UCD Humanities Institute Research Collection
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The Humanities Institute showcases UCD’s expertise and scholarship in the humanities to develop international distinction that enhances the vitality and richness of Ireland’s cultural and intellectual experience.
The institute aims to develop the critical mass and international visibility of interdisciplinary research in the humanities at UCD by acting as a laboratory for the study of culture and the human experience. It complements research undertaken within related UCD Schools and research institutes while concurrently providing a neutral space for the delivery of interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary research that transcends the intellectual boundaries of a particular subject or discipline. The HI will develop as a driving force for knowledge creation and transfer within UCD and in the context of the humanities and social sciences in Ireland and Europe.
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Browsing UCD Humanities Institute Research Collection by Author "Meaney, Gerardine"
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- PublicationDiscovering Structure in Social Networks of 19th Century Fiction(ACM, 2016-05-25)
; ; ; ; ; Inspired by the increasing availability of large text corpora online, digital humanities scholars are adopting computational approaches to explore questions in the field of literature from new perspectives. In this paper, we examine detailed social networks of characters, extracted from several works of 19th century fiction by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This allows us to apply methodologies from social network analysis, such as community detection, to explore the structure of these networks. By evaluating the results in collaboration with literary scholars, we find that the structure of the character networks can reveal underlying structural aspects within a novel, particularly in relation to plot and characterisation.Scopus© Citations 10 705 - Publication
1633 - PublicationExploring the Role of Gender in 19th Century Fiction Through the Lens of Word Embeddings(2017-06-20)
; ; ; ; Within the last decade, substantial advances have been made in the field of computational linguistics, due in part to the evolution of word embedding algorithms inspired by neural network models. These algorithms attempt to derive a set of vectors which represent the vocabulary of a textual corpus in a new embedded space. This new representation can then be used to measure the underlying similarity between words. In this paper, we explore the role an author's gender may play in the selection of words that they choose to construct their narratives. Using a curated corpus of forty-eight 19th century novels, we generate, visualise, and investigate word embedding representations using a list of gender-encoded words. This allows us to explore the different ways in which male and female authors of this corpus use terms relating to contemporary understandings of gender and gender roles.1309 - PublicationHistory Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish Women's PoetryRecent years have seen a very rapid development in women's poetry in Ireland, a development which is part of a much wider one in women's writing and culture. The prevalence of poetry and the relative scarcity of prose in this movement is specific to Ireland and a significant departure from the pattern elsewhere. The strength of the tradition of women's fiction and the fragmentary nature of the tradition in poetry have tended to produce first an increasingly self-conscious feminist fiction, then an upsurge of women's poetry which attempts to re-define the poetic tradition and women's relation to it.
638 - PublicationLong Day's Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal LossLong Day's journey into Night may seem a strange starting place for a feminist analysis of modernism and post-modernism. Yet even the most conservative criticism reads this play as an enactment and embodiment of loss, specifically loss of the mother. That loss is rarely seen in the context of a more general "loss", a cultural loss of legitimacy and authenticity, endemic in and enabling modernism, articulated as "disinheritance" by an Other "coded as feminine."
7880 - PublicationNavigating Literary Text with Word Embeddings and Semantic Lexicons(2018-06-05)
; ; ; Word embeddings represent a powerful tool for mining the vocabularies of literary and historical text. However, there is little research demonstrating appropriate strategies for representing text and setting parameters, when constructing embedding models within a digital humanities context. In this paper we examine the effects of these choices using a case study involving 18th and 19th century texts from the British Library. The study demonstrates the importance of examining implicit assumptions around default strategies, when using embeddings with literary texts and highlights the potential of quantitative analysis to inform critical analysis286 - PublicationNovel2Vec: Characterising 19th Century Fiction via Word Embeddings(2016-09-21)
; ; ; ; Recently, considerable attention has been paid to word embedding algorithms inspired by neural network models. Given a large textual corpus, these algorithms attempt to derive a set of vectors which represent the corpus vocabulary in a new embedded space. This representation can provide a useful means of measuring the underlying similarity between words. Here we investigate this property in the context of annotated texts of 19th-century fiction by the authors Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. We demonstrate that building word embeddings on these texts can provide us with an insight into how characters group differently under different conditions, allowing us to make comparisons across different novels and authors. These results suggest that word embeddings can potentially provide a useful tool in supporting quantitative literary analysis.1340 - PublicationSex and Nation Women in Irish Culture and PoliticsThe aim of this pamphlet is to challenge the assumptions made by and about the women's movement in Ireland. It is to some extent a retrospective exercise, an attempt to analyse and respond to some of the ideas put forward in previous pamphlets in this series. It is, more importantly, an attempt to suggest directions in which Irish feminism can move in the future, an attempt to learn from the reverses and successes of the 1980s and to identify opportunities which will be available to Irish feminism in the 1990s.
11993 - PublicationWaking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright's Narrators in MourningReflecting in 2008 on the link between her groundbreaking work on gender and her more recent work on war, Judith Butler proposed a relationship between liveable and grievable lives: 'it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable'. This essay takes Butler's exploration of the 'politics of mourning' as its starting place for a reading of The Gathering and of the short story, 'My Little Sister' from Taking Pictures.
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