An endangered oral tradition of the North Atlantic

Dr Leonard is a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall College, the Department of Linguistics and the Scott Polar Research Institute, all at the University of Cambridge. He is an anthropological linguist with research interests in the role of language in the establishment of social and linguistic identities in small speech communities, the ethnography of speaking, endangered languages and cultures, linguistic diversity and language revitalisation. His doctoral research at the University of Oxford focused on the construction of social and linguistic identity in early Iceland, and he has conducted sociolinguistic and ethnographic research in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In 2010, Dr Leonard embarked on a new project to document the endangered oral traditions and communicative practices of the Inughuit people in northwest Greenland.Faroese skjaldur are a genre of oral literature and music comprising rhymes, lullabies and short tales that have existed for centuries and played a part in the transmission — and survival — of the Faroese language. Rich in content, skjaldur illustrate how folklore, language and local knowledge were passed down the generations.While the origins of the genre remain opaque, they were part of a wider tradition of oral literature that included ballads, kvæ ir (poems, tales) and tættir (satirical ballads, often rude and insulting). The nineteenth century, when the Faroese language was most threatened by the colonial language, Danish, saw the flourishing of verbal arts, ethnic music and ballads.The influence of skjaldur and other forms of oral literature on the vernacular language has been disproportionately significant, as Faroese did not develop a written tradition until the nineteenth century. Faroese was never a minority language as such and survived the onslaught of Danish through its position as an oral form in a bilingual environment, with its use restricted to the homestead where oral literature continued to thrive. The contribution of skjaldur to the development of the Faroese language is thus beyond doubt. At present, however, in the increasingly urbanised society of the Faroe Isles, the custom of parents narrating nursery rhymes, counting games, lullabies and folktales to their children is rapidly giving way to more mainstream entertainment media, transmitted in either English and Danish.World Oral Literature Projec

Creative Fidelity in a Changing World

non

Final MA Portfolio

This portfolio is a compilation of graduate research and writing completed as the capstone project for the Master of Arts in English degree with a specialization in professional writing and rhetoric. The first selection is a research paper that reviews how embellishments in graphical representations and infographics affect viewer perception. The second research paper is a content analysis that explores the extent to which visual metaphors are used in ISO public information graphical symbols. The third research paper explores how to create effective video software tutorials and reorganizes existing guidelines into eighteen distinct guidelines in three major categories: accessibility, cognitive design, and affective design. The final selection is a teaching guide geared toward an introductory undergraduate technical writing course

Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos for Gaussian Orthogonal and Symplectic Ensembles

We study the characteristic polynomials of both the Gaussian Orthogonal and Symplectic Ensembles. We show that for both ensembles, powers of the absolute value of the characteristic polynomials converge in law to Gaussian multiplicative chaos measures after normalization for sufficiently small real powers. The main tool is a new asymptotic relation between the fractional moments of the absolute characteristic polynomials of Gaussian Orthogonal, Unitary, and Symplectic Ensembles.Comment: 73 pages. Version 3: Significant expansion of the proofs in Section 6 and Section 7. Corrections for many minor errors and typo

The Development of Photography Training for Recreation and Wellness Marketing

The Department of Recreation and Wellness marketing office previously did not have a standardized photographic workflow to ensure all marketing student employee photographers consistently capture, edit, name, and store digital image files. As a result, the digital photo library contained digital image files of varying quality that were organized inconsistently. These inconsistencies made it difficult for designers to quickly and efficiently locate adequate image files for use in the creation of promotional items. In addition, a reduction in administrative staff and an increase in workload necessitated that new student employees learn new processes through self-instruction. The researcher created a photography workflow with accompanying instructions to guide student employees hired as photographers through the processes of preparing for a shoot, shooting, editing and renaming image files in post-production software, and storing the files within the MediaBeacon digital asset management (DAM) system. To guide student employees on the use of the Adobe Lightroom software and MediaBeacon DAM system, the researcher created instruction manuals providing step-by-step explanations of the various processes referenced within the photography workflow. The researcher also transferred all existing digital image files from the Recreation and Wellness shared drive and external hard drives to the MediaBeacon DAM system. A new file directory organization was created as well as file and folder naming, metadata, and keyword standards. The objective of documentation created for this major project was to improve photographic image quality and maintain the new organization of the digital images on the MediaBeacon DAM system through the process of self-instruction

A semiotic approach to language ideologies: Modelling the changing Icelandic languagescape

Attempts have been made to examine how speakers frame linguistic varieties by employing social semiotic models. Using ethnographic data collected over many years, this article applies such a model to Iceland, once described as the ‘e-coli of linguistics’ – its size, historical isolation and relative linguistic homogeneity create conditions akin to a sociolinguistic laboratory. This semiotic model of language ideologies problematizes the prevailing discourse of linguistic purism at a time of sociolinguistic upheaval. The analysis shows how an essentializing scheme at the heart of Icelandic language policy ensured that linguistic “anomalies” such as “dative disease” and “genitive phobia” indexed essential differences. “Impure” language was indicative of un-Icelandicness. Once monolingual (indeed monodialectal), the Icelandic speech community is increasingly characterized by innovative linguistic transgressions which thus far have not been instrumentalized by language policy makers. It is shown how a semiotic model can help us analyse the function of language ideologies more generally.  &nbsp