Inter- and intra-plate deformation at North American plate boundaries

Alaska tectonics and earthquake hazard studies; Southern California tectonics (block rotation); spreading near the Salton Trough; California plate motion (fault zone kinematics); and Caribbean plate motion investigations are examined

Internet delivery of time-synchronised multimedia: the SCOTS projects

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) Project at Glasgow University aims to make available over the Internet a 4 million-word multimedia corpus of texts in the languages of Scotland. Twenty percent of this final total will comprise spoken language, in a combination of audio and video material. Versions of SCOTS have been accessible on the Internet since November 2004, and regular additions are made to the Corpus as texts are processed and functionality is improved. While the Corpus is a valuable resource for research, our target users also include the general public, and this has important implications for the nature of the Corpus and website. This paper will begin with a general introduction to the SCOTS Project, and in particular to the nature of our data. The main part of the paper will then present the approach taken to spoken texts. Transcriptions are made using Praat (Boersma and Weenink, University of Amsterdam), which produces a time-based transcription and allows for multiple speakers though independent tiers. This output is then processed to produce a turn-based transcription with overlap and non-linguistic noises indicated. As this transcription is synchronised with the source audio/video material it allows users direct access to any particular passage of the recording, possibly based upon a word query. This process and the end result will be demonstrated and discussed. We shall end by considering the value which is added to an Internet-delivered Corpus by these means of treating spoken text. The advantages include the possibility of returning search results from both written texts and multimedia documents; the easy location of the relevant section of the audio file; and the production through Praat of a turn-based orthographic transcription, which is accessible to a general as well as an academic user. These techniques can also be extended to other research requirements, such as the mark-up of gesture in video texts

Text Festival Bury

For Text Festival, Stawarska-Beavan produced a set of 3 screen-prints entitled Transliteration. The work investigated how ethereality of sound, speech and passage of time can be translated into a two-dimensional visual image, and brings printmaking practice, new media and interactive element together. Using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) text and graphical elements such as a grid and gradations of lines, numerous subtle marks on black paper and elaborate typographical arrangements engaged viewers visually to decipher phonetic bilingual text, but the IPA obstructs the reading process; the text is coded. The viewer looks for familiarities in the text, but to break the code he/she must produce the sounds out loud; hearing their own voice as they decode the narrative

A generic application for corpus management and administration

Our corpus project is building a digital collection of both written and spoken texts. The corpus is a publicly available resource, mounted on and searchable via the Web. This paper will describe the corpus management and workflow administration methods that the project has developed and the technologies used. We believe that the structures we have created to manage the different parts of the administration of the project are the basis for a re-usable, generic package for scholars building an online corpus from new linguistic materials

International Print Triennial: Horst-Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg, Germany �“Multiple Matters” Kunstler Haus, Vienna, Austria

In Mother Tongue, a set of three screen-prints with integrated three sound pieces were presented at both the Multiple Matters (Vienna) and Print Without Borders (Oldenburg): part of the International Print Triennial 2010. The work was an investigation of how to represent in two-dimensional form such as print, a passage of time, and the ephemeral moments in the development of a child’s relationship with language. The three prints depict recognizable visual representations of sound such as waveforms and phonetic symbols. These marks were visual artefacts of temporal sounds, used to archive and preserve transitory events/moments in space and time. The work explored a relationship between two-dimensional works, such as print, and digital sound; how sound can navigate the viewer through the image

Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW)

This poster describes the online Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945), being created at the University of Glasgow. The corpus fills the chronological gap between the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1375-1700) and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (1945-present). The period covered by CMSW is an important time in the history of Scotland and Scots. It begins with the last stages of the standardisation of written English and the onset of the ‘Vernacular Revival’ in literary Scots. Out of the interaction between Broad Scots and written Standard English, the hybrid prestige variety of today’s Scottish English is said to emerge: CMSW will allow researchers to substantiate this claim, among many others. Once complete, CMSW will contain at least 4 million words of text, with accompanying metadata, covering a range of genres, including personal writing, administrative prose, verse and drama, and the writings of language commentators

Radiocarbon dates from the Highland Jar and Coffin burial site of Phnom Khnang Peung, Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia

The Cardamom Mountain Jar and Coffin burial site of Phnom Khnang Peung is the most extensive example of the distinctive burial ritual first reported by Beavan et al. (2012a). The 40 intact Mae Nam Noi and late Angkorian-era ceramic jars used as burial vessels held a total of up to 152 individuals, representing the largest corpus of skeletal remains of any of the 10 known Jar and Coffin burial sites that have been discovered in the eastern ranges of the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia. We report here on the radiocarbon dating of this site and notable burial phenomena, using a Bayesian approach to model the start and end date of activity as well as its overall span. The results of the dating and Bayesian analyses indicate that the Phnom Khnang Peung site’s earliest burials began cal AD 1420–1440 (95% probability). Interestingly, the concen- tration of burial activity spans only 15–45 years (95% probability), despite the large number of inhumations at the site. The 14C chronology presented for the site places the Highland burial ritual coincident with a period of economic, political, and societal transformations in the lowland Angkorian polity, but the unique burial practice and trade relationships evidenced by the burial goods and maritime trade ware ceramics employed in the burial ritual suggest these Highland people were a culture apart from Angkorian cultural influences

ComPair: compare and visualise the usage of language

This paper will demonstrate ComPair, a new tool to investigate and compare word usage, encouraging new ways to explore language variation. While remaining focussed on the usability and the promotion of navigation, this tool represents an evolutionary step forward from the author’s previous award winning visualisation applications. This paper will introduce the methods and technologies at its core, perform a demonstration of the tool and discuss opportunities for further collaboration

Inter- and intra-plate deformation at North American plate boundaries

A geodetic network which spans the region between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe has been measured 5 times completely with triangulation in 1880, 1922, 1929, 1943, 1963. A resurvey with the Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1991 allows the formation of 1 coseismic and 4 interseismic epochs. The data from this network provide a unique opportunity to examine the temporal and spatial evolution of the strain field associated with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in particular and with the Pacific-North American plate boundary in general. Calculations of strain rate from the network data lead to the following conclusions. (1) There is no resolvable (greater than 0.05 microradians/yr) strain in between Sutter Buttes and the Sierra Nevada. (2) Throughout the time since the 1906 earthquake, a region extending at least as far east as the westernmost Great Valley has been undergoing deformation related to Pac:Nam interaction and the associated earthquake cycle. (3) In the time and space of overlap, our results agree with those from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) trilateration data. Both data sets indicate that strain must be accumulating to the east of Vaca. (4) The San Andreas discrepancy cannot be accommodated in the Great Valley at the 1 sigma level of our results. It is possible to absorb it in that region at the 2 sigma level. (5) Strain rate is elevated in the years following the earthquake and decays slowly with time. It is possible that the rate in the Coast Ranges increases until around 1950 and then decays. With the exception of one epoch, strain rate in the Coast Ranges is consistently fault parallel, shows no sign changes, and is consistent with monotonic strain accumulation