Developing Better Non-English Materials: Understanding the Limits of Translation

Presents lessons learned from demonstration sites on the challenges of providing non-English material for patients with limited English proficiency, including misconceptions about translation and lack of effective evaluation methods. Recommends solutions

"I Saw You": searching for lost love via practices of reading, writing and responding

How do emotions move and how do emotions move us? How are feelings and recognitions distributed socio-materially? Based on a multi-site ethnographic study of a romantic correspondance system, this article explores the themes of love, privacy, identity and public displays. Informed by ethnomethodology and actor-network theory its investigations into these informal affairs are somewhat unusual in that much of the research carried out by those bodies of work concentrates on institutional settings such as laboratories, offices and courtrooms. In common with ethnomethodology it attempts to re-specify some topics of interest in the social sciences and humanities; in this case, documents and practices of writing and reading those documents. A key element of the approach taken is restoring to reading and writing their situated nature as observable, knowable, distributed community practices. Re-specifying topics for the social sciences involves the detailed description of several situated ways in which the romantic correspondence system is used. Detailing the translations, transformations and transportations of documents as 'quasi-objects' through several orderings, the article suggests that documents have no essential meaning and that making them meaningful is part of the work of those settings

Cultural consequences of computing technology

Computing technology is clearly a technical revolution, but will most probably bring about a cultural revolution\ud as well. The effects of this technology on human culture will be dramatic and far-reaching. Yet, computers and\ud electronic networks are but the latest development in a long history of cognitive tools, such as writing and printing.\ud We will examine this history, which exhibits long-term trends toward an increasing democratization of culture,\ud before turning to today's technology. Within this framework, we will analyze the probable effects of computing on\ud culture: dynamical representations, generalized networking, constant modification and reproduction. To address the\ud problems posed by this new technical environment, we will suggest possible remedies. In particular, the role of\ud social institutions will be discussed, and we will outline the shape of new electronic institutions able to deal with the\ud information flow on the internet

Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Writing. The Parallel Lives of Michael Ventris and Linda Schele and the Decipherment of Mycenaean and Mayan Writing

Catalogue of an exhibition conducted in conjunction with the Eleventh International Mycenological Colloquium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. This program features brief histories of the CIPEM Mycenological conferences and PASP, followed by comparative retrospectives on both Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, and Linda Schele, who performed a similar feat for Mayan glyphs.Classic

RECOLED: A group-aware collaborative text editor for capturing document history

This paper presents a usability analysis of RECOLED, a shared document editor which supports recording of audio communication in remote collaborative writing sessions, and transparent monitoring of interactions, such as editing, gesturing and scrolling. The editor has been designed so that the collaboration results in the production of a multimedia document history which enriches the final product of the writing activity and can serve as a basis for post-meeting information retrieval. A discussion is presented on how post-meeting processing can highlight the usefulness of such histories in terms of tracking information that would be normally lost in usual collaborative editing settings

Codes and Hypertext: the Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law

The field of information studies reveals gaps in the literature of international and comparative law as part of interdisciplinary and textual studies. To illustrate the kind of theoretical and text-based work that could be done, this essay provides an example of such a study. Religious law texts, civil law codes, treaties and constitutional texts may provide a means to reveal the nature of hypertext as the new format for commentary. Margins used to be used for commentary, and now this can be done with hypertext and links in footnotes. Scholarly communication in general is now intertextual, and texts derive value and meaning from being related to other texts. This paper draws upon examples chosen after observing relationships between text presentation and hypertext as well as detailing similar observations by scholars to date. However, this essay attempts to go beyond a descriptive level to argue that this intertextuality, and the hypertext nature of the web, bring together texts and traditions in a manner conducive to the study of legal systems and their points of convergence

Survey over Existing Query and Transformation Languages

A widely acknowledged obstacle for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web is the inability of many current Semantic Web approaches to cope with data available in such diverging representation formalisms as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. A common query language is the first step to allow transparent access to data in any of these formats. To further the understanding of the requirements and approaches proposed for query languages in the conventional as well as the Semantic Web, this report surveys a large number of query languages for accessing XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. This is the first systematic survey to consider query languages from all these areas. From the detailed survey of these query languages, a common classification scheme is derived that is useful for understanding and differentiating languages within and among all three areas

Overview of the CLEF-2005 cross-language speech retrieval track

The task for the CLEF-2005 cross-language speech retrieval track was to identify topically coherent segments of English interviews in a known-boundary condition. Seven teams participated, performing both monolingual and cross-language searches of ASR transcripts, automatically generated metadata, and manually generated metadata. Results indicate that monolingual search technology is sufficiently accurate to be useful for some purposes (the best mean average precision was 0.18) and cross-language searching yielded results typical of those seen in other applications (with the best systems approximating monolingual mean average precision)

The auditor as historian: Reflections of the epistemology of financial reporting

Concern has been growing recently that the modern commercial organisation is becoming less auditable. The volume and complexity of transactions and the opacity of computer-based information systems, coupled with the increased knowledge gap between auditors and clients, make the auditor reliant on evidence whose quality and reliability is open to broad challenges. At the same time, the changing nature of financial reports, from summaries of the past to images of the present and windows on the future, weakens the link between evidence of underlying activities and transactions and their representation in financial statements.This exacerbates the epistemological challenge faced by accountants and auditors: how can financial statements be said to be a faithful representation of an entity, and how can auditors give a well-grounded opinion that the financial statements give a true and fair view? These issues are by no means unique to financial reporting. Similar problems arise in historical research, where historical theorists and practical historians have had to grapple with the nature and status of evidence of the past and the relationship between evidence and historical narratives. By examining contemporary debates within the literature of historiography, insights into comparable issues within financial reporting and auditing should be gained.The paper concentrates in particular on the contribution to the historiographical debate made by Keith Jenkins. Through his books Re-thinking History (1991), On “What is History?” (1995) and Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (1999), and his edited collection The Postmodern History Reader (1997), Jenkins has provocatively challenged more mainstream views of the historian’s relationship with evidence, indeed the nature of historical evidence itself, in ways that raise issues for the conventional understanding of evidence in the audit context. The arguments of Jenkins are contrasted with those of C. Behan McCullagh, whose The Truth of History (1998) explicitly explores the extent to which historical descriptions can be “true and fair”, and thus provides a direct analogy between the task of the historian and that of the auditor. The paper concludes that auditing stands or falls in an epistemological sense with history, in that the statements of auditors bear essentially the same relationship to audit evidence as those of historians bear to historical evidence. If, in a postmodern world,histories that claim to tell a unique “truth” are not just logically impossible but also ethically immoral, then so are financial statements and audit reports

Narrative-based writing for coherent technical documents

Narrative-based writing is a technique that was developed to address the lack of support for document coherence. The technique depends on the production of a story-like executive summary of the document called a DN (Document Narrative). This is then analysed using a discourse theory called Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) which helps further to correct any lapses in coherence in the DN before proceeding to use it to write the document. Previous papers have described the technique briefly, alongside discussions of the ongoing software development to incorporate narrative support in writing tools. It has now become apparent that the technique itself needs to be explained in greater detail. This is the purpose of this paper. Here, narrative-based writing and the reasoning behind it is described. This is followed by a description of a user experiment conducted in May 2006 to evaluate narrative-based writing and discover areas in which it could be improved. The positive feedback from the volunteers has motivated us to continue to refine and simplify the technique