Szkoła Mistrzów

Prof. Monika Zin, Universität Leipzig

Borrowing the forms, shifting the meanings – Contacts between West and East in the first centuries of our era

It is a well-known fact that Alexander the Great travelled as far as India and that this part of Asia (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan) was influenced first by Hellenistic and later by Roman culture. What is less well known is that the south of the subcontinent also adopted much from the West. At present, science even recognises that these influences were far more direct, because thanks to the recognition of the seasonal monsoon winds, a ship could make it from Mediterranean to India and back in just one year. However, when we recognise certain Western forms in Indian art, the question arises as to what has actually migrated: only the forms or also their meanings?

BIO: Monika Zin studied literature, art history and Indology in Krakow and Munich. After teaching art history of South, Southeast and Central Asia in Munich, Leipzig and Berlin, Zin currently is the head of the research group “Buddhist Wall Paintings of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road”. She has written numerous articles on Buddhist narrative art and books on the Ajanta paintings and the Kanaganahalli Stūpa (An Analysis of the 60 Massive Slabs Covering the Dome). Her books on depictions of the Parinirvāṇa Narrative Cycle and Gods, Deities and Demons in the Paintings of Kucha deal with the Central Asian survival of Indian culture in the Buddhist sites of Kucha, among other topics. Zin’s themes further include mutual contacts and influences between Rome and the Indian subcontinent.

Prof. Vahram Atayan, Heidelberg University

What data tells – or rather shows: Data visualization in linguistics

The last decades have witnessed a major paradigm shift in linguistics towards empirical approaches in research. The compilation of large corpora and the development of a wide range of corpus and computational linguistic methods opened up entirely new perspectives for contrastive linguistics and translation studies. Computational linguistic tools allow the automatic annotation of different linguistic categories on the language surface. Moreover, machine learning methods provide access also to more abstract semantic categories (such as sentiment and argumentation). Nevertheless, humans are still much better than automated systems at analyzing highly abstract phenomena. This is the reason why we consider the combination of manual annotations of abstract phenomena with statistical evaluation a particularly promising approach in linguistics and in the humanities in general. Since humans are usually not very adept in processing numerical data, which constitutes the standard output of statistical analysis, we also believe that the visualization of statistical results is of great importance. In our talk, we will discuss some types of research questions concerning nominal data and different scenarios for statistical evaluation and data visualization.

BIO: Vahram Atayan is Full Professor of translation studies for French and Italian at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at Heidelberg University. He studied physics in Yerevan (Armenia), then computer science and translation in Saarbrücken (Germany). In his PhD Thesis, he analyzed the macrostructures of argumentation in German, French and Italian. His research interests cover translation studies, contrastive linguistics, languages for special purposes, temporal semantics and corpus-based discourse linguistics.