HyperJoseph: the hypertextual organization. Epistemological considerations

HYPERJOSEPH combines hypertext, information retrieval, literary studies, Biblical scholarship, and linguistics. Dialectically, this paper contrasts hypertextual form (the extant tool) and AI-captured content (a desideratum), in the HYPERJOSEPH project. The discussion is more general and oriented to epistemology.

Nine traces in a circle

Nine contemporary stories set in a border town that capture the modern Greek psyche with sharp realism and often a satirical, humorous mood. [From the Author]

Kappa calculus and evidential strength: A note on Åqvist's logical theory of legal evidence

Lennart Åqvist (1992) proposed a logical theory of legal evidence, based on the Bolding-Ekelöf of degrees of evidential strength. This paper reformulates Åqvist's model in terms of the probabilistic version of the kappa calculus. Proving its acceptability in the legal context is beyond the present scope, but the epistemological debate about Bayesian Law isclearly relevant. While the present model is a possible link to that lineof inquiry, we offer some considerations about the broader picture of thepotential of AI & Law in the evidentiary context. Whereas probabilisticreasoning is well-researched in AI, calculations about the threshold ofpersuasion in litigation, whatever their value, are just the tip of theiceberg. The bulk of the modeling desiderata is arguably elsewhere, if one isto ideally make the most of AI's distinctive contribution as envisaged forlegal evidence research.

Spaces of observation and obscurity: cinematic prisons of light and dark

In The Eye of Power, Foucault delineated the key concerns surrounding hospital architecture in the latter half of the eighteenth century as being the ‘visibility of bodies, individuals and things'. As such, the ‘new form of hospital' that came to be developed ‘was at once the effect and support of a new type of gaze'. This was a gaze that was not simply concerned with ways of minimising overcrowding or cross-contamination. Rather, this was a surveillance intended to produce knowledge about the pathological bodies contained within the hospital walls. This would then allow for their appropriate classification. Foucault went on to describe how these principles came to be applied to the architecture of prisons. This was exemplified for him in the distinct shape of Bentham's panopticon. This circular design, which has subsequently become an often misused synonym for a contemporary culture of surveillance, was premised on a binary of the seen and the not-seen. An individual observer could stand at the central point of the circle and observe the cells (and their occupants) on the perimeter whilst themselves remaining unseen. The panopticon in its purest form was never constructed, yet it conveys the significance of the production of knowledge through observation that became central to institutional design at this time and modern thought more broadly. What is curious though is that whilst the aim of those late eighteenth century buildings was to produce wellventilated spaces suffused with light, this provoked an interest in its opposite. The gothic movement in literature that was developing in parallel conversely took a ‘fantasy world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons…' as its landscape (Vidler, 1992: 162). Curiously, despite these modern developments in prison design, the façade took on these characteristics. The gothic imagination came to describe that unseen world that lay behind the outer wall. This is what Evans refers to as an architectural ‘hoax'. The façade was taken to represent the world within the prison walls and it was the façade that came to inform the popular imagination about what occurred behind it. The rational, modern principles ordering the prison became conflated with the meanings projected by and onto the façade. This confusion of meanings have then been repeated and reenforced in the subsequent representations of the prison. This is of paramount importance since it is the cinematic and televisual representation of the prison, as I argue here and elsewhere, that maintain this erroneous set of meanings, this ‘hoax'.