Tagging Time in Prolog: The Temporal Effect Project.

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of 'time' with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design c...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Literary & Linguistic Computing Vol. 20; pp. 107 - 125
Autor principal: Meister, Jan Christoph
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Dec2005 Supplement
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of 'time' with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand "how time works": more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can re-construct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the 'time stamp' of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted.