Laymen’s Narratives in Amouddou’s Eco-documentary: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources

Sociolinguistic variation and the public interest

Although the disparity between sociolinguistic knowledge and popular beliefs about language diversity is well documented, little proactive attention has been given to changing public misconceptions. How can programs about linguistic diversity be presented when the prevailing public language ideology is largely fueled by the principle of linguistic subordination and interpreted in terms of a correctionist model? The approach to dialect awareness presented here is based on the underlying assumption that the public is inherently curious about language differences and that this intrigue can be transformed into public education venues. It connects the legacy of language variation to legitimate historical and cultural themes that are intrinsically interesting to the public, and assumes that the most effective and permanent education takes place when learners discover truths for themselves. It further presumes that positively framed presentations of language differences in socioculural and sociohistoical context hold a greater likelihood of being received by the public than the direct confrontation of seemingly unassailable ideologies. The presentation considers three quite different venues to exemplify engagement: (1) an extended, long-term engagement commitment in a small, historically isolated research community; (2) language documentaries in public education; and (3) the role of activist linguists on university campuses. The presentation demonstrates that the public rhetoric on linguistic diversity can, in fact, be reconciled with a linguistically informed perspective and that language-awareness programs can serve a range of audiences utilizing a variety of venues

TRECVID: evaluating the effectiveness of information retrieval tasks on digital video

TRECVID is an annual exercise which encourages research in information retrieval from digital video by providing a large video test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. TRECVID benchmarking covers both interactive and manual searching by end users, as well as the benchmarking of some supporting technologies including shot boundary detection, extraction of some semantic features, and the automatic segmentation of TV news broadcasts into non-overlapping news stories. TRECVID has a broad range of over 40 participating groups from across the world and as it is now (2004) in its 4th annual cycle it is opportune to stand back and look at the lessons we have learned from the cumulative activity. In this paper we shall present a brief and high-level overview of the TRECVID activity covering the data, the benchmarked tasks, the overall results obtained by groups to date and an overview of the approaches taken by selective groups in some tasks. While progress from one year to the next cannot be measured directly because of the changing nature of the video data we have been using, we shall present a summary of the lessons we have learned from TRECVID and include some pointers on what we feel are the most important of these lessons

The Faculty Notebook, December 2003

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Integrating School Makerspaces into the English Language Arts Curriculum

School Makerspaces have shown great potential to foster powerful learning outcomes for students, including the enhancement of creative problem-solving abilities, the nurturing of “soft skills” such as grit and leadership, as well as deep STEAM knowledge development. Within the school context, however, little attention has been given to how Makerspaces can promote social activism. Students hold passionate views on issues, such as homelessness, e-cigarette smoking, domestic violence, plastic pollution, and street harassment. How can Makerspaces provide an environment that promotes personal learning and self-expression so that these passions take form as social activism? This practitioner perspective details the implementation of a Social Action-Themed Makerspace within a New York City middle school. The author, the school’s Makerspace coordinator, outlines the pedagogical practices used to promote personalized learning, namely the presentation and framing of social issues to students, the centrality of personal choice, the curation of resources to facilitate research, and the freedom of access to tools and materials for product creation. Student learning outcomes are presented, including student-produced documentaries, songs, craftwork, and art pieces. The article concludes with practical challenges for School Makerspace coordinators, as well as future directions that may increase the impact of such spaces

The aesthetics of migration: Reversals of marginality and the socio-political turn

Translation has imposed itself with determination as a condition for intercultural and linguistic exchanges among human beings living in distant parts of the globe for millennia. Not only has it contributed to the understanding of sociocultural structures, political syste ms, and technological and digital processes, but it has also encouraged our knowledge of the world – strengthening our awareness of marginalities, liminalities and otherness, and, certainly, widening our interlinguistic and intercultural, as well as transl inguistic and transcultural horizons

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Immigrant Youth and Digital Disparty in California

This study addresses three key research questions regarding immigrant youth and the digital divide:What are the patterns of home technology use among native-born and immigrant families and youth?What are the causes and consequences of the digital divide for immigrant families and youth?How does technology at CTCs in California benefit immigrant families and youth