In this class, students will engage in a critical examination of environmental transformations that arise from the complex interactions between natural systems and human activities. The pursuit of knowledge about natural resources and ecological systems is a scientific enterprise, yet addressing questions about the production, consumption,…[Read more]

In July 2013, the recently elected Pope Francis chose Lampedusa for his fist pastoral visit. A tiny island, part of the Sicilian region yet closer to Tunisia than to Italy, Lampedusa has at times become hyper-visible in the media and national discourses surrounding immigration while at other times it is ignored — part of Italy’s geographic and soc…[Read more]

In studies of immigration, generation is typically considered a static categorical system. I argue, however, that generation is a fluid construct and must be understood as place-based. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among Latino/as along the Texas–Mexico border, I seek to explore what current framings of generation leave out. Many in Laredo, T…[Read more]

Review of American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film by Ann Brigham (University of Virginia Press, 2015)

In the documentary, Comic Book City, Portland, Oregon USA, I construct a representation of the city as a place for comics creation. In this paper, I distill key insights from my interviews with writers, artists, and publishers regarding the decision to live and work in Portland. My documentary research suggests that creators are attracted by…[Read more]

This paper presents a newly funded international project for machine translation and automated analysis of ancient cuneiform 1 languages where NLP special ists and Assyriologists collaborate to create an information retrieval system for
Sumerian. This research is conceived in response to the need to translate large numbers of administrative texts…[Read more]

Sumerian and Akkadian language contact in the early part of the second millennium BCE. The article discusses prevalent language ideologies based on native metalinguistic discourse in comparison with language use in practice with the phrase mu—pad₃ = nīš—itma ‘(s)he swore an oath’ as a case study.

In this research, we examine the productivity of the broken plural in Maltese. Using machine learning techniques and behavioral methods, we show that the broken plural is able to be predicted by a singular noun’s CV structure. Using a logistic regression classifier, we are able to correctly predict the plural CV structure of the singular noun w…[Read more]

In a Bangkok mall a fibreglass policeman warning against intellectual property (IP) piracy stands just metres away from vendors selling fake DVDs; a scene indicative of incomplete and unsuccessful attempts by foreign governments (the US and EU in particular) and corporate actors at enrolment towards ever-higher IP standards – the ‘IP rat…[Read more]

Borderland Cities in New India explores contemporary urban life in two cities in India’s Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change. Social and economic transformation from India’s embrace of neoliberalism and globalisation, often referred to as ‘new’ India, has become a popular subject for academic analysis in the last decade. This is epit…[Read more]

In this chapter we explore the pedagogical effects of collective movement on bicycles grounded in our direct experiences, personal reflections, group discussions and the notes we took during a trans-European, self-organized educational activity called Cycling Alternatives in 2013 and 2014. We thereby engage with non-representational and…[Read more]

This article investigates the confluence of personal interests and official policy on collective farms in the mid-1930s, a period that has received far less scholarly attention than the collectivization drive. The current historiography on collective farmers’ relationship with the state is one-sided, presenting peasants either as passive victims o…[Read more]

Corpus Linguistics and NLP have many obvious applications for researchers, academics, and other specialists; what should not be overlooked, however, is their role in improving the mundane, everyday interactions between people and language, be they a reader of a newspaper; a child with a storybook; or a student in a classroom. The language analyses…[Read more]

“Making a Tibetan Speech Corpus” — སྐད་ཕུང་སྒྲུབ་སྟངས་ཀྱི་ལག་དེབ། — is a beginner’s guide and training manual for collecting & transcribing natural speech data. While it was written specifically with the Tibetan language in mind, the principles within are generally applicable. The first chapter introduces linguistics, corpora, and practical…[Read more]

Project Abstract: Ancient Mesopotamia, birthplace of writing, has produced vast numbers of cuneiform tablets that only a handful of highly specialized scholars are able to read. The task of studying them is so labor intensive that the vast majority have not yet been translated, with the result that their contents are not accessible either to…[Read more]

Project Abstract: Ancient Mesopotamia, birthplace of writing, has produced vast numbers of cuneiform tablets that only a handful of highly specialized scholars are able to read. The task of studying them is so labor intensive that the vast majority have not yet been translated, with the result that their contents are not accessible either to…[Read more]

Bunun is a language spoken by one of the Austronesian minority groups on the island of Taiwan. Its most marked characteristics are its complex verbal morphology and its unusual argument alignment system. Takivatan Bunun is the third-largest of its five extant dialects and is spoken by a number of small settlements in two counties in the central…[Read more]

Missionary history has been acknowledged in recent years as a fundamental context for the emergence of European Orientalism. In particular, it is becoming clearer the specific cultural relevance of the Catholic missionaries to India, working under the Portuguese Royal Patronage (Padroado Real), depending from the Roman Congregation De Propaganda…[Read more]

Talk Abstract