Data Critique

This dataset consists of five short stories by Boris Pahor. They all appear in his 2008 short story collection, Il Rogo nel Porto, or The Pyre on the Port. These five were selected by teacher Nina Bjekovic for students to read as part of Italian 98T: Bordered Identities: Between Italy, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia. As short stories, they include only nominal data by way of the words that Pahor used. The original works appear in Slovenian, Pahor’s native language. Ms. Bjekovic translated them to English for her students for comprehension purposes. While this may present a minor limitation regarding translational issues, as a fluent speaker and reader of both languages and a lifelong student of Pahor, Ms. Bjekovic captured his words as effectively as possible. Another potential limitation is the length of the stories, as they are rather short. While the researcher considered using other, longer texts, many of them are inaccessible because of lack of translation into English as well as copyright issues preventing download, and therefore analysis. Claudia and Nina also ultimately decided that it was most appropriate to compare only short stories to one another due. to their comparable format. The dearth of English-translated works reflects Pahor's status as minor author, an unfortunate designation in part resulting from his political ostracization. His works remained unpublished in Italy by a hostile nationalist environment, and were only translated in English for the first time in 2013. This dataset was collected in order to analyze Pahor’s language choices and rhetorical device usage across texts to discover patterns of communication.