When asked for a definition of the digital humanities, I often fall back on a crisp formula. Digital humanists use computation to generate, organize, publish, or interpret humanistic data. This covers most of the bases, but it's also a bit abstract. “What sort of computation?” a colleague sometimes asks. “I use a computer at work; why aren't I a digital humanist?” To this, I agree; there isn't much daylight between digital and analogue scholarship. Less interesting than what separates the two domains is the question of what unites them. In my view, the most significant shared ingredient is technology.

This article analyzes the special historical characteristics of prefecture-level regional financial administration during the latter half of the Tang Dynasty, which had as its primary revenue source the twice-a-year tax legally established in 780. Prefectural financial administration during this period consisted of three components: the portion of the twice-a-year tax retained by prefectures (liuzhou), “money for public use” (gongyongqian), and the ever-normal and charity granaries (changping yicang). Each of these elements made its appearance at separate times from the Northern Wei to the Sui. Following the establishment of the twice-a-year tax law, they became consolidated as components of prefectural financial administration at the beginning of the ninth century. At the same time, these components of prefectural financial administration became subject to the control of the central government, especially with regard to the “money for public use,” the section over which prefectures exercised the broadest discretion. In the early Northern Song, at the end of the tenth century, all revenue sources (beyond those used to meet obligatory expenses such as the stipends of bureaucrats) came to be retrieved by the central government, and prefectural financial administration came to be placed directly under central control.

Defining digital humanities is tricky. Our scholarship has been intrinsically digital for quite a few decades already, as we rely more and more on electronic storage to save, word processors to write, bibliography managers to organize, databases to consult, digital libraries to search and read. Living in the digital world, however, does not make us all digital humanists—if these digital entities are taken away, we will have their analog prototypes to fall back on, and beyond a certain level of inconvenience, this will not affect the way most of us do our scholarship. The transition to digital humanities must begin somewhere at the point where our humanistic inquiry starts to rely on the machine as the matter of methodological exigency.

In the public debate played out in the media, the financial crisis in Italy is often depicted through a culturalist frame; the country’s difficulties are traced deterministically to an ethos, supposedly widespread among Italians, of amoral familism and a limited sense of civic engagement. This paper illustrates three issues that exemplify the country’s financial problems, and which are often seen through this type of culturalist lens: i) a lack of discipline in managing public finances; ii) a lack of interest in co-operation caused by the excessive importance given to family ties; iii) a lack of agency from the people involved, symbolised by a reluctance to leave home and to adopt an intense pace of work. Considering the relevant literature and various statistics, we show that a culturalist approach helps to spread a stereotyped and misleading view of these three issues. Instead, we suggest that a more accurate reading of the situation, and more stimulating when it comes to public debate, can be obtained by observing the way individuals adapt to the limitations and opportunities of the context in which they operate.

This case study focuses on intensificatory tautological constructions (e.g. tiny littlebird, big hugepay rise). The attention that intensificatory tautology has elicited in previous literature is scarce and often centred on specific aspects of its Present-day English (PDE) distribution. Formally, tautological intensificatory patterns often involve the combination of two synonymous size-adjectives (e.g. massive great, tiny little) in a given order (i.e. great big but not big great). Functionally, they are standardly associated with emphatic descriptive modifying functions and informal styles (Matthews 2014: 364; Coffey 2013: 59; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 561–2). This contribution takes a corpus-based, synchronic standpoint in order to (a) refine previous literature's account of the formal and functional distribution of tautological size-adjective clusters in PDE and (b) assess the significance of tautological intensification for functional–structural descriptions of the English Noun Phrase. The analyses indicate that PDE intensificatory size-adjective clusters have a wider functional distribution than has hitherto been observed, with reinforcer and adverbial intensifying functions slowly developing alongside the descriptive modifier functions. More generally, the article shows that tautological size-adjective clusters create pockets of interpersonal meanings whose impact on the formal and functional structure of the NP needs further exploration.

In this article, I offer a reading of the ‘creation’ of femminicidio and of its role in the emergence of a new women’s question in Italy. I concentrate on three central steps in the legitimation of the word and the worlds femminicidio: Unione delle Donne Italiane (UDI)’s political use of the term in 2006, UDI’s Staffetta in 2008/2009, and the birth of the movement Se Non Ora Quando in 2011. By following Rancière’s understanding of politics as a ‘reconfiguration of the sensible’, I argue that the emergence of femminicidio fostered the emergence of a ‘community of sense’ of women as a new political subject. This community did not gather mainly around ideas of who a woman is or should be, nor did it arise from a common acknowledgement of the nature of ‘violence’. Rather, it was structured around shared feelings and affects, triggered by women’s sense of being actual or potential objects of violence.

Legal theorists have long debated whether law originates from a single source (the actions of state officials) or from multiple sources (including the innumerable communities and associations that constitute broader civil society). In recent years, proponents have defended polycentrism—and its critics have tried to refute it—from various moral, economic, and historical angles. But no contemporary writer has examined polycentrism from a Christian perspective. In the absence of such a study heretofore, this article attempts to evaluate legal polycentrism from a Christian theological and jurisprudential perspective. The Christian scriptures and Christian theology do not directly address whether law is polycentric or monocentric. Nevertheless, appealing to a number of biblical-theological issues—including the image of God, the Noahic covenant (Genesis 8:21–9:17), wisdom, and the purpose of civil government—I argue that Christians have good reason to regard polycentrism as a more satisfactory view of law.

This article looks at the ways in which the legal system of a modern European jurisdiction has engaged with a counter-cultural minority religious movement. The jurisdiction in question is England and Wales, and the religious movement is revived modern Paganism. The article seeks to cast light on the question of what a post-Christian secular state does in practice when its commitment to pluralistic values encounters a group whose self-understanding challenges the norms of both Christianity and secularity. In more general terms, it allows us to look at how the law of England and Wales has attempted to move beyond its historic confessional Protestant premises; and how this attempt has not been without its anomalies and shortcomings.

The rabassaire struggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented the most intense unrest in the Catalan countryside since the peasant rebellions of the fifteenth century, and it was one of the main social movements in rural Western Europe in this period. In this article we examine the rabassaire struggle over a period of roughly 150 years. Following Charles Tilly, we understand this social movement as a form of political action, which began in the late eighteenth century, reached maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and came to an end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Beyond the organizational changes arising from the shifting social and political circumstances, a new long-term overview can shed light on the continuities of the movement, especially in terms of building a social identity and legitimating its claims and its struggle.

This article examines how voiceless th-stopping (e.g. ting for thing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Although th-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use of th-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*