Reading Between the Lines

“Why do so many people come to our country? They come here and they take pictures, and then they go home and use them to show that we are a terrible place. Why do you do this?” This question was posed to me by a sixteen-year old boy in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti while I was visiting his school on a post-earthquake relief trip in 2012. [excerpt

Reading Between the Lines

Twenty-seven years: the time it took after Paul O’Connell’s return from Vietnam for him to fully reflect on his war experience. O’Connell, a Marine who at the age of eighteen served in the jungles of Vietnam from October 18th, 1968 to October 1st, 1969, was a purple-heart receiving grunt who faced some of the most horrid experiences of guerrilla warfare. His memoir, Between the Lines, is a collection of his letters written home from Vietnam, and reflections about his experiences and the “between the lines” of the correspondences. Throughout his memoir, the themes of heroism, cowardice, suspicion, pride, and integrity are portrayed while his transition home exemplifies emotional and physical change, a loss of innocence, identity, and betrayal by the homecoming society. The timely letters and later reflections have similarities and differences in regards to these motifs, which serve to demonstrate how O’Connell changed after he encountered the homecoming society, and how O’Connell’s soldier’s tale is representative of all veterans. [excerpt

Reading between the lines: attitudinal expressions in text

This is a brief overview of the starting points a project currently proposed and under evaluation by funding agencies. We discuss some of the linguistic methodology we plan to employ to idenitify and analyze attitudinal expressions in text, and touch briefly on how to evaluate our future results

Between the Lines

Narratives employed when writing about a place and building a place have a central theme in common: both weave between the human, personal and emotional experience of place and the physical, spatial and atmospheric place – a dialogue between the inner and outer worlds. This article builds upon a lecture given at the University of Zurich’s Department of Literature’s conference Shifting Grounds: Culture, Literature and Spatial Phenomenologies (2016), addressing several explicit uses of literature to inform the design of contemporary urban place. These uses are drawn from practical experience at Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture, where we use literature to access a deeper understanding of how people perceive and describe their experiences of place as well as descriptions of place. The examples of literature central to our work and the accompanying projects they have informed shed light upon four facets of our contemporary urban landscape and the experience of them: 1. bodily spatial experience, 2. nature, 3. the sensory experience of being in suburban woodland fragments and 4. traffic and sound

Between the lines

2005 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.In my exploration of line and structure of a picture's surface I have relied on analysis, as well as intuitive response to the work as it progresses, as a method of creating art. Attitude is an important element in influencing what inevitably is produced. A rigid mind produces rigid art and, conversely, a more fluid mind can create freer art, art which may therefor evoke an emotional response from an audience, rather than intellectual analysis of form or objects. In my use of materials I chose encaustic for the majority of the works, which requires heat in its application. While researching the history of prehistoric art I serendipitously discovered that heat and fire are commonly associated with shamans in tribal cultures, and since the axis mundi is an integral shamanic motif in this series, it seems appropriate that another shamanic element is included. The material of beeswax is another connection to the shamanic aspect of my work in that it is a natural substance, and thus reinforces the theme of nature in this body of work. It is the shamans' respect and communion with nature, and their art created from this perspective, which has motivated my own artistic investigation as well as inspiring historical research into primitive cultures. The nonobjective forms I have employed serve to function artistically as language or symbols rather that representation of objects. It is this symbolic nature of visual art that is the core of my thesis. This form of art, abstract or nonobjective, relates to music in its structure and transcendence of material reality, as well as explores a temporal dimension. What is communicated in this art is conceptual as well as observational, as much of my imagery is inspired by concepts of natural systems, formed by unseen forces, yet manifested in pattern and structure

Between the Lines: Writing Center Classes in Pedagogical Perspective

The CFP for this spring 2007 issue of Praxis invites us to consider the writing center and the classroom as separate entities with complementary, but ultimately distinct, practices, methods, and goals. This perspective is by no means new. When the first writing labs emerged in the 1940s, they imagined themselves as a counterpoint to the traditional classroom; indeed, many initial explorations of what writing centers could become began with an assertion of what they were not.[1] From those earliest years until now, however, a third entity has existed alongside these seemingly dichotomous forms. The writing center class (or “workshop,” as it’s sometimes called) does represent an alternative to the traditional classroom.[2] It typically meets a handful of times at most; students earn neither credits nor grades for attending, and they sign up voluntarily. At the same time, the material and pedagogical conditions of the writing center class–a group of students, an “expert” instructor, handouts, desks, a chalkboard–can appear quite conventional. In short, by combining elements of the traditional classroom and the writing center, the writing center class is a hybrid form. Those who want to offer this kind of instruction–and there are many reasons to do so–must carefully negotiate that hybridity if they want to succeed.University Writing Cente

Listening between the Lines: Learning Personal Attributes from Conversations

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web applications, by extracting personal attributes from conversations. This problem is more challenging than the established task of information extraction from scientific publications or Wikipedia articles, because dialogues often give merely implicit cues about the speaker. We propose methods for inferring personal attributes, such as profession, age or family status, from conversations using deep learning. Specifically, we propose several Hidden Attribute Models, which are neural networks leveraging attention mechanisms and embeddings. Our methods are trained on a per-predicate basis to output rankings of object values for a given subject-predicate combination (e.g., ranking the doctor and nurse professions high when speakers talk about patients, emergency rooms, etc). Experiments with various conversational texts including Reddit discussions, movie scripts and a collection of crowdsourced personal dialogues demonstrate the viability of our methods and their superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: published in WWW'1