Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts

Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion

The Role of Motion Verbs in Conveying Path-Related Information in English and Slovene Fictive Motion Expressions

The paper presents a study on fictive motion (FM) uses of motion verbs in English and slovene from the point of view of conveying path-related information. An FM expression describes a static scene in terms of motion (e.g. The road weaves through a range of hills). Motion verbs in FM uses do not describe actual motion events, but may refer to certain properties of the path by virtue of their meanings. English and slovene FM expressions exhibit different behaviours in this respect. Many English verbs display meaning components that can be metonymically mapped onto the properties of the path. The meanings of slovene verbs are less specific, so that such properties need to be expressed verb-externally in slovene FM expressions

Walking Women:Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry

Reading early Wordsworth through Adorno, this article suggests that Romantic walking entails the subjugation of external objects through the exercise of an imperial and elevated perception. It then considers Dorothy Wordsworth’s influence over her brother and the possibility that a Romantic ‘eco-poetic’ emerges from the ‘feminine’ perspective 'below' the mountain, and within the domestic landscape. I argue that this gesture away from walking and mountaineering as the demonstration of physical prowess, or as the pursuit of a real or ideal goal, is taken up by three contemporary women poets of landscape. Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Helen Macdonald offer different ways of walking, which dispense with goal-orientation, explore the ethical choices available to perceptual beings, and attempt a more immersive, embodied engagement with the land. Their contribution to contemporary ‘radical landscape poetry’ combines the feminist discourse of ‘situated knowledge’ with an implicitly enactivist approach to human encounters with the environment

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

El tratamiento y la representación de las colocaciones verbales en el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura

A collocation is considered a frequent co-occurrence of two words which hold a syntactic relationship and whose elements enjoy a different status. Given their perception as a unit in language, access to the prominent word (base) involves immediate access to the other item (collocate). In terms of meaning, some combinations tend to be more transparent than others. The pervasiveness of these word associations in language has sparked a strong research interest in the last decades. A compelling reason for this approach may be the fact that they are naturally produced by native speakers but must be actively learned by non-native individuals. Not only has this reality led to their treatment in the general language, but it has also become a legitimate field of study in a wide range of specialized languages, such as the environment, computing, law or tourism, which is our object of study. As a consequence, specialized knowledge resources covering this type of word combinations have seen the light with the primary purpose of offering some extra help to people who deal with this type of language, for example, translators, linguists or other professionals. Nevertheless, there is still much to do in this respect. Taken this into account, it is hypothesized that verb collocations in the specialized language of adventure tourism convey specialized meaning that is worth being collected in terminological products. Therefore, this work endeavors, as its main purpose, to perform a deep analysis of verb collocations in this specialized domain and their implementation in the entries for motion verbs in DicoAdventure, a specialized dictionary of adventure tourism, whose inspirational idea was to highlight the significant role of verbs in the linguistic expression of concepts. Accordingly, the following theoretical objectives were set: first, to cover the linguistic branches which influence specialized lexicography; second, to define the concept of specialized collocation; and third, to examine a vast number of lexicographical and terminological resources so as to discover the items of information that would make an adequate representation of collocations in a specialized dictionary and, then, design a model for such task. Furthermore, the following practical objectives were formulated: first, to extract the motion verbs which would be the bases of the collocations implemented; second, to retrieve the lexical collocations of these verbs; and third, to classify the resulting list of collocations according to the meaning expressed, that is, actual motion or fictive (or metaphorical) motion. The practical steps taken in this research were based on the English monolingual specialized corpus ADVENCOR, which contains promotional texts about adventure tourism, and the use of corpus management software. The results of the theoretical work can be summarized as follows: (1) the specialized language of adventure tourism must be considered as specialized as any others; (2) collocations are not usually encoded in verb entries in dictionaries; and (3) a specialized collocation carries specialized knowledge which must be covered in terminological products. On the other hand, regarding the practical work, 12% of the verbs extracted were selected, as they were the ones expressing motion. However, only 46.61% of them produced collocations according to the extraction criteria established. Last, after applying more strict criteria for the collocation classification, only 25.42% of the verbs along with their collocations were collected in the dictionary. In addition to these results, the theory of Frame Semantics proved useful to understand the meaning of the verbs and their collocates. As for their implementation, which was the primary objective of this doctoral dissertation, the inclusion of verb collocations was of paramount importance for the identification of distinct meanings expressed by one verb in different contexts, as collocates conveyed subtle nuances of meaning. Finally, it was concluded that the incorporation of explanations about the combinations in lay terms facilitates the comprehension of the entries to any type of user, from experts to laypersons, which makes DicoAdventure a terminological product that can render valuable assistance to individuals with distinct specialized expertise.Una colocación es una coaparición frecuente de dos palabras que mantienen una relación sintáctica y cuyos elementos alcanzan un estatus diferente. Puesto que se perciben como una unidad del lenguaje, el acceso al elemento prominente (base) conlleva el acceso inmediato al otro componente (colocativo). Con respecto a su significado, algunas combinaciones tienden a ser más transparentes que otras. La constante presencia de las colocaciones en el lenguaje ha despertado gran interés por su investigación en las últimas décadas. Una razón convincente de este acercamiento podría ser el hecho de que los hablantes nativos las producen de forma natural, mientras que los no nativos deben aprenderlas de manera activa. Esta realidad no solo ha llevado a su tratamiento en el lenguaje general, sino también a que se hayan convertido en un campo de estudio legítimo en una amplia gama de lenguajes especializados, como son el medio ambiente, la informática, el derecho o el turismo, que es el objeto de estudio de esta investigación. Como consecuencia, se han creado recursos de conocimiento especializado con el propósito fundamental de ofrecer ayuda a las personas que interactúan con este tipo de lenguaje, por ejemplo, traductores, lingüistas u otro tipo de profesionales. No obstante, aún queda mucho por hacer en este aspecto. Teniendo esto en cuenta, la hipótesis de este trabajo se basa en la idea de que las colocaciones verbales en el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura expresan significados especializados que merecen ser recopilados en productos terminológicos. Por lo tanto, este trabajo tiene como principal objetivo el estudio exhaustivo de las colocaciones verbales en este campo de especialidad y su implementación en las entradas de los verbos de movimiento en DicoAdventure, un diccionario especializado del turismo de aventura, cuyo punto de partida fue la intención de destacar el importante papel que juegan los verbos en la expresión lingüística de los conceptos. Por consiguiente, se establecieron los siguientes objetivos teóricos: primero, revisar las ramas de la lingüística que ejercen una influencia en la lexicografía especializada; segundo, definir el concepto de colocación especializada; y tercero, examinar un gran número de recursos lexicográficos y terminológicos para descubrir qué tipo de información conformaría una representación adecuada de colocaciones en un diccionario especializado y, a continuación, diseñar un modelo para esta tarea. Además, se propusieron estos objetivos prácticos: primero, extraer los verbos de movimiento que serían las bases de las colocaciones implementadas; segundo, extraer las colocaciones léxicas de estos verbos; y tercero; clasificar la lista resultante de colocaciones según su significado, es decir, movimiento real o movimiento figurado (o metafórico). Los pasos prácticos que se dieron en esta investigación se llevaron a cabo mediante la gestión del corpus especializado monolingüe en inglés ADVENCOR, que contiene textos promocionales sobre el turismo de aventura, y el uso de software de gestión de corpus. Los resultados de la parte teórica del trabajo se pueden resumir de la siguiente manera: (1) el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura debe considerarse tan especializado como otros; (2) las colocaciones no suelen codificarse en las entradas de verbos en los diccionarios; y (3) una colocación especializada contiene conocimiento especializado que debe aparecer en productos terminológicos. Por otro lado, con respecto al trabajo práctico, se seleccionó el 12% de los verbos extraídos, ya que eran los que expresaban movimiento. Sin embargo, solo el 46,61% de ellos produjeron colocaciones según los criterios de extracción establecidos. Por último, después de aplicar criterios más estrictos para la clasificación de las colocaciones, solo el 25,42% de los verbos con sus colocaciones fueron recogidos en el diccionario. Además de estos resultados, se demostró la utilidad de la teoría de la Semántica de Marcos para entender el significado de los verbos y sus colocativos. En cuanto a su implementación, que era el objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral, la inclusión de colocaciones verbales fue de suma importancia para la identificación de los distintos significados expresados por un verbo en diferentes contextos, puesto que los colocativos aportaban sutiles matices de significado. Finalmente, se concluyó que la incorporación de explicaciones sobre las combinaciones en términos legos favorece la comprensión de las entradas por parte de cualquier tipo de usuario, desde expertos a personas no especialistas, lo cual hace de DicoAdventure un producto terminológico que puede proporcionar valiosa ayuda a personas con diversa formación especializada

Identifying landscape relevant natural language using actively crowdsourced landscape descriptions and sentence-transformers

Natural language has proven to be a valuable source of data for various scientific inquiries including landscape perception and preference research. However, large high quality landscape relevant corpora are scare. We here propose and discuss a natural language processing workflow to identify landscape relevant documents in large collections of unstructured text. Using a small curated high quality collection of actively crowdsourced landscape descriptions we identify and extract similar documents from two different corpora (Geograph and WikiHow) using sentence-transformers and cosine similarity scores. We show that 1) sentence-transformers combined with cosine similarity calculations successfully identify similar documents in both Geograph and WikiHow effectively opening the door to the creation of new landscape specific corpora, 2) the proposed sentence-transformer approach outperforms traditional Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency based approaches and 3) the identified documents capture similar topics when compared to the original high quality collection. The presented workflow is transferable to various scientific disciplines in need of domain specific natural language corpora as underlying data