The tragic and brutal death of Deborah Emmanuel on May 12, 2022, at the hands of Muslim students on her college campus in Sokoto, Nigeria, has brought attention to the ongoing religious tensions in the country. This incident sparked outrage and concern among the country's Christian population, who fear that the government's inaction in bringing the perpetrators to justice may indicate an 'Islamization agenda'. This study examines eight YouTube channels with the most comments related to the incident in question. The corpus was created using the Google Sheets Apps Script, which enabled the use of a code that directly accessed the Youtube Data API v2 and authorized the retrieval of comments.

To better understand the perspectives and sentiments surrounding religious conflicts in Nigeria, a sentiment analysis of the comments made on YouTube will be conducted, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The five main words in the data - God, Religion, People, Islam, and Nigeria - have been chosen as they are central to the topic of religious conflicts and will be used to manually read and code the comments. This choice is justified by the fact that the comments in the corpus constructed and reproduced understandings of God, religion, people, Islam, and Nigeria, and how they might be related to power relations. The analysis will be informed by the social identity theory, which shows how individuals define themselves and others based on group membership and how these identities shape their perceptions and interactions, and the speech act theory, which demonstrates how language, even when used in the virtual world, can trigger physical action. These theories will help to examine how the comments in the corpus constructed and reproduced understandings of they most frequent and significant words in the corpus, and how they might be related to power relations in this context. This study aims to better understand the religious conflicts in Nigeria and the sentiments surrounding its major agents.

This paper sets out to analyse the discourse on the crisis in the German Democratic Republic in the decade between 1976 and 1986 through a computer-assisted approach. Using the DIMEAN methodology developed by Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011), the paper aims explicitly to analyse both the articulation of the political discourse on the crisis in the last phase of the East German state’s life and the diachronic evolution of its constitutive strategies. To achieve this, three constitutive levels (intertextual, actoral, and transtextual) have been studied quantitatively and qualitatively to clarify the nature of the discourse. The dataset is constituted by the speeches of the most prominent political leaders in the discursive community, such as the secretary general as well as the other members of the political office. The speeches were contained in the protocol of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany congress published by the Dietz Verlag, at the time one of the main publishing houses of the party, if not the most influential. A total of five volumes, relative to the ninth (two protocol), tenth (two protocol), and eleventh party congress, have been digitalised using optical character recognition software. In order to tokenize the data, I used AntConc to convert them into machine-readable TEXT files. The results ultimately showed how the discourse on the crisis is multifaceted being characterised by an exceptional structural complexity. Concretely, the crisis is such only insofar as it is relegated to the external capitalist context and never internal. These two fundamental dimensions are differentiated according to the greater or lesser degree of explicitness. The results of this research on the political language in an authoritarian environment support the idea that discursive features can be inferred although rhetorically obscured or even absent, suggesting that further research in this direction should be undertaken.

Reference List

Spitzmüller, Jürgen, and Ingo Warnke. Diskurslinguistik: eine Einführung in Theorien und Methoden der transtextuellen Sprachanalyse. De Gruyter Studium. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter, 2011.

Intellectual property is key to our work as humanists. After all, our objects of study are cultural productions, whether works of literature and philosophy, works of art, historical records, or music. The ability to analyze and interpret the intellectual property of authors, artists, and other creators of cultural artifacts, some of which may be under copyright, is essential to our work, as is the creation of our own intellectual property in the form of journal articles, books, and digital projects. Indeed, the importance of intellectual property and copyright to our work is compounded when that work—our objects of study and our scholarship—lives in an online, digital environment, in which reproducing works of intellectual property, whose copyright status is often unclear, is only a click away.

In this presentation, I will argue that an understanding of copyright is essential to our work as digital humanists, as users and creators of intellectual property. What do we need to know when reproducing digital images from a digital archive? Or when we copy text from Project Gutenberg for textual analysis? How can we protect our own work from being modified and reproduced against our wishes?

Thinking about the Canadian copyright context, and with the disclaimer that I am not a legal expert, I will explore some common copyright issues that digital humanists are likely to face based on my own experiences using digital resources and creating digital projects. To do this, I will use a case study approach, taking as an example my in-progress online digital edition of the novel Destiny: Or, the Chief’s Daughter (1831) by the nineteenth-century Scottish novelist Susan Edmonstone Ferrier. I will outline the potential copyright issues that need to be considered at each stage of the project, from building the text corpus to sourcing images for the website to deciding how users will be allowed to modify and reproduce the editorial notes, if at all. Beyond the digital project itself, decisions must be made about where to publish any articles based on the project, and whether and how to make that work open access.

Building on the findings of the case study, and drawing on knowledge gained through my work on open scholarship policy and through my MLIS studies, I will offer some suggestions for using digital materials and managing one’s own copyright, including through the use of Creative Commons licenses.

I will end the presentation by focusing on a recent policy development related to copyright in Canada: the extension of Canada’s general copyright term that came into effect on January 1, 2023. Due to this policy change, no works will enter the public domain in Canada for the next 20 years. By discussing some potential effects of this drought on digital humanities, and on digital literary studies in particular, I will emphasize the importance for digital humanists on being familiar with the copyright environment in Canada and how it affects our work.