Re-reading the Ryan Report: Witnessing via and Close and Distant Reading

Pine, Emilie; Leavy, Susan; Keane, Mark T.

doi:10.1353/eir.2017.0009

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Automatic annotation of excerpts of the report based on the meaning of the text enabled a more focussed close reading of these identified paragraphs, surfacing significant new patterns of events and language in the institutional system (Pine et al, 2017). These insights were previously obscured by the legal constraints on and narrative form of the Ryan Report, which emphasised an in-depth case-by-case study, in lieu of system-wide analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Patterns in language: Text analysis of government reports on the Irish industrial school system with word embedding

Leavy

Keane

Pine

2019

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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Industrial Memories is a digital humanities initiative to supplement close readings of a government report with new distant readings, using text analytics techniques. The Ryan Report (2009), the official report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), details the systematic abuse of thousands of children from 1936 to 1999 in residential institutions run by religious orders and funded and overseen by the Irish State. Arguably, the sheer size of the Ryan Report—over 1 million words—warrants a new approach that blends close readings to witness its findings, with distant readings that help surface system-wide findings embedded in the Report. Although CICA has been lauded internationally for its work, many have critiqued the narrative form of the Ryan Report, for obfuscating key findings and providing poor systemic, statistical summaries that are crucial to evaluating the political and cultural context in which the abuse took place (Keenan, 2013, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture. Oxford University Press). In this article, we concentrate on describing the distant reading methodology we adopted, using machine learning and text-analytic methods and report on what they surfaced from the Report. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) it shows how text analytics can be used to surface new patterns, summaries and results that were not apparent via close reading, (ii) it demonstrates how machine learning can be used to annotate text by using word embedding to compile domain-specific semantic lexicons for feature extraction and (iii) it demonstrates how digital humanities methods can be applied to an official state inquiry with social justice impact.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, aspects of its narrative structure have been criticised for obscuring as much as it revealed. The anonymisation of names of the clergy for instance has been criticised for protecting the religious orders (Powell et al, 2012) and the structure of the document obscures the systematic nature of the abuse (Pine et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns in language: Text analysis of government reports on the Irish industrial school system with word embedding

Leavy

Keane

Pine

2019

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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“…Another example is the combined use of data analytics and digital arts to enable new readings and a deeper understanding of historical and social events. In the Industrial Memories project developed by Keane, Pine & Leavy (2017), data analytics techniques were RIO, Nº 23, 2019 Sandrine Peraldi applied to the Ryan Report, a 2009 report commissioned by the Irish government to enquire into the extent and effects of child abuse in Irish institutions for children. The mapping and structuring of the information enabled the creation of digital representations of the people who knew about these practices and the displaying of 'hidden patterns in the Report, illustrating the system of abuse in action' .…”

Section: Object Of Study 21 Defining Corpus Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating corpus-based tools in translators’ work environment: cognitive and professional implications

Peraldi¹

2019

RIO

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Despite the growing recognition of corpora-induced benefits for translation quality, the use of corpus technology remains an exception in a professional setting. This article describes the results of a pilot study aimed at integrating corpus-based tools into the work environment of legal/financial translators. In particular, the paper examines resistance and success factors with a view to encouraging the progressive integration of corpus technology into translators’ toolboxes.

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Disability and Constrained Genres: The Sports and Celebrity Narrative and the Limits of Oral History

Grubgeld

2020

Literary Disability Studies

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Re-reading the Ryan Report: Witnessing via and Close and Distant Reading

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

Patterns in language: Text analysis of government reports on the Irish industrial school system with word embedding

Patterns in language: Text analysis of government reports on the Irish industrial school system with word embedding

Integrating corpus-based tools in translators’ work environment: cognitive and professional implications

Disability and Constrained Genres: The Sports and Celebrity Narrative and the Limits of Oral History

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