Antiquity after Repatriation: New Perspectives on the Debate over Cultural Property

Today, the legacies of 19th century imperialism and colonialism are ever-present inside the West’s most prestigious encyclopedic museums, powerful institutions that continue to retain antiquities illicitly taken from countries during times of colonial rule, economic turmoil, or military conflict. Since the 1970s, more and more countries have come forward to request that Western museums return many of these antiquities. Contentious debates between museums and origin countries have resulted, producing large volumes of scholarship arguing both for and against repatriation. One common factor that links almost all of these arguments, however, is speculation over the fate of antiquities after repatriation. In this talk, I first examine how scholarly arguments made for and against repatriation frequently invoke speculation rather than tangible evidence when discussing the fate of antiquities after repatriation. Arguing against predominantly speculative arguments, I will introduce original research conducted throughout Italy during May 2018, wherein I ascertained the current status and locations of nearly 40 antiquities repatriated to Italy from the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2007. Discussing my findings, I will showcase how additional research concentrating on antiquities post-repatriation can help cast a new light on speculative arguments for and against repatriation. Findings from one particular instance of repatriation cannot be universally applied to all repatriation controversies. However, showcasing the insights obtained through my research in Italy, I argue that around the world, studying the fate of antiquities after repatriation can generate new perspectives on repatriation and help museums and origin countries construct productive frameworks for resolving repatriation controversies

Task-driven programming pedagogy in the digital humanities

In this chapter, we advocate for a task-driven approach to teaching computer programming to students of the digital humanities (DH). Our perspective is grounded first in Birnbaum's (2014) plenary address to the University of Pittsburgh Faculty Senate (Birnbaum 2014), in which he argued that coding, like writing, should be taught across the liberal arts curriculum in domain-appropriate ways. This position argued that (1) coding is not an esoteric specialization to be taught solely by computer scientists, and that (2) coding might be taught most effectively in the context of different disciplines. Here, we present a method for embedding Digital Humanities education, and more specifically programming pedagogy, within the long-standing traditions of the Humanities and argue that this approach works most effectively when new learners have access to context-specific mentorship. Our second point of reference lies with oral-proficiency-oriented (OP) foreign language pedagogy. Within an OP model, the ability to communicate in a foreign language is a skill, and the primary goal for learners who seek to acquire that skill is not an academic understanding of the grammar of a language, but, instead, the ability to function successfully within realistic contextualized human interactions. Seen from this perspective, computer-programming curricula organized around the features of the programming language might be compared to older grammar-and-translation foreign-language pedagogies. What we advocate instead is that the ability to use a programming language (programming proficiency) is best acquired in the context of performing contextualized, discipline-conscious tasks that are meaningful to humanists, an approach that has parallels to OP language learning

Leveraging different meronym discovery methods for bridging resolution in French

International audienceThis paper presents a statistical system for resolving bridging descriptions in French, a language for which current lexical resources have a very low overage. The system is similar to that developed for English by Poesio but it was enriched to integrate meronymic information extracted automatically from both web queries and raw text using syntactic patterns. Through various experiments on the DEDE corpus, we show that although still mediocre the performance of our system compare favorably to those obtained by Poesio for English. In addition, our evaluation indicates that the different meronym extraction methods have a cumulative effect, but that the text pattern-based extraction method is more robust and leads to higher accuracy than the web-based approach

Point-Counterpoint: Value of School Textbooks

Educators frequently are involved in textbook adoptions in various content areas, an important activity because textbook programs may define school curricula by dictating what is taught, in what sequence, and for how long. Recently, education groups have criticized school textbooks for being boring, incoherent, and dumbed-down. Viewed from one perspective the selection of new textbooks offers little hope for improving the school reading program because by their nature textbooks can inhibit the teaching of thinking. Viewed from a different perspective, textbooks offer the potential for much improvement in the reading program, if features of the text are used to the fullest with a critical approach. Educators looking to improve the reading programs in their schools may reasonably ask, What are the positive and negative values of using textbooks? This point-counterpoint discussion focuses on four issues involved in answering that question

Lexical Co-occurrence: The Missing Link

Aside from syntax, linguistic knowledge can be separated into two distinct parts, encyclopedic knowledge and dictionary knowledge. Encyclopedic knowledge describes the world whereas the dictionary describes individual word features, thus capturing lexical knowledge. Among the various types of lexical knowledge, one has generally been overlooked and should bring new results in computational linguistics: co-occurrence knowledge. Co-occurrence knowledge stands for the extent to which an item is specified by its environment independently of syntactic or semantic reasons. The basic concept is that of a lexical relation due to Saussure [49]. A lexical relation between two units of language stands for a correlation of common appearance of the two units in the utterances of the language

Computational Aspects of Language Acquisition from World to Word

This paper surveys and evaluates research on the subject of language acquisition. Emphasis is put on computational aspects of the problem, and our discussion is based on a critical presentation of a group of systems that have been developed and that we found the most relevant to our topic

The representation of planning strategies

AbstractAn analysis of strategies, recognizable abstract patterns of planned behavior, highlights the difference between the assumptions that people make about their own planning processes and the representational commitments made in current automated planning systems. This article describes a project to collect and represent strategies on a large scale to identify the representational components of our commonsense understanding of intentional action. Three hundred and seventy-two strategies were collected from ten different planning domains. Each was represented in a pre-formal manner designed to reveal the assumptions that these strategies make concerning the human planning process. The contents of these representations, consisting of nearly one thousand unique concepts, were then collected and organized into forty-eight groups that outline the representational requirements of strategic planning systems