Cultural Considerations
Asynchronous Session
Dominican Representation in Introductory Level Spanish Textbooks in the United States View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sheridan Wigginton
This research project investigates the representation of Dominicans and Dominican culture in nine widely-used Spanish textbooks in universities and colleges in the United States. The project seeks to richly describe these portrayals, highlight their absence when appropriate, and through qualitative content analysis consider Dominican representation through the lens of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ “Culture” Standard, which is grounded in products, perspectives, and practices. The organization, commonly referred to by its acronym ACTFL, describes products as books, tools, foods, laws, music, and games; practices as patterns of social interactions; and perspectives as meanings, attitudes, values, and ideas. The content analysis of the texts specifically includes a visual analysis of the physical representation of the people depicted in Dominican-themed culture activities to more clearly integrate issues of color and national identity into the discussion.
Geographies of Identities and of Social Relations in Dubliners by James Joyce View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Clara Birrento, Maria Helena Saianda, Olga Gonçalves
The landscape presupposes an intangible resource, whose characteristic is its appearance, the idea of view, of senses, scenarios. The language which describes the experiences of a visual structure is the emotional experience of place. The affective and emotional ties which people develop in relation to places and to environments, from the microscale, like the room, the neighbourhood, the street, to the macroscale, like the city or the nation, create a sense of place. It can be described as the unique and distinctive qualities of certain areas and regions, the spirit of the place, in other words. Both the sense and the spirit of the place are represented positively and negatively, e.g. a sense of comfort and well-being, or a sense of fear and disorientation. The individuals and the social groups mould the environment they experience daily and give a meaning to it by means of their emotions. Emotions and places help to share the experiences of the characters in the story and explain the causes and consequences of events. The paper proposes to read Dubliners framed by an interdisciplinary approach: a lexicometric, semiolinguistic and cultural analysis enlightens the emotional and spatial cartographies of the narratives, drawing a geography of emotions in the representation of the sensorial, mental or visceral experiences of the moment. It aims at reading Dubliners as a text that expresses what is ineffable, a sense of the emotional involvement of the characters with the places instead of an emotional desegregation., and discuss the emotional topographies of Dublin.
Cosmopolitan Knowledge Production: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Humanistic Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cyrus Patell
Inspired by the concepts of cosmopolitan irony and rooted cosmopolitanism, this paper argues that the challenge for the future of humanistic study is to bring a cosmopolitan approach not just to the study of culture, but also to academic methodology. Once conceived as a form of universalism opposed to the idea of nationalism, cosmopolitanism is now conceived in contradistinction both to nationalism and to universalism itself. Cosmopolitanism is best understood as a structure of thought, a perspective that builds on sameness, but embraces difference to promote the bridging of cultural gaps. Unlike multiculturalism, which promotes tolerance in a way that privileges difference above sameness, cosmopolitanism seeks to adjudicate between the claims of sameness and the claims of difference in order to discern the best ideas and practices through self-conscious conversations in which participants cultivate an ironic distance from their own assumptions. A cosmopolitan approach to knowledge production should not be interdisciplinary, but rather multidisciplinary: scholars remain rooted in the particular disciplines in which they are originally trained, but seek out conversations with other disciplines and engage in collaborative research and teaching projects across disciplinary lines. Such an approach does not render the way in which the vast majority of humanities scholars are trained—rooted in a particular discipline—a problem but rather a pre-requisite, a starting point from which to engage in conversations with scholars rooted in other disciplines. It requires a willingness to discern what is portable from one analytical mode to another, both inside and outside of the humanities.
Featured The Impact of Marketing-analysis Software Programs on Commercial Translations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Davide Pafumi
This paper examines the intersection between Humanities and Economics by exploring how marketing criteria influence the translator’s linguistic choices for sale-oriented purposes. It takes the example of a marketing-analysis software for Amazon and Walmart, called Helium 10, and its keyword tool, Magnet, in order to investigate whether marketing analysis tools can be useful to refine the translations and at the same time can influence the process of translation. This research is situated at the intersection between Translation Studies and Marketing. The method used for this study is both quantitative and qualitative, combining the use of the Helium software to collect data regarding best-selling products, research volumes, and their upward or downward trends. A comparison of different examples from a series of translations from Italian to German assesses which choice is better for the enterprises and their commercial aims. The results suggest that the integration of marketing analysis tools is indeed useful for refining technical and commercial translations to increase the visibility of the translated keyword associated with a given product on e-commerce platforms making them more competitive with respect to other products of the same category, and, accordingly, fostering sales. This might lead to further studies reconsidering the creative role of the translator as well as the concept of equivalence between a source language and a target one based on a logic of economic profitability.
Using Dramaturgical Analysis to Examine President Donald Trump’s Claim That He Won the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephen Sussman, Carole Huberman, James Talerico
A court filing in a lawsuit against Fox News depicts the drama at the network. Fox News had alienated its viewers and damaged its brand by not lining up with President Donald Trump’s claims that he had won the 2020 presidential election. The real worry was that Fox would lose viewership, and as such, the news team, including prime-time broadcasters, did not set the record straight about the unfounded fraud claims during and after the election. Fox’s accuser, Dominion Voting Systems, claimed 1.6 billion in damages and purported that the executives at Fox news continued to perpetuate the election fraud myth partly in fear of losing subscribers, damaging their brand name, and tanking their stock price. Dramaturgical tradition coined by Erving Goffman suggests that life is theater and individuals play roles. Using a dramaturgical lens, this qualitative study explores through court documents, the backstage statements made at Fox during the election, and its aftermath in tandem with the front-stage performance by the Fox News broadcast team.
Curating the Past: Understanding the Construction of History View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mariana Imaz
Curatorship is a practice that we associate with the art world, particularly museums and galleries. We talk about this practice as a process in which someone carefully and thoughtfully chooses and organizes a way to present particular artworks to the public. Some have theorized that curating an art exhibit and exercising organization and selection of artworks is very similar to telling a story. Rosalind E. Krauss for example, argues that in a museum “One proceeds in such a building from space to space along a processional path that ties each of these spaces together, a sort of narrative trajectory with each room the place of a separate chapter, but all of them articulating the unfolding of the master plot.” Thinking about Krauss’ statement David Carrier suggests that “In museums, as in books, we find individual works of art presented in a narrative. A walk in an art museum is a narrative under another name, for you need to describe what you see as you walk to write a history.” Krauss and Carrier statements not only allow us to think about the relationship between curatorial work and narratives, but they also invite us to expand their analogy and reflect on how it can help us illuminate what historians do as storytellers of the past. In particular, this analogy helps us reflect on the importance that selection, organization and choice have in the creation of a historical narrative.
