Computer Graphics. Volume 2 - an Annotated Bibliography to the NASA-MSFC Digital Computer Graphics Program

Annotated bibliography on digital computer graphic

Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume presents a group of papers by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. They focus on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it

University of San Diego Bulletin 1968-1969 College for Men

166 pages : illustrations, photographs ; 23 cmhttps://digital.sandiego.edu/coursecatalogs-cfm/1015/thumbnail.jp

Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume presents a group of papers by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. They focus on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it

Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: Few introductory materials are available, and, furthermore, the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought

Artificial intelligence, education and music : the use of artificial intelligence to encourage and facilitate music composition by novices

The goal of the research described in this thesis is to find ways of using artificial intelligence to encourage and facilitate music composition by musical novices, particularly those without traditional musical skills. Two complementary approaches are presented. We show how two recent cognitive theories of harmony can be used to design a new kind of direct manipulation tool for music, known as "Harmony Space", with the expressivity to allow novices to sketch, analyse, modify and compose harmonic sequences simply and clearly by moving two-dimensional patterns on a computer screen linker to a synthesizer. Harmony Space provides novices with a way of describing and controlling harmonic structures and relationships using a single, principled, uniform spatial metaphor at various musical levels; note level, interval level, chord level, harmonic succession level and key level. A prototype interface has been implemented to demonstrate the coherence and feasibility of the design. An investigation with a small number of subjects demonstrates that Harmony Space considerably reduces the prerequisites required for novices to learn about, sketch, analyse and experiment with harmony - activities that would normally be very difficult for them without considerable theoretical knowledge or instrumental skill. The second part of the thesis presents work towards a knowledge-based tutoring system to help novices using the interface to compose chord sequences. It is argued that traditional, remedial intelligent tutoring systems approaches are inadequate for tutoring in domains that require open-ended thinking. The foundation of a new approach is developed based on the exploration and transformation of case studies described in terms of chunks, styles and plans. This approach draws on a characterisation of creativity due to Johnson-Laird (1988). Programs have been implemented to illustrate the feasibility of key parts of the new approach

Internet como factor central na tradução

Mestrado em Tradução EspecializadaThe main objective of this dissertation is to develop a guide for people who set about to carry out a translation. Nowadays, given the multitude of resources available online, translating a text has become much easier – one simply must know how to make the best of these resources. From my experience as a translator, I am aware of how valuable the discovery of a high-quality dictionary, glossary, or other resources can be both in attaining high quality translations and in expediting the processes, especially when it comes to performing a technical translation. I hope my work will help future and present translators in their professional lives.O objectivo principal deste trabalho é elaborar um guia para orientar as pessoas que se empenham em fazer uma tradução, quer ela seja de um texto oral ou escrito. Hoje em dia, face à grande quantidade de fontes de apoio à tradução disponíveis online, traduzir um texto torna-se muito mais fácil – mas é essencial saber como tirar o maior partido dessas fontes. Pela minha experiência como tradutor, sei o quanto a descoberta de um glossário, ou de um dicionário pode significar a diferença na qualidade final do produto de tradução e no tempo dispendido, especialmente quando se trata de uma tradução técnica, pois estes e outros instrumentos podem auxiliar e optimizar todo o trabalho de tradução