Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 479.
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: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 08:06:12 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: new books
Humanists will be interested in the following two new books, both German
Habilitationsschriften published in English:
Jan Christoph Meister, Computing Action: A Narratological Approach (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2003).
>Computing Action takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action
>in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to
>the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and
>finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new
>model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional
>structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised
>in the light of constructivist theories.
>
>In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed
>is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of
>the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two
>specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of
>this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for
>parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the
>mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and
>action constructs they contain. (The software tools and all relevant data
>files will be provided for download on the de Gruyter website).
>
>The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe’s
>Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Here, the practical application
>of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of
>Goethe’s famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative
>construction of action – an experiment intended to demonstrate not only
>Goethe’s aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his
>epistemological convictions.
(See the listing at
http://www.degruyter.com/rs/bookSingle.cfm?id=IS-3110176289-1&l=E.)
Jörg R. J. Schirra, Variations and Application Conditions for the Data Type
"Image": The Foundation of Computational Visualistics (2003, at
http://www.computervisualistik.de/~schirra/Work/Projects/Habilitation/).
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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