Today I'm going to write a blog on Digital Humanities as our thinking task by Dilip Barad sir . So let's begin …
Thematic Activities:
🔴 Word cloud
A word cloud is a simple yet powerful visual representation object for text processing, which shows the most frequent word with bigger and bolder letters, and with different colors. The smaller the the size of the word the lesser it’s important. In the word cloud, select the word you wish to combine with other words. Type in a word or phrase you wish to combine the word with, and press Enter. Repeat this process for all other words or phrases you wish to combine , until you have exhausted the synonyms.
🔴What is digital humanities?
Digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. Digital Humanities helps students learn by being able to see more, experience more, and collaborate together. Not only does this help show the value of the study of Humanities, but digital projects can also help inform and engage those outside the university setting. The humanities include the study of ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, human geography, law, politics, religion, and art...etc.
DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS, TOOLS, AND QUESTIONS THEY SUPPORT
As a project and tools of digital humanities there are such points about that
List tools of data analysis that can be applied to text in any language, space, networks, images, and statistical analysis.
Evaluate existing digital platforms based on features that can be used for data analysis within such fields as literature, history, art, and music.
ACQUIRING, CLEANING, AND CREATING DATA
In this introduction of edx humanities course , there is four perspectives as usage of this let's have a look at these
Identify the differences between unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.
Distinguish between different file types, their definitions, and applications.
Apply intellectual property rights to the downloading and sharing of data.
Practice different ways of downloading and creating data.
THE COMMAND LINE
As a command line there is some usage about the leaning of this
Apply command line functions to text files.
Create smaller text files from larger text files in preparation for further analysis.
So , it's very useful for us as a source of knowledge of digital humanities by edx Harvard course.
The ChiLit corpus has been compiled as part of the GLARE project. GLARE was funded by the European Commission within Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. more
The CLiC – Activity Book makes suggestions for this integration. It provides
examples of activities that teachers can adapt to or incorporate into their classes. It
also includes activities that can inspire ideas for student projects for the NEA.
However, even if you are looking for materials solely for language or literature this
book provides relevant concepts and methods, as it is fundamentally concerned
with how we derive meanings from texts – and especially how we ‘read’ literary texts.
Any reading experience will be shaped by the format or the materiality of the text. In
the digital age, new forms of texts have emerged and new methods of reading
have become possible.
How to use this book?
The CLiC – Activity Book is structured into two main parts – a methodological section
that introduces the functionality of the CLiC app and a thematic section that
illustrates specific thematic activities. However, you do not have to go through the
book chronologically. The main advantage of the structure is that it introduces basic
concepts in a systematic way – almost like an extended glossary – so that an
overview of methods is provided that enables you to apply these methods to texts of
your choice. The first part introduces, for instance, how you can run concordances
and it provides an example to illustrate the kind of information that concordances
can provide. The second part then starts the other way round, from topics and
questions you might want to address. In the activity on A Christmas Carol we are
interested in the social importance of the fireplace, and concordances will be one
way of investigating the topic. As a result of this structure, some of the activities in
Part II also bring in other online materials that can be usefully combined with findings
from CLiC .
Very interesting it is , there is such references about this book
Sunday reading : visit to an art gallery : Ajanta Exhibition
Hello readers ,
Here I'm going to write a blog on the Exhibition of Ajanta caves paintings by Khodidas Parmar which was exhibited in our BHAVANAGAR last Sunday . So, let's start friends…
First we take a brief introduction about Khodidas Parmar
Very famous painter and proud of Saurashtra Bhavnagar ``Khodidas Parmar '' was born at Bhavanagar in 1930 . He used to say that " any kind of fine art is pleasing to the mind, it is nourishing to the mind and soul. " Not only did he say this but he also did a great job in his life. Their talent can also be judged by the fact that they have won more than 26 national level awards.
Khodidasbhai received the National Fine Arts Academy Award in 1957, the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society Award in 1960, 62,63,64,65,66 and the All India Kalidas Festival Award in 1992, 1959, 61,64, 66,68,69 and 1995. Received Bombay Art Society Awards in 1952, 53, 53, 56 and 1961, Lalit Kala Akademi, Gujarat Awards twice in 1960 and 1965.
Let's get some information about Caves of Ajanta …
The Ajanta Caves The Buddhist Caves in Ajanta are approximately 30 rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments dating from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 CE in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra state in India.The caves include paintings and rock-cut sculptures described as among the finest surviving examples of ancient Indian art, particularly expressive paintings that present emotions through gesture, pose and form. If you want to know more about Ajanta Caves click here
Last Sunday there was an Exhibition of Painting by Khodidas Parmar of Ajanta caves , unfortunately I was not able to visit it so , I'm unable to share the experience about it , but yes, I have some pictures about it which were captured by my colleagues or friends . So , with those pictures I want to give my opinion or response about it.
Lots of pictures were there , amongst them I have chosen some pictures to say something about it
By these pictures I came to know that Khodidas Parmar was used to paint about the "Buddhist era" or "Buddhism" . In these pictures we can see that Khodidas Parmar was influenced by Buddhism, that's why he has made these pictures about Buddha. Moreover , we can say that he was very much adept in fine arts , Because in these pictures very clear fine designs are there.
We can see in this picture the fine clear design done by them . It shows the mastery of Khodidas Parmar in fine arts.
Also it is another painting which shows the fine arts design . In this picture there are two Birds in which were " Mor and Morni " .
Another very beautiful painting by Khodidas Parmar , in this painting there are two bulls fighting each other , it shows "BullFighting" . It is one of the religious festivals of South India. Also at the bottom there is a very beautiful design in this picture.
This is the picture of a Lady who is immersed in her thoughts with one of her hands on his head. It shows the activity of thinking about something . Also the ornaments which are on this lady show the era of the kingdom .
In this picture there are some animals which are showing love or kindness to each other and with humans. It shows the love of animals towards humans. Also I think it shows the meaning like Deva taught animals to be kind or friendly to all.
Also many paintings of love were made by Khodidas Parmar , this painting also shows the affection between two lovers .
This is the picture of an elephant , by one tale it's the 9th "Avatar" of Vishnu God as Gautam Buddha. The mother of Buddha "Mayadevi" sees a dream , in that an Elephant with white colour comes and does "Parikrama" of the Mayadevi and then it's entered and absorbed in her womb. Then she gives birth to the son , who becomes "God Buddha" . If you want to know more about the story then watch this video 👇
Thinking Activity: Marxist, Ecocritical, Feminist, and Queer Criticism
Hello friends ,
Today I'm going to write a blog on a few critical theories which are Marxist theory, Ecocritical theory , Feminist theory and Queer Criticism , so we have to explain deeply in a critical way , so we are starting with Marxist critical theory , so let's begin…
🔴 Marxism
First we have to understand what Marxism is ?
Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism. Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.
One of his fellow thinkers Friedrich Engelswho Emphasised on the following aspects :
Its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its " material production" , that is , of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods.
Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society
Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology
So we can say that Karl Marx and his fellow- thinker Friedrich Engels practice on these types of cultural and economic theories .
Also In the present era , "ideology" is used in a variety of non Marxist ways , also Marx represented ideology as a "superstructure" of which the concurrent socioeconomic system is the"base".
While Friedrich Engels described ideology as a " a false consciousness." During the era of eighteenth century the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class , the "bourgeoisie" with means of production and distribution which is opposed to the wage - earning working class.
George Lukács , the Hungarian thinker , one of the most widely influential of Marxist critics, by him in literature , each great work creates "it's own world," which is unique and seemingly distinct from "everyday reality."
In the nineteenth century Lukács attacked modernist experimental writers as "decadent" instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented World of our late stage of capitalism .
In opposition to Lukács , the Frankfurt school of German Marxists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , lauded modernist writers such as James Joyce , Marcel Proust , and Samuel Beckett , proposing that their formal experiments.
Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin , German Marxists, who supported modernist and nonrealistic art , have had considerable influence on non - Marxist as well as Marxist criticism.
Another notable critic is Walter Benjamin , who was both an admirer of Brecht and briefly an associate of the Frankfurt school. He said that , "a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art."
Louis Althusser , assimilate the structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a monolithic whole , but is constituted by a diversity of "no synchronous" social formations, or "ideological state apparatuses," including religious, legal, political, and literary institutions.
The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci , imprisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents on political, social and cultural subjects, known as the "prison notebooks." Gramsci's writing also inspired a number of post-Marxist thinkers, who sought to adapt Marxism to poststructural discourse.
In England , Terry Eagleton, a leading theorist of Marxist criticism who expanded and elaborated the concept of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text is a special kind of production in which ideological discourse , described as any system of mental representations of lived experience , is reworked into a specifically literary discourse.
What Marxist critics do?
They make a decision between 'overt' and 'covert' content of a literary work and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes .
Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social- class status of the author.
A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it .
A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed' , a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is , the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstances.
🔴 Ecocritical
Let's first know about what Ecocritical theory is ?
Ecocriticism asks us to examine ourselves and the world around us, critiquing the way that we represent, interact with, and construct the environment, both “natural” and manmade. At the heart of ecocriticism, many maintain, is “a commitment to environmentality from whatever critical vantage point”
"Ecocriticism" designates the critical writings which explorer the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities.
The nostalgic view of a return to unspoiled nature in order to restore a lost simplicity and concord remained evident in James Thomson's long poem in blank verse 'The Seasons'
In America, an early instance of nature writing was William Bertram's Travels through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.
In the twentieth century the warnings by scientists and conservationists increased; two especially influential books were Aldo Leopard's A Sand County Almanac , drawing attention to the ominous degradation of the environment, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
It was in this Climate of crisis that Ecocriticism was inaugurated.
Ecocritics do share a single theoretical perspective or procedure; instead, their engagements with environmental literature manifest a wide range of traditional, poststructural , and Postcolonial points of view and modes of analysis .
Their concerns are :
reigning religions and philosophies of Western civilization are deeply anthropocentric.
Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions. Our culture and our place are images of each other, and inseparable from each other.” Our identities, or sense of self. On the other side, human experience of the natural environment is not a replication of the thing itself, but always mediated by the culture of a particular time and place.
extension of “green reading” to all literary genres, including prose fiction and poetry, and also to writings in the natural and social sciences.
A conspicuous feature in ecocriticism is the analysis of the differences in attitudes toward the environment that are attributable to a writer’s race, ethnicity, social class, and gender. The writings of Annette Kolodny gave impetus to what has come to be called ecofeminism .
growing interest in the animistic religions of so-called “primitive” cultures, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions and civilizations that lack the Western opposition between humanity and nature, and do not assign to human beings dominion over the nonhuman world.
What Ecocritics do ?
They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world.
They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world -concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources.
They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century.
They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature.
They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories.
🔴 Feminist
First we have to know about what Feminism is ? So,
feminism is the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women. Feminism largely arose in response to Western traditions that restricted the rights of women, but feminist thought has global manifestations and variations.
feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).
An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf , who, in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929) . and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within what she called a “patriarchal” society, dominated by men, that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their productive and creative possibilities.
second-wave feminism
“second-wave feminism,” was launched in France by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949),
In America, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Mary Ellmann’s deft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women (1968).
Even more influential was Kate Millett’s hard-hitting Sexual Politics .By “politics” Millett signifies the mechanisms that express and enforce the relationships of power in society; she analyzes many Weste social arrangements and institutions as covert ways of manipulating power so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and the subordination of women.
the critical analysis and evaluation of works of literature:
The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal.
It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender.
The further claim is that this patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature.
Gynocriticism
A number of feminists have concentrated, not on the woman as reader, but on what Elaine Showalter named gynocriticism that is a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis, and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters.
Notable books in this mode :
Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination (1975)
Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976)
Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own
Brontë to Lessing (1977)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)
One concern of gynocritics is to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women the world of domesticity, for example, or the special experiences of gestation, giving birth, and nurturing, or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism, are the primary interest.
Another concern is to uncover in literary history a female tradition, incorporated in subcommunities of women writers who were aware of, emulated, and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors.
A third undertaking is to show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectivity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world.
Some feminists have devoted their critical attention especially to the literature written by lesbian writers, or that deals with lesbian relationships in a heterosexual culture.
The most prominent feminist critics in France, however, have occupied themselves with the “theory” of the role of gender in writing, conceptualized within various poststructural frames of reference, and above all Jacques Lacan’s reworkings of Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory. English-speaking feminists.
feminist criticism since the 1970s has been remarkable for the wide range of positions that exist within it. Debates and disagreements have centred on three particular areas, these being:
the role of theory;
2. the nature of language, and
3. the value or otherwise of psychoanalysis.
A Room Of One's suggests that language use is gendered, so that when a woman turns to novel writing she finds that there is 'no common sentence ready for her use'.
What feminist critics do?
1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.
2. Revalue women's experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'.
7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men.
9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations.
🔴Queer Theory
Let's first we have to know about what the Queer Theory is ? So,
Queer Theory is both theory and political action. Definition is impossible, but Queer Theory can be summarised as exploring the oppressive power of dominant norms, particularly those relating to sexuality, and the immiseration they cause to those who cannot, or do not wish to, live according to those norms.
The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry. See Teresa de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, 1991; and Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, 1996.
Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements” in parallel with the movements for African-American and feminist liberation.countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. In the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian that has remained stable through human history.
A major endeavor was to identify and reclaim the works of nonheterosexual writers from Plato to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and from the Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos to Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. A number of queer theorists, for example, adopted the deconstructive mode of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture.In an important essay of 1980, “Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich posited what she called the “lesbian continuum” as a way of stressing how far-ranging and diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding among women, including female friendship, the family relationship between mother and daughter, and women’s partnerships and social groups, as well as overtly physical same-sex relations.
Lesbian and gay theory
Lesbian and gay literary theory had emerged prominently as a distinct field only by the 1990s - there is nothing about it, for instance.the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, published in 1993. There is also a relevant MA course, 'Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change'.
In lesbian/gay criticism, the defining feature is making sexual orientation 'a fundamental category of analysis and understanding'.Lesbian feminism However, lesbian/gay criticism is not a single unified body of work. There are differences of emphasis between lesbian and gay theory, and two major strands of thinking within lesbian theory itself. The first of these is lesbian feminism, which is best understood by seeing it initially in the context of its own origins from within feminism, for lesbian studies emerged in the 1980s as a kind of annexe of feminist criticism, before acquiring disciplinary independence.in the 1990s would be that feminism had become so successful and so institutionalised that lesbian studies laid claim to the radical ground vacated by feminism. On this reading of the situation, feminism found it difficult to accommodate difference, whether racial, cultural, or sexual, and tended to universalise the experience of white, middle-class, urban heterosexual women. This kind of critique of feminism originated in the work of African-American critics who pointed out that academic feminism had reproduced the structures of patriarchal inequality within itself by excluding the voices and experiences of black women. This case is memorably put, for instance.
Bonnie Zimmerman, among others, in a well-known essay 'What has never been: an overview of lesbian feminist criticism' attacked this 'essentialism', pointing out the way 'the perceptual screen of het-erosexism' prevented any consideration of lesbian issues in pioneering feminist writing .a feminist literarycritical classic like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic contains only a single passing reference to lesbianism. 'Classic' feminism, then, had marginalised or ignored lesbianism.
concept of the lesbian continuum therefore designates a wide variety of female behaviour, running, for instance, from informal mutual help networks set up by women within particular professions or institutions.Paulina Palmer points out, however, seeing lesbianism in this way has the curious effect of de-sexualising it, so that it becomes almost wholly a political act, rather than a sexual orientation, and is hence 'sanitised' and transformed into something else.
In the 1990s a second, less essen-tialist, notion of lesbianism had emerged, within the sphere of what is now known as 'queer theory'. Queer theory So far, then, we have discussed the nature and development of the thinking designated as lesbian feminism. The second kind of lesbian thinking, designated libertarian lesbianism by Paulina Palmer, breaks away from feminism and makes new allegiances, in particular, with gay men rather than with other women, and this kind of lesbian theory sees itself as part of the field of 'queer theory' or 'queer studies', terms increasingly used by gays .
One of the main points of post-structuralism was to 'deconstruct' binary opposition showing, firstly, that the distinction between paired opposites is not absolute,secondly that it is possible to reverse the hierarchy within such pairs,In an essay which we might take as a practical example of how this dichotomy can be deconstructed, Richard Meyer writes, in the same volume, about the film star Rock Hudson, once the screen epitome of attractive heterosexual masculinity.
lesbian/gay criticism of the recent 'queer theory' phase tends to favour texts and genres which subvert this kind of familiar literary realism, like thrillers, comic and parodic fiction, and sexual fantasy. Thus a novel like Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are not the only fruit is of interest to the lesbian/gay critic not just because of its lesbian subject matter, but also because of its many anti-realist elements.
What lesbian/gay critics do?
Identify and establish a canon of 'classic' lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct tradition.
Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such , rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways.
Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories.
Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures.
Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over, for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry.
Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity or femininity.such as the nineteenth-century adventure stories with a British 'Empire' setting discussed by Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys .
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