Reading Between the Lines

Twenty-seven years: the time it took after Paul O’Connell’s return from Vietnam for him to fully reflect on his war experience. O’Connell, a Marine who at the age of eighteen served in the jungles of Vietnam from October 18th, 1968 to October 1st, 1969, was a purple-heart receiving grunt who faced some of the most horrid experiences of guerrilla warfare. His memoir, Between the Lines, is a collection of his letters written home from Vietnam, and reflections about his experiences and the “between the lines” of the correspondences. Throughout his memoir, the themes of heroism, cowardice, suspicion, pride, and integrity are portrayed while his transition home exemplifies emotional and physical change, a loss of innocence, identity, and betrayal by the homecoming society. The timely letters and later reflections have similarities and differences in regards to these motifs, which serve to demonstrate how O’Connell changed after he encountered the homecoming society, and how O’Connell’s soldier’s tale is representative of all veterans. [excerpt

Reading Between the Lines

“Why do so many people come to our country? They come here and they take pictures, and then they go home and use them to show that we are a terrible place. Why do you do this?” This question was posed to me by a sixteen-year old boy in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti while I was visiting his school on a post-earthquake relief trip in 2012. [excerpt

Reading Between the Lines

Computers are usually blamed for the rise in newspaper linesetting errors. We have all frequently had the experience: reading to the end of one line of text, only to find that the next line has no grammatical connection. The answer is usually a dropped line or transposed lines. If several lines are printed in scrambled order, the rest can be a challenge to re-order

Reading Between the Lines

Professors explore what gets lost and found in translations of great literary works

Reading Between the Lines: Using Citations to Understand Anthropologists’ Reading Patterns

Academic libraries want to collect the materials most useful to researchers, yet how can libraries know how successful they are? While Berkeley’s George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library collects data on which books circulate, it is difficult to evaluate how materials are actually being used to further the discipline of anthropology. In this article, we examine sources cited by our a) faculty members, b) dissertation writers, and c) honors thesis students to better understand how anthropologists read when conducting research. This paper compares materials used across subfields and research levels to highlight patterns in citations within this discipline, leading to new insights that will improve collection development among anthropology librarians

Reading Between the Lines

The non-normative structural possibilities of poetry, with its focus on emotion, imagery and sound, makes it a useful way to portray inner experiences that are difficult to express through traditionally descriptive, more prosaic language. As a lecturer, artistic designer and researcher with dyslexia I have often had to use alternative paths to succeed professionally. Both professionally and privately I share arising complexities of my inner intellectual and felt life through poetry. This is a flow of consciousness about my dyslexia

Reading between the lines: attitudinal expressions in text

This is a brief overview of the starting points a project currently proposed and under evaluation by funding agencies. We discuss some of the linguistic methodology we plan to employ to idenitify and analyze attitudinal expressions in text, and touch briefly on how to evaluate our future results

Reading Between the Blurred Lines of Fisher v. University of Texas

After more than eight months of anticipation and speculation, the Supreme Court finally issued its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Contrary to fears held by some and hopes held by others, the Court did not use the case as an opportunity to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, thereby prohibiting the consideration of race in higher education admissions decisions. Instead, the Court vacated the Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding the University of Texas’ (“UT” or “University”) race-based admissions policy and remanded the case “for further proceedings consistent with [the] opinion.” At first glance, the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy appears to be a straight forward tutorial regarding the parameters of strict scrutiny by which courts are to examine the constitutionality of race-based admissions plans. After concluding that the Fifth Circuit failed to analyze the UT plan under the proper constitutional standard due to the deference shown to the University during its narrow tailoring analysis, the Court decided that “fairness to the litigants and the courts that heard the case requires that it be remanded so that the admissions process can be considered and judged under a correct analysis.” While the University and other affirmative action supporters may view the Court’s decision as an optimistic signpost for the future of race-based admissions policies, this Essay fears that, unfortunately, such optimism may be misplaced. It argues that a closer reading of the opinion reveals troubling language and sentiments that could detrimentally impact both the UT admissions plan, specifically, and the future of racial diversity in higher education, more broadly