Black Labor and the Deep South in Hurston’s The Great Day and Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige

Among the musical representations of Deep South African American life circulating in the 1930s and early 1940s, Ellington’s extended composition Black, Brown, and Beige and Zora Neale Hurston’s staged revue The Great Day stand out for their shared emphasis on the laboring body. This emphasis, I argue, countervailed predominant representations produced in two important spheres of artistic activity at the time. The first, Tin Pan Alley, had inherited much from the legacy of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel theater and tended to present Southern plantation life through nostalgic, bucolic tableaus and through playful “naturally rhythmic” dancing black bodies. The second, intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance, cast the concert spiritual as the music best suited to put black cultural actors on equal footing with their white counterparts, positioning the “soul” as the bearer of African American culture, thus downplaying the role of the body. Building on works from Cedric Robinson and Raymond Williams, this article highlights the ideological work that goes into naturalizing ideas of race and space. In the 1930s and 1940s this ideological work could be seen in what Ellington labeled “the Dixie Chamber of Commerce dream picture of the South.” Through Ellington’s poetry and Hurston’s critical essays, I show the intent of these artists to reimagine the Deep South landscape in ways that highlight the contribution of black labor. Then, through an analysis of Ellington’s music and Hurston’s staging of folkloric songs, I demonstrate the specific ways that each artist went about realizing this intent

Expansion of flight simulator capability for study and solution of aircraft directional control problems on runways

The development, evaluation, and evaluation results of a DC-9-10 runway directional control simulator are described. An existing wide bodied flight simulator was modified to this aircraft configuration. The simulator was structured to use either two of antiskid simulations; (1) an analog mechanization that used aircraft hardware; or (2) a digital software simulation. After the simulation was developed it was evaluated by 14 pilots who made 818 simulated flights. These evaluations involved landings, rejected takeoffs, and various ground maneuvers. Qualitatively most pilots evaluated the simulator as realistic with good potential especially for pilot training for adverse runway conditions

Addressing linguistic inequality in legal settings

Individuals have different linguistic competence in using the ‘standard’/official language(s) set by the state, and the differences can lead to inequality in the justice system. • Translators and interpreters in legal settings can be used as an immediate approach to compensate disadvantaged individuals. • The right to an interpreter and/or translator for those who do not speak, or (far less often) who speak non-standard varieties of the language of the court, is protected in many countries and mainly applies to criminal cases, leaving gaps in other legal cases where this right is not guaranteed. • In non-criminal trials, the responsibility to request interpreters and/or translators often falls either on those in need of the service, who sometimes are unaware of their needs or cannot afford the service, or on the judges who have not received sufficient training and support in recognizing and fulfilling these needs. • Practices addressing the issue include court transcription and interpreting, but even the use of these techniques does not eliminate errors which are extremely difficult to correct afterwards, leaving court participants’ rights unprotected. • More rigorous policies on legal interpretation and translation services are needed and a list of suggestions are provided in this paper

A Model for Language Annotations on the Web

Several annotation models have been proposed to enable a multilingual Semantic Web. Such models hone in on the word and its morphology and assume the language tag and URI comes from external resources. These resources, such as ISO 639 and Glottolog, have limited coverage of the world's languages and have a very limited thesaurus-like structure at best, which hampers language annotation, hence constraining research in Digital Humanities and other fields. To resolve this `outsourced' task of the current models, we developed a model for representing information about languages, the \textbf{Mo}del for \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{A}nnotation (\langmod{}), such that basic language information can be recorded consistently and therewith queried and analyzed as well. This includes the various types of languages, families, and the relations among them. \langmod{} is formalized in OWL so that it can integrate with Linguistic Linked Data resources. Sufficient coverage of \langmod{} is demonstrated with the use case of French

Audubon at Illinois: Selections from the University Library's "Birds of America"

published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe