The Artist’s Voice and the Written Word: Language in Art from 1960 to 1975

Between 1960 and 1975 there was an outpouring of artists writing critically in the United States, reflecting a mass desire to reclaim the voice of the artist in a critic-dominated art world. Texts in general rapidly spread throughout the artistic landscape during this period; as Conceptual artists challenged notions of visuality and viewership, we see a dramatic increase in artists engaging with experimental writing. This generation of artists, which included Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, had a fascination with the written word’s potential as an art medium, many using the art magazine as an alternative venue to the “elitist” art gallery or museum. This thesis explores the fluid boundaries between art and text during this integral period, bringing to light the ways in which visual language and written language were seamlessly integrated through Conceptual Art in order to challenge the meaning of what art and art writing should be

A Swiss Pocket Knife for Computability

This research is about operational- and complexity-oriented aspects of classical foundations of computability theory. The approach is to re-examine some classical theorems and constructions, but with new criteria for success that are natural from a programming language perspective. Three cornerstones of computability theory are the S-m-ntheorem; Turing's "universal machine"; and Kleene's second recursion theorem. In today's programming language parlance these are respectively partial evaluation, self-interpretation, and reflection. In retrospect it is fascinating that Kleene's 1938 proof is constructive; and in essence builds a self-reproducing program. Computability theory originated in the 1930s, long before the invention of computers and programs. Its emphasis was on delimiting the boundaries of computability. Some milestones include 1936 (Turing), 1938 (Kleene), 1967 (isomorphism of programming languages), 1985 (partial evaluation), 1989 (theory implementation), 1993 (efficient self-interpretation) and 2006 (term register machines). The "Swiss pocket knife" of the title is a programming language that allows efficient computer implementation of all three computability cornerstones, emphasising the third: Kleene's second recursion theorem. We describe experiments with a tree-based computational model aiming for both fast program generation and fast execution of the generated programs.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455

L’organisation et la gestion de l’espace dans la langue et la culture igbo du Nigeria

This study based on Igbo language and literature – especially proverbs and folktales – focuses on the use of space, the way it is distributed, organised and managed. It reveals a highly structured use of a communal space organised around the person, considered as member of the group. Traditions, which protect the communal space and ensure its being handed down from one generation to the next, equally give everyone an individual share in it. This space is both versatile and highly partitioned, closely managed and distributed according to age, gender and the sons’ rank in the family. Folktales describe the human world, represented by the village where life revolves around the house and the market, as close to that of the spirits, with the forest and the stream acting as boundaries. Humans and spirits share this space on the understanding that men are only managing it for a while as representatives of their family

Ontology based Scene Creation for the Development of Automated Vehicles

The introduction of automated vehicles without permanent human supervision demands a functional system description, including functional system boundaries and a comprehensive safety analysis. These inputs to the technical development can be identified and analyzed by a scenario-based approach. Furthermore, to establish an economical test and release process, a large number of scenarios must be identified to obtain meaningful test results. Experts are doing well to identify scenarios that are difficult to handle or unlikely to happen. However, experts are unlikely to identify all scenarios possible based on the knowledge they have on hand. Expert knowledge modeled for computer aided processing may help for the purpose of providing a wide range of scenarios. This contribution reviews ontologies as knowledge-based systems in the field of automated vehicles, and proposes a generation of traffic scenes in natural language as a basis for a scenario creation.Comment: Accepted at the 2018 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 8 pages, 10 figure

Semiospheric transitions: A key to modelling translation

Lotman’s contribution to semiotic theory, anthroposemiotics, the study of artistic texts and defining the relationship between language and culture represent some of the most powerful work produced within the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics. The importance of translation is one of the central principles that unites all of Lotman’s work. In the following paper, we will consider Lotman’s definition of translatability in the context of (1) the definition of semiospheric internal and external boundaries and the importance of crossing these boundaries, (2) the role of no fewer than two languages as a minimal unit of semiotic meaning-generation, (3) culture text-level generation of collective memory, and (4) the ever-present tension in the communication act. In our concluding section, we will offer an extended model of the communication act, based on the fundamental principles given in Jakobson, Sebeok and Lotman, in order to specify important moments of the translation process

Patenting activity in the food safety sector

Research on science and technology policy has heavily relied on patent data. However, relatively few studies of food safety patent activity appear in scholarly literature. This paper provides a discussion on patents as a measure of new knowledge generation in the food safety sector. In so doing, there are inherent challenges to identifying a research taxonomy for this multidisciplinary area. To overcome these challenges, the paper uses a natural language approach that can be applied to other research areas where boundaries of fields are not well defined

Multilingual statistical text analysis, Zipf's law and Hungarian speech generation

The practical challenge of creating a Hungarian e-mail reader has initiated our work on statistical text analysis. The starting point was statistical analysis for automatic discrimination of the language of texts. Later it was extended to automatic re-generation of diacritic signs and more detailed language structure analysis. A parallel study of three different languages-Hungarian, German and English-using text corpora of a similar size gives a possibility for the exploration of both similarities and differences. Corpora of publicly available Internet sources were used. The corpus size was the same (approximately 20 Mbytes, 2.5-3.5 million word forms) for all languages. Besides traditional corpus coverage, word length and occurrence statistics, some new features about prosodic boundaries (sentence initial and final positions, preceding and following a comma) were also computed. Among others, it was found that the coverage of corpora by the most frequent words follows a parallel logarithmic rule for all languages in the 40-85% coverage range, known as Zipf's law in linguistics. The functions are much nearer for English and German than for Hungarian. Further conclusions are also drawn. The language detection and diacritic regeneration applications are discussed in detail with implications on Hungarian speech generation. Diverse further application domains, such as predictive text input, word hyphenation, language modelling in speech recognition, corpus-based speech synthesis, etc. are also foreseen

Shifting language Attitudes in a linguistically diverse learning environment in South Africa

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development on 22 December 2008, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2167/jmmd495.0.This paper draws on post-structuralist theories on language and identity to explore the shifting language attitudes of 15 'black' students over the course of their undergraduate studies at a historically 'white' South African university. All the students speak an indigenous language as their first language. Those students who have been educated in racially mixed schools are relatively at ease in the environment and are able to straddle racial and linguistic boundaries. Those who have been educated in working-class, ethnically homogenous schools enter the institution with a strong desire to preserve their home languages and home identities. For them, English is equated with 'whiteness'. The paper describes the process through which this equation is questioned as English and institutional discourses become more dominant in students' lives, and as relationships with their home communities become strained. By the time the students enter their senior undergraduate years, a shared speech code emerges. The authors argue that this code signals students' dual affiliation to English (and the cultural capital it represents) and to their home identities. In mixing languages across boundaries of school background and across traditional ethnic barriers, the code also signals students' shared group identity as first-generation university students in post-Apartheid South Africa