train the trainers. (92)

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Kutzinski, Vera M. The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas

Kutzinski, Vera M. The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas. New York: Cornell University Press, 2012. Print.

Introduction

The sense in which I use translation combines the act of moving oneself (translatio) with that of leading or carrying someone or something across some sort of divide (traductio). Neither sense is reducible to bridging distances between diverse linguistic spaces by finding equivalents for foreign words and sentences in one’s own native idiom. In fact, the metaphor of the bridge, one of the key metaphors for translation,  it highly suspect....As a result, an understanding of translation as an act of bridging linguistic and cultural differences may well end up solidifying those very differences. (3)

Given Hughes’ many personal connections to Mexico and Cuba, it is perhaps predictable that Spanish would be the one language into which his writings have been translated the most since the late 1920s. While some of those translations have appeared in Spain, the vast majority of them were published in Hispanic America, particularly, and perhaps oddly, in Argentina in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. I say “oddly” because Argentina is not a country known for its population of African descent in the way that say, Brazil is. (3)

The “geography of crossing points” in which I am most interested here is located in Harlem, Havana, Madrid, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, not the well-explored modernist hubs of London and Paris. These intellectual way stations or crossroads are (on) the fringes of modernism as we know it in the English-speaking world, geographically, linguistically, and aesthetically. That neither Spanish nor Portuguese is typically considered a major language of modernism shows just how sharply the history of modernists’ intellectual and artistic exchanges diverges from their marginalization in relation to assumed European and Anglo-American centers. The linguistic dimension in that these sites, and the itineraries that connect them, add to Atlanticist inquiry skews more familiar triangles into jagged polyhedrons. The irregular shape of these sites is all the more precarious for incorporating “the cuts and interruptions of the existing modalities of historical knowledge”(Chambers Mediterranean Crossings, 144; see also Astradur Eysteinsson, the Concept of Modernism) that postcolonial studies have brought into view during most of the twentieth century. (14)

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Modernism and the New Spain

Rogers, Gayle. Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

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Real Reading

Outline 

The Scapegoat 

Una Vida Subterránea

Citizen

The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy Two Boys Kissing - David Levithan My Name Is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok An Arrow's Flight - Mark Merlis Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein

A History of Private Life

Murakami's 1Q84! 

Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam

Ahab's Wife

[silenttrystero]

To find

Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Study

Amy Earhart

[silenttrystero]

Ireland Through the Looking Glass

Taaffe, Carol. Ireland through the looking-glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish cultural debate. Cork: Cork University Press, 2008. Print.

“Nonsense is a new sense:” The Third Policeman in 1939 (chapter 3)

...TTP was not offered to any publisher. Instead the manuscript was plundered for The Dalkey Archive, published in 1964, in which another de Selby has possession of Policeman Fox’s omnium, now no longer a vague source of omnipotence, but an item with a destructive potential that rivals the post-war atomic bomb. (63)

While there is little obvious satire in its eerily estranged vision of rural Ireland, the novel’s sense of bleak confusion was strangely appropriate for the winter of 1939. The Third Policeman’s  humor depends for its effect on the narrator’s pained reasonableness in the face of an incomprehensible world. It invites the reader’s identification with the confusion of an innocent man, but one who is ‘a heel and a killer’ too, a murderer like so many of the novel’s characters. If The Third Policeman is a parable, it was a curiously timely one. (64)

By always trying to deny the peculiarities around him, he misses their true implication: that his old world has (literarily) been exploded apart...Yet all the characters of TTP exist in a similarly lop-sided private universe, a fact which the narrator is forced to recognize when he collides with the logic of the policemen. Like de Selby, they are equal to any perplexity; in Pluck’s jurisdiction, the question ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ has only one answer. Within its limits, everything is knowable and nothing makes sense- if a sentence can be logically executed then so can a prisoner. (66)

Yet not an example of naturalism or contextual reading of Ireland

Its tale of an individual trapped in an inscrutable wonderland desperately trying to learn the rules of the game may have satiric undertones, but this is also a text enamored of its own self-reflexive playfulness, of the expressive limits of language, and one that is ultimately centered on a pun (as it turns out, everything is about a (bi) cycle). (74)

The easy familiarity of the policemen in O’Nolan’s novel, maintained even when they decide to hang the narrator as a matter of personal convenience, bears similar comparison to the social mores of contemporary Ireland. However, any satiric potential must be fairly qualified, couched as it is in a form which begs not to be taken too seriously. (75)

In October 1939, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger moved to Dubin at the invitation of Éamon de Valera to escape the Nazi regime. Over the next two decades, this most intellectually conservative of world capitals was to play host to the Nobel prize-winning scientist. (77)

The country TTP’s narrator describes on his doomed journey is uncanny but familiar (to a degree which a student of German like O’Nolan might have considered unheimlich), gradually developing an estranged  and slightly surreal version of Ireland. Yet if its landscape is recognizably Irish, it is also a parody of Irishness, unchangingly dotted with lonely fields, bogs and turf cutters. (78)

At the turn of the century, a large amount of print was being devoted to the improbability of Ireland, whether as an independent nation-state or as the mystical invention of the Celtic Twilight. By the time TTP was written, the improbable had long since become a reality, both in political and literary terms. Its strange country may not be quite identifiable as Ireland, but it is not quite unfamiliar enough to be anything else. (81)

...the historical vagueness is appropriately disorienting, exaggerating the sense that wherever we are, it is not quite home...It is the balance of strangeness and familiarity that is so disquieting, the more so since TTP implies that something approximating rural Ireland is in itself sufficient punishment for all eternity. (82)

Indeed, the novel combines the Catholic purgatory with a Dantesque hell, a place where the ‘dead and the damned are doomed to go round and round, never remembering precisely who they are and why they are there. But it is also a paranoiac’s dream, its protagonist the victim of hidden maleficent forces, a cog in a pitiless machine. (85)

It may repeat the cycle of scholarly crime to argue that, up to a point, TTP may be read as a displaced satire that presents an estranged version of Irelan, an oddly monotonous hell where authority is wielded in a capricious fashion. But evidence for this is nevertheless oblique and suggestive; given the conundrums at the heart of the text, to look for an over-arching coherence in it seems ironically to ignore some of the point. (89)