Digital filter structures from classical analogue networks

Imperial Users onl

Report on offset agreements: evaluating current Jisc Collections deals. Year 1 – evaluating 2015 deals

This report is the first of three annual evaluations of Jisc Collections offset agreements. The work has been sponsored by Jisc as part of the Jisc Collections Studentship Award at Birkbeck, University of London

A single case study of articulatory adaptation during acoustic mimicry

The distribution of fine-grained phonetic variation can be observed in the speech of members of welldefined social groups. It is evident that such variation must somehow be able to propagate through a speech community from speaker to hearer. However, technological barriers have meant that close and direct study of the articulatory links of this speaker-hearer chain has not, to date, been possible. We present the results of a singlecase study using an ultrasound-based method to investigate temporal and configurational lingual adaptation during mimicry. Our study focuses on allophonic variants of postvocalic /r/ found in speech from Central Scotland. Our results show that our informant was able to adjust tongue gesture timing towards that of the stimulus, but did not alter tongue configuration

Articulatory insights into language variation and change: preliminary findings from an ultrasound study of derhoticization in Scottish English

<p>Scottish English is often cited as a rhotic dialect of English. However, in the 70s and 80s, researchers noticed that postvocalic /r/ was in attrition in Glasgow (Macafee, 1983) and Edinburgh (Romaine, 1978; Johnston and Speitel 1983). Recent research (Stuart-Smith, 2003) confirms that postvocalic /r/ as a canonical phonetically rhotic consonant is being lost in working-class Glaswegian speech. However, auditory and acoustic analysis revealed that the situation was more complicated than simple /r/ vs. zero variation. The derhoticized quality of /r/ seemed to vary socially; in particular male working class speakers often produced intermediate sounds that were difficult to identify. It is clear that although auditory and acoustic analysis are useful, they can only hint at what is going on in the vocal tract. A direct articulatory study is thus motivated.</p> <p>Instrumental phonetic studies that examine the vocal tract during the production of sustained rhotic consonants and in laboratory-based studies of American English /r/ have identified a complex relationship between articulation and acoustics, including articulatory differences with minimal acoustic consequences (starting with Delattre and Freeman, 1968). In other words, different gestural configurations can be used to generate a canonically rhotic consonant. A pilot study (Scobbie and Stuart-Smith, 2006) using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) with a Scottish vernacular speaker revealed something rather different: the occurrence of a strong articulatory retroflex tongue motion, which generated little or no rhotic acoustic consequences because it was timed to occur after phonation had ceased, before pause. This tongue motion was found in a speaker who was weakly rhotic. Thus we may have a situation in which acoustic differences with a sociolinguistic function have, in some prosodic contexts, imperceptible articulatory differences in tongue position, though timing will vary. The situation of language variation and change in Scotland means that an articulatory/acoustic study is likely to give very different results to similar studies of rhotic speakers in the USA (Mielke, Twist, and Archangeli, 2006), and be particularly relevant to understanding social variation.</p> <p>Ultrasound is non-invasive and portable and therefore has great potential as an instrumental method for studying aspects of socially stratified variation: articulatory data can be physically collected in every-day social settings. However the technique requires refinement for effective use in recording locations outside the laboratory (e.g. in school, at home), and the potential impact of using the equipment on speech is not known. Gick (2002) suggest methods for fieldwork, but we are not aware of any study which attempts to quantify the effects of the technique on vernacular speakers.</p> <p>Ultrasound is non-invasive and portable and therefore has great potential as an instrumental method for studying aspects of socially stratified variation: articulatory data can be physically collected in every-day social settings. However the technique requires refinement for effective use in recording locations outside the laboratory (e.g. in school, at home), and the potential impact of using the equipment on speech is not known. Gick (2002) suggest methods for fieldwork, but we are not aware of any study which attempts to quantify the effects of the technique on vernacular speakers.</p&gt

Public Libraries and Knowledge Politics

[Preprint of a forthcoming book chapter] To complement contemporary discussions on open access, this chapter considers public libraries as one element of the longer history of access to scholarly knowledge. A historical perspective reveals that access to knowledge has undergone a long, slow process of change, related to social, technical, and political developments in printing, mass literacy, universities, and libraries. Until the advent of the digital technologies which enable the open access movement, public access to the scholarly record required physical access to printed works. Public libraries helped facilitate this, fulfilling a vital role in extending access to scholarship beyond the academy. Yet the complex power dynamics at play in the dissemination of ideas are visible in the creation of public libraries, through the role of philanthropy, Enlightenment notions of self-improvement, and the class politics of the Victorian era. Examining these origins reveals that current debates around the consequences of widening public access to scholarship – and how this expansion should be paid for – are nothing new. The liberal ideals underpinning librarianship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are still present in the digital era, and exploring the biases and contradictions contained within public libraries’ history may give us pause when considering the political context of scholarly publishing today

Fee waivers for open access journals

Open access journals which charge article processing charges (APCs) sometimes offer fee waivers to authors who cannot afford to pay them. This article measures the extent of this practice among the largest toll access and open access publishers by gathering stated fee waiver policies from publishers’ websites. A majority (68.8%) were found to offer fee waivers and sometimes they are only available to authors from low- and middle-income countries. This has implications for the ability of authors without funding to publish in journals from these publishers

Access, ethics and piracy

Ownership of intellectual property rights for a large proportion of the scholarly record is held by publishers, so a majority of journal articles are behind paywalls and unavailable to most people. As a result some readers are encouraged to use pirate websites such as Sci-Hub to access them, a practice that is alternately regarded as criminal and unethical or as a justified act of civil disobedience. This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge. By doing so, it is shown that piracy is an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape that can render the current intellectual property regime irrelevant. If we wish to actively construct a true scholarly commons, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge towards the creation of an open scholarly communication system that is fit for purpose

Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014

This dataset contains details of 6,943 article processing charges (APCs) paid by 25 higher education institutions in the UK during 2014. The data was collected as part of Jisc Collections’ APC data collection project and has been released with permission from the institutions who provided the data. The data has been aggregated, normalized, and archived as a single CSV file. It will be of interest to those seeking to understand the scale of open access payments within the UK, and could be reused by combining it with subscription and APC expenditure data from other sources

The role of gesture delay in coda /r/ weakening: an articulatory, auditory and acoustic study

The cross-linguistic tendency of coda consonants to weaken, vocalize, or be deleted is shown to have a phonetic basis, resulting from gesture reduction, or variation in gesture timing. This study investigates the effects of the timing of the anterior tongue gesture for coda /r/ on acoustics and perceived strength of rhoticity, making use of two sociolects of Central Scotland (working- and middle-class) where coda /r/ is weakening and strengthening, respectively. Previous articulatory analysis revealed a strong tendency for these sociolects to use different coda /r/ tongue configurations—working- and middle-class speakers tend to use tip/front raised and bunched variants, respectively; however, this finding does not explain working-class /r/ weakening. A correlational analysis in the current study showed a robust relationship between anterior lingual gesture timing, F3, and percept of rhoticity. A linear mixed effects regression analysis showed that both speaker social class and linguistic factors (word structure and the checked/unchecked status of the prerhotic vowel) had significant effects on tongue gesture timing and formant values. This study provides further evidence that gesture delay can be a phonetic mechanism for coda rhotic weakening and apparent loss, but social class emerges as the dominant factor driving lingual gesture timing variation

Digitisation Benchmarking Project Report

Enabling access to digitised, copyright cleared texts on module reading lists is a highly valued service to students and academic staff. However it appears that there is very little ability to measure the effectiveness of this service or to identify a benchmark in order to understand whether a good service is being provided to customers. This project was set up to address this by aiming to understand the digitisation service in different institutions, establish robust measurements and a realistic initial benchmark. Thirteen institutions took part in the year-long project. The recorded activity included collecting data for all new and renewal digitisation requests and the average time it took to make the item available online. This was done across four sample weeks within the academic year. This data has identified the peaks in service across all the institutions and established an average turnaround time of 7.6 days which can be used to benchmark our services; something we did not have before this project. In addition, the recorded activity has resulted in several immediate impacts for a number of the institutions. These include: • upskilling staff to deal with peaks or bring the scanning in-house; • employing temporary staff to deal with backlogs; • investing in new scanning equipment; • researching potential software solutions and in one case the purchase of a software package. For all institutions the project has enabled them to really focus on their service in order to identify where improvements can be made which ultimately benefit the customers. The future is a little harder to determine, particularly with the ever-changing digital information landscape. However, the project has created a community of digitisation service professionals who are now connected and have shared their knowledge and their experience to increase their own understanding of digitisation in their own and academic institutions