#myDHis messy, or an Ode to Untidy Bricolage

#myDHis messy, or an Ode to Untidy Bricolage
DHSI 2017 Institute Panel, Perspectives on DH

David Joseph Wrisley 
New York University Abu Dhabi 
@DJWrisley

messy < mess (n):  Old French mes “portion of food, course at dinner”
early 15c “company of persons eating together”
1530s  “communal eating place” (military)
1738 sense of “mixed food,” especially for animals
1828 “jumble, mixed mass”
1834 “state of confusion”
1851 “condition of untidiness”
1903 “excrement of animals”

Example 1  Between languages: assessing translation variance

The Transmission of an Arabic wisdom text, the Mukhtar al-Hikam in medieval Europe (From Arabic to English, via Spanish, Latin and French) – alignment using LF Aligner

messy issue: few literary problems correspond to available data

Example 2  Multilingual realities: documenting and mapping multi-script polyglossia on the street (llbeirut.org)

messy issue: reality is messy, social creation of data adds new untidy levels

Example 3  Orthographic variance

messy issue:  teaching a computer to recognize a pattern with a language where irregularity is the norm

sample medieval French word (“alms” in English): almosne, aumosne, aumone, haumone, asmone, esmone, aumorne

sample medieval French place (Almeria, Spain):

Example 4   Aligning orally-influenced texts inside the “same language”: (with @vizcovery)

messy issue: pre-modern transmission of texts is messy, sometimes like re-mixing, add orthographic instability

Example 5  Expanding the language of DH to Arabic (with @najlajarkas1).  See post.

messy issue: computational linguistics with Arabic text is not done in Arabic by most of the world; finding a language for a nascent community to use