Edward Bliss Emerson\u27s Transnational Journal: Danish West Indies, Puerto Rico, New England, 1831-1834

The journal and letters written by Edward Bliss Emerson in the Caribbean provide exciting, idyllic, and at times troublesome visions of that region, but also insights on the life of a sick, poor, religious and brilliant young man. Emerson’s reflections on life in St. Croix remain unquoted, and although brief excerpts from the Puerto Rico portion of the journal appeared in print in 1959 and 1991, his more extensive text supplements the contemporary publications, which only praised the colonial administration. A third, and equally important location, is the implicit base for his perspective – New England in the period of Jacksonian populist democracy. The journal presents terse reminders of daily activities, mixed with extensive descriptions of landscape, exotic civic and religious observances, business and social customs, fruits, music and sports, with personal meditations on Edward’s readings, his search for health, and his adaptation to a new life away from his family, with little prospect of wealth or longevity. His letters include periodic reckonings of the benefits and disadvantages that he saw to life in Puerto Rico. This diverse eyewitness account represents an important resource for researchers of Caribbean society and culture

Combining Knowledge- and Corpus-based Word-Sense-Disambiguation Methods

In this paper we concentrate on the resolution of the lexical ambiguity that arises when a given word has several different meanings. This specific task is commonly referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). The task of WSD consists of assigning the correct sense to words using an electronic dictionary as the source of word definitions. We present two WSD methods based on two main methodological approaches in this research area: a knowledge-based method and a corpus-based method. Our hypothesis is that word-sense disambiguation requires several knowledge sources in order to solve the semantic ambiguity of the words. These sources can be of different kinds--- for example, syntagmatic, paradigmatic or statistical information. Our approach combines various sources of knowledge, through combinations of the two WSD methods mentioned above. Mainly, the paper concentrates on how to combine these methods and sources of information in order to achieve good results in the disambiguation. Finally, this paper presents a comprehensive study and experimental work on evaluation of the methods and their combinations

La difusión en Hispanoamérica de las primeras publicaciones españolas sobre vacuna (1799-1804)

This article indentifies the first sources of information on the smallpox vaccine and their dissemination according to local documents of the time. As of 1799 the periodical press in Latin America and Madrid played a major role in the wide and rapid spreading of information on the subject publishing European as well as American news. From among the first nineteen books and leaflets publicizing the vaccine, which were written or translated by Spaniards and published before 1804, eight were printed in Catalonia, five in Madrid and the rest in Bilbao, Montpellier, Cádiz, Pamplona and Saragossa. Six out of this stock of nineteen texts are translations from French, eight of them were quoted or reprinted in America. This intensive education and documentary activity, headed by Government publications in Spain and the Colonies, preceded the Vaccination Expedition of the Spanish Government. So one of the Expedition's most noteworthy results was that, upon landing in America, it encountered interest in and knowledge of the vaccine.Este artículo identifica las primera fuentes de información sobre vacuna de viruela en Hispanoamérica, y su difusión, según documentos locales de la época. Desde 1799 la prensa periódica en América y Madrid jugó un papel principal en la diseminación amplia y rápida de información sobre el tema, con noticias de origen tanto europeo como americano. De los diecinueve primeros libros y folletos sobre vacuna escritos o traducidos por españoles y publicados hasta 1804, ocho fueron impresos en Cataluña, Pamplona y Zaragoza. Seis de los diecinueve textos son traducciones del francés, y ocho fueron publicados el primer año, 1801. Por lo menos ocho fueron citados o reimpresos en América. Esta intensa actividad de educación y documentación, encabezada por publicaciones oficiales en España y las colonias, precedió la Expedición de Vacuna del gobierno español y su resultado más obvio fue que a la llegada a América de ésta, hubiera allí un enorme interés y conocimiento sobre la vacuna