Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis <p><span style="font-size: small;">METHIS. STUDIA HUMANIORA ESTONICA on Tartu Ülikooli kultuuriteaduste ja kunstide instituudi j<span class="tabeltootajategrupeerimine1"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a </span></span>Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi kultuuriloolise arhiivi ühisväljaanne, ilmumissagedusega kaks korda aastas (juuni ja detsember). Ajakiri on rahvusvahelise kolleegiumiga ja eelretsenseeritav</span></p> en-US marin.laak@gmail.com (Marin Laak) epner@ut.ee (Heiki Epner) Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 OJS 3.1.2.4 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Digipõlvkonnast sotsiaalmeedia põlvkonnaks. Põlvkondlikku enesemääratlust kujundavad trendid Eesti noorte internetikasutuses / From the digital generation to the social media generation: the main internet usage trends among Estonian young people leading t https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16908 <p>Meediakasutust puudutavad isiksuseomadused on kujunenud olulisteks põlvkondliku enesemääratluse ja identiteedi osisteks. Artiklis tutvustatakse meediapõlvkondade kultuurilisest käsitlusest lähtuvat lähenemist, mis näeb tänapäeva lapsi ja noori sotsiaalmeedia põlvkonnana. Mitmete empiiriliste uuringute tulemustele tuginevalt antakse artiklis ülevaade peamistest Eesti noortele omastest internetikasutuse harjumustest ja internetitegevustest. Millisena tajuvad sotsiaalmeedia põlvkonna esindajad sotsiaalmeedia rolli enda igapäevaelus, näitavad viieks päevaks sotsiaalmeedia kasutamisest loobunud noorte kogemuspäevikute sissekanded.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Scholars argue that the sense of belonging to a generation has proven to be one of the most important prerequisites for the formation of media habits and for the ways people consume various media. Especially the experience with media and technologies during the formative years, which helps to shape long-term media habits, is noted to be relevant in defining generations and their media consumption cultures. Younger generations, in particular, tend to build their generational identity around the devices that they use, perceiving that the specificity of the self-definition of their generation is anchored in the use of such technology. For example, a variety of labels – “digital generation”, “Net generation”, “digital natives”, etc. have been coined to signify the media preferences and supposed common media habits of present-day young people.</p> <p>Relying on various recent quantitative (e.g. EU Kids Online survey) and qualitative studies, the present article aims to give an overview of the main trends surrounding Estonian children’s (9–17 year olds) internet use (e.g. access to the internet, time spent online, online activities, using the internet for schoolwork, digital skills). Furthermore, relying upon the findings of a qualitative study where young adults (n = 42, 18–23 year olds), who were asked to refrain from using any social media platforms for five consecutive days, reflect in their detox diaries upon the role social media plays in their daily lives.</p> <p>The findings of EU Kids Online survey (n = 1020) from 2018 indicate that the internet has become an integral part of the daily lives of Estonian young people. The findings illustrate that 97 % of Estonian children (9–17 year olds) access internet through at least one device (most commonly a mobile or a smart phone) on a daily basis and tend to spend a significant amount of their waking hours on the internet. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, children’s screen time has increased even more. Furthermore, the present-day pandemic has also revealed a digital stratification trend, which was not as strikingly evident in 2018 – in many households (34 %) children need to share devices for accessing remote learning platforms, as smart phones are not as user friendly.</p> <p>Estonian young people claim to be versatile internet users, although entertainment and communication-related activities tend to prevail. Although children’s self-assessment of their digital skills is very good, children’s engagement in creative and participatory online activities, which also require more digital skills, is still rather uncommon. Findings of qualitative studies indicate that young people’s modest digital participation can be explained by their lack of motivation on the one hand, and the lack of polite and reasoned communication culture, on the other hand.</p> <p>Due to the variety of affordances social media platforms provide, many children and young adults in Estonia have become habitual users of social media. The analysis of social media detox diaries revealed that for many young people social media is invisibly present in most of their daily activities (e.g. while eating, waiting to catch a bus, attending a lecture, taking a bath, etc.). Furthermore, the communicative interactions the young people engaged in, as well as the maintenance of both personal and professional relationships, had become increasingly mediated through various social media platforms. Thus, many young persons described their experience of feeling anxiety and FOMO (fear of missing out) during the social media detox. Thus, they experienced a need to find alternatives to their previously established media diets. In fact, in some of the participants, social media detox also triggered technostalgia for pre-digital forms of communication and “older” ways of communicating (e. g. face-to-face contacts, speaking on the phone).</p> Andra Siibak Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16908 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Arvutiteaduse kaasamine humanitaarharidusse / Integrating Computation into Humanities Education https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16909 <p>Digihumanitaaria-alane haridus peaks keskenduma selgelt määratletud allvaldkondadele, mis on mõttekad kohalikus kontekstis. Otsustasime Helsinki ülikoolis pöörata peatähelepanu interdistsiplinaarse digihumanitaaria valdkonnale. Käesolevas artiklis näitame, et digihumanitaaria-alaste uuringute edukaks läbiviimiseks on oluline interdistsiplinaarsus, ning väidame, et seda on digihumanitaarharidusse kõige parem liita humanitaarteaduslikel ühisuuringutel põhineva projektipõhise õppe kaudu.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Digital Humanities can be regarded as a complex landscape of partially overlapping and variously connected domains, including e.g. computational humanities, multimodal cultural heritage and digital cultural studies and cultural analytics (Svensson 2010). Yet, as a precondition for setting up an educational programme within an academic institution, one needs to be able to delineate the discipline being taught (Sinclair and Gouglas 2002, 168) in terms of a coherent academic identity, interrelations between courses, and skills that graduates will attain. Therefore any locally situated educational enterprise needs to focus on those areas of DH that can be reasonably tied to research conducted at the hosting institution. At the University of Helsinki, we have put particular effort into defining our educational profile in interdisciplinary computational humanities, taught both as a minor studies module (30 ECTS) and an MA track (120 ECTS).</p> <p>Because of the complexities of humanities data and the lack of standard protocols for dealing with it, it is very difficult for a humanities scholar to apply computational and statistical methods in a trustworthy manner without specialist help. At the same time, neither can computer scientists, statisticians or physicists answer humanities questions on their own, even if they understand the algorithms. Our solution to this problem is to argue that computational humanities research, and as a consequence also digital humanities education, should be fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavours, where statisticians, computer scientists and scholars in the humanities work together to develop, test and apply the methodology to solve humanities questions. Our version of computational humanities thus exists precisely and solely at the intersection of humanities and computer science rather than as separate from either of them. Consequently, people participating in this field should primarily anchor their academic profile to one of the parent disciplines instead of trying to find an identity purely in the middle. This is reflected in our educational approach.</p> <p>We provide students in the humanities with instruction on how to use ready-made tools, workflows or applied programming, granting them a general digital competency and agency, but our focus is on developing a broader literacy regarding data and computational methods. By learning to contextualize their skills within the field of computational humanities as a whole, the humanities students also learn to assess where their personal boundaries lie, and where an interdisciplinary collaboration is required instead. In this context, their computational literacy also helps them converse with the methodological experts coming to the field from computer science.</p> <p>In this interdisciplinary setting, we take a project-based approach to learning, tying teaching to actual research projects being conducted at the faculty. This approach both harnesses the varying competencies of our students and provides an excellent basis for learning interdisciplinary collaboration (Bell 2010). The culmination of our project courses is the Digital Humanities Hackathon, a multidisciplinary collaboration between the University of Helsinki digital humanities programme and the data science programmes at the Department of Computer Science and Aalto University. For researchers and students from computer and data sciences, the Hackathon is an opportunity to test their abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems; for people from the humanities and social sciences, it shows what is possible to achieve with such collaboration. For both, the Hackathon gives the experience of working with people from different backgrounds as part of an interdisciplinary team and simulates group work in such professional settings as the students may find themselves in after graduation, acculturating them to work outside academia (cf. Rockwell and Sinclair 2012).</p> <p>Our conception of computational humanities as intrinsically collaborative and interdisciplinary is based on the realisation that the traditional, single-author research culture of the humanities is a hindrance to successfully integrating computational approaches into humanities research. We feel that our formulation of the field has the power to contribute to the renewal of research culture and education within the humanities in general, adding value to traditional disciplinary curricula, as well as equipping students with skills relevant in the workplace.</p> Mikko Tolonen , Eetu Mäkelä, Jani Marjanen, Tuuli Tahko Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16909 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Kultuuripärand ja digitaalne lugemine: raamatu ja platvormi vahel / Cultural heritage and digital reading: between book and platform https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16910 <p>Kultuuripärandi säilimine kultuurimälus, selle osalus kultuuriidentiteedi väärtustamises ja kultuuri kestlikkuse tagamises sõltub tema meelespidamise viisidest. Tänapäeval on nendeks viisideks transmeedialisus ja digitaalne lugemine. Pärandi vahendajatena ilmuvad raamatute kõrvale digitaalsed platvormid. Nende eesmärk on ühtlasi kultiveerida uusi kirjaoskusi, mis ei põhine üksnes verbaalsel emakeelel, sest kultuuris osalemine eeldab üha enam ka pildiliste ja helilis-pildiliste märgisüsteemide valdamist nii tõlgendamises kui eneseväljenduses. Artikkel põhineb TÜ transmeedia uurimisrühma kogemusel (humanitaar)hariduslike platvormide loomisel, tuues selle pinnalt välja mõned digitaalses keskkonnas eriti selgelt esile tulevad kultuurisemiootilised printsiibid.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Traditionally, books have been considered as one of the most valuable elements of culture (Kroó 2019, Torop 2019). Mediating unique literary/artistic texts, they also appear as models of culture. The book as a model of culture represents readiness to understand culture as a whole and the same attitude is echoed within the digital book. The changes that digitalization has brought along do not concern merely shifts in formats or new types of texts. From the perspective of cultural heritage, new ways of communicating with literary texts and changes in reading practices matter most. Hereby we suggest that digital reading is reading, watching and listening a conceptualized whole on a platform, where primary and secondary texts (and/or their fragments), interpretations, intersemiotic translations and instructions for users exist together. This conceptual whole has a transmedial nature.</p> <p>Digital educational platforms may both undermine and facilitate accessibility of education as a common good. However, in the situation of the deluge of digital information, delimiting and systematizing information for educational needs is desperately needed and digital platforms offer a solution. Together with the Transmedia Research Group working at the department of semiotics at the University of Tartu, we have been developing the platform Education on Screen (Haridus Ekraanil) for secondary school students to help cultivate both cultural and digital literacies. In the present article we give an overview of the cultural semiotic principles that have been governing our work and that we suggest are especially relevant in the digital cultural space.</p> <p>The digital environment allows to overcome spatial limitations of the pre-digital media and highlight the heterogeneity and fluidity of literary experience. Providing almost unlimited storage capacities, it also brings into question the principles of selection and organization of the material, raising new theoretical problems for textual analysis, from the unit for textual analysis to the boundary between text and context etc (Bolin 2010, 74).</p> <p>We propose the distinction between crossmediality and transmediality as a methodological starting point. The crossmedia aspect hereby refers to the way the publishing of a literary text is increasingly accompanied by other (online) texts that together make up a relatively coordinated whole. In most cases these are compressed and fragmentary versions of the core text such as book trailers, book covers featuring a still frame from a cinematic adaptation, social media profiles etc. Thus, the crossmedia aspect consists in a pragmatic communicative strategy directed towards the receiver and the target text. The transmedia aspect concerns the spontaneous pulverisation of a text into a diversity of texts in different media. The spontaneity refers to the relative unpredictability of the artistic language of the authors of these new texts, which can appear over a very long period of time as we have seen in the continuing adaptations of canonical texts. This is in contrast with the coordinated manner in which most crossmedia texts enter culture over a much more limited time frame. Another distinction between the two is that the transmedia process is dominated by the source text as the individual parts are not coordinated mutually.</p> <p>Printed book represents the holistic dimension of culture by offering the possibility of complementing the core text with forewords, illustrations, comments etc. Digital book uses the same possibilities in a more dynamic manner, because its multimodality is much richer and audio, audiovisual as well as other modes can be integrated into the whole in an organic manner. While both printed book and digital book are still based on one core text, then digital platform allows for the synthesis of divergence and convergence and creation of a conceptual whole on the basis of a series of fragments and interpretations. Such transmedial whole reflects the value of the canonic literary text in culture and at the same time allows for the experience of analysis of its intersemiotic and multimodal interpretations.</p> Maarja Ojamaa , Peeter Torop Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16910 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Arhiivimaterjalide juurdepääsu ja konteksti küsimused Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi käsikirjakogu näitel / Issues of Access and Context of Archival Materials: Explorative Database of the Manuscript Collection of the Learned Estonian Society https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16911 <p>Artikkel uurib Eesti riiklikes arhiivides asuvate mitte-eestikeelsete käsikirjakogude juurdepääsu ja konteksti küsimusi. Juhtumiuuring keskendub baltisaksa estofiilide 1938. aastal asutatud Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi käsikirjakogudele Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumis, mis on jagatud Eesti Kultuuriloolise Arhiivi ja Eesti Rahvaluule Arhiivi vahel. Käsikirjakogude asukohtadest ülevaate saamine osutus keeruliseks aja- ja töömahukaks ülesandeks, mida komplitseeris veelgi fakt, et uurija ei valda eesti keelt. Täiendavaks takistuseks osutus seegi, et kättesaadavaid digihoidlaid oli võimalik kasutada ainult eesti keeles. Ühe võimaliku lahendusena neile probleemidele pakuti välja avastusliku relatsioonandmebaasi loomine, mis toob kokku mõlemas arhiivis hoitavad materjalid. Käesolevas artiklis kirjeldatakse selle andmebaasi teostamist: erisuguste metaandmete ühtlustamist ja andmebaasi täiendamist isikuregistriga, ning arutletakse, kuidas seda andmebaasi mugava kasutajaliidese abil edasi arendada.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Access to archival sources is often determined by the cultural-historical context of the archive where it is preserved. The Estonian state funded archives’ provenance is largely shaped by the Estonian Baltic-German colonial history, the earlier belonging of the Estonian territory to the Swedish Empire (1583–1721) and its later incorporation into the Russian Empire (1721–1917); as a result, archives contain very multi-layered and multi-language archival materials. This article is dedicated to the issues of access and context of German archival materials from the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in Estonian archives. It is based on the manuscript collection of the Learned Estonian Society (LES), located at two different archives of the Estonian Literary Museum: The Estonian Folklore Archives and the Estonian Cultural History Archives. The access to this collection is obstructed for non-Estonian speakers by a complex Estonian archival system.</p> <p>However, without the public being able to interact with materials and re-evaluate and re-figure their contents (Hamilton, Harris, and Reid 2002, 7), the relevance of materials to be preserved in an archive diminishes. The questions of what, how, and when materials can be made accessible, especially through digitisation processes, are convoluted and carry a lot of weight. Every decision made in this regard by the custodians can reflect and perpetuate power dynamics in archives, favouring certain groups of materials and dismissing others. The article discusses how an archive’s special role as a memory institution should influence these decisions about accessibility. Therefore, the relations between memory, history and institutions are reflected in the light of Aleida Assmann’s and Juri Lotman’s theories of memory.&nbsp;</p> <p>The article also proposes the building of a new explorative database as one possible solution helping to overcome some of these issues connected to access and context. It thus presents the Master’s Project by Larissa Leiminger (2020a) and the resulting website “Sammlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft” (accessible via https://galerii.kirmus.ee/GEG/) (2020b), which explored and implemented this solution. The database is constructed on the basis of the Omeka Classic software and displays metadata according to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). It currently contains 931 objects, (717 manuscript items and 214 individuals), which can be explored via two different search options as well as by a tag word system and the implicit relations between items and creators. At the same time, it provides some additional information on the context of the collections and the persons connected with the shaping of these collections. A short history of the LES, its collections and secondary literature can be found on the pages “Die Gesellschaft” and “Die Sammlungen”. To follow the principles of transparency and to reflect the archival practices involved, the website also holds information about the scope, intention, and shortcomings of this Project on the “Das Projekt” page. The “F&amp;A” page further clarifies some of the website’s functions and provides some details on how the archival materials can be accessed either digitally or in person. As a newly established resource, the website and the incorporated database could pave the way to a multitude of different research questions.</p> Larissa Leiminger , Aija Sakova Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16911 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Eluraamatute arvutianalüüs – prooviuurimus / Computational analysis of Life Books – a probing study https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16912 <p>Niipea, kui andmed muutuvad suurandmeteks, võib muutuda probleemiks lähilugemise abil tehtav analüüs: sellest võib saada lõputu protsess, mida uurija aju ei suuda enam hoomata. Osaliselt võib probleemi lahendada digihumanitaaria meetoditega: suurte, näiteks etnoloogia-alaste tekstihulkade kvantitatiivseks analüüsiks on võimalik kasutada mitmesuguseid töövahendeid. Näiteks programmi AntConc abil saab uurida nii sõnade sagedust kui jaotust tekstis. LIWC2015 abi on võimalik kasutada elulugude sentimendianalüüsis, programmi Stylo tekstide stilomeetrilises analüüsis. Selliste programmide kasulikkust katsetatakse siin suhteliselt väikese nn eluraamatute korpuse juures, et selgitada välja, kui väärtuslik võiks see tööriist olla peagi korpusesse lisanduva palju suurema tekstihulga puhul.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As soon as “data” turn into “big data”, analysis by “close reading” can become a problem: it can become an endless process that eventually the brain of the researcher can no longer get a grip on. Methods of computational humanities can partially solve the problem: various tools can be used to make quantitative analyses of large amounts of text, for example in the field of ethnology or folklore. Various tools may be considered for such text analysis. For example, the program AntConc can be used to study word frequencies, as well as the distribution of concepts across the text. LIWC2015 can be used for sentiment analysis of life stories and show differences between genders (or generations) in telling life stories. Stylo may be used for the stylometric analysis of texts. The usefulness of such programs is tested here on a still relatively small corpus of so-called Life Books. The Life Books (“Levensboek”) is a project of Humanitas Foundation in Netherlands to publish limited edition booklets of life stories compiled from interviews with older people, recorded and edited by volunteers. This study is based on 19 digital Life Books – in fact still small enough for close reading and qualitative analysis. However, the intention here is to use the corpus as a pilot to see how valuable the tools can be for a much larger amount of texts that will be added in the near future. In this pilot I want to see to what extent the Life Books can be used for structural analysis, gender differences in narrative style and subject choice, sentiment analysis, recurring themes, distribution of motifs, and perhaps most importantly: thematic gaps. That is to say: which (important) issues are not raised by the storytellers?</p> <p>The experiment shows that it is possible to do research into narrative structures, although this could be much more refined in terms of events. Stylometric analysis with Stylo of male and female repertoires is rather tricky, because interviewers/editors can (very much) interfere as a filter here. Stylo looks for patterns in the use of function words to determine different styles, but Life Books are just not quoting narrators literally all the time, so in quite some cases linguistical features, like the use of function words, may not originate from the storytellers but from the editors.</p> <p>On the other hand, sentiment analysis in combination with gender, for example, is possible using LIWC2015: this tool can give a fair respresentation of emotions, relationships and related motifs in life stories. Furthermore, AntConc proves to be a useful tool to investigate the occurrence and distribution of themes and topics. Research into the lack of certain themes and motifs remains an interesting option as well.</p> Theo Meder Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16912 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Soolisuse esitamine Eesti grafitis ja tänavakunstis / Representing of gender in Estonian graffiti and street art https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16913 <p>Artiklis on tähelepanu all sooline aspekt grafitis ja tänavakunstis kui konteksti- ja kommunikatsioonikeskses kultuuriilmingus. Põhiküsimused on, kuidas soolisus ja sooline kommunikatsioon grafitis avaldub ning milline on grafiti soolisustatud esteetika. Analüüs osutab soolistele klišeedele grafitis ja näitab stereotüüpseid arusaamu laiemas sotsiokultuurilises tähenduses. Teisalt toob uurimus esile ka grafiti ja tänavakunsti rolli sooliste stereotüüpide vaidlustajana ja uudsete tähenduste esiletoojana. Uurimus põimib grafiti ja tänavakunsti käsitlused soouurimusliku lähenemisviisiga ning kasutab uurimismeetodina grafiti ja tänavakunsti kui efemeerse kultuuriilmingu kontekstualiseerimist vaataja perspektiivist. Artikli allikmaterjali moodustavad põhiliselt aastail 2010–2020 jäädvustatud grafitid, mis on koondatud internetiandmebaasi „Grafiti andmebaas“.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Graffiti and street art belong inseparably to the present-day urban space and their various sociocultural meanings are related to different subcultural layers.</p> <p>The involvement of graffiti and street art in urban space refers to the fact that these are informal ways of depiction which have sometimes been taken to be vandalism. On the other hand, graffiti are a democratic, open and dialogical way of representation, as everyone can make changes in them and add their own commentaries. Graffiti and street art reveal power relations in society, that is why they have also been seen as the undermining of public authority. Such opinion is related to the specific character of graffiti and street art as non-institutional art.</p> <p>Western researchers have associated graffiti and street art with the male subculture, with an area where male identities are created. Although women have in recent years become more visible among street artists and they have also introduced the so-called feminine subjects, this has not changed the general image of graffiti as the male subculture. Differing from Western countries, graffiti and street art have been relatively less studied in Estonia and no attention have been paid at all to the gender aspect of graffiti and street art.</p> <p>The article focusses on the study of gender relevance in Estonian graffiti and street art. The key questions here are how gender (or femininity and masculinity) and gender communication are represented in graffiti and how the aspects of gender aesthetics are revealed.</p> <p>As its sources, the article uses the examples of graffiti, collected in Estonia in 2010-2020 and recorded in the internet database “Grafiti andmebaas” (www.folklore.ee/Graffiti). The database contains also different of graffiti-related metadata, such as the context, the time of its making, the author (when known), etc., including, all in all, about 700 different records of graffiti.</p> <p>The database does not have much information about the authors; therefore, we could not concentrate on the analysis of the differences in the graffiti and street art created by men and women. Our research method was to interpret graffiti and street art from the position of the viewer. In a way, this approach can be associated with visual autoethnography, analysing visual artefacts and the archive containing photos of these artefacts (see Hamdy 2015, 69). The authors’ practical observations and intuitive interpretations of graffiti also play a role in this approach.</p> <p>We analyse graffiti as a mix of visual and textual representation where both elements carry some important meaning; however, very often, a piece of graffiti is formed either by an image or a text only.</p> <p>Analysing the graffiti and street art database, we discovered that gender is in some way or other expressed in one fourth of the works of graffiti and street art included in it. We analysed how gender is represented in texts and images, how femininity and masculinity are represented, whether the works express masculine or feminine points of view, and how all this is done by the artists.&nbsp;</p> <p>On the basis of works collected in the database we can conclude that a large part of graffiti and street art often represents the masculine point of view (most of the quotations and visual images are related to well-known men, but very few of them refer to well-known women). This could possibly indicate that the majority of authors are men and that men continue to be more visible both in society and in culture which, in its turn, is again reflected in graffiti. The greater visibility of men in society and culture is related to the greater authority of men and masculinity. On the other hand, femininity is often represented in stereotypes, e.g., by sexualising the female body. Among other aspects, the graffiti recorded in the database reflects the gender stereotypes which are widely spread and accepted in society, such as the notion of clean, neat and sober women, while men are seen as influential public figures (e.g., politicians), and masculinity is related to stereotypical behaviour, such as the consumption of alcohol. To counterbalance the masculine stereotypes, there are some exceptional hints on the so-called soft masculinity, and a few images where men and women are represented as equal partners.</p> <p>However, we can say that women are also visible as the authors of graffiti, as it can be seen in the emergence of new perspectives as well as in the diversification of the visual way of representation in graffiti and street art. Graffiti and street art created by women, such as works made by MinajaLydia, highlight the positive experience of being a woman, which can be seen as an attempt of increasing the visibility and authority of women in public space.</p> <p>Regarding the gender aspect, a certain amount of graffiti and street art can be considered neutral, but the possible gender interpretations may depend on the viewer in the role of the active creator of meaning.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> Eve Annuk, Piret Voolaid Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16913 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Regilaulude teema-analüüs: võimalusi ja väljakutseid / Topic analysis of Estonian runosongs: Prospects and challenges https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16914 <p>Artikkel uurib regilaulu teema-analüüsi võimalusi teemade modelleerimise meetodi abil. Meetodi kasutamisel on probleemiks regilaulu keele piirkondlik varieeruvus. Laulutekstide esmane analüüs näitas, et sisukamaid tulemusi annab teema-analüüs ühtlasema keelega kogumite puhul. Lähemaks vaatluseks valitud Hiiumaa, Saaremaa ja Muhu laulude teema-analüüsil tuvastati 20 teemat, mis annavad kiire ülevaate vaadeldavate laulude temaatilisest struktuurist. Uurimus näitas, et tuvastatud teemad jaotuvad vaadeldud piirkonnas võrdlemisi ühtlaselt. Kuid arvutuslikud teemarühmad ei kattu üheselt regilaulu varasema liigitusega, arvestamata laulude žanrilisi erinevusi ning tuues esiplaanile vaadeldavas laulukogumis sagedamini esinevad laulutüübid.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The article explores possibilities of computational topic analysis of Estonian runosong texts using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modelling. Runosong is an oral poetic tradition known among most of Finnic peoples. Estonian runosong texts, the material of the current research, have been collected mainly since 1880s and gathered into the Estonian Folklore Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum, where the runosong database with more than 100 000 texts has been compiled (Oras et al 2003–2020). Language of runosongs varies considerably across dialects and, in addition to that, it uses a specific archaic idiom different from the spoken language which complicates the computational analysis of the content aspects of the texts.</p> <p>Topic modelling is a method that enables to discover abstract topics detected statistically on the basis of the frequency of the co-occurrence of the words in the texts. In case of a runosong corpus, the method could be used to automatically detect the thematic structure of a large amount of runosong texts, to compare the thematic distribution of regional traditions of the runosong, and to analyse how the thematic distribution obtained with the help of computational methods relates to the classification of the texts resulting from folkloristic analysis. The idea of the current article is to explore whether topic modelling can give meaningful results if applied to unlemmatized and highly variative runosong texts.</p> <p>For LDA topic modelling I used the application MALLET (McCallum 2002). The initial trials with the whole corpus of runosong texts made it clear that the language of the songs is too variative to reach the level of content. It also became obvious that it is necessary to remove stopwords and refrain words. The topics, obtained from the runosongs from all over Estonia, represented dialectal variants of the language rather than thematic clusters and it was necessary to restrict the material. I used stylometric analysis (using R package stylo, Eder et al 2013) to divide the area into linguistically more homogenous subregions, and chose the area of Western islands of Estonia with 16 parishes and 3672 song texts for further explorations.</p> <p>With this material I decided to generate 20 topics. Within this smaller area the topics did not cluster regional language variants any more: (1) the linguistic variants of the main concepts of a topic were brought together under the keywords of the same topic; (2) in most cases, the detected topics were distributed among all the parishes included in the selection.</p> <p>Looking at the 20 keywords, the topics indeed seemed to reflect certain thematic subgroups of the songs. In several cases the most prominent song type of a topic was reflected in keywords, in other cases the keywords referred to larger groups of songs. Five of the 20 topics focused on weddings, more precisely, on different episodes of the wedding ritual: adornation and dressing, arriving and greeting, finding the bride and taking her to her new home, sharing the presents prepared by the bride, and recommendations to the bride and the groom. In all these topics the verbs refer either to the present or the future (rather than to the past which is common in narrative songs). A topic of swinging songs includes also the songs about dancing and feasts. Five topics focus on different narrative plots about the troubles of young people, about wooing and marriage. Lyric songs about the life of orphans and about singing form a separate topic each, and there is a separate male topic covering the songs of various genres related to horses, riding and the woods. The largest topic includes the songs on working at home and outside, but also the songs about premarital sex. There are two topics with the focus on well-known children’s songs and lullabies. Two topics relate to German landlords, their power and activities, and one to recruiting and the war.</p> <p>As a conclusion of this exploration: (1) for topic modelling it is necessary to use the texts in homogenous language variants; otherwise, the linguistic differences override the topics at some point; (2) it is possible to use unlemmatized texts for topic modelling, but in this case the grammatical features (tense, modality) interfere with topic analysis; (3) the proportions of variable and stable (recurrent) elements (song types, motifs) in the material have a clear impact on topic formation: the more frequently an element occurs in the material, and the more stable is its wording, the bigger its probability to form the centre of a topic, whereas distinct but rare themes remain unnoticed and will be shared between the topics of more prominent subjects; (4) common sets of words assembled together as the topic may, in addition to the common thematic focus, refer to a common framework, for example environments, and behavioural or communicative patterns (for example, begging for something). Compared to the folkloristic classification of folk songs, the automatic distribution of songs (1) highlights the subjects occurring more frequently in the body of songs (for example, a topic highlights swinging songs instead of calendar songs of the folkloristic classification); (2) partly overrides the genre differences (for example song games can be found under different topics, whereas forming a distinct group in folkloristic classifications).</p> Mari Sarv Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16914 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200 Tegelasvõrgustikud kahes raamatus Reinuvader Rebasest / Character networks in two books about Reynard the Fox https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16915 <p>Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwaldi „Reinuvader Rebane“ (1850) oli loomaeeposežanri esimeseks tutvustuseks eesti keeles. Ernst Peterson-Särgava kogumik „Ennemuistsed jutud Reinuvader Rebasest“ (1911) on sarnaste rebasejuttude valimik lastele. Mõlemas teoses on ühisosa eesti folkloorsete loomamuinasjuttudega. Võrgustikuanalüüsi kasutades analüüsitakse kahe raamatu tegelaskonda. Mõlemas teoses tegelastena esitatud loomade kogum ja nendevaheliste suhete võrgustik katab enamiku eesti loomamuinasjuttude põhitegelastest. Mõlemas teoses on täheldatav vaenuliku võrgustiku domineerimine sõbraliku võrgustiku üle. Tsensuurist ja enesetsensuurist tulenevad muutused raamatutes ei ole tegelasvõrgustikesse olulisi muutusi toonud.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s Reynard the Fox, a 12-chapter work of fiction loosely based on Johann Wolfgang&nbsp; von Goethe’s epic poem Reineke Fuchs and Aleksander Friedrich Franz Hoffmann’s popular book Geschichte von Reineke dem Fuchs, first introduced the genre of the animal epic into the Estonian language. Ernst Peterson-Särgava’s collection of stories for children Old Tales about Reynard the Fox (1911) had a somewhat similar structure; most of its tales are connected with the fox and have been brought together by the author to form a 20-chapter book of tales for children. The former book on the fox more strongly resembles a animal epic, the latter rather appears to be a less rigorously connected collection of animal tales. Both works, however, have elements in common with the animal tales of Estonian folklore. Both introduce the tales of the animal epic with a tricksterly protagonist to the Estonian readership, yet the focus of the works is slightly different. Similarly to the animal epic, Kreutzwald’s book gives a survey of Reynard the Fox’s misdeeds as he is summoned to the court presided by the Lion, but after giving a skilful talk in his own defence the fox is judged to be not guilty and is promoted to become the ruler of the whole state in the end. Peterson-Särgava starts the description of the events from a little girl named Pille who lives at a farm close to the forest; thereafter different confrontations between the woodland creatures and their shenanigans concerning the old man and woman are described, while the book ends&nbsp; with the fox’s death.</p> <p>Both works have had to undergo censorship in their various editions. Several paragraphs were cut from the 1850 edition of Kreutzwald’s Reineke the Fox at the behest of the censor, and even more were omitted from the second edition. The cut text was mostly restored in the third edition (1869). In the first Soviet-time edition of Peterson-Särgava’s text, that appeared in 1947, the author made not only stylistic changes but also those prompted by self-censorship. The character networks of the books, however, have remained almost uninfluenced by censorship and the authors’ self-censorship; the only character omitted was God to whom the old man started to climb in Peterson-Särgava’s work.</p> <p>Network analysis is used to study the characters of the two books. The communication of the characters is annotated as concerns communication at least one character is conscious of within the limits of an episode, as is the (positive or negative) modality of the communication.&nbsp; Visual representation of the interaction of character networks is an efficient way of obtaining an overview both of a work’s characters as well as the relationships between them. Narratives such as literary stories about animals and animal tales serve as a good basis for analysing character pairs as in animal tales characters usually appear in twos with much dialogue between them. The network has been visualised using Gephi software. The number of animals represented as characters in Kreutzwald’s Reynard the Fox and Peterson-Särgava’s Old Tales about Reynard the Fox, as well as the network of the relationships between the animals covers most of the main characters of Estonian animal tales. The character lists of both books mostly contain the animals&nbsp; who appear in the list of the top dozen most popular animals in the animal tales of Estonian folklore.</p> <p>Reynard the Fox, the protagonist of both books, appears as the central character judging by the number of links connected to him. In Kreutzwald’s book also the lion, as well as the more important side characters the bear, the cat and the wolf appear in important positions in the network of characters connected&nbsp; with the fox; in Peterson-Särgava’s book the positions are held by the wolf, the bear, the old man and his daughter Little Pille. The general outlook of the network is also influenced by the fact that several characters only appear once or twice in the book and have no independent roles from the perspective of the plot; Kreutzwald in particular has used (based on Goethe)&nbsp; a lengthy list of animals who do not participate in other activities to make it obvious to the reader that there were indeed many animals who suffered from the fox’s actions. Both books mention a character other than the fox first and a part of the plot centres around them – in Kreutzwald it is the Lion and in Peterson-Särgava it is Little Pille who seemingly emerges as the protagonist in the opening chapter.</p> <p>An analysis of the modality of the characters’ relations in both works reveals the domination of the unfriendly network over the friendly network. In Kreutzwald’s book about the fox positive and negative associations appear to an almost equal measure, while in Peterson-Särgava’s work most of the links between characters are negative.</p> <p>Although the communication acts appearing in the two fox-centred books discussed rather tend to be hostile, the books still retain a certain charm and delightfulness that has kept them among the people’s reading material throughout the years. It is tricksterly cleverness, after all, that on occasion turns out to be the best means to cope with the obvious ills in life.</p> Risto Järv Copyright (c) https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/methis/article/view/16915 Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0200
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