Concepta news

CFP: Text-mining in the Digital Humanities, 13.–14. May 2010 Lancaster

Sami — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:19:35 +0200

Call for Papers

Text-mining in the Digital Humanities: The Interface between Conceptual History, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.

Lancaster University Thu 13 – Fri 14 May 2010

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to explore the potential for collaboration between researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Conceptual History (CH), the study of key socio-political concepts in their historical context (see http://www.concepta-net.org/conceptual_history).

Recent studies by mainly Lancaster-based researchers have suggested the methodological synergy that can result from combining CDA and corpus-linguistic approaches. Meanwhile, the discourse-historical approach in CDA developed by Ruth Wodak (Lancaster) overlaps with CH in its study of the discursive construction of collective identities that can themselves be seen as concepts, each with their own history. Finally, the development of increasingly sophisticated software programs, such as Lancaster’s UCREL Semantic Analysis System, opens up exciting new research possibilities for mining the ever-increasing number of historical texts available in digital form. The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for researchers in CH, CDA and CL to discover how they might benefit from mutual collaboration. It should also be of interest to anyone in the Humanities and Social Sciences who works with texts and/or deals with basic socio-political concepts, including collective identities.

Guest speakers will include Jan Ifversen (Head of Institute for History and Area Studies, Aarhus University), Hans-Erich Boedeker (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin), both from the History of Political and Social Concepts Group, and Gerlinde Mautner (Vienna University of Economics and Business), who pioneered the use of corpus-linguistic techniques in CDA. The workshop will also include demonstrations of various software programs.

Abstracts (200-300 words)

We invite the submission of proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars working in:

· Conceptual History (including historical semantics and metaphor history)

· Critical Discourse Analysis (including critical metaphor analysis and cognitive approaches)

· Corpus Linguistics (including historical text-mining and keyword extraction)

Possible topic areas for papers include, but are not limited to:

Case studies in using historical corpora
Concepts, texts and discourses
Conceptual history vs historical semantics
Conceptual contestation / conceptual innovation
Critical metaphor analysis and cognitive approaches
Different national approaches
Identities as concepts
The importance of context(s)
Reconstructing semantic fields
The role of concepts in the discourse-historical approach
What corpus linguistics can and cannot do
What makes a key word key?

Workshop fee

Full delegate rate £40

Postgraduate Researchers £20

(The fees include lunches and morning and afternoon refreshments on both days.)

Important dates

26 March 2010 Deadline for abstracts, to be sent to Prof. Anne Wichmann (a.wichmann@virgin.net)

1 April 2010 Notification of acceptance

23 April 2010 Deadline for registration and payment of conference fees.

Further information (accommodation, travel etc) will soon be available at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/events/chcdacl2010/

For queries in the meantime please contact one of the organisers.

Organisers

Neil Foxlee n.foxlee@virgin.net or n.foxlee1@uclan.ac.uk

Anne Wichmann a.wichmann@virgin.net or awichmann@uclan.ac.uk

Paul Rayson p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk

Paul Baker j.p.baker@lancaster.ac.uk

Dawn Archer dearcher@uclan.ac.uk

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for the support of

Lancaster University, Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ias

University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Preston, UK. http://www.uclan.ac.uk/ahss/journalism_media_communication/english_linguistics/

New Dissertation in Conceptual History

Sami — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:40:51 +0200

Evgeny Roshchin defended his doctoral dissertation 'Friendship in International Relations: A History of the Concept' at the University of Jyväskylä on November 27, 2009.
Supervisor of the dissertation: Academy Professor Kari Palonen, University
of Jyväskylä; Opponent: Jens Bartelson, Professor of Political Science,
Lund University

ABSTRACT
Roshchin, Evgeny
Friendship in International Relations: A History of the Concept
Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2009, 236 p.

This thesis examines the history of the concept of friendship as applied
to the relations among political units. It does not suggest another
argument in favor of friendship as an ideal of international life. Instead
it offers an account of how modern political thought acquired and further
reified a normatively informed concept of international friendship and
what stakes it involved. The thesis argues that the distinction between
the concepts of international and interpersonal friendship became blurred,
thereby clearing the space for ethical assessments of international
conduct, in the course of the early modern discussions of the nature of
men, state of nature and constitution of the state as well as in the tacit
adaptations to certain ideas of political order. The study draws on
Quentin Skinner's approach to the history of concepts. It investigates a
number of early modern political, juridical and historical treatises as
well as the British and American treaties.

In addition to the familiar 'normative' concept of friendship, the
research of these sources reveals another concept of friendship as a
voluntary contracted relationship with specified and binding terms. The
latter was used in Antiquity and the Middle Ages to describe and classify
'friendship compacts', to set up and legitimize political and legal
orders, with specific stipulations on commercial and military duties and
more general articulation of the issues relating to the equality or
inequality of the parties. In the period of transition to the Westphalian
system of international relations, the 17th and 18th century debates on
the state of nature and the constitution of the commonwealth valorized the
concept of friendship as an ethical relationship. They presented it as a
dictate of nature and an inherent part of human sociality and,
consequently, marginalized the voluntary and contracted concept of
friendship. The thesis shows how friendship understood as a particular
politico-legal instrument is transformed to a desired normative ideal of
the invented system. The analysis of the use of friendship in relations
with non-European peoples in the 17th-19th centuries demonstrates that,
despite the prevailing normative understandings of political theory, the
concept remains one of the key tools for constructing politico-legal
orders, which are not necessarily based on the principles of sovereign
equality. Hence, the thesis suggests looking at international friendship
not as a perennial value, but as a contingent conceptual tool employed to
promote particular political projects.

Keywords: friendship, history of concepts, rhetoric, political order,
contract, inequality,
anthropomorphism

Redescriptions vol. 13

Sami — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:36:14 +0200

Redescriptions vol. 13, Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory has recently come out. New volume includes articles by Pierre Rosanvallon, José María Rosales, Evgeny Roschin and Tuija Pulkkinen. View table of contents at: http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/redescriptions/articles_2009.htm

Seminar on Quentin Skinner

Sami — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:01:57 +0300

On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics

Quentin Skinner, Bryan Garsten, Melissa Lane, Philip Pettit, and Nadia Urbinati

2009 marks the 40th anniversary of Quentin Skinner's pathbreaking essay "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." This afternoon conference will celebrate and critically evaluate Skinner's work, broadly defined. Participants will include Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London; Bryan Garsten, Professor of Political Science, Yale University; Melissa Lane, Professor of Politics, Princeton University; Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values, Princeton University; and Nadia Urbinati, Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University. Moderated by Helena Rosenblatt, Professor of History, the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Friday, October 23rd, 3:00-6:30pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btwn 34th & 35th)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
No registration. Please arrive early for a seat. 212-817-2005

www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org

Conference in Temeswar/Romania

Sami — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:53:42 +0300

Conference on "Fundamental Concepts in the Romanian Social-Political Languages" is taking place in Temeswar/Romania from September 23 until September 26, 2009.

For more information and programme on the following link: http://www.histinst.rwth-aachen.de/de/index.php?id=271