Express Yourself
Do You Speak Math? : Or Extrapolating Humanity in How Mathematicians Talk View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elisabet Takehana
In the age of data-driven decision-making, predictive modeling, and AI-authoring, it behooves the humanist to understand the mathematician as much as it does the mathematician to grasp the ethical, social, and cultural impact of their work. This paper contrasts the rhetorical and stylistic choices made in the most commonly assigned statistic textbooks in the United States alongside a run of mass market, best-selling books by mathematicians such as Hannah Fry, Cathy O’Neil, and Ben Orlin to pinpoint how and why mathematics and quantitative literacy is cast as potentially “inhuman” or “human.” Obscuring the concerns and desires of humans in how we teach and write about mathematics has a significant negative impact on our wellbeing in a world increasingly filtered and interpreted by algorithms and humanists adept at textual and discourse analysis have much to offer. A textual analysis through a close reading of differing ways mathematics, particularly statistics and probability, are presented will prove attractive to digital humanists interested in quantitative methods of inquiry, data or math ethicists, rhetoricians, and educators. Results will include observations on the reliance on mathematics to illustrate a concept, the use of narrative or figurative elements (especially tone, humor, and perspective), and how the texts grapple with interpretive challenges on the meaning of the results. While ultimately increased quantitative literacy across the board will continue to grow in importance as we consider ethics in the digital world, it may benefit from the attention to language typically relegated to the writer rather than the mathematician.
Identifying Moments of Breaching Linguistic Hospitality: A Framework for Analysis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sandra Kouritzin, Nathalie Piquemal
Working within and against various concepts of hospitality and guest/host relationships, we propose a framework for analysis of both linguistic in/hospitality and linguistic in/civility, outlining the tensions that arise between guest and host languages. At the macro level, linguistic in/hospitality arises from feelings associated with language use, and legitimate participation in various host/guest communities of linguistic practice, such as the use of English or French by recent immigrants who associate this language with [military] betrayal, with colonization of their country of origin, or with neo-colonialism represented by capitalism. At the meso-level, linguistic in/hospitality may be found at the level of discourse: news reports, social media, and other forms of public education that both create and reflect social and cultural norms and send clear messages about individual or social identities (e.g., those referenced by “MAGA supporters” or “anti-vaxxer”). At the micro-level, in/hospitality may reside in layers of complex respectful language usage that have been added in living memory including non-racialized language, or the use of gender-neutral terms such as “pregnant people” instead of “expectant mothers”. Also at the micro-level, we find linguistic in/hospitality in interpersonal discourses requiring facility with nuanced language resulting in micro-aggressions. Our purpose is twofold: (1) to initiate conversations about linguistic in/hospitality at micro, meso, and macro-levels of analysis, and (2) to then raise questions about the responsibilities of those in higher education contexts to ensure that everyone has access to the new rules governing dangerous words and acceptable speech.
Ukrainian Literature in Flux: War-themed Writing as a Paradigmatic Shift in Ukraine’s Literary Discourse View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Antonova
The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war is effecting profound shifts in the structure of Ukraine’s literary production, which is increasingly focusing on the central theme of negotiating Ukrainian national identity through processing of the nation’s war-time experiences. This paper centres on the emerging genre of Ukrainian war-themed literature (often termed “veterans’ writing”) to explore how this relatively new literary phenomenon is redefining contemporary Ukrainian literature and its representation of national self-awareness. “Veterans’ writing,” which addresses the events of the Russia-Ukraine war following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, is currently an extremely productive literary model, comprising over 500 fictional and non-fictional texts, including memoirs, diaries, documentary chronicles, thrillers, melodramas, realistic historical novels, poetry, humorous sketches, etc. typically authored by former combatants, volunteers, activists, or war zone survivors. In my analysis, I examine the main thematic patterns of these texts, as well as their specific literary qualities pertaining to the factors of authorship and circumstances of textual production, with primary emphasis on such works as Stanislav Aseyev’s collection of documentary essays In Isolation, Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Orphanage, and Tamara Duda’s novel Daughter. My approach intends to highlight how contemporary Ukrainian war-themed narratives navigate the themes of identity, belonging, and the dialectics of local, national, and universal against the backdrop of the raging military conflict, reimagining the idea of Ukrainianness and contributing to the construction of a new patriotic literary discourse.
