A Pilot Study on Identifying Exclusionary Content in Art-Related Texts (paper)

This article presents an initial, exploratory approach to the study of the discourses of exclusion in art. One of the main contributions of this research is to propose the exclusionary argument as an analytical category intended to describe formally how hierarchies are constructed, justified and reinforced across multiple domains, including the artistic sphere. To this end, we formulate a preliminary definition of this type of argument, hoping that it may be adopted—and even developed or expanded—by the research community. Additionally, drawing on Teufel and Kan's (2011) concept of argumentative zoning, the article proposes a preliminary typology of textual segments which, because of their content and discursive function, may contain exclusionary arguments. Finally, through a pilot study that takes the sentence as its unit of analysis, the degree of reliability with which exclusionary content can be identified in art texts is assessed. Given that inter-annotator agreement reached 97.7%, the results obtained confirm that the effort of designing and annotating an extensive corpus with argumentative components and relationships is entirely justified. This task will constitute the central focus of our future work.