Vernacular Languages and Cultures in Rural Development: Theoretical Discourse and Some Examples

The role of language and culture in rural development projects is investigated. Examples taken from the context of Northern Iran, the significance of which is not confined to its agricultural and forestry resources and extends beyond national borders, are presented. A starting point of the analysis is an appreciation of diversity, not only in the biological, but also in the cultural sense, as an asset and viewing development endeavors as sense making acts. It is further argued that new intangible forms of capital are increasingly gaining in importance in the contemporary world. Capital is considered not merely as an asset, but as a relation having accumulation moment as well, and impact on the regeneration of cultural and economic divides. A central concern is enhancing social inclusion and promoting conditions for making voices of otherness heard. It is deemed that vernacular voices encompass valuable indigenous knowledge and modes of perception, the negligence of which can undermine the success of rural development projects

Linking Sheet Music and Audio - Challenges and New Approaches

Score and audio files are the two most important ways to represent, convey, record, store, and experience music. While score describes a piece of music on an abstract level using symbols such as notes, keys, and measures, audio files allow for reproducing a specific acoustic realization of the piece. Each of these representations reflects different facets of music yielding insights into aspects ranging from structural elements (e.g., motives, themes, musical form) to specific performance aspects (e.g., artistic shaping, sound). Therefore, the simultaneous access to score and audio representations is of great importance. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically generating musically relevant linking structures between the various data sources that are available for a given piece of music. In particular, we discuss the task of sheet music-audio synchronization with the aim to link regions in images of scanned scores to musically corresponding sections in an audio recording of the same piece. Such linking structures form the basis for novel interfaces that allow users to access and explore multimodal sources of music within a single framework. As our main contributions, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art for this kind of synchronization task, we present some novel approaches, and indicate future research directions. In particular, we address problems that arise in the presence of structural differences and discuss challenges when applying optical music recognition to complex orchestral scores. Finally, potential applications of the synchronization results are presented

Towards Bridging the Gap between Sheet Music and Audio

Sheet music and audio recordings represent and describe music on different semantic levels. Sheet music describes abstract high-level parameters such as notes, keys, measures, or repeats in a visual form. Because of its explicitness and compactness, most musicologists discuss and analyze the meaning of music on the basis of sheet music. On the contrary, most people enjoy music by listening to audio recordings, which represent music in an acoustic form. In particular, the nuances and subtleties of musical performances, which are generally not written down in the score, make the music come alive. In this paper, we address the problem of bridging the gap between the sheet music domain and the audio domain. In particular, we discuss aspects on music representations, music synchronization, and optical music recognition, while indicating various strategies and open research problems

LIFE-SHARE Project: Developing a Digitisation Strategy Toolkit

This poster will outline the Digitisation Strategy Toolkit created as part of the LIFE-SHARE project. The toolkit is based on the lifecycle model created by the LIFE project and explores the creation, acquisition, ingest, preservation (bit-stream and content) and access requirements for a digitisation strategy. This covers the policies and infrastructure required in libraries to establish successful practices. The toolkit also provides both internal and external resources to support the service. This poster will illustrate how the toolkit works effectively to support digitisation with examples from three case studies at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York

Silver-Mobility - near field mobility concepts for the age group 50+

The research group “Silver-Mobility - near-field mobility concepts for the age group 50plus” develops concepts to support elder people with beginning or advanced loss of their personal key mobility. Also the improvements of existing systems to substitute loosen abilities like wheel-chairs are in focus of the research group. The paper gives an overview about the approaches and some resulting concepts, mainly for overcoming of obstacles with wheel-based mobility aids, for energy storing solutions and for different assistance systems for mobility aids. The main principle for all these concepts was to get know and analyze the future users, their requirements and needs and then derive solutions from these analyses. The results show the necessity to develop adaptable, individualisable and re-configurable systems

Internationalizing of Higher Education and Critical Engagement in Cooperative Learning Networks

Jütte W. Internationalizing of Higher Education and Critical Engagement in Cooperative Learning Networks. In: Fremerey M, Pletsch-Betancourt M, eds. Universities in Transition Towards More Quality and Relevance in International Higher Education. Frankfurt/Main: IKO-Verlag; 2006: 269-282