http://hdl.handle.net/10379/150 2017-10-29T21:53:33Z 2017-10-29T21:53:33Z Ruppo Malone, Irina http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6848 2017-10-04T07:47:28Z 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

What's wrong with Medievalism: Tolkien, the Strugatsky brothers, and the question of the ideology of fantasy Ruppo Malone, Irina This article addresses the question of the ideology of medievalist fantasy genre through an analysis of Hard to Be a God (1963) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky with references to J. R. R. Tolkien s The Lord of the Rings. Once we step outside the English-speaking tradition and the various Western ideological trends of the fantasy boom years, the following aspects of medievalist fantasy become particularly apparent: its descent from the historical novels of the nineteenth century, its concern with historiography, and its relation to the pan-European cultural revivalist movements. As a hybrid text, part fantasy and part science fiction, Hard to Be a God offers insights on the ideological tendencies and challenges of medievalist fantasy.

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z Carey, Daniel http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6347 2017-02-24T02:02:07Z 2017-02-01T00:00:00Z

John Locke, Edward Stillingfleet, and the Quarrel over Consensus Carey, Daniel Philosophical antagonism and dispute by no means confined to the early modern period nonetheless enjoyed a moment of particular ferment as new methods and orientations on questions of epistemology and ethics developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke played a key part in them with controversies initiated by the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). This essay develops a wider typology of modes of philosophical quarrelling by focusing on a key debate the issue of whether human nature came pre-endowed with innate ideas and principles, resulting in a moral consensus across mankind, or remained, on the contrary, dependent on reason to achieve moral insight, and, in practice, divided by diverse and irreconcilable cultural practices as a result of the force of custom and the limited purchase of reason. The essay ultimately concludes on the idea that we should not only attend to the genealogy of disputes but also to the morphology of disputation as a practice.

2017-02-01T00:00:00Z Causer, Tim Tonra, Justin Wallace, Valerie http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6269 2017-01-28T02:01:09Z 2012-03-28T00:00:00Z

Transcription maximized; expense Minimized? Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham Causer, Tim; Tonra, Justin; Wallace, Valerie This article discusses the crowdsourced manuscript transcription project Transcribe Bentham, and how it will impact upon long-established editorial practices at the Bentham Project, University College London, which is producing the new and authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. We site Transcribe Bentham in the burgeoning field of scholarly crowdsourcing projects, and, by detailing our experiences of running and administering the project, attempt to assess the potential benefits of engaging the public in humanities research. The article examines the conceptualization and development of Transcribe Bentham, and how editorial practices at the Bentham Project may change as a result. We account for the design of the bespoke transcription tool which is at the project's heart, and which allows volunteers to transcribe the material and encode it in TEI-compliant XML. We attempt to answer five key questions: is crowdsourcing the transcription of complex manuscripts cost-effective? Is crowdsourcing exploitative? Are volunteer-produced transcripts of sufficient quality for editorial use and uploading to a digital repository, and what quality controls are required? Does crowdsourcing ensure sustainability and widen access to this priceless material? And finally, should the success of a project like Transcribe Bentham be measured solely according to cost-effectiveness or the volume of work produced, or do considerations of public engagement and access outweigh such concerns?

2012-03-28T00:00:00Z Yose, Joseph Kenna, Ralph Mac Carron, Pádraig Platini, Thierry Tonra, Justin http://hdl.handle.net/10379/6101 2016-10-29T01:00:34Z 2016-10-21T00:00:00Z

A networks-science investigation into the epic poems of Ossian Yose, Joseph; Kenna, Ralph; Mac Carron, Pádraig; Platini, Thierry; Tonra, Justin In 1760 James Macpherson published the first volume of a series of epic poems which he claimed to have translated into English from ancient Scottish-Gaelic sources. The poems, which purported to have been composed by a third-century bard named Ossian, quickly achieved wide international acclaim. They invited comparisons with major works of the epic tradition, including Homer s Iliad and Odyssey, and effected a profound influence on the emergent Romantic period in literature and the arts. However, the work also provoked one of the most famous literary controversies of all time, colouring the reception of the poetry to this day. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scholars, while others protested that they misappropriated material from Irish mythological sources. Recent years have seen a growing critical interest in Ossian, initiated by revisionist and counter-revisionist scholarship and by the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first collected edition of the poems in 1765. Here we investigate Ossian from a networks-science point of view. We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources. Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant network-structural differences between Macpherson s text and those of Homer. They also show a strong similarity between Ossianic networks and those of the narratives known as Acallam na Senórach (Colloquy of the Ancients) from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.

2016-10-21T00:00:00Z