Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 430.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 10:04:18 +0000
From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Request for expansion Re: 17.427 gender-testing
Willard,
I wonder if Professor Argamon or others would care to elaborate on the
notion of an "information age criticism":
>
> Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:03:03 +0000
> From: "Prof. Shlomo Argamon" <argamon@iit.edu>
> [...]
>
> I am very interested in discussing this topic more - the links between
> lexicogrammar, gender, genre, and how text is perceived are very
relevant, I
> believe, to developing an "information age criticism", bridging the gap
> between the "Two Cultures".
>
> -Shlomo-
Whose two cultures? Grammatical gender is marked differently in different
languages. And not all societies map social gender onto grammatical
gender. Likewise perceptions and constructions of a science-art divide (I
think this is the intended reference of the two cultures) vary greatly
depending upon discursive contexts.
What does it say about the model at play when the researcher strips out
the count of pronouns and thereby ascribes the text to male-authorship?
What studies bolster the link between female-authorship and pronoun
peppering? How extensive and valid is the empirical data that informs the
assertions made by the model? The sampling on gender-based linguistic
analysis needs to account for such factors as socio-economic status, age,
first-language, inheritance of language patterns from gender of the
primary language teacher, production context of the utterances (e.g.
gender of the interlocutors). If the model can begin to account for the
sociolects and the ideolects of speakers and writers, the number crunching
analyses might be put to good use in terms of gender-testing not only the
sociosexualization of the writers but also that of the intended readers:
M to M
M to F
F to M
F to F
And that whole dynamic shifts when moving from a one-to-one to a
one-to-many:
M to M&M
M to M&F
When the phenomenon of split addresse is observed and taken into account
the unicity, especially the gendered uniformity of the author may no
longer cohere.
Who is a question that bears reflection in the context of where, when and
with whom.
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachanceWondering if...
mnemonic is to analytic as mimetic is to synthetic
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