May 2025 The DHSS Hub Seminar Recipients of the MA Thesis Grant Present their Research  You are cordially invited to attend the DHSS Hub Seminar on Wednesday, June 25, at 13:30. In this session, three recipients of our MA thesis grant will present their ongoing research: Orit Nachmani will discuss a range of texts from the 11th to the 17th century, in which Jewish thinkers calculated and predicted the date of the apocalypse. Ben Reich will present his work on the trust problem in the American cryptocurrency system and public attitudes towards it. Lastly, Nitzan Yasur will examine the growing divisions within Israeli society in recent years, and their connection to online disinformation campaigns and masspersonal social engineering. Art Exhibition PostHum Condition: A Tribute to Guernica Michel Platnic The DHSS Hub's latest art exhibition is set to open on May 29, and will be open to the public until September 15 in the columns gallery, the Kikar Building at campus Ra'anana.  The installation, comprising eight video works and four mechanically animated "robots," continues Platnic's sustained investigation into twenty-first-century existential concerns. Furthermore, the installation incorporates real-time engagement with visitors through motion sensors and surveillance cameras. Platnic extracts individual figures from Picasso's composition, granting each a space of individuality in which to subtly convey their helplessness and despair.  Curators: Hava Aldouby and Carmit Blumensohn. The Israeli International Conference on Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Tuesday, June 10, 2025, Ra'anana campus Just a few days remain until the conference! Registration is still open - join us for the biggest event in the field of digital humanities and social sciences.  The conference will feature panels on a wide range of topics, from automatic text analysis to computational cultural research, as well as digital artworks that showcase the creative side of digital scholarship.  For the program and registration form. A Computational Exploration of the Creative Aspect of Language In her recent project funded by the Ministry of Science, Nurit Melnik investigates linguistic creativity by combining traditional linguistics with computational methods. Her research explores how speakers innovate within language systems, examining the balance between novelty and comprehensibility that makes certain expressions engaging to listeners. Among several linguistic phenomena analyzed, Melnik and her team documented patterns in which speakers modify conventional expressions, like "thinking outside the box", with unexpected variations (e.g., “building confidence to swim outside the box”, regarding acclimation to open water swimming). This effort incorporated computational models to measure similarity between conventional expressions and their innovative variants, providing quantitative evidence for theories regarding optimal innovations. By applying vector space models to linguistic data, Melnik et al. demonstrate that successful creative expressions maintain an intermediate similarity to their source — different enough to be noticed, but similar enough to be understood. Another research strand examines how speakers exploit gaps between competing grammatical constructions across languages. An investigation of Hebrew and English corpora reveals systematic patterns where speakers intentionally violate grammatical constraints to achieve creative effects. More specifically, an analysis of a Hebrew blog corpus uncovered numerous examples in which speakers deliberately placed loanwords in the synthetic possessive construction to create attention-catching expressions (e.g., karizmat-enu, ‘our charisma’). The parallel findings in English comparative constructions (e.g., the non-standard comparative adjective “curiouser” used instead of the standard “more curious”) suggest that this is a broad linguistic phenomenon. The multifaceted approach of this project, situated at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and computational linguistics, demonstrates that linguistic creativity is not random, but follows quantifiable patterns that can be detected through computational means, while remaining firmly grounded in linguistic theory.