615 research outputs found
Multiethnic Societies of Central Asia and Siberia Represented in Indigenous Oral and Written Literature
Central Asia and Siberia are characterized by multiethnic societies formed by a patchwork of often small ethnic groups. At the same time large parts of them have been dominated by state languages, especially Russian and Chinese. On a local level the languages of the autochthonous people often play a role parallel to the central national language. The contributions of this conference proceeding follow up on topics such as: What was or is collected and how can it be used under changed conditions in the research landscape, how does it help local ethnic communities to understand and preserve their own culture and language? Do the spatially dispersed but often networked collections support research on the ground? What contribution do these collections make to the local languages and cultures against the backdrop of dwindling attention to endangered groups? These and other questions are discussed against the background of the important role libraries and private collections play for multiethnic societies in often remote regions that are difficult to reach
Retracing the 1910 Carruthers Royal Geographical Society Expedition to the Turgen Mountains of Mongolia – Reconstruction of a Century of Glacial Change
The Turgen Mountains lie in northwestern Mongolia, roughly 80 kilometers south of the Russian border. The area was visited in 1910 by a Royal Geographical Society (RGS) expedition led by Douglas Carruthers. They undertook an extensive survey of the range and produced a detailed topographic map. They also documented the extent of the glaciers with photographs. This modern study consisted of three phases. The first step was to procure the historical documents from the RGS in London, including copies of the photos, journal entries, and the map. Field work in Mongolia entailed traveling to the remote study site and retracing portions the 1910 expedition. Camera locations were matched to the historical photographs and repeat images taken. In addition, the termini of the two main glacial lobes were surveyed by GPS. Finally, spatial analysis was conducted in the computer laboratory using a GIS to generate a „historic‟ elevation model from the 1910 map and compare it to a modern DEM generated from SRTM data. Map analysis software was employed to evaluate cartometric accuracy of the 1910 map against modern Russian topographic sheets. The results of the DEM and map analysis were then validated using the field GPS data and remotely sensed imagery to quantitatively describe the changes in the glacial system. The repeat photography was analyzed using photogrammetric techniques to measure glacier changes. Also, a custom cartographic product was produced in the style of the 1910 Carruthers map. It displays the extent of the glaciers in 2010 and the locations of repeat photography stations for future expeditions. Placing the results of this study alongside previous work paints a clear picture of the Turgen glacial regime over the last century. The results suggest that while the snow and ice volume on the summits appears to be intact, lower elevation glaciers show significant ablation. This study successively demonstrates the utility of using historic expedition documents to extend the modern record of glacial change
Multiethnic Societies of Central Asia and Siberia Represented in Indigenous Oral and Written Literature
Central Asia and Siberia are characterized by multiethnic societies formed by a patchwork of often small ethnic groups. At the same time large parts of them have been dominated by state languages, especially Russian and Chinese. On a local level the languages of the autochthonous people often play a role parallel to the central national language. The contributions of this conference proceeding follow up on topics such as: What was or is collected and how can it be used under changed conditions in the research landscape, how does it help local ethnic communities to understand and preserve their own culture and language? Do the spatially dispersed but often networked collections support research on the ground? What contribution do these collections make to the local languages and cultures against the backdrop of dwindling attention to endangered groups? These and other questions are discussed against the background of the important role libraries and private collections play for multiethnic societies in often remote regions that are difficult to reach
The Glacier Complexes of the Mountain Massifs of the North-West of Inner Asia and their Dynamics
The subject of this paper is
the glaciation of the mountain massifs
Mongun-Taiga, Tavan-Boghd-Ola, Turgeni-
Nuru, and Harhira-Nuru. The glaciation is
represented mostly by small forms that
sometimes form a single complex of domeshaped
peaks. According to the authors,
the modern glaciated area of the mountain
massifs is 21.2 km2 (Tavan-Boghd-Ola),
20.3 km2 (Mongun-Taiga), 42 km2 (Turgeni-
Nuru), and 33.1 km2 (Harhira-Nuru).
The area of the glaciers has been shrinking
since the mid 1960’s. In 1995–2008, the rate
of reduction of the glaciers’ area has grown
considerably: valley glaciers were rapidly
degrading and splitting; accumulation
of morainic material in the lower parts
of the glaciers accelerated. Small glaciers
transformed into snowfields and rock
glaciers. There has been also a degradation
of the highest parts of the glaciers and the
collapse of the glacial complexes with a
single zone of accumulation into isolated
from each other glaciers. Reduced snow
cover area has led to a rise in the firn
line and the disintegration of a common
accumulation area of the glacial complex.
In the of the Mongun-Taiga massif, in 1995–
2008, the firn line rose by 200–300 m. The
reduction of the glaciers significantly lagged
behind the change in the position of the
accumulation area boundary. In the past two
years, there has been a significant recovery
of the glaciers that could eventually lead to
their slower degradation or stabilization of
the glaciers in the study area
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A high level approach to Arabic sentence recognition
The aim of this work is to develop sentence recognition system inspired by the human reading process. Cognitive studies observed that the human tended to read a word as a whole at a time. He considers the global word shapes and uses contextual knowledge to infer and discriminate a word among other possible words. The sentence recognition system is a fully integrated system; a word level recogniser (baseline system) integrated with linguistic knowledge post-processing module. The presented baseline system is holistic word-based recognition approach characterised as probabilistic ranked task. The output of the system is multiple recognition hypotheses (N-best word lattice). The basic unit is the word rather than the character; it does not rely on any segmentation or require baseline detection. The considered linguistic knowledge to re-rank the output of the existing baseline system is the standard n-gram Statistical Language Models (SLMs). The candidates are re-ranked through exploiting phrase perplexity score. The system is an OCR system that depends on HMM models utilizing the HTK Toolkit. The baseline system supported by global transformation features extracted from binary word images. The adopted features' extraction technique is the block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) applied to the whole word image. Feature vectors extracted using block-based DCT with non-overlapping sub-block of size 8x8 pixels. The applied HMMs to the task are mono-model discrete one-dimensional HMMs (Bakis Model). A balanced actual scanned and synthetic database of word-image has been constructed to ensure an even distribution of word samples. The Arabic words are typewritten in five fonts having a size 14 points in a plain style. The statistical language models and lexicon words are extracted from The Holy Qur‟an. The systems are applied on word images with no overlap between the training and testing datasets. The actual scanned database is used to evaluate the word recogniser. The synthetic database is a large amount of data acquired for a reliable training of sentence recognition systems. This word recogniser evaluated in mono-font and multi-font contexts. The two types of word recogniser have been used to achieve a final recognition accuracy of99.30% and 73.47% in mono-font and multi-font, respectively. The achieved average accuracy by the sentence recogniser is 67.24% improved to 78.35% on average when using 5-gram post-processing. The complexity and accuracy of the post-processing module are evaluated and found that 4-gram is more suitable than 5-gram; it is much faster at an average improvement of 76.89%
Central Asian Sources and Central Asian Research
In October 2014 about thirty scholars from Asia and Europe came together for a conference to discuss different kinds of sources for the research on Central Asia. From museum collections and ancient manuscripts to modern newspapers and pulp fiction and the wind horses flying against the blue sky of Mongolia there was a wide range of topics. Modern data processing and data management and the problems of handling five different languages and scripts for a dictionary project were leading us into the modern digital age. The dominating theme of the whole conference was the importance of collections of source material found in libraries and archives, their preservation and expansion for future generations of scholars. Some of the finest presentations were selected for this volume and are now published for a wider audience
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Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution
This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy.
The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center.
The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way.
“Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought
The picture of Dongmun Yuhae : lexicographic description and review of its functions as a dictionary
This thesis addresses the problem of situating Dongmun Yuhae, a Chinese-Korean-Manchu dictionary published by
Joseon’s Bureau of Interpreters in 1748, within the crisis of identity afflicting the Joseon Dynasty. To achieve this, it
is proposed that an analysis concerning a dictionary focuses on its inherent nature as a lexicographic tool, through a
lexicographic description and review of its functions. Understanding Dongmun Yuhae’s functions ensures that the
dictionary is not analysed according to its individual parts in separation from each other, but rather according to its
whole design to produce a more comprehensive representation.
The analysis mainly compares the functions of Dongmun Yuhae that have been explicitly stated in the postface of
Dongmun Yuhae (Manchu vocabulary consultation) and the presumed function described by other research
(vernacular Chinese consultation). Based on the results of macrostructural, microstructural and mediostructural
analysis, Dongmun Yuhae is proven to be designed to fully support the consultation of Manchu vocabulary for its
target users, students and interpreters of the Bureau of Interpreters. Against the crisis of identity of Joseon,
Dongmun Yuhae reveals the diplomatic function of Manchu and its importance in Joseon’s search for legitimacy as
the last bastion of Confucian cultures and value.
Historical sources support the description and review of Dongmun Yuhae’s main function and shows that despite the
crisis of identity and need for Joseon’s court and intellectuals to prove to be the deserving heir of Ming’s legacy,
Joseon court still needed to maintain diplomatic relationship with Qing Dynasty. DMYH was one of the many steps
taken to augment its cultural identity. To sum up, the cultural and political crisis of identities and linguistic situations
are reflected in DMYH’s design and functions
Investigating Multilingual, Multi-script Support in Lucene/Solr Library Applications
Yale has developed over many years a highly-structured, high-quality multilingual catalog of bibliographic data. Almost 50% of the collection represents non-English materials in over 650 languages, and includes many different non-Roman scripts. Faculty, students, researchers, and staff would like to make full use of this original script content for resource discovery. While the underlying textual data are in place, effective indexing, retrieval and display functionality for the non-Roman script content is not available within our bibliographic discovery applications, Orbis and Yufind. Opportunities now exist in the Unicode, Lucene/Solr computing environment to bridge the functionality gap and achieve internationalization of the Yale Library catalog. While most parts of this study focus on the Yale environment, in the absence of other such studies it is hoped that the findings will be of interest to a much larger community.Arcadia Foundatio
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