Talk it up! — Integrating and prioritizing conversational data in documentation

Syllabus for workshop, CoLang 2016This course will introduce participants to some of the basic methodological and theoretical issues related to recording and analyzing everyday conversations. We will discuss specific contributions of naturalistic interactions to understanding aspects of linguistic structure, social interaction, and culture and explore how interactional data can be better integrated into language documentation projects.2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language Research – ALASKA Alaska Native Language Cente

New State Movements, 1900-2013

The separatist vision espoused by some State of Jefferson supporters is in no way a unique idea. Almost as long as there has been a United States there have been people who, feeling alienated from their host state governments, have sought to break away into smaller, more self-regulating political territories. In fact, the current State of Jefferson movement in northern California and southern Oregon is not even the first proposed “Jefferson” in the nation’s history. A region that would later become Colorado as well as parts of Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska was proposed as the Jefferson Territory as early as the 1850s. An area of Texas was also proposed as the State of Jefferson as early as the 1870s. These Jeffersons are by no means the only regions of the US that have sought to separate and form new states. A slew of regions have proposed secession from their state, territory, and national governments, including regions that have sought to secede so they could join other states, territories, or countries. This map displays new state movements, regions of existing states that have sought to become their own states, that have occurred in the US since 1900. Only regions for which adequate temporal and spatial data could be identified were included in this cartographic visualization. Names and data on the depicted movements were obtained from open-source websites

Leibniz's Cosmology: Transcendental Rationalism and Kabbalistic Symbolism

This thesis is a special investigation of Leibniz's cosmology as it can be determined both from his writings and by means of a comparison of it with the mystical philosophy of Christian Lurianic Kabbalah. The chief protagonists of this latter were Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Francis Mercury van Helmont and Anne Conway. They will be discussed, along with Leibniz's acquaintance with them and his involvement in the kabbalistic text Thoughts on Genesis. The comparison, which includes examinations of Leibniz's critical remarks on their writings, as well as his work on Thoughts on Genesis, highlights Christian Platonic elements in Leibniz (which are often overlooked) and seeks to yield an improved interpretation of his cosmology, free of the apparent paradoxes and vacillations that some other interpretations have been prone to attribute to him. It is argued that certain consequences are implied by Leibnizian principles, some of which he sought to obscure on account of their latent unorthodoxy, and others which he seems not to have fully been aware of. The comparison shows that the two doctrines are actually rather close on account of their shared Platonic principles. This should not be taken as evidence that Leibniz was influenced by the kabbalists, for these principles were established in his philosophy before he had any significant contact with them. However, there is evidence that Leibniz may have adopted some of their metaphors. In this thesis Leibniz's interest in Christian Lurianic Kabbalah is interpreted in terms of his greater goal to effect social peace, an aspiration shared by them too. This goal was to be realized by harmonizing the different religious traditions through the common base of his own metaphysics: Leibniz wanted to see whether the exoteric writings of Christian Lurianic Kabbalah could be grounded in his rational metaphysics. The thesis proposes that the proximity of these two doctrines is such that Christian Lurianic Kabbalah can be regarded, in many ways, as a mystical exoteric parallel to Leibniz's