Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El Material Humano And The Labyrinth Of Postwar Guatemala: On Ethics, Truth, And Justice

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano (2009) grapples with the consequences of Guatemala’s violent past by probing into a once-secret police archive that brings into the present the sufferings of the past. This article demonstrates how the novel unsettles our easy assumptions regarding the relation between documentary truth and the notions of justice and reconciliation. By charting the protagonist’s intellectual and emotional conflicts, I argue that his crisis ultimately serves a homeopathic function that makes possible a special mode of ethical engagement, one which brings into fruitful tension two distinct modes of cognition—thought and affect—and is thus able to register the contradictions and nuances of the human reality of postwar Guatemala. By implication, I claim that the novel shows that an ethics based solely on documentary truths and simplistic conceptions of justice and reconciliation is insufficient, for it loses sight of the fact that such truths are always embedded in an ever-changing matrix of traumas, regrets, compassions, and enmities. El material humano, then, posits an ethics based not on historical truth but on the larger, more redemptive truth of the human predicament

Safeguarding El Salvador’s Transition To Peace And Democracy: A View From The Cultural And Political Magazine Tendencias (1991-2000)

This article examines the role that the cultural and political magazine Tendencias (1991-2000) played in El Salvador’s transition to peace. Specifically, it studies how Tendencias’s contributors tackled some of the key issues of the transition—the failure to reform the economy, the undermining of the peace process by economic and political elites, and the inability of the FMLN to respond to the new political situation—and argues that the magazine served as a counter to El Salvador’s culture of ideological entrenchment. By fostering democratic and rational-critical discussion, Tendencias opened up a new “public sphere” for El Salvador and gave voice to a vibrant and tenacious intellectual culture that has often been overlooked

Spanish named entity recognition in the biomedical domain

Named Entity Recognition in the clinical domain and in languages different from English has the difficulty of the absence of complete dictionaries, the informality of texts, the polysemy of terms, the lack of accordance in the boundaries of an entity, the scarcity of corpora and of other resources available. We present a Named Entity Recognition method for poorly resourced languages. The method was tested with Spanish radiology reports and compared with a conditional random fields system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Spanish Football

The authors analyze the financial situation of the Spanish football industry. They first argue that a relevant analysis of the industry's financial results relies on a careful description of how historical and cultural factors have influenced its organization. Moreover, they stress the important relationship between the industry and television. The authors suggest that the situation of the Spanish football industry suffers from some structural weaknesses in its accounts. However, the situation seems less severe than in other major European football leagues, partly because local authorities in Spain have strong incentives to back football teams.Publicad

Measures of narrative performance in Spanish-speaking children on the test of narrative language-Spanish

textIn the field of speech-language pathology, there is an increasing need for valid and appropriate assessment measures for Spanish-speaking students that can reliably be given by examiners with a wide range of Spanish knowledge and scoring experience. In order to determine the level of detail needed to reliably score a standardized measure of Spanish narrative ability, 15 participants, ranging in Spanish proficiency and experience levels, scored six samples of the experimental version of the Test of Narrative Language-Spanish (TNL-Spanish). Consistency and accuracy of scores were compared with Spanish proficiency levels, comfort levels, and presentation method (written transcript and audio-recorded samples). Results indicated no significant effect for any factor, indicating that examiners of varying levels of Spanish proficiency and experience level can reliably and efficiently score an assessment in Spanish when provided with clear and specific scoring procedures and information regarding the kinds of errors present in language disorders in Spanish.Communication Sciences and Disorder