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Cross-Linking of Vocabularies for Art, Architecture, and Material Culture: Methods, Strategies, Practice, and the AI Perspective
Künstliche Intelligenz, Linked Data, Interoperabilität, Kulturerbe, Mapping, Thesaurus
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Die Sacherläuterungen in der digitalen Editorik. Auf der Suche nach der Best Practice
Digitale Edition, Webdesign, Leseforschung, Editionsphilologie, Kommentar
Sonifikation. Vermittlungsansätze zwischen Klang und Information
Methode, Sonifikation, Multimodalität
Overseas reception of English translations of Journey to the West: Temporal dynamics, cross-platform sentiment patterns, and topic modeling
PLoS One. 2026 Apr 21;21(4):e0347253. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347253. eCollection 2026.
ABSTRACT
The overseas reception of classical literature through online platforms presents a critical lens for understanding cross-cultural dynamics in the digital age. This study investigates the overseas reception of English translations of Journey to the West by analyzing a corpus of 1,795 reviews from Amazon and Goodreads to examine temporal dynamics, cross-platform sentiment patterns, and topic modeling. The analysis covers four celebrated translators: Arthur Waley, Anthony C. Yu, Julia Lovell, and W.J.F. Jenner. Methodologically, we developed a hybrid sentiment lexicon by integrating a domain sentiment lexicon with AFINN, NRC, and VADER through weighted fusion, addressing the limited adaptability of general sentiment lexicons in translated literature analysis. LDA modeling was further applied to enable data-driven theme extraction. Key findings reveal a consistent year-on-year increase in review counts across all translations. Notably, despite an overall positive sentiment, significant cross-platform divergences emerge, reflecting the distinct evaluative mechanisms of digital platforms. Thematic analysis identifies three central reader concerns: translation quality, plot acceptance, and character portrayal, with plot acceptance exhibiting markedly higher negativity. Furthermore, translator-level analysis reveals performance variations across these themes. This study demonstrates how digital platforms reconfigure the valuation of literary translation, and pioneers a methodological framework for capturing the dynamic interplay between reader perception, media infrastructure, and textual mobility, offering new pathways for digital humanities research in translation studies.
PMID:42013105 | PMC:PMC13098970 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0347253
Reconfiguring the Ideal Order: Ablation and Field Formation in the Twentieth-Century Nigerian Novel in English
What if the most structurally important books to a literary tradition aren't its
most famous? This paper introduces a new computational method by which the
critic can determine the texts that are foundational to the semantic
architecture of a corpus.
Infrastructures of Listening: The ManoWhisper Podcast Analysis Pipeline
ManoWhisper is an end-to-end research pipeline for
collecting, transcribing, and analyzing hateful and misogynistic podcast
content, built to support peer-reviewed and policy-facing research on
gender-based extremism. This paper argues the tool reframes harmful
media as a site of feminist methodological inquiry, with implications
for understanding how such content spreads across platforms and into AI
training data
The Eras Tour: Machine Learning for Dating Historical Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt
This paper introduces a machine learning approach to predicting the
authorship dates of historical texts by using named entities — specifically,
person and place names — as temporal markers.
Digital bioethics: exploring an emerging field
Med Health Care Philos. 2026 Apr 16. doi: 10.1007/s11019-026-10347-1. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
The uptake of social science methods by bioethics significantly expanded its methodological spectrum, raising new theoretical, methodological, and practical questions. Recently, we are witnessing another trend, adding advanced data science methods to bioethics' toolkit to aid, for example, in online data analysis, support scholarly writing, and inform clinical ethics. This article explores the emerging field of Digital Bioethics across its dimensions by analysing the tangled relationship between topics and methods, highlighting intersections between Digital Bioethics and Bioethics of the Digital, and advocating for a methods-based definition of the field. The use of advanced data science methods within bioethics must be interpreted in the context of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health care. At the same time, it presents unique opportunities and challenges. Defining, and thus demarcating, Digital Bioethics can create support for the new field but also requires navigating trade-offs. To do so, we take four kindred academic fields as points of comparison (Digital Humanities, Experimental Philosophical Bioethics, computational medicine and digitised biology) to analyse what each of them teaches for critically assessing and further developing Digital Bioethics. The article discusses potential pitfalls and concludes with recommendations on how the field can fully develop its potential to promote bioethical research and argument. Furthermore, the article discusses how a critical reflection of the use of AI methods within bioethics itself will also contribute to the ethical oversight of increasingly AI-driven branches of healthcare.
PMID:41989660 | DOI:10.1007/s11019-026-10347-1
Digital scholarship in education: multimodality as a window into learning. Brendan Jacobs
Digital scholarship in education: multimodality as a window into learning. JacobsBrendan, London, Routledge, 2024, pp. 94. ISBN 9781032582641. £19.99 (P/B).
Movers and haters: dynamic network visualization and analysis of an historical French controversy
Abstract
This article presents the results of a novel, mixed-methods project that studied an eighteenth-century French debate about education reform using approaches from Social Network Analysis and contemporary Controversy Mapping, alongside traditional humanities methodologies. Toggling between close reading of over 200 texts, and distant reading of the whole debate as a network, revealed that this little-known polemic—which we call the Querelle des collèges—was one of many early modern quarrels, and that its central actors were not straightforwardly those one might have expected. SNA uncovered the paradoxical role in the debate of the celebrity philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the previously overlooked participation of politicians, little-known teachers, and chronologically unexpected points of reference in this late-Enlightenment debate. Moreover, we underscore the value of analysing an historical controversy not just as a static network, considered at its end state, but as a dynamic entity that develops and changes over time. We show how a network can be dynamically visualized, to serve both exploratory and communicative ends. Ultimately, this article proposes a ‘bifocal reading’ method for historical controversy mapping, and identifies directions for future comparative research that might help us understand the dynamics of controversies from the past to the present. From romance to reality: lexical and topic evolution in Chinese popular lyrics through digital humanities approaches
Abstract
This study explores the lexical and topic evolution of Chinese popular music lyrics from 2000 to 2025, reflecting changing public sentiments and broader socio-cultural transitions. While prior research has largely overlooked non-Western lyric corpora, this study addresses that gap by constructing the Chinese Popular Music Diachronic Corpus, comprising 1,560 representative popular songs sampled across twenty-five years. Using digital humanities approaches, it integrates word frequency analysis, readability metrics, and BERTopic-based topic modelling to trace lexical and topic evolution of lyrics over time. Findings reveal that high-frequency words consistently revolve around emotional expression, individual introspection, and interpersonal dynamics. Type-token ratio (TTR) has increased significantly, indicating growing lexical diversity, while textual complexity shows fluctuation, reflecting stylistic shifts in song writing. Topic analysis identifies twelve major topics, including romantic love, future aspirations, and urban life, with topic structures evolving from natural and temporal abstraction to emotional concreteness and psychological introspection. Recent years show a significant rise in negative emotional topics and self-referential artistic motifs. This study contributes a novel methodological framework for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of music, language, and society, and underscores the value of digital humanities tools in mapping collective emotions and cultural change through large-scale lyric analysis. Investigating the structural formation system of modern simplified Chinese characters from a complex network perspective
Abstract
Chinese characters hold pivotal significance in the development of Eastern civilization. While their structural formation exhibits a systematic nature, system science approaches are seldom seen in analyzing the formation system. Therefore, based on complex network methods, this study aims to examine macro-scale network features and the essential system properties of modern simplified Chinese characters. Specifically, three types of networks were constructed: co-occurrence, directed, and weighted networks, along with their random counterparts. In these networks, primitive components served as nodes, and their relationships as edges. Subsequently, seventeen general network metrics were measured to analyze the network features, enabling deeper discussion of the system properties. Research results show that component networks exhibit five distinct network features compared to their random counterparts, including small-world feature, scale-free feature, disassortative mixing, high centrality, and hierarchical organization. These features demonstrate that the formation system displays three properties, namely complexity, robustness, and economy, which emerge respectively from organized, close-knit, and efficient component combinations. These findings serve as a significant supplement to the empirical research on the structural formation system of Chinese characters. Topic counts and quality in topic models for historic corpora
Abstract
Topic modelling methods enable the identification of potential topics within a corpus of historical texts; in particular, they enable the identification of latent topics that are not described just by a single word. Like so many computational methods for the automatic processing of historical text corpora, they come with a number of parameters with which the method can be tuned and adapted. Each change in the settings of any of these parameters will generate a new set of topics that will differ in larger or smaller ways and which may be qualitatively better or worse. One of the main parameters for tuning topic models is setting the number of topics to be generated. In this article, we present an analysis of the impact of the number of topics on the quality of topic models for two historical text corpora. Two manual evaluation approaches are combined with an automated evaluation metric, and based on the results, we propose a formalized process for choosing the final set of parameters for a topic model. The process ensures the quality of the final model, while minimizing the amount of manual evaluation work. The more structured process also allows for better documentation of the parameter choices and in that way enables better replicability of any research using topic models. Decoding AI discourse: contrastive analysis of media representations in German and Chinese contexts (2018–23) using machine learning techniques
Abstract
Previous studies have primarily focused on artificial intelligence (AI) discourse within specific language media, with limited contrastive analyses across different cultural contexts. This study analyzes the representation of AI in German and Chinese media discourses from 2018 to 2023, employing a modified version of Ruth Wodak’s discourse analysis framework alongside advanced machine learning methods. Our findings indicate that both German and Chinese media concentrate on AI issues pertinent to their regions. Chinese media adopt a perspective strategy by frequently quoting political figures, particularly President Xi Jinping, and consistently maintain a positive stance on AI. Conversely, German media, especially after the launch of ChatGPT, highlight high-tech figures and adopt a more critical and cautious approach toward AI. These differences in media discourses arise from distinct media cultural systems shaped by their respective contexts. In China, media outlets are party-affiliated and promote a narrative framing AI as a national strategic endeavor crucial for economic growth, reflecting governmental viewpoints. In contrast, media from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland present diverse perspectives on AI, expressing significant concerns about its potential risks. This study offers valuable insights for interpreting and formulating AI policies across different nations. Early modern translation and the digital humanities. Hilary Brown, Regina Toepfer, and Jörg Wesche (eds.)
Early modern translation and the digital humanities. BrownHilary, ToepferRegina, and WescheJörg (eds.), Berlin & Heidelberg, J.B. Metzler, 2025, 189 pp., €33.58 (P/B). ISBN: 9783662704820.
Digital technologies for Early Modern Portuguese manuscripts: an experiment with two ‘Handwritten Text Recognition’ software applications
Abstract
This article presents the results of an experiment involving the automatic transcription of sixteenth-century Portuguese Inquisition manuscripts using two Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) applications. The experiment focused on modelling the handwriting of a single scribe and comparing the machine-generated transcriptions with human-made diplomatic transcriptions, from a palaeographic perspective. The tools used were Transkribus (developed by ReadCoop) and Lapelinc Transcriptor (developed by the Corpus Linguistics Laboratory at the State University of Southwest Bahia, Brazil), both based on machine learning techniques. The results reveal that palaeographic expertise plays a crucial role not only in interpreting the output but also in improving HTR model performance. By addressing both practical and scholarly challenges, this study contributes to ongoing discussions in the field of so-called digital palaeography, particularly regarding Early Modern Portuguese manuscripts. Measuring sounds from the East: digital approaches to commonality and specificity in Chinese Mandarin pop lyrics
Abstract
Since China’s reform and opening-up in 1978, its popular music industry has experienced rapid development and emerged as a significant component of global contemporary pop music. This study conducts a systematic analysis of contemporary Chinese Mandarin pop lyrics (1978–2019) with digital methodologies. A stylometric measurement, the Busemann coefficient, was employed to demonstrate the lyrics’ high textual activity from both static and dynamic perspectives. This finding supports the lyrics’ stylistic essence as narratives. Besides, sentiment analysis of lyrics reveals an overall positive tone, though a significant watershed occurred around the year 2000, marking a divergence between the two periods. Furthermore, analyses with topic modeling demonstrate diversified topic distribution patterns across these periods, reflecting both the universality of popular culture and the distinctive Chinese characteristics shaped by cultural and temporal contexts. Exploring the cross-cultural influence of song Jiangnan Chan Buddhist poetry on Goryeo Han poetry through text visualization
Abstract
This study examines the influence of Jiangnan Chan poetry on Goryeo Han poetry through a comparative analysis of three representative poets from four dimensions: vocabulary imagery, spatiotemporal deconstruction, thematic evolution, and emotional expression. It proposes a text visualization-based methodology employing Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF)-based keyword extraction, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, supplemented by neologism mining and Kimi Intelligent Assistant (KIMI)-based word segmentation using AI large models. The results reveal four key findings: (1) both poetries share similar vocabulary and imagery centered on nature and Chan Buddhism; (2) both reflect an interweaving of eternal perspective and historical consciousness, alongside a dialectic between cosmic vastness and human reality; (3) in terms of thematic evolution, the original focus on “Nature and Chan” in Jiangnan poetry was transformed in Goryeo Han poetry into a trinitarian framework of “national protection, Dharma propagation, and social salvation”; and (4) Jiangnan poetry emphasizes transcendence and emptiness, while Goryeo Han poetry incorporates depictions of secular life and historical memory. The findings also suggest that the proposed methodology is effective in improving the accuracy of Chinese word segmentation for ancient poetry texts. This study underscores the value of quantitative comparative analysis in visualizing the intercultural diffusion and transformation of Chan Buddhism poetry. A GIS view of the word orders of numeral bases and numeral classifiers in Kuki-Chin languages
Abstract
Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages are known for their diversity in numeral systems and classifiers. This paper investigates the Kuki-Chin (KC, also called South-Central Tibeto-Burman) languages in TB’s Northeast Indian Areal Group and provides a comprehensive description of the four types of numeral systems: base-final, base-initial, base-split, and no-base, and the four types of classifier systems: CL-final, CL-initial, CL-split, and no-CL. A thorough survey of the literature, aided by fieldwork, enables a GIS view of the distribution of the different types of languages. Also, KC languages conform to Greenberg’s Universal 20A: N does not come between Num and CL, and the numeral base and classifier harmonize in word order. We propose the following hypothesis for Proto-KC (PKC) and Proto-TB (PTB) to account for the variation in numeral bases and classifiers in KC, that is, PKC, like PTB, is base-initial and without numeral classifiers, and the current variation in numeral bases and numeral classifiers in KC is due to horizontal external influence via language contact. Bayesian phylogenetic inference tests, however, show mixed results, as PKC is likely to be base-initial, as expected, but CL-initial, and PTB is likely to be base-final but CL-initial. Thus, we plan to conduct a comprehensive survey of all TB languages and further explore the state of PTB in terms of numeral bases and classifiers.