Paper Tools

We aim to lay the basis for a unified architecture for enterprise computer nomenclatures by providing the grounding ontology based upon the BORO Foundational Ontology. We start to lower two significant barriers within the computing community to making progress in this area; a lack of a broad appreciation of the nature and practice of nomenclature and a lack of recognition of some specific technical, philosophical issues that nomenclatures raise. We provide an overview of the grounding ontology and how it can be implemented in a system. We focus on the issue that arises when tokens lead to the overlap of the represented domain and its system representation – system-domain-overlap – and how this can be resolved.

The periodic system is an icon of science, with an exceptional level of usage around the world. It is especially celebrated as a source of information and pedagogical tool. Although many publications on the history and philosophy of the system have appeared over the years, few of them deal with its underlying values aside from predictability. In this issue, scholars from different disciplines use the history of the periodic system to discuss what the system signifies and has signified for scientists and teachers, as well as for philosophers and historians. By presenting different layers of underlying values as they appear in the eyes of the users, we aim to provide a richer understanding of the periodic system, past and present.

This article proposes a new understanding of Theodor Fontane’s reading techniques in the context of nineteenth-century textual practices. On the basis of Fontane’s unpublished notebooks and other sources, the article reconstructs Fontane’s management of a postal library network that supplied him with a ceaseless influx of materials from both high- brow and lowbrow culture. Analyzing the reading practices with which he traversed this variegated overabundance of material, the article contends that the virtuosic technique of “brutal reading” enabled Fontane to break textual sources down into discrete passages that became available for creative recombination for his own writing process. The article rebuts conventional approaches in Fontane scholarship that focus on his reading of indi- vidual authors and their influence, arguing that the question of how Fontane read is far more important than the question of what he read.

Petra Spies, “A Creative Machine: The Media History of Theodor Fontane's Library Network and Reading Practices.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 87:1 (2012), 72–90.
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