1. In biographies of Japanese writer Kanehara Hitomi (b. 1983) included in the English language translations of her work, commentators unerringly proclaim that Kanehara's brilliance was evident from the moment she famously left home at an early age to pursue a career in literature. Kanehara was eleven when she stopped attending school. The repeated claims in these biographies of her rebellious ...

This article focuses on the early book-length biographies of Darwin published from his death in 1882 up to 1900. By making 1900 the cutoff point I can examine the biographies produced when the iconic figure was not yet set in stone, and before the rediscovery of Mendel's work in the early twentieth century and the anniversary celebrations of 1909 changed the way in which Darwin was regarded. Da...

This paper describes and evaluates a method for computing artist similarity from a set of artist biographies. The proposed method aims at leveraging semantic information present in these biographies, and can be divided in three main steps, namely: (1) entity linking, i.e. detecting mentions to named entities in the text and linking them to an external knowledge base; (2) deriving a knowledge re...

In 2009/10, I spent many weeks in a former beverage market in Bielefeld, Germany.1 The warehouse — as well as I myself — was cooled down to 60° F in order to guarantee optimal conditions for the storage and preservation of the archival and material legacy of Dr. Oetker. This well-known German consumer product brand unites under its umbrella the production of various foodstuff s — this was the o...