1,031 research outputs found
Fantasia on a Theme of Purpose: Using a Music-Guided Scribble Technique to Support Meaning-Making in Older Adult Retiree Musicians
Within the population of older adults, overall well-being corresponds with the ability to self-actualize and seek meaning, but age-related changes combined with ageism and isolation can negatively impact this capacity to maintain a sense of purpose, especially following retirement. It may be that retired musicians are especially vulnerable to this experience later in life due to a loss of the primary method of creative engagement and community that is facilitated by musical performance in a group setting. Integrating phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, this study utilized a qualitative design to understand how music-guided art-making incorporating the scribble technique could support a sense of purpose among older adult retiree musicians. In an art-based intervention that collected art and interview data, participants responded to self-selected music with a variety of fluid and resistive drawing materials categorized as Media Dimension Variables (MDV). Data analysis was executed in conjunction with theories of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC). Results obtained via thematic analysis suggested that the intervention facilitated access to creative intentionality in support of a sense of purpose. The process of self-selecting music that was rich with personal significance provided an optimal frame of reference in a novel art experiential that engaged individual strengths, values, and expertise. Responding to music in real-time with a kinesthetically-focused drawing technique presented a non-threatening approach to visual composition; the spontaneity in this process also offered opportunities for self-discovery and contact with the present moment
Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present
This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordThis is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Manifestos Ancient Present)This volume brings together the work of practitioners, communities, artists and other researchers from multiple disciplines. Seeking to provoke a discourse around displacement within and beyond the field of Humanities, it positions historical cases and debates, some reaching into the ancient past, within diverse geo-chronological contexts and current world urgencies. In adopting an innovative dialogic structure, between practitioners on the ground - from architects and urban planners to artists - and academics working across subject areas, the volume is a proposition to: remap priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines, critically analysing their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; and provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns about displacement. Ultimately, this volume aims to provoke future work and collaborations - hence, manifestos - not only in the historical and literary fields, but wider research concerned with human mobility and the challenges confronting people who are out of place of rights, protection and belonging
Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active
area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly;
more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such
as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl
Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The
goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field,
including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths,
together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto
based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took
place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge
Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation
to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its
challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade
“Difference in/at the center a transnational approach for mobilizing international multilingual graduate writers\u27 writing assets during writing instruction.
This research project presents an empirical exploration of how the writing assets possessed by international multilingual graduate writers impact the theory and pedagogical practices in writing studies, especially regarding the approaches to teaching writing. Extant scholarship in writing studies, especially on second language research/teaching, translingual writing practices, and asset-based writing pedagogy has engaged issues of difference in language, race, culture, as well as funds of knowledge, highlighting the impacts of these differences on the academic success of non-native English speakers in US schools and colleges. My dissertation builds on these trends and highlights the narratives, perceptions, and experiences of international multilingual graduate writers and writing consultants at the University of Louisville’s Writing Center to contribute a new, reflexive way of viewing writing differences in our work with students who are from countries other than the US. I employed a qualitative study that is informed by in-depth interviews with five international multilingual graduate writers and two focus group discussions with five writing consultants. I subjected the data I collected from my participants to analytical interpretations using the theoretical lens of the transnational writing framework as well as rhetorical empathy. The alignment of both frameworks is evident in how rhetorical empathy becomes a heuristic tool that writing instructors can use to successfully navigate the contexts of their teaching, either writing centers or writing classrooms––which I argue have increasingly become transnational in nature. Through analysis of international multilingual graduate writers’ interviews and review of their observation data, I show that they are aware of the difference between their prior writing orientation and their current writing situation in the US. Regardless, they possess some knowledge of how writing works, influenced by their linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical competencies. These competencies are leveraged as assets that they possess and would reveal to their writing consultants as long as an atmosphere that welcomes a discussion of their writing assets and tends to allow them to guide us on what we can do with these assets is cultivated. Likewise, I submit that writing professionals (instructors and consultants) need to start to reimagine every encounter of writing instruction the transnational engagement that ties people and places together across borders and adopt a rhetorical empathy stance to create opportunities for changing the Subject and the Other in terms of the knowledge of academic writing. Finally, I offer implications to this research and concluded by offering rhetorical empathy’s applications in writing studies, especially in writing classroom contexts with a suggestion for a move away from having different sections of college writing class and toward making all college writing courses multilingual sections
Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference
The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years
Advances in automatic terminology processing: methodology and applications in focus
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The information and knowledge era, in which we are living, creates challenges in many fields, and terminology is not an exception. The challenges include an exponential growth in the number of specialised documents that are available, in which terms are presented, and the number of newly introduced concepts and terms, which are already beyond our (manual) capacity. A promising solution to this ‘information overload’ would be to employ automatic or semi-automatic procedures to enable individuals and/or small groups to efficiently build high quality terminologies from their own resources which closely reflect their individual objectives and viewpoints. Automatic terminology processing (ATP) techniques have already proved to be quite reliable, and can save human time in terminology processing. However, they are not without weaknesses, one of which is that these techniques often consider terms to be independent lexical units satisfying some criteria, when terms are, in fact, integral parts of a coherent system (a terminology). This observation is supported by the discussion of the notion of terms and terminology and the review of existing approaches in ATP presented in this thesis. In order to overcome the aforementioned weakness, we propose a novel methodology in ATP which is able to extract a terminology as a whole. The proposed methodology is based on knowledge patterns automatically extracted from glossaries, which we considered to be valuable, but overlooked resources. These automatically identified knowledge patterns are used to extract terms, their relations and descriptions from corpora. The extracted information can facilitate the construction of a terminology as a coherent system. The study also aims to discuss applications of ATP, and describes an experiment in which ATP is integrated into a new NLP application: multiplechoice test item generation. The successful integration of the system shows that ATP is a viable technology, and should be exploited more by other NLP applications
Formulaic sequences in Early Modern English: A corpus-assisted historical pragmatic study
This doctoral project identifies formulaic sequences (hereinafter FS and the plural form FSs) in Early Modern English (hereinafter EModE) and intends to investigate the functions they serve in communication and different text types, namely EModE dialogues and letters. Main contributions of the study include, firstly, the study provides solid arguments and further evidence that FSs are constructions in the Construction Grammar instead of exceptions in the traditional grammar-dictionary model. Within this theoreticall framework, I proposed a new working definition of FSs that is inclusive, descriptive, and methodologically neutral. The study also argues that there are fundamental differences between FSs and lexical bundles (LBs), although the latter often treated as an alternative term of FSs or sub-groups of FSs. Nevertheless, after a thorogh review of the characteristics of the two mult-word units, the study argues that despite of the differences, LBs can be upgrated to FSs as long as they fulfill certail sematic, syntactic, and pragmatic criteria. THis forms the fundation of the methodology design of the study. Secondly, the study enhanced the corpus-assisted approach to the identification of FSs, esp. in EModE texts. The approach consists of three steps: preparation, identification, and generalisation. The identification step was further conducted within two phases: automatic generation of LBs for a corpus and manual identification of FSs from LBs. Specifically, in the preparation step, the dissertation critically discussed how spelling variation in EModE texts shall be dealt with in investigations on FSs. I designed a series of criteria for the two-phase identification of FSs. For one thing, I disagree with previous research that two-word LBs shall be excluded from examination by arguing that many of them are formulaic and cannot be captured from longer LBs and the workload of processing the massive number of two-word LBs is actually manageable. For another, the study contributes an easy-to-follow flow chart demonstrating the procedure of the manual identification of FSs from LBs and listing the criteria that guide the decision-making process. Thirdly, the study provides systematic and comprehensive accounts of FSs in EModE dialogues and letters, esp. how their forms are conventionally mapped to their functions. Data analysis were conducted from aspects such as degree of fixedness, grammatical structures, distribution across function categories, multi-functional FSs, genre-specific FSs, etc. General findings suggest that EModE dialogues and letters actually have many similarities regarding the form and function of FSs and general trends of distribution across function categories. However, outstanding differences between the two text types can be observed too. From the perspective of form, the distinction lies in word choice in realisations of certain FSs. From the perspective of meaning/function, the distinction lies in the kinds of functions that need FSs the most or the least and common function combinations. More importantly, the study observed two types of relationships among FSs themselves and the discourse, including horizonal networks and vertical networks, which reflects the complexity of FSs and their identity as constructions. Specifically, three types of horizontal networks of FSs are embedding, attaching, and joining. A pair of new concepts is proposed to describe the vertical networks: superordinate FSs and subordinate FSs. As a result of the vertical networks, three types of functional diviation are observed: function extension, shifting, and specification
On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish
This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are linguistically encoded surprise, or mirativity, and obviousness. An empirical investigation via an audio-enhanced production experiment finds that mirativity and obviousness are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamatives are found not to differ significantly in intonational marking from neutral declaratives, showing that they need not be miratives. Moreover, we find that intonational marking on different discourse particles in natural dialogue correlates with their meaning contribution without being fully determined by it. In part, these findings quantitatively confirm previous qualitative findings on the meaning of intonational configurations in Madrid Spanish. But they also add new insights on the role intonation plays in the negotiation of commitments and expectations between interlocutors
Yabancı dil olarak İngilizce öğreniminde yazma becerisinin dağıtık biliş perspektifinden incelenmesi
This study aimed to reveal the effectiveness of integrating a focus on form
approach to collaborative writing tasks on the EFL learners’ accuracy of the writing
performance by examining the writing process from the distributed cognition perspective.
In line with this purpose, 24 volunteer participants from 10
th
graders of an Anatolian High
School in Adıyaman participated in the study. They were divided into experimental and
control groups and each group had 12 students. The experimental group was exposed to
focus on form instruction about simple past tense structure in English and they were
divided into 3 groups to work collaboratively with their peers on their writing task while
the control group worked individually. They were both given pre-test which is about
writing a story about pictures by using the simple past tense structure and their paragraph
was reformulated by the researcher. Additionally, the experimental group participated in
noticing, stimulated recall, and interview stages. Both groups were given the same writing
task as a post-test after 2 weeks. Qualitative analysis of collaborative dialogues showed
that students benefited from artifacts and instructional practices, and they affected their
writing performance. Furthermore, the experimental group emphasized their positive
opinions towards working collaboratively, video-taped mini-lesson, noticing, and
stimulated recall stages in the interview. Quantitative data analysis demonstrated that the
difference in error scores between the control and experimental groups, measured from
the pre-test to the post-test, was statistically significant. This result confirms that
employing a combination of form-focused instruction and collaborative writing tasks is
an effective approach for enhancing writing accuracy.Bu çalışma, dağıtık biliş perspektifinden yazma sürecini inceleyerek, işbirlikçi
yazma görevlerine form odaklı bir yaklaşımın entegre edilmesinin İngilizce öğrenen
öğrencilerin yazma performansının doğruluğu üzerindeki etkinliğini ortaya koymayı
amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, Adıyaman'daki bir Anadolu Lisesi'nin 10. sınıf
öğrencilerinden 24 gönüllü katılımcı çalışmaya katılmıştır. Katılımcılar deney ve kontrol
gruplarına ayrılmış olup her bir grupta 12 öğrenci bulunmaktadır. Deney grubu,
İngilizcedeki basit geçmiş zaman yapısını form odaklı öğretimle öğrenmiş ve yazma
görevlerinde akranlarıyla iş birliği içinde çalışmak üzere 3 gruba ayrılmıştır, kontrol
grubu ise bireysel olarak çalışmıştır. Her iki gruba da basit geçmiş zaman yapısını
kullanarak verilen resimler hakkında bir hikâye yazma için ön test verilmiş ve paragrafları
araştırmacı tarafından yeniden düzenlenmiştir. Ayrıca, deney grubu farkındalık,
uyarılmış hatırlama ve mülakat aşamalarına katılmıştır. İki hafta sonra her iki gruba da
aynı yazma görevi son test olarak verilmiştir. İşbirlikçi diyalogların nitel analizi,
öğrencilerin araçlardan ve öğretim uygulamalarından faydalandıklarını ve yazma
performanslarını etkilediklerini göstermiştir. Ayrıca, deney grubundaki katılımcılar
görüşmede işbirlikçi çalışmaya, kullanılan araçlara, farkındalık ve uyarılmış hatırlama
aşamalarına yönelik olumlu görüşlerini vurgulamışlardır. Nicel veri analizi, kontrol ve
deney gruplarının ön testi ile son testi arasındaki hata puanları farkının istatistiksel olarak
anlamlı olduğunu göstermiştir. Bu sonuç, form odaklı öğretim ve işbirlikçi yazma
görevlerinin birleştirilerek kullanılmasının yazma doğruluğunu artırmak için etkili bir
yaklaşım olduğunu doğrulamaktadır
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