As neural language models begin to change aspects of everyday life, they understandably attract criticism. This position paper was commissioned for a roundtable at Princeton University, dedicated to one of the most influential critiques: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru,…[Read more]

As neural language models begin to change aspects of everyday life, they understandably attract criticism. This position paper was commissioned for a roundtable at Princeton University, dedicated to one of the most influential critiques: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru,…[Read more]

Using the evidence of the aural as intrinsic to mester de clerecía’s mode of diffusion and reception as point of departure, this chapter examines sound as a wider and complex system of references, actualizations, and allusions that articulate and structure the mode in its composition, as part of its tools to effect meaning. Music and song play ob…[Read more]

The Danza general de la muerte (Dance of Death) (late 14th-century) is a rhymed dialogue in Castilian in which death personified greets one victim after another. It is the earliest of 3 extant Castilian versions of the Dance of Death, which was popular across Europe in the Middle Ages. The Dance of Death gives expression to the premodern view that…[Read more]

The Danza general de la muerte (Dance of Death) (late 14th-century) is a rhymed dialogue in Castilian in which death personified greets one victim after another. It is the earliest of 3 extant Castilian versions of the Dance of Death, which was popular across Europe in the Middle Ages. The Dance of Death gives expression to the premodern view t…[Read more]

From its linguistic origins as a Biblical land of great wealth across the sea, to its more recent nostalgic imaginary as a lost Golden Age of Mediterranean Jewish culture, Sefarad has been as much an idea as a physical place, a lens through which Iberian Jews have interpreted their world, first in al-Andalus, then in Christian Iberia, and later in…[Read more]

English Abstract: In the context of the Spanish reform of the university degree system begun in 2005 under the PSOE Ministry of Education, this paper denounces the manipulation of representative mechanisms on the part of the CCU (Council of University Coordination), impeding a consultation with the Universities by way of transforming the Rectors…[Read more]

The film The Small Back Room was written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and released in 1949. It is the wartime tale of an injured and embittered back-room scientist, who is recruited to help combat a new kind of explosive device. Based on Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, the film significantly alters the story’s climactic seq…[Read more]

A comment on the division of work in the Third Cycle of higher education in the Spanish university. The Catedrático gets all the PhD candidates who are able to really write a dissertation on their own, that´s why they “work” more and their job is easier. (Paper written 2011)

My notes (taken c. 1990) on Geoffrey Leech’s ‘Principles of Pragmatics’ (London: Longman, 1983). Pagination on the left; my parenthetical comments in italics.

The structure of fifth-century Athenian society remains largely unknown, as is the distribution of its citizens into different socio-political categories. Ancient literary sources mostly describe a society divided into élite and poor. However, the model of a society alternately dominated by
the élite and the ‘lower-class’ is to be recon…[Read more]

The third volume of the DH Benelux Journal. This volume includes six full-length, peer-reviewed articles that are based on accepted contributions to the 2020 virtual DH Benelux conference. Contents: 1. Editor’s Preface (Wout Dillen, Marijn Koolen, Marieke van Erp); 2. Introduction: Digital Humanities Online (Antske Fokkens, Christian Gosvig…[Read more]

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) wrote and published in an era in which a highly developed erotic code was adopted by dozens and dozens of writers in Italy, and presumably understood by tens of thousands of readers in Europe. A most helpful text for decoding the erotic lexicon was written by Jean Toscan: Le carnaval du langage: le lexique érotique des…[Read more]

In 1525, Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua published a condemnation of Dante’s Comedy that has often passed for linguistic and cultural criticism, yet might be better understood as satire.

The tourist spaces determine a new social reality and the future destiny of the localities in Mexico. The socioeconomic relationship that they establish personifies a new social sense, a grammar of the domain that influences the daily behavior of the people. New types of practice and social representation are produced and reproduced in relation to…[Read more]

La Paz, Baja California Sur lives a new urban phase through an spacial intervention, sites are integrated by a historical and cultural dinamic, looking for to generate a tourist offer, situation that puts the city within the speech of the World Tourism Organization. Thus, La Paz becomes in a consumer product that forms part of the global tourism…[Read more]

This research focuses on the concept of identity, a concept that is useful to account for the process of social change. Identity describes the perception of the social actor at the individual and collective level, how his social behavior is, where he locates a perspective of the lived and inhabited space, what is his subjective experience in the…[Read more]