William J Turkel
Biographic Data
| ID | 214347 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William J Turkel |
| GIVEN NAMES | William J |
| FAMILY NAME | Turkel |
| SIGNATURE | TURKEL W J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4734-9894 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Making Sense of the Emergence of Manslaughter in British Criminal Justice
Manslaughter emerged as a new and distinct category of crime amongst those tried at the Old Bailey in London in the first half of the nineteenth century. From being a rare charge in 1800, manslaughter came to represent over 60% of all trials for ‘killing’ by the 1850s. This article describes the methodologies used by the authors to explore this phenomenon via trials included in the Old Bailey Online. It details the use of unsupervised clustering,…
A Conversation About Generative Artificial Intelligence
This is a wide-ranging conversation on the ways that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is changing history and historical disciplines. Topics covered include the impact of gen AI on historical practice, its effects on archival research, the ethics of its use, strategies for combating biases, and inclusivity. The participants are Canadian scholars chosen based on their prior publications about AI and history. They represent a range of di…
Incorporating the Sensemaking Loop from Intelligence Analysis into Bespoke Tools for Digital History
The discipline of intelligence analysis, like the discipline of history, requires its practitioners to create interpretations supported by large collections of sources that may be incomplete, inconsistent, ambiguous, and occasionally deceptive. Here I argue that models of the intelligence analyst’s research process, structured techniques for qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, and software for incorporating human ‘sensemaking’ can all be ada…
Jennifer Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles
Music Theory, the Missing Link Between Music-Related Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
This paper examines musical artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can not only learn from big data, but learn in ways that would be familiar to a musician or music theorist. This paper aims to find more effective links between music-related big data and artificial intelligence algorithms by incorporating principles with a strong grounding in music theory. We show that it is possible to increase the accuracy of two common algorithms (mode p…
Internet histories and computational methods: A “round-doc” discussion
This conversation brings together leading experts within the field of computational methods. Participants were invited to discuss “Internet histories and computational methods”, and the debate focused on issues such as why scholars of internet histories should consider using computational methods, what scholars should be looking out for when they use these methods, how the process of collecting influences computational research, what impedes the …
The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1913: Text Mining for Evidence of Court Behavior
The shortest trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings is precisely eight words in length. In February, 1685: Elizabeth Draper, Indicted for Felony, was found Guilty.
Intervention: Hacking history, from analogue to digital and back again
The process of digitization creates a representation that shares some of the attributes of an original, but not all of them. Which attributes are preserved is not an essential trait of digitization per se, only of a particular process. Technologies that are not frequently used by historians, for example, could allow us to capture and recreate the smells of documents, foods, artefacts and environments. Rather than concentrating on the properties o…
The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau
Winner, 2008 Clio Award for BC, Canadian Historical Association\n"The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location -- British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different understandings of its past -- and differen…
Every place is an archive: Environmental history and the interpretation of physical evidence
Practitioners of environmental history often turn to the interpretation of material traces to support their arguments about the past. This kind of unwritten evidence—a footprint is a mundane example—signifies a past event by virtue of a causal and/or physical connection with it. Here a series of case studies is used to explore the analogy between environmental historians' interpretation of physical evidence and the interpretive practices of geolo…
Children’s and Adults’ Understanding of Proper Namable Things
In two studies, we explored 5-year-olds’ and adults’ beliefs about entities that receive reference by proper names. In Study 1 we used two tasks: (1) a listing task in which participants stated what things in the world can and cannot receive proper names, and (2) an explanation task in which they explained why some things merit proper names. Children’s lists of proper namable things were more centred than adults’ on living animate entities and th…
Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 George Colpitts
Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition
This is a study of how children acquire language and how this affects language change over generations. Written by an international team of experts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we can not only address the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development of languages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather th…
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition
Noise-Induced Enhancement of Parameter Setting
October 01 1998 Noise-Induced Enhancement of Parameter Setting In Special Collection: CogNet William J. Turkel William J. Turkel University of British Columbia and MIT Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information William J. Turkel University of British Columbia and MIT Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 1998 Massachusetts Institute of Technology1998 Linguistic Inquiry (1998) 29 (4):…
Intervention: Hacking history, from analogue to digital and back again
The process of digitization creates a representation that shares some of the attributes of an original, but not all of them. Which attributes are preserved is not an essential trait of digitization per se, only of a particular process. Technologies that are not frequently used by historians, for example, could allow us to capture and recreate the smells of documents, foods, artefacts and environments. Rather than concentrating on the properties o…
Every place is an archive: Environmental history and the interpretation of physical evidence
Practitioners of environmental history often turn to the interpretation of material traces to support their arguments about the past. This kind of unwritten evidence—a footprint is a mundane example—signifies a past event by virtue of a causal and/or physical connection with it. Here a series of case studies is used to explore the analogy between environmental historians' interpretation of physical evidence and the interpretive practices of geolo…
Internet histories and computational methods: A “round-doc” discussion
This conversation brings together leading experts within the field of computational methods. Participants were invited to discuss “Internet histories and computational methods”, and the debate focused on issues such as why scholars of internet histories should consider using computational methods, what scholars should be looking out for when they use these methods, how the process of collecting influences computational research, what impedes the …
Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition
Noise-Induced Enhancement of Parameter Setting
October 01 1998 Noise-Induced Enhancement of Parameter Setting In Special Collection: CogNet William J. Turkel William J. Turkel University of British Columbia and MIT Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information William J. Turkel University of British Columbia and MIT Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 1998 Massachusetts Institute of Technology1998 Linguistic Inquiry (1998) 29 (4):…
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition
This is a study of how children acquire language and how this affects language change over generations. Written by an international team of experts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we can not only address the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development of languages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather th…
Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 George Colpitts
Children’s and Adults’ Understanding of Proper Namable Things
In two studies, we explored 5-year-olds’ and adults’ beliefs about entities that receive reference by proper names. In Study 1 we used two tasks: (1) a listing task in which participants stated what things in the world can and cannot receive proper names, and (2) an explanation task in which they explained why some things merit proper names. Children’s lists of proper namable things were more centred than adults’ on living animate entities and th…
Every place is an archive: Environmental history and the interpretation of physical evidence
Practitioners of environmental history often turn to the interpretation of material traces to support their arguments about the past. This kind of unwritten evidence—a footprint is a mundane example—signifies a past event by virtue of a causal and/or physical connection with it. Here a series of case studies is used to explore the analogy between environmental historians' interpretation of physical evidence and the interpretive practices of geolo…
The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau
Winner, 2008 Clio Award for BC, Canadian Historical Association\n"The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location -- British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different understandings of its past -- and differen…
Intervention: Hacking history, from analogue to digital and back again
The process of digitization creates a representation that shares some of the attributes of an original, but not all of them. Which attributes are preserved is not an essential trait of digitization per se, only of a particular process. Technologies that are not frequently used by historians, for example, could allow us to capture and recreate the smells of documents, foods, artefacts and environments. Rather than concentrating on the properties o…
The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1913: Text Mining for Evidence of Court Behavior
The shortest trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings is precisely eight words in length. In February, 1685: Elizabeth Draper, Indicted for Felony, was found Guilty.
Internet histories and computational methods: A “round-doc” discussion
This conversation brings together leading experts within the field of computational methods. Participants were invited to discuss “Internet histories and computational methods”, and the debate focused on issues such as why scholars of internet histories should consider using computational methods, what scholars should be looking out for when they use these methods, how the process of collecting influences computational research, what impedes the …
Music Theory, the Missing Link Between Music-Related Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
This paper examines musical artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can not only learn from big data, but learn in ways that would be familiar to a musician or music theorist. This paper aims to find more effective links between music-related big data and artificial intelligence algorithms by incorporating principles with a strong grounding in music theory. We show that it is possible to increase the accuracy of two common algorithms (mode p…
Jennifer Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles
Incorporating the Sensemaking Loop from Intelligence Analysis into Bespoke Tools for Digital History
The discipline of intelligence analysis, like the discipline of history, requires its practitioners to create interpretations supported by large collections of sources that may be incomplete, inconsistent, ambiguous, and occasionally deceptive. Here I argue that models of the intelligence analyst’s research process, structured techniques for qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, and software for incorporating human ‘sensemaking’ can all be ada…
Making Sense of the Emergence of Manslaughter in British Criminal Justice
Manslaughter emerged as a new and distinct category of crime amongst those tried at the Old Bailey in London in the first half of the nineteenth century. From being a rare charge in 1800, manslaughter came to represent over 60% of all trials for ‘killing’ by the 1850s. This article describes the methodologies used by the authors to explore this phenomenon via trials included in the Old Bailey Online. It details the use of unsupervised clustering,…
A Conversation About Generative Artificial Intelligence
This is a wide-ranging conversation on the ways that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is changing history and historical disciplines. Topics covered include the impact of gen AI on historical practice, its effects on archival research, the ethics of its use, strategies for combating biases, and inclusivity. The participants are Canadian scholars chosen based on their prior publications about AI and history. They represent a range of di…
Computer Science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Cognitive science (5 works) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Data science (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works)