1,721,106 research outputs found
Ex-situ language documentation and the Urban Fieldstation for Linguistic Research
No full textIt has been fully recognized that the looming loss of the majority of the world’s languages requires rapid direct action in the form of linguistic documentation, description and conservation. However, documentation efforts have thus far been focused on traditional fieldwork largely to the exclusion of working with immigrant groups outside the original speech community. By doing so, an enormous linguistic resource has been overlooked. Here, I explore the advantages, disadvantages and general prospects for “ex-situ” documentation in the context of the Urban Fieldstation for Linguistic Research, a soon to be launched center for language documentation in New York City. The UFLR will operate in collaboration with the the City University of New York Graduate Center with the following goals: (i) to facilitate an ongoing survey of endangered and marginalized languages within NYC, (ii) to produce high quality documentation and descriptive work on languages spoken by local immigrant groups, (iii) to find ways of integrating language documentation into the standard linguistics curricula. Some obvious disadvantages of “ex-situ” documentation are that many of the original speech genres and social contexts are difficult to reproduce outside the original community, localized environmental vocabularies (e.g. fauna and flora) are impossible to document beyond the basics, and the social mobility required to travel outside the speaker’s native country often corresponds to dominance in the national language, which can make finding fluent speakers challenging. Because of all these factors, ex-situ documentation will never be able to replace in-situ fieldwork. Nonetheless, I argue that ex-situ documentation is still feasible, necessary and even has its own unique advantages, the most important of which are the reduction of cost, bureaucracy, time pressure and the affordance of a controlled environment for recording. More importantly, by easing logistic burdens, large-scale collaboration with multiple researchers can be facilitated. I discuss all these issues in the context of two on-going projects in the UFLR, one on the Minahasan languages (Austronesian; North Sulawesi, Indonesia) and the other on Zaghawa (Nilo-Saharan; Darfur, Sudan)
A tool for sharing interlinearized and lexical data in diverse formats
Full text linkThe last decade has seen great advances in the development of electronic tools for automated interlinearization, corpus creation and lexicon building (e.g. Fieldworks Explorer [FLEx]), as well as tools for creating time-aligned annotations (e.g. ELAN). However, methods for sharing these new data formats online lag far behind. While good options exist for lexical data (e.g. Webonary, Lexique Pro), there is no tool for turning a project created in the FLEx software into an online interlinearized corpus. We present here a tool in development which does precisely that. FLEx databases can be searched using regular expressions and individual lines from a text can be linked to audio and video media. The tool can furthermore bring together linguistic data in diverse formats (from ELAN, Praat, Fieldworks, Toolbox, Shoebox) for a single query and allow for queries over multiple language projects. We discuss the benefits of this program in relation to several ongoing fieldwork projects that are being used to evaluate it. These projects present several interesting challenges. In one, we attempt to create a unified database from several centuries of documentation during which the language showed considerable change. Similarly, in the second project we create a unified database for two lexically, syntactically and phonologically distinct dialects of the same language and show how an interlinearized database facilitates searching across dialects. Finally, in the third project, we show how video data can be integrated into an online FLEx database, a feature which is still lacking in the FLEx software itself. By way of conclusion, we show the audience how to upload their own data (either privately or publicly) and experiment with the tool’s features. Ultimately, the open source program will be available for anyone interested in hosting their own installations
Collaborating with language communities in diasporic contexts: Three cases studies from NYC
No full textMigration due to economic, environmental and political factors is increasingly displacing populations to urban centers internationally. While most of the world's languages were previously spoken only in the traditional territories of their speakers, we now find large sub-populations of small linguistic communities in diaspora. This has clear consequences for language endangerment and documentation as collaboration with such populations presents unique challenges. In this talk, we discuss ongoing work on endangered Iranic languages in New York spoken by Jewish populations from Iran, the Caucaus, and Central Asia. Most of these languages have not been documented sufficiently and are now almost all spoken entirely outside of their home areas without being transmitted. As such, the last hope of documenting them adequately depends on working with speakers in diaspora. We focus here in particular on the following three languages, which represent three points on the spectrum of endangerment and present different challenges for collaboration.
Bukhori is an endangered dialect of Tajik rather than a unique language by itself. Due to the size and relative health of its speaker base, our primary goal with local speakers has been to create further audio-visual documentation of the language as used in conversation, poetry and song by elder speakers.
Judeo-Kashani, a Median language on the other side of the spectrum, is not viewed as an independent language by the handful of remaining speakers, who appear resigned to losing it within this generation. As Judeo-Kashani is virtually undescribed, linguistically quite unique, and extremely endangered, its description has been prioritized.
The status of Juhuri, a series of dialects within the Tat language group of the Caucuses, is intermediate between these two extremes. The descriptive record is far from complete despite recent advances. At the same time, a small core of activists seek to maintain the language in this critical period and an ample number of older, fluent speakers are interested in language work with the goal of revitalization.
The significantly different desires and circumstances of each diasporic community reveals how much adaptability is required of linguists working in urban centers. Succesful collaborative projects in these contexts depend on linguists being flexible and able to contribute in a wide variety of ways beyond description and documentation. We hope to shed light on several different approaches that can be adapted to collaborative work in other global cities
Coupled principles for computational frictional contact mechanics:
No full textMethods for simulating frictional contact response are in high demand in robotics, graphics, biomechanics, structural engineering, and many other fields where the accurate modeling of interactions between solids are required. While techniques for accurately simulating structures and continua have advanced rapidly, methods for simulating the contact between solids have lagged behind. This thesis addresses the difficulties encountered in designing robust, accurate, and efficient computational methods for simulating frictional contact dynamics. We focus on understanding the fundamental sources of difficulty in frictional contact modeling, elucidating existing structures that can be leveraged to minimize them, and designing robust, accurate and efficient algorithms to simulate challenging frictional contact problems.
In this thesis a Coupled Principles formulation of discrete, time-continuous frictional contact is developed in depth. This is then applied as the basis for deriving novel, time-discrete, variational integrators that pose the discrete frictional contact problem as a system of coupled minimizations. Solutions to these systems are given by points that are optimal for both of the minimizations and avoid known issues with existing variational integration approaches for friction and contact. We then consider a specific two-step variant of these variational schemes that generalizes the popular Stewart-Trinkle model for frictional contact simulation. This is taken as a starting point for investigating the sources of difficulties found in solving these types of methods. We show that existing solution algorithms that have generally been presumed suitable for solving the contact-related optimization problems posed by these methods, fail entirely for many important examples of frictional contact and then address these limitations with our Staggered Projections algorithm. Applying a fixed-point scheme, derived from the Coupled Principles Formulation, we show that Staggered Projections efficiently obtains accurate solutions to optimization problems for many frictional contact problems that were previously impractical to solve. Finally, we also offer a detailed convergence analysis of the Staggered Projections algorithm, as well as simulations and instrumented examples that capture convincing and accurate frictional contact behaviors for both rigid and large deformation models.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-139)by Danny M. Kaufma
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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