Censorship challenges to books in Scottish public libraries

Censorship challenges to books in UK public libraries have received renewed attention recently. This study sought to establish the incidence of censorship challenges to books in Scottish public libraries in the years 2005-2009 and the actions taken in response to these challenges. It was found that eight local authorities in Scotland had received formal censorship challenges to books, with a total of 15 challenges throughout the country. The most common action taken in response to these challenges was for the book to be kept in stock in its original position with the rationale for this explained to the complainer, with the second most common action being taken to move the title to another section of the library. Two books were removed from the library in response to a censorship challenge. The largest numbers of challenges were made against books on the basis of sexual material

TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains [Extended version]

Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin

Video violence : cognitive and cultural implications

There is nothing unprecedented about the peak of popularity which is currently being enjoyed by horrific stories and films depicting violent situations. Given the fact that there is a tradition of this type of fiction, however, there are a number of significant changes in just what is today taken to constitute the horrific and shocking, as well as in the manners in which this subject is handled. In this essay I propose to place the phenomenon of contemporary horrific fiction within the context of a wider cultural debate. This will involve the alignment of some of this fiction's underlying assumptions and concerns with some of the theories, beliefs and anxieties which have dominated our century's attempts to understand itself, and with some of the images which contemporary society has found fit to express its conception of itself and of its habitat. The arguments developed here, therefore, build on the understanding that our perceptions of the environment both determine and are expressed in the myths of our times.peer-reviewe

An Essay in Formal Ontology

As conceived by analytic philosophers ontology consists in the application of the methods of mathematical logic to the analysis of ontological discourse. As conceived by realist philosophers such as Meinong and the early Husserl, Reinach and Ingarden, it consists in the investigation of the forms of entities of various types. The suggestion is that formal methods be employed by phenomenological ontologists, and that phenomenological insights may contribute to the construction of adequate formal-ontological languages. The paper sketches an account of what might be involved in this new discipline, an account which is illustrated in application to the formal-ontological problems raised by negative states of affairs

Exploring the Academic/Creative Writing Binary

I began to work on this study in my ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines class during my junior year at Pace University. After being asked to write a paper on what writing looks like in my discipline, I realized that my perceptions of the kinds of writing done by faculty and students in a university English department were limited and constricting as a result of the binary way in which I viewed academic and creative forms of writing. For instance, I had trouble believing that my creative writing professor studied pre-med in undergrad. I continued my research on this topic by developing a study to discover how faculty and undergraduates think about writing in an English department. In conducting this research, I hoped to redefine and illustrate potential overlaps between academic and creative writing and to propose new (perhaps more fluid or capacious) ways of labeling and conveying the kind of writing students and faculty produce. Specifically, I wanted to explore whether these are terms or categories that either groups use, or whether faculty and students’ perceptions of academic and creative writing challenge these categories. I explored these concepts through a qualitative study. After obtaining IRB approval, I devoted one class of Meaghan Brewer’s English 201:Writing in the Discplines to a workshop where students in the class brought in samples of their own writing and then put them into categories and created labels. Students filled out a form giving a rationale for how they labeled different kinds of writing before having a class discussion. I repeated the same process in a composition faculty meeting in the English department. These activities are modeled on activities described in research by composition scholar Anne Ruggles Gere. This highly contextual, qualitative research is commonplace in composition studies and has been present in the majority of my initial literature review. In conducting this study, my largest obstacle was the small amount of time I had to analyze the results of my activities between drafts. However, the data collected exceeded my expectations in that, like in much of the research cited in this paper, I found students had binary views of academic and creative writing despite not using them often as labels. For the most part, they described academic as being constricting and reliant on structure whereas they saw creative as a freer style that allowed them to voice an opinion. On the contrary, faculty used these terms more frequently, but thought about them in less binary ways. After having a group discussion, both faculty and students appeared to have broadened the way they looked at writing which is what I was hoping to encourage with this study. My findings suggest that faculty members need to create curricula that encourage students to see genres in more complex ways. Future research might explore how expanding the approach to teaching genre could redefine student perceptions of college writing