Topic management :the 'about what-ness' of interaction in student university meetings

PhD ThesisThis study adopts a multimodal conversation analytic approach to the study of educational talk-in-interaction. Specifically, it investigates the management of topical talk in student university meetings within the context of problem-based learning. The analyses draw on a close micro-analytic account of topic initiation, topic development, topic termination and topic transition. It also examines various multi-semiotic resources that the participants utilise during the ongoing sequences of interaction, including gaze, gesture and body posture, as well as orientations to meeting artefacts such as meeting agendas as transition-relevant objects. This approach is consistent with the position that interaction is holistic and multifaceted (Nguyen, 2012). In this respect, and to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study to investigate topic management in student university meetings from a multimodal perspective. It looks at how participants utilise verbal and non-verbal resources to perform an organised sequence of actions according to a certain context to secure a particular outcome. The data is taken from the Newcastle University Corpus of Academic Spoken English (NUCASE) (Walsh, 2014), a one-million-word corpus of academic spoken English, recorded in various sites across the university and incorporating small group sessions from the three faculties of the university: Humanities and Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Science, Agriculture and Engineering. The NUCASE data comprise spoken interactions recorded in seminars, student group meetings, tutorials, PhD supervisions, staff-student consultations, English language classes and sessions involving informal learner talk. The aim of this corpus is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of spoken academic discourse across a range of higher education contexts where there is interactivity. In this study, five transcribed hours of video and audio recordings were analysed, comprising a series of group meetings involving a single group of six undergraduate students working on their final year project for a BSc in Naval Architecture Some of the analyses illustrate that topic management and multimodal resources are intertwined. This is evident in the chairperson’s organised sequential moves through the utilisation of multi-semiotic resources and orientations to meeting artefacts. These sequential moves are employed to signal and make the disjunctive topic transition to the next topic of their meeting. It also illustrates how topic transitions are accepted and oriented to by the co-participants. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the extent to which multiple bodily movements co-occur, which is still not well explored in topic management. It suggests that certain interactional and multimodal resources are utilised by the primary speaker to include a certain participant in topic development. It also reveals the utilisation and interplay of bodily resources to display different forms of topic resistance. Finally, the analyses show how the ii timing, placement and the design of a turn are very crucial to manage the topics of the meetings. The analyses in this thesis have implications for the study of topic management by clarifying the relationship between topic management and multimodality which can deepen our understanding of how topics are managed not only in meeting interactions, but also from a broader perspective. Finally, the analyses have direct implications for higher education research by examining student university meetings as a truly multimodal enterprise and considering how students manage their meeting interaction with no tutor presence

The Equitable Construction Of Social Institutions

My aim was to establish a rationale for co-operative behaviour, based on my own experiences, elaborated and tested through academic research, and then further refined through conversations with a variety of people who might be thought to act in a way that is consistent with the rationale. The methodology explains why this process might be thought appropriate to a doctoral thesis. In the introduction, some of the essential underlying premises of the thesis are presented, together with an outline of the shape of the argument. Briefly, that shape is as follows. A set of ontological, moral, and epistemological commitments are stated. These are then used to derive a methodology, including comparisons with a variety of conventional approaches, and an attempt to assess some of the potential difficulties and disadvantages of the chosen method. The rationale of co-operation that emerged from this process is then presented, and followed by an attempt to explain how the assertions made in the rationale relate to a variety of existing academic discourses. After this, the field work is discussed, both in terms of its progress, and as a report on the sorts of ideas that were offered to me by those with whom I spoke. In conclusion, there is a brief set of reflections on how the research went, and what might be learned from the process

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

Reading poetry and dreams in the wake of Freud

Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to provide an account of certain poetic effects. Poetic texts resemble dreams in that both induce identificatory desires within, while simultaneously estranging, the reading process. In establishing a theoretical connection between poetic texts and drearit-work, the discussion raises issues concerning death, memory and the body. The introduction relates Freudian and post-Freudian articulations of dream-work to the language of poetry, and addresses the problem of attributing desire "in" a literary text. Interweaving the work of Borch-Jacobsen, Derrida and Blanchot, the discussion proposes a different space of poetry. By reconfiguring the subject-of-desire and the structure of poetic address, the thesis argues that poetic "dreams" characterize points in texts which radically question the identity and position of the reader. Several main chapters focus on texts - poems by Frost and Keats, and Freud's reading of literary dreams - in which distinctions between waking and sleeping, familiarity and strangeness, order and confusion are profoundly disturbed. The latter part of the thesis concentrates on a textual "unconscious" that insists undecidably between the cultural and the individual. Poems by Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold and Walcott are shown to figure strange dreams and enact displacements that blur the categories of public and private. Throughout, the study confronts the recurrent interpretive problem of reading "inside" and "outside" textual dreams. This thesis offers an original perspective on reading poetry in conjunction with psychoanalysis, in that it challenges traditional assumptions about phantasy and poetry dependent upon a subject constituted in advance of a poetic event or scene of phantasy. It brings poetry into systematic relation with Freud's work on dreams and consistently identifies conceptual and performative links between psychoanalysis and literature in later modernity

Mental and motor representation for music performance

This research proposes a theory of nonconscious motor representation which precedes mental representation of the outcome of motor actions in music performance. The music performer faces the problem of how to escape sedimented musical paradigms to produce novel configurations of dynamics, timing and tone colour. If the sound were mentally represented as an action goal prior to being produced, it would tend to be assimilated to a known action goal. The proposed theory is intended to account for creativity in music performance, but has implications in other areas for both creativity and motor actions. The investigation began with an ethnographic study of two 'posthardcore' rock bands in London and Bristol. Posthardcore musicians work with minimal explicit knowledge of music theory and cognitive involvement in performance is actively eschewed. Serendipitous musical felicities in performance are valued. Such felicities depend on adjustment and fine control of dynamics, timing and tone colour within the parameters of the given. A selective survey of music aesthetics shows that the defining qualities of music are the production of immanent rather than representational meaning; polysemy; and processuality. Taking an analytic philosophy and cognitive science approach, I argue that apprehensions of immanent meaning depend on relationships between proximal percepts within the specious present. A general argument for nonconceptual perceptual content as perception of relations between magnitudes within the specious present is extended to music and argued to account for both the polysemic richness of music and its processuality. Nonconceptual relational perception can account for novel apprehensions by music listeners, but not for the production of novel configurations by the performer. I argue that motor creativity in music performance is achieved through the nonconscious parameterization of inverse models without conscious representation of the goal of the action. Conscious representation for the performer occurs when they hear their own performance

Love: an approach to texts

This dissertation responds to the question, "What would it be like, what would it mean, to approach texts lovingly?" in terms of the work of 20th-century theorists, writers, and thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Jean-Luc Marion, E. E. Cummings, Rainer Maria Rilke, Teresa Brennan, and W. J. T. Mitchell. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness and place of love in the philosophical canon, the dissertation combines a consideration of affect with these writers' work. Beginning with an exemplary reading of Cy Twombly's painting The Ceiling, the then dissertation adapts Mitchell's question "What do pictures want" to an approach to texts, as defined with reference to Barthes. An introduction and literature review trace the places love in texts by Plato, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, and a host of writers who fall under the rubric of 'affect theorists'. Because an approach to texts is the dissertation's focus, a chapter is spent discussing the possibilities for deconstruction to be part of such an approach. Derrida's work is constellated with that of Cixous, Irigaray, Marion, and Brennan in order to emphasise the integrity of sensory and affective information to such an approach. The writing of Rilke and Cummings provides examples of an authorial approach to texts that can inform a readerly one, and serves to further expand the canon of texts that suggest the possibility of this approach. The final chapter is a second exemplary reading of the story of Moses and the burning bush. Deliberately aiming to stretch the expectations of scholarly work, I combine the anecdotal, the affective, and the textual as modes of engaging with and ways of knowing about love

Love: an approach to texts

This dissertation responds to the question, "What would it be like, what would it mean, to approach texts lovingly?" in terms of the work of 20th-century theorists, writers, and thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Jean-Luc Marion, E. E. Cummings, Rainer Maria Rilke, Teresa Brennan, and W. J. T. Mitchell. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness and place of love in the philosophical canon, the dissertation combines a consideration of affect with these writers' work. Beginning with an exemplary reading of Cy Twombly's painting The Ceiling, the then dissertation adapts Mitchell's question "What do pictures want" to an approach to texts, as defined with reference to Barthes. An introduction and literature review trace the places love in texts by Plato, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, and a host of writers who fall under the rubric of 'affect theorists'. Because an approach to texts is the dissertation's focus, a chapter is spent discussing the possibilities for deconstruction to be part of such an approach. Derrida's work is constellated with that of Cixous, Irigaray, Marion, and Brennan in order to emphasise the integrity of sensory and affective information to such an approach. The writing of Rilke and Cummings provides examples of an authorial approach to texts that can inform a readerly one, and serves to further expand the canon of texts that suggest the possibility of this approach. The final chapter is a second exemplary reading of the story of Moses and the burning bush. Deliberately aiming to stretch the expectations of scholarly work, I combine the anecdotal, the affective, and the textual as modes of engaging with and ways of knowing about love