Going all in or going slow: Preferences for radical versus incremental trajectories of behavior change

There are different temporal paths to achieving a goal such as exercising. Somebody with a radical change trajectory will invest large amounts of time and effort into the goal early and then attempt to sustain this level of effort over time. In contrast, somebody with an incremental change trajectory will start small and, over time, increase time and effort until the goal is met. Study 1 (N = 250) tested a measure of preferences for different trajectories as an individual difference. The measure had acceptable convergent and divergent validity and allowed us to detect that preferences for radical change predicted better trait self-regulation and less procrastination. Study 2 (N = 87) investigated how each type of trajectory is mentally represented. Results indicated that radical and incremental change goals are represented verbally in the form of self-talk and suggested that radical change goals are associated with a more action-oriented mindset. Study 3 (N = 176) included an experimental manipulation of change preferences and longitudinal measures of their effects on language learning over the course of one week. Beginners did not form radical plans even when the manipulation had successfully convinced them of the convenience of radical trajectories. In contrast, advanced learners who pursued radical trajectories did set radical intentions and subsequently dedicated 40-50 minutes more practice time throughout the week than those who set incremental intentions. The contribution of this doctoral thesis was to introduce a conceptualization of change trajectory preferences as a new construct and examine predictions about their effects

TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a series of related essays that culminate in a rough outline for a collaboratively designed, coded, and maintained application to replace the Foundation’s website. Whatever benefit might result, replacing archival mechanisms of racial capitalism while remaining within its systemic modes of value creation is at best a form of substitution: it is not an actual change in relations and not a transition to anything. Doing so may, however, allow greater clarity in understanding how poetry is situated within US-based institutions, beyond the images and values that poets and critics in the US often help to maintain. Chapter one, “‘Indianness’ and Omission: 60 Indian Poets,” reads the anthology 60 Indian Poets, published in 2008 in India and the UK (with US distribution), as argument about the contours of Indian Poetry in English and about the contours of India’s relations in the world. It relates Rashmi Sadana’s work on the meanings of English in India to decisions made within the anthology, and look further at Pollock’s conception of cosmopolitanism and vernacularity, particular as it applies to the Indian North-East and the poetry of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. The second chapter, “Archival Power: Individualization, the Racial State, and Institutional Poetry” engages Roderick Ferguson’s concept of archival power to explain the 2015 “crisis” within contemporary US poetry driven by practitioners of conceptual poetry, and an attempted archival act with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter ends with a fragment of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s recent account of US university life as experienced by Black artists and scholars. That chapter is followed by “The Poetry Foundation as Site of Archival Power,” which extends Jodi Melamed’s critique of US university value-creation mechanisms to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation’s website. It argues that the Poetry Foundation functions as a de facto arm of the US university system as outlined in the previous chapter, and aids in capitalist value-creation. “TextFrame: An Open Archive for Poetry,” the fourth chapter, is an attempt to begin thinking a replacement for current mechanisms of archiving non-exclusively anglophone poetry. The fifth chapter, “Narayanan’s Language Events as Free-Tier Application,” documents work imagined for TextFrame, as an application, that has actually already been built: the poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan adapted Robert Desnos’s Language Events for the classroom using a variety of discrete free services, and the present author collaborated with Narayanan in creating a stand-alone Web application. Chapters six, seven, and eight function as case studies to be used in creating templates for providing context to specific poems within any built application. Both of the specific moments covered transmogrify the “anti-psychological.” The sixth chapter, “An Unendurable Age: Ashbery, O’Hara, and 1950s Precursors of ‘Self’ Psychology” thus argues that an anti-psychological ethos is developed in Ashbery and O’Hara’s poems of that moment. It shows that Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) is almost certainly a parody of Gordon Allport’s theory of Personalism, of related strands of 1950s American psychology, and of the poetry that developed alongside them in the 1930s. It follows other critics in looking at midcentury conceptions of schizophrenia as a specifically homosexual disease, and argues for the importance of contemporarily published examples of schizophrenic discourse, particularly those of Harry Stack Sullivan. It argues that Ashbery’s poem “A Boy” can be read as directly engaging those ideas, and opposing them. The shorter discussions follow consider the affinities that Some Trees has with anti- or a-psychological theories of mind that were being developed at Harvard and MIT at the time that Ashbery and O’Hara were in Cambridge, including generative grammar and critiques of philosophical analyticity. The eighth chapter, “Before Conceptualism: Disgust and Over-determination in White-dominated Experimental Poetry in New York, 1999-2003,” highlights Dan Farrell and Lytle Shaw’s very different uses of lyric’s peculiar staging of voice to foreground the multi-furcation of white identities and voice in response to state pressures. The last two chapters take up two corollaries, or theoretical concerns that fell out trying to think a cosmopolitanist application. The first, “Why Not Reddit?” examines existing commercial cosmopolitanist solutions for some of the functionality proposed for the application, and reasons for rejecting them. In doing so, it discusses Thomas Farrell’s construct of “rhetorical culture” in detail, and traces a theory of communication and authorship within a community, particularly with regard to thinking history. The last chapter (and second corollary) is titled “Ethos in Pedagogy as a Limit on Norm Translation.” It establishes the Aristotelian concept of ethos as a pedagogical limit for norm translation. The study’s governing interest is not the conflicts or differences between practitioners or tendencies that are detailed here, but their relative incomprehensibility of those differences outside of their formative contexts

Text and Genre in Reconstruction

In this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship. The essays offer a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, for better or worse. Text and Genre in Reconstruction will appeal to scholars in both the humanities and sciences and provides essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relationship between reader and text in the digital age

Toponym Resolution in Text

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsBackground. In the area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a shared discipline between informatics and geography, the term geo-parsing is used to describe the process of identifying names in text, which in computational linguistics is known as named entity recognition and classification (NERC). The term geo-coding is used for the task of mapping from implicitly geo-referenced datasets (such as structured address records) to explicitly geo-referenced representations (e.g., using latitude and longitude). However, present-day GIS systems provide no automatic geo-coding functionality for unstructured text. In Information Extraction (IE), processing of named entities in text has traditionally been seen as a two-step process comprising a flat text span recognition sub-task and an atomic classification sub-task; relating the text span to a model of the world has been ignored by evaluations such as MUC or ACE (Chinchor (1998); U.S. NIST (2003)). However, spatial and temporal expressions refer to events in space-time, and the grounding of events is a precondition for accurate reasoning. Thus, automatic grounding can improve many applications such as automatic map drawing (e.g. for choosing a focus) and question answering (e.g. , for questions like How far is London from Edinburgh?, given a story in which both occur and can be resolved). Whereas temporal grounding has received considerable attention in the recent past (Mani and Wilson (2000); Setzer (2001)), robust spatial grounding has long been neglected. Concentrating on geographic names for populated places, I define the task of automatic Toponym Resolution (TR) as computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to a representation of the extensional semantics of the location referred to (its referent), such as a geographic latitude/longitude footprint. The task of mapping from names to locations is hard due to insufficient and noisy databases, and a large degree of ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth). In addition, names of places and the boundaries referred to change over time, and databases are incomplete. Objective. I investigate how referentially ambiguous spatial named entities can be grounded, or resolved, with respect to an extensional coordinate model robustly on open-domain news text. I begin by comparing the few algorithms proposed in the literature, and, comparing semiformal, reconstructed descriptions of them, I factor out a shared repertoire of linguistic heuristics (e.g. rules, patterns) and extra-linguistic knowledge sources (e.g. population sizes). I then investigate how to combine these sources of evidence to obtain a superior method. I also investigate the noise effect introduced by the named entity tagging step that toponym resolution relies on in a sequential system pipeline architecture. Scope. In this thesis, I investigate a present-day snapshot of terrestrial geography as represented in the gazetteer defined and, accordingly, a collection of present-day news text. I limit the investigation to populated places; geo-coding of artifact names (e.g. airports or bridges), compositional geographic descriptions (e.g. 40 miles SW of London, near Berlin), for instance, is not attempted. Historic change is a major factor affecting gazetteer construction and ultimately toponym resolution. However, this is beyond the scope of this thesis. Method. While a small number of previous attempts have been made to solve the toponym resolution problem, these were either not evaluated, or evaluation was done by manual inspection of system output instead of curating a reusable reference corpus. Since the relevant literature is scattered across several disciplines (GIS, digital libraries, information retrieval, natural language processing) and descriptions of algorithms are mostly given in informal prose, I attempt to systematically describe them and aim at a reconstruction in a uniform, semi-formal pseudo-code notation for easier re-implementation. A systematic comparison leads to an inventory of heuristics and other sources of evidence. In order to carry out a comparative evaluation procedure, an evaluation resource is required. Unfortunately, to date no gold standard has been curated in the research community. To this end, a reference gazetteer and an associated novel reference corpus with human-labeled referent annotation are created. These are subsequently used to benchmark a selection of the reconstructed algorithms and a novel re-combination of the heuristics catalogued in the inventory. I then compare the performance of the same TR algorithms under three different conditions, namely applying it to the (i) output of human named entity annotation, (ii) automatic annotation using an existing Maximum Entropy sequence tagging model, and (iii) a na¨ıve toponym lookup procedure in a gazetteer. Evaluation. The algorithms implemented in this thesis are evaluated in an intrinsic or component evaluation. To this end, we define a task-specific matching criterion to be used with traditional Precision (P) and Recall (R) evaluation metrics. This matching criterion is lenient with respect to numerical gazetteer imprecision in situations where one toponym instance is marked up with different gazetteer entries in the gold standard and the test set, respectively, but where these refer to the same candidate referent, caused by multiple near-duplicate entries in the reference gazetteer. Main Contributions. The major contributions of this thesis are as follows: • A new reference corpus in which instances of location named entities have been manually annotated with spatial grounding information for populated places, and an associated reference gazetteer, from which the assigned candidate referents are chosen. This reference gazetteer provides numerical latitude/longitude coordinates (such as 51320 North, 0 50 West) as well as hierarchical path descriptions (such as London > UK) with respect to a world wide-coverage, geographic taxonomy constructed by combining several large, but noisy gazetteers. This corpus contains news stories and comprises two sub-corpora, a subset of the REUTERS RCV1 news corpus used for the CoNLL shared task (Tjong Kim Sang and De Meulder (2003)), and a subset of the Fourth Message Understanding Contest (MUC-4; Chinchor (1995)), both available pre-annotated with gold-standard. This corpus will be made available as a reference evaluation resource; • a new method and implemented system to resolve toponyms that is capable of robustly processing unseen text (open-domain online newswire text) and grounding toponym instances in an extensional model using longitude and latitude coordinates and hierarchical path descriptions, using internal (textual) and external (gazetteer) evidence; • an empirical analysis of the relative utility of various heuristic biases and other sources of evidence with respect to the toponym resolution task when analysing free news genre text; • a comparison between a replicated method as described in the literature, which functions as a baseline, and a novel algorithm based on minimality heuristics; and • several exemplary prototypical applications to show how the resulting toponym resolution methods can be used to create visual surrogates for news stories, a geographic exploration tool for news browsing, geographically-aware document retrieval and to answer spatial questions (How far...?) in an open-domain question answering system. These applications only have demonstrative character, as a thorough quantitative, task-based (extrinsic) evaluation of the utility of automatic toponym resolution is beyond the scope of this thesis and left for future work

Sustainable development under the conditions of European integration. Part I

This collective monograph offers the description of sustainable development in the condition of European integration. The authors of individual chapters have chosen such point of view for the topic which they considered as the most important and specific for their field of study using the methods of logical and semantic analysis of concepts, the method of reflection, textual reconstruction and comparative analysis. The theoretical and applied problems of sustainable development in the condition of European integration are investigated in the context of economics, education, cultural, politics and law

Text and Genre in Reconstruction

In this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship. The essays offer a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, for better or worse. Text and Genre in Reconstruction will appeal to scholars in both the humanities and sciences and provides essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relationship between reader and text in the digital age