In 1929, I. A. Richards observed in Practical Criticism that "every response is ’subjective’ in the sense that it is a psychological event determined by the needs and resources of a mind," and he concluded, "we have a real problem about the relative values of different states of mind, about varying forms, and degrees, of order in the personality." Indeed, more than eighty years later, we still do. One main reason we still do is that, despite considerable efforts by reader-response, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theorists to understand identity, literary scholars have so far found no good way of conceptualizing reader variation–a way that offers real explanatory insight. They accept that readers differ–how could they not?–but no one has yet examined this variation in light of what is known in the modern psychological sciences about personality, reading preferences, and the function that reading fiction fulfills for different people.

Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project. Comment: Part of special issue: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. 15 pages, 4 figures

One of the major digital challenges of the Syriaca.org research project has been to encode and visualize personal names of authors in Middle Eastern languages (especially Syriac and Arabic). TEI-XML and HTML are digital standards for the encoding and visualization of cultural heritage data and have features for encoding names and displaying Middle Eastern languages. Because these formats were developed primarily for Western cultural data, however, representing our non-Western data in these formats has required complex adaptation particularly in regard to marking up name parts, customizing search algorithms, displaying bidirectional text, and displaying Syriac text with embedded fonts. These requirements have led us to develop small-scale systems that may be of use to other cultural heritage preservation projects involving names for ancient and, especially, non-Western entities.

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Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages examines the religious and political power communicated in late antique and early medieval graphic signs (third through tenth centuries), including christograms, monograms, carmina figurata, and the sign of the cross, which appear in a variety of media from coins, jewelry, and lamps to manuscripts, monumental inscriptions, and mosaics. As Ildar Garipzanov indicates in the introduction, the authors employ the term "graphic sign" in a broad sense, as defined by Henry Maguire in the volume as a visual motif "that stands in for something or someone else in a literal or direct way," and carries metaphorical meaning(s) in addition to the literal (224, cf. 2). The twelve essays that comprise this multidisciplinary collection are organized into three sections: "Graphic Signs in Manuscript Culture," "Graphic Signs in Public Spaces and Everyday Material Culture," and "Graphic Signs on Material Objects of Status and Authority." Graphic signs are considered in European, Byzantine, and North African contexts; the contributors trace the ways in which graphic signs had the ability to invite viewer response and, in turn, affect their environments. Illustrated with one hundred forty-two figures, tables, and diagrams (varying in quality), one of the distinct contributions of this book is that it brings together discussions of graphic signs that usually remain siloed by academic discipline.