Thank you, Catherine.
Well, good morning, everybody.
We're really honored to be here today
in being part of these conversations
on how digital technologies intersect with humanities.
And we're really inspired by the potential
that digital humanities has for the field
foreign language studies.
And as educators, we are primarily interested
in the pedagogical applications of these new digital tools.
We are a team of three researchers,
as teachers at Providence College,
scholars in linguistic and literary studies,
and a web designer, Brad Mearing,
who's not here today, but who is responsible
for building this platform
that we are going to share with you today.
The project called GALGO,
which is the Golden Age Literature Glossary Online,
is an original tool that we conceived
as a way to help students in our foreign language classrooms
engage more directly and effectively
with texts from a different period,
specifically the Spanish Golden Age
in the 16th and 17th centuries in Spain.
And it's a student's apprehension
about reading classic works in a foreign language.
The glossary consists of select keywords
from the canon of Spanish Golden Age literature.
The works have been digitized and are available
in the glossary in complete electronic versions.
The theoretical approach that organized the glossary
derives from Raymond Williams' keyword theory.
And according to Williams' keywords
are social and political terms
that are key to understanding a society's values
because they reflect a given community's
shared interests and ideologies.
In essence, the words we glossed
reflect important linguistic and cultural concepts
of the early modern period.
And we'll be looking at words like honor
and force and magnanimity.
Our analytical method consists first in defining the keyword.
We provide descriptive definitions for the keyword
and users can map definitions across the text and texts.
The keywords and definitions are unique nodes in the database.
Each definition is abstracted,
so a single definition can be applied to multiple contexts.
The second step tracing the keyword
allows users to visualize those keywords
that are in close proximity with one another.
This function is useful to trace the semantic relationships
between multiple keywords.
Definitions are context-based,
so in every specific instance,
the definitions exhibited by keywords
in the particular context will be revealed.
And last, clustering the keyword
allows users to discover various keywords
that have been grouped in thematic categories
that define the values of the time,
such as class, citizenship, ethnicity, identity, gender,
or the attachment of metadata to keywords and definitions
enables word searches by relationships
between the contextual uses of keywords and thematic categories.
We're not basing our project on word frequency analysis
or not as a digital concordance.
Rather, our digital glossary is constructed around the selection
and in-depth analysis of keywords
from the literary and social-linguistic points of view.
Really, our project is focused on
the pedagogical objectives that we have for the students
based on over 20 years of teaching foreign language,
and particularly foreign language literature courses
where the students have a very difficult time
engaging text from a different period
and certainly in a different form of the language that they're learning.
And we come from a small liberal arts college,
and so this is our primary interest.
And I think that our experience at Providence College
is very similar to many small colleges
and primarily teaching universities across the country.
Our experience as teachers, in our experience,
the digital classroom applications
need to be very, very well delineated and focused.
We are very aware that undergraduate students and the general public,
and we think this would be a useful tool for the general public as well,
who are interested in these classic texts,
and these texts are major, major texts.
Every Spanish major, anyone interested in Spanish literature,
would want to read these texts.
We're aware that they're not scholars,
and we want them to interact with our glossary
in the most dynamic and productive way
without overwhelming them with too many exploratory options
that I've seen in a number of other tools.
The acronym GALGO expresses, we think,
this desire to provide readers with a very fast and immediate access
to information that is really essential
in their understanding of these Golden Age texts
and to their understanding of the Golden Age period in general.
GALGO stands for Golden Age Literature Glossary Online,
and in Spanish, you maybe already know, means Greyhound Dog,
so we have this connotation of fast.
I want to introduce, unveil the glossary as it exists right now,
but I want to give one disclaimer.
This is very much a work in progress,
and we are scholars of the humanities,
and we're working very closely with a web designer,
but we don't have, unfortunately, as MIT does, a large digital lab,
so this is a step-by-step process.
What we're showing you today represents a very first draft
of the platform that we're creating.
What we're most excited about and what we've developed over several years
is through extensive research,
we're most excited about sharing with you the research that we've done
and the pedagogical potential behind this digital textual analysis tool
that in the next stage of web development will be significantly enhanced.
So this is the homepage, and it just explains,
it gives a description and the purpose of the glossary
and the words and the works that are included.
Here you see we only have four words and two works.
We have 50 words that we're working on
and 20 works that will be included in the corpora.
We arrived at all of our definitions after careful study
of early modern period Spanish and English dictionaries.
These sources will all be hyperlinked with each definition
so students can consult directly these original materials
from which we've derived the definitions.
This is a page from the Ela Bense Rache,
which is a small little novella of the period.
Here you see that for each word, hintil in this case,
you see the multiple definitions.
And what we're trying to focus on and trying to point out to the students
is that all of these words are polysemic, have multiple definitions.
And so the links to the, when you click on the word,
you get the specific definitions.
So these are all individual notes, not the word.
But you also have this text box with all of the definitions
so you can compare the different definitions,
the ones in context as well as the fuller number of definitions, meanings.
What's so important and what we're doing is,
I think, I wouldn't say we're providing a new way of reading a text,
but we're definitely combining close and distant reading strategies in our tool.
And I think this is visually pointed out.
And here you see that you can only arrive at the definition of hintilesa in its context
with another keyword, esfuerzo,
which would be clustered together in one of these thematic categories.
Here's hintil again with a different definition of cultivated manner and appearance.
And you see that the different grammatical categories are given as well.
This is onra honor, which was extremely, extremely complex semantically in the period.
Some of you know that.
And so what we do with honor is we give, and this is onroso, an adjectival form of it.
We give, it's very, the specific factor related to honor.
There were many factors related to who was revered in the period.
And it would be in this case, on this page, because it's in close proximity to fuertas,
it would be put in a category, in the semantic category of war.
So you would look at the semantic category of war, and you would get, in this case,
but across all of the texts, the combination fuertas.
And fuertas also has a number of meanings.
In this case, it's troops, and onroso means a marshal valor in this context.
Finally, as I hope you can see, the glossary has the potential to engage students
in the analysis of classic literary texts in a more meaningful way,
by allowing them to test their hypotheses about any kind of preconceptions
they might be bringing to the text, and giving them immediate feedback,
accurate feedback about the values of the period.
The intra and intertextual nature of this tool reveals, first,
the idiosyncratic complexity of these concepts in the period, in the Golden Age,
and encourages them to reflect on the evolution of these concepts over time,
from the early modern period to the present.
We envision that this glossary, not only envision, I've used this in three of my courses,
has generated very innovative essays and discussion topics that arise freely
from the student interaction with this glossary.
And we think it is really enhancing student-centered learning.
Thank you.