To celebrate the 20th anniversary of our MA in Philosophy Programme, a series of philosophy talks will be held from February to June 2024. The 3rd talk will be given by Mr. Shum Yat-fei, Veteran Journalist and Cultural Workers.

If you are interested to join, please register the 3rd talk at: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13680095 by 6 May 2024 (Monday).
If you have registered previously, please do not re-submit a new registration. We will send confirmation email to you around late April 2024.

#1 Seminar | 30 April 2024 (Tue)

From Corpora to Semantic Spaces: how computational methods can help us uncover word meaning change in historical texts

Date: 30 April 2024 (Tue)
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library
Speaker: Dr. Barbara McGillivray

The growing availability of digitised textual collections and advancements in data-intensive methodologies from the computational sciences present a unique opportunity to apply these techniques in digital humanities. The investigation of lexical semantic change, i.e. the evolution of word meanings over time, represents a particularly promising endeavour. This area holds broad appeal and relevance extending well beyond linguistics, encompassing disciplines such as history, literary studies, and lexicography. Computational linguistics research has increasingly focused on this challenge in recent years, leading to the development of various algorithms aimed at automatically detecting semantic change from corpus data.

This seminar will explore computational methods for the analysis of semantic change in texts. Dr McGillivray will present her insights into the application of computational tools to investigate shifts in word meanings over time, drawing on her experience of working on contemporary texts and 19th-century English texts. This interdisciplinary approach bridges computational linguistics with digital humanities scholarship, offering novel perspectives on language evolution and cultural transformations through quantitative analysis.

#2 Workshop | 2 May 2024 (Thu)

From Corpora to Semantic Spaces: some practical examples of corpus analysis and computational processing to study word meaning change in historical texts

Date: 2 May 2024 (Thu)
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library
Speaker: Dr. Barbara McGillivray
 

The question of what words mean and how they come to have multiple meanings has fascinated generations of linguists and philosophers. In recent years, computational linguists have addressed this research area as a detection challenge: how can we automatically identify whether a word has changed semantically just from its contexts of usage in corpus data? 

The aim of this workshop is to support students and researchers interested in exploring the changing nature of the vocabulary in historical texts at scale, and to reflect critically on the limitations of these computational analyses. The workshop will cover the topics of corpus building and text processing. Dr. McGillivray will introduce the basic concepts of semantic spaces and distributional semantics and walk through some simple code for training computational methods for representing word meaning (word embeddings) from 19th-century English corpora, evaluating them, and using them in digital humanities research with reference to the corpus of Darwin’s letters from the Darwin Project.

Husserl’s phenomenology seeks a full description of the life of consciousness, what he called the ‘ABC of consciousness’, an account of all the component parts of consciousness in their essential interrelation (or ‘grammar’) leading to an account of the constitution of the intersubjective world as a whole. But the primary element of consciousness is perception. Husserl developed a rich and complex ‘phenomenology of perception’. For Husserl, we are anchored to the world via perception in the widest sense. Moreover, this perception is incarnate, embodied and the world is revealed through our bodily movements as well as the apprehensions of our senses. Within the basic connection of perception – there is an implicit valorizing or ‘norming’. We have criteria for normality and within normality there is optimality. Perception is intrinsically normative. In this lecture, I will explain the relation between normality and normativity in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception and its implication for his account of world-constitution.

Online
No registration is required.
Meeting ID: 947 7400 1809 (link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/94774001809)

Face-to-face
Register by 22 April 2024 (link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13687127)
 

#1 Workshop | 24 April 2024 (Wed)
Computational Approaches to Textual Similarity

Date: 24 April 2024 (Wed)
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library
Speaker: Dr. Donald Sturgeon

Textual similarity – encompassing a variety of phenomena including direct quotation, unattributed copying with rewording or embellishment, allusion, and distinctly similar word usage – has long been of interest to textual scholars in many domains for a variety of reasons. Often these similarities are non-trivial to uncover, but once identified can provide valuable evidence for hypotheses about textual transmission histories and authorship – particularly important where these are complex or disputed.

Digitization of texts at an enormous scale together with ever more-powerful computer technology present excellent opportunities for identifying textual similarities automatically at scales that would otherwise be impossible. Focusing primarily on classical Chinese examples, this interactive, hands-on workshop will give an overview of some of the most commonly used approaches, and introduce practical ways of identifying, summarizing, and visualizing a variety of types of textual similarity in historical materials. No technical background is assumed, and all necessary materials will be provided.

#2 Seminar | 26 April 2024 (Fri)
Premodern China in the Age of AI: Opportunities and Challenges

Date: 26 April 2024 (Fri)
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library
Speaker: Dr. Donald Sturgeon

This seminar introduces ongoing work on building and using NLP models in the context of a large and widely used digital library of premodern Chinese texts, the Chinese Text Project, and the challenges encountered during this process. Using models trained on a large collection of data obtained through a combination of rule-based automation, linking of external resources, and crowdsourced editing, this ongoing project deploys deep learning models to directly augment a digital library with computer-generated data in a practically useful and sustainable way.

These models cover a range of tasks, many of which would previously have been considered impractical without human intervention, including: automated punctuation of unpunctuated texts; automated annotation of named historical entities in transcribed texts; automated OCR post-correction to correct mistaken transcriptions in text generated through OCR; and lastly more speculative and research-oriented tasks such as the application of deep learning to chronological and authorial attribution of historical texts.

Since imperial times, and even more since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese authorities have endeavored to control the historical narrative. This conference will present the essential role played by minjian (unofficial) history in our understanding of the history of contemporary China.

This talk showcases the constructive role of mothers in the formation of male bonding during medieval China, with an emphasis on the Tang dynasty (618-907). The practice of making obeisance to mothers extended beyond a mere family ritual, serving as a crucial mechanism for creating quasi-kinship bonds. Tang intellectuals not only recognized this practice but also conceptualized it within broader frameworks of rituals, emotional attachment, and gender norms. The practice of making obeisance to mothers evolved to gain strategic importance among regional military leaders, emerging as a thoughtful act of goodwill aimed at easing political discord. By redefining the image of women at elite men’s social functions, this research demonstrates that the politicization of domestic space, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and the display of friendship and fraternity together characterized male bonding in medieval China.

This paper begins with a brief discussion of four ways of imagining social change: replacement, transformation, transition,   and reconfiguration. Focusing on transformation and transition, the paper then asks: if examining or experiencing a particular social transformation, how can we understand the presence of things past? How do practices, logics, ideals, and things from the past inform, influence, or simply exist in the “new” social context? Understanding forms of continuity is simply the flip side of the coin of understanding change. Conceptualizing continuity intimately relates to imagining social transformation. The paper proposes two modes of understanding continuity: haunting and recombinant transformation. The paper ends by working through an example of the place of the past in the present: location based social control in the Great Leap Famine, the birth planning policy, and the recent Covid related lockdowns in Shanghai. How do the ideas of haunting and recombinant transformation differentially illuminate this continuity?

The five subjects are:

• Modern Languages, ranked 28th
• Linguistics, ranked 33rd
• Anthropology, ranked 36th
• Arts and Humanities, ranked 47th*
• Theology, Divinity & Religious Studies, also ranked 47th

These rankings are a testament to the hard work and commitment of everyone in the Faculty of Arts. We extend our deepest gratitude to our faculty, students, and staff for their contributions to making the Faculty a center of excellence in arts and humanities education and research.

As we celebrate these accomplishments, we are also reminded of the ongoing challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The Faculty of Arts is committed to continuing its pursuit of academic and research excellence, fostering a vibrant intellectual community that contributes to the advancement of knowledge and society.

We invite you to explore our diverse programmes and join us in our journey towards achieving even greater heights in the future.

*Arts & Humanities are broad subject areas.

Expressivists about ethical discourse maintain (near enough) that an assertion of 'x is good' displays the speaker's positive evaluation of x, opposing those descriptivists who maintain that the assertion instead describes x as having the evaluative property of 'being good'. A familiar promise of this expressivism is the dissolution of metaphysical vexation over how evaluative properties fit into the natural order: talk of 'evaluative properties' is confused, and the vexatious question along with it. An expressivism about mental discourse (including discourse about 'consciousness') would have a comparable promise of dissolving metaphysical vexation over how mental properties fit into the natural order -- namely, the mind–body problem: talk of 'mental properties' is confused, and the mind–body problem along with it. Unfortunately, ethical-discourse expressivism has a familiar tendency to collapse into a subjectivist descriptivism, on which 'x is good' describes the speaker as positively evaluating x: for mental-discourse expressivism, such a collapse would disastrously restore mental properties, while drastically attenuating our ability to speak about them. Fortunately, the collapse can be prevented -- albeit by means of an extremely deep adjustment to the foundations of analytic philosophy, by reassigning the fundamental theoretical role in systematic theory of meaning from truth, the actual world, and metaphysically possible worlds to (what I call) 'endorsement', 'my present stance', and 'phenomenologically possible stances': by exchanging 'logical realism' for 'logical mentalism'.

Online
No registration is required.
Meeting ID: 945 0500 2061
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/94505002061

Face-to-face
Register by 12 April 2024
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13686629
Delivered in English. All are welcome.