10 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
  2. Jan 2021
  3. Mar 2020
    1. Do Creative Commons licenses affect exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use?

      This question is such a common one. I don't think most people understand that Creative Commons doesn't replace copyright. At my institution most people seem to think that it's either one or the other and if it is licensed under creative commons, that it is always free to use with no copyright restrictions. This does a nice job of clarifying that.

  4. Jul 2018
  5. course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
    1. I propose to tell you–in the first place–what is known of the manner in which your cousin met his death; appending to the statement such inferences and conclusions as we are justified (according to my opinion) in drawing from the facts

      Sergeant Cuff's narrative is very straight forward and to the point compared to the others, especially Miss Clack. Because Cuff's intention in this narrative is to relay facts to Franklin, and also because he is a detective, Cuff uses few unnecessary adjectives or "flowery" language. I would be interested in running a POS (Parts of Speech) analysis on Cuff's narrative and compare it to Clack and Betteredge, as well as the rest of the text.

    2. Having heard the story of the past, my next inquiries (still inquiries after Rachel!) advanced naturally to the present time. Under whose care had she been placed after leaving Mr. Bruff’s house? and where was she living now?

      Blake's account of Rachel is clearly distinct form the other narrators because of their romantic past. He mentions her frequently throughout his narrative. I would like to run a frequency count the number of times he mentions Rachel compared tot he rest of the narratives in the book. I wonder if it is possible to isolate the discussions of Rachel in each character's narrative and then do some topic modeling with the extracted texts to examine how Rachel is discussed by each character.

    3. It distressed me, it did indeed distress me, to hear her say that. She was so young and so lonely–and she bore it so well!

      Bruff's impression of Rachel is very different from Miss Clack, but similar to the affectionate tone of Betteredge. I would be interested in running a word frequency count on all of the ways Rachel is described by the different narrators and do a comparison between the words used by the different narrators and also which words they share in her description.

    4. Penelope fired up instantly. “I’ve never been taught to tell lies Mr. Policeman!–and if father can stand there and hear me accused of falsehood and thieving, and my own bed-room shut against me, and my character taken away, which is all a poor girl has left, he’s not the good father I take him for!”

      Penelope has been a compelling and independent character throughout the narrative, from the ways in which she gives insight to the narrative itself , to this moment here. It would be interesting to extract her character descriptions and speech and compare it to the other female characters in the story to see how they are different / similar. I would also be interested in comparing her to the male characters. Would this be something the sentiment analysis could be used for?

  6. Feb 2018
    1. songs

      All that I have given up to this let them serve as examples of the way in which the Connaught peasant puts his love-thoughts into song and verse, whether it be hope or despair, grief or joy, that affect him. (147)

      In these final lines of the book, the reader is offered Hyde’s selection of songs as a faithful and complete insight into vernacular Connacht song about the theme of love. Moreover, Hyde suggests that in reading this anthology one achieves a good degree of familiarity with an idealized, essentially native ‘Connaught peasant’.

      Although speakers in the songs are variously male and female, and the reasons for separation from absent lovers differ, the experience of love is fairly uniform throughout. It is a sore experience of unrealized desire. That scenario produces a pronouncedly virtuous image of the ‘Connaught peasant’ for a number of reasons.

      The reader encounters deep loyalty where admiration is unstinted by forbiddance of love because of emigration, lack of requital, or death. ‘Úna Bhán,’ for example, is preceded by a long passage explaining how deeply a bereaved lover missed the fair Úna after, until he himself passed away. Also, Hyde’s anthology is particularly rich in its examples of similes drawn from the natural world. See ‘my love is of the colour of the blackberries’ (5) in ‘If I Were to Go West’, ‘I would not think the voice of a thrush more sweet’ (27) in ‘Long I Am Going,’ and ‘My love is like the blossom of the sloe on the brown blackthorn’ (31) in ‘An Droighneán Donn’. In the vivid rendering of these images, the beauty of the desired lover is stressed, and the delicate sensibility of the speaker is inherently implied. The Connaught peasant is thoroughly valorized as a result.

      Accounting for consistencies among what anthologies include, and among what they exclude, can highlight their organizing agenda. One obvious example in the area of Irish Studies is the Field Day Anthology controversy, detailed in depth by Caitríona Crowe in The Dublin Review: https://thedublinreview.com/article/testimony-to-a-flowering/

      In the case of Hyde’s Love Songs, consistencies among excluded material strengthen our perception of how actively he sought to contrive an estimable image of the Connaught peasant. Though Hyde claims his selection is emblematic of the love-thought of that idealized personage, he does not provide any examples of la chanson de la malmariée. This variety of song is so widespread that Seán Ó Tuama, who was the principal authority on the theme of love in Irish folksong, included it as one of five major genres in his article ‘Love in Irish Folksong’ (in the book Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage. Such songs are an expression of grief by a young woman unhappily married to an elderly man.

      If we are to view the songs anthologized by Hyde in a broader context of Connacht songs about love, an awareness of the chanson de la malmariéé is required. Faoi Rothaí na Gréine (1999) is a relatively recently published collection of Connacht songs. The collecting work was done in Galway between 1927 and 1932 by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and latterly edited by Professor Ríonach Uí Ógáin. ‘An Droigheán Donn’, ‘Úna Bhán’, and ‘Mal Dubh an Ghleanna’ are common to Faoi Rothaí na Gréine and Love Songs of Connacht. The inclusion in the former of two famous songs of the malmariée genre, ‘Dar Mo Mhóide Ní Phósfainn Thú’ (I Swear I Wouldn’t Marry You), and ‘Amhrán an Tae’ (The Tea Song) demonstrate the strong presence of that genre in the ‘love-thought’ of vernacular Connacht song.

      This way of framing discussion of Love Songs of Connacht invites close interrogation of Hyde’s biases. The choice of material for inclusion and exclusion is ideologically cohesive, to the specific end of creating a valorous image of the idealized native peasant. In my M.A. thesis, I might further refine the line of argument pursued in this annotation, and use it as the basis on which to build a discussion of Hyde’s particular ideological motivations.

    1. Máire Ní Mhongáin

      As Ciarán Ó Con Cheanainn writes in Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán, the oldest written version of this song dates to 1814, and is found in MS Egerton 117 in the British Library. Oral lore in Conneamara has it that Máire Ní Mhongáin’s three sons joined the British Army, and that Peadar deserted soon after joining, and emigrated to America. It seems probable that their involvement was in the French Revolutionary Wars or the Napoleonic Wars, the major conflicts fought by the British Army in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth respectively.

      Máire Ní Mhongáin seems to have resonated among Irish emigrant communities in the United States. My evidence for this is that Micheál Ó Gallchobhair of Erris, County Mayo, collected songs from Erris emigrants living in Chicago in the 1930s, over a century after the occasion of ‘Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin’s’ composition. It features in his collection, which you access via the following link: http://www.jstor.org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/stable/20642542?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

      The virulent cursing of departed sons by the mother, named Máre, produces the effect of striking g contrasts with John Millington Synge’s bereaves mother, Old Maurya, in Riders to the Sea.

      My Irish Studies blog features an in-depth account of typical features of the caoineadh genre to which Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin belongs. You can access it via the following link: johnwoodssirishstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/carraig-aonair-an-eighteenth-century-west-cork-poem/

    1. Search alphabetically by song title

      This website provides important context for the exploration of a research question I am addressing in my M.A. thesis preparation.

      The portrayal of female personages in revivalist literature sets them in signally passive roles. This is most clearly at issue in the work of that period’s two foremost dramatists. In W.B. Yeats’ Cathleen Ni Houlihane, the female protagonist does not pursue her own course of action, but rather serves to inspire male heroism (P.J. Mathews discusses the play’s portrayal of female passivity at length in a piece, see http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/literature-and-1916). In The Only Jealously of Emer and The Countess Cathleen the value of women to society is achieved through acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of significant male others (Christina Wilson has argued similar points in great detail: http://chrestomathy.cofc.edu/documents/vol5/wilson.pdf).

      In John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, we encounter a blending of the taste for passive female characters with a revival fascination with the rural west. Old Maurya’s reticence and stern faith in God, following the drowning of her five sons, established her as the moral centre of her native Aran community. Her monologue in the play’s ending concentrates our attention on the community’s willingness to surrender to tragic fate, which is always threatened by the danger of the sea (the play is available to read online at this link: http://www.one-act-plays.com/dramas/riders_to_the_sea.html).

      What is interesting to me is that images of a massive female subject, favoured by Abbey playwrights who sought to stress the cultural specificity of Ireland, differ strongly with some prominent portrayals of the female subject in vernacular literature in Irish. In my annotation of this archive, I will provide examples of some genres of folk song – composed by females, and traditionally sung by female singers – that contradict ideas of a female subject as passive sufferer of fate. Annotations will include translations to English.

      After highlighting these features of oral literature in Irish, I will have laid down substantial grounding for a discussion of the ideological motivations of revivalist authors’ depiction of female subjects. It is interesting that certain tropes of a national identity, which these authors consciously sought to create, can be seen as divergent with realities of the social group which was most fundamental to that identity. This observation encourages consideration of European intellectual currents which might have influenced revivalist writers, romantic nationalism in particular.