Audience Awareness

Audience

Who are you posting for? Who else will be seeing it? Who might find it in the future?

The levels of AUDIENCE radiate out from you, the poster. When we talk about AUDIENCE we focus on three levels:
(1) the person (imagined or real) you’re directly addressing,
(2) other people (imagined or real) you know will see your post,
(3) any people (imagined or real) who may find your post in the future.

Language Rights, Endangerment, Crossing

Related to notions of copyright and access in Digital Studies, in Linguistics we can ask questions about who has access and rights in a given language? Do I– as a second language speaker– have rights to the French language? What about endangered and indigenous languages like Kumeyaay? And then what about dialects?– Can I use the ways of speaking typical of a social group that I don’t belong to? Do I have that right?

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Blissymbolics - A copywritten language

AG_010313_a_lBlissymoblics was conceived by Charles Bliss as a universal ideographic/semantic writing system that would be easy to use and culture-neutral. However, he was also a strong defender of the copyright he owned for the symbols used in Blissymbolics and restricted their use to the texts and writing machines he produced. This is an interesting wrinkle in the question– can a language be copyright protected?

Talking about Blissymbolics in LING 243 is not only interesting for the history of constructed and invented languages, it also allows us to address questions of rights AND the cultural (possibly able-ist) underpinnings and restrictions of a language of supposedly “universal ideas”.

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Beyoncé as a Time Lord

QueenBeeprezie-2The writing system for the language in Doctor Who has been used here for Beyoncé album art. This is the finest spirit of the Digital Humanities approach– remxing two disparate media to create something altogether new– and creating new ways of understanding by the act of hacking. Linguistically, this work explores the relationship of orthography to language. See the full work on Tumblr.

 

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SolReSol - The Visual/Musical Language

SolReSolSolresol is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827, published in 1902 in the Grammaire du Solresol. In Solresol, all words are composed of only seven “syllables”– the seven notes of the Solfege scale. This also corresponds to the seven colors of the rainbow, so student projects often combine the two. One excellent example by Brian Lab can be heard below. Here, Brian has translated the “Liebfraumilch” scene from House of Yes. Brian incorporated the four voices of the actors, the difference between direct speech and flouted speech in terms of harmony types, tenses as musical harmonics, topic marking as musical cadence, grace notes as anaphoric reference, and so on. This is far beyond Sudre’s original use of “music” in Solresol and is truly remarkable.

[Additional examples can be found on the LanguageVillage tumblr]

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The Morphology of Images

In linguistics, morphemesare the smallest meaningful unit of language. Similarly, we can think of images as combinations of meaningful parts. In this exercise, students were asked to locate images online and describe them as a breakdown of their meaningful parts.

Minor Changes 50Take a look at the image “Minor Changes 50” by Todd Webb (all images by Todd Webb, take from Comics Workbook and Wall Drawing).

  1. What parts of the image do you see?
  2. How do those parts interact with each other?
  3. Is this image telling a story?
  4. Which parts of this image are characters in the story?
  5. Which parts of this image are crucial for the setting of the story ?
  6. Which parts of this images are crucial for the plot?
  7. How do these parts interact?

[see student posts on “The Morphology of Images” on the LING 101 website]

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Language Variation and Dialect Quizzes

Dialect quizzes combine two aspects of Digital Literacy– metadata and graphical displays. Students respond to questions on popular dialect quiz websites (vetted beforehand by a legit linguist) and then respond to the results they get. This immediate feedback-and-response is key to Digital Humanities.

[See Dialect Quiz posts on LING 101 website]

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The Realms of Skyrim

Realms of Skyrim

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Krypton

Krypton

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Maps & GIS

Maps & GIS (Geographic Information Systems) are perfect tools for teaching tagging and metadata. When you create a map, the categories you find important are the things that get labeled.

In LING 243, we’ve had two maps so far: a map of Superman’s Krypton (in the Glactic Universal Language “Interlac” as well as in English) and a map of the Realms of Skyrim in the magical language of a Dovahkin.

Krypton
Realms of Skyrim

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My Language Experience

This task asks students to consider what information they present about themselves as they respond to the question “what experiences have you had with language?” Because they know that their fellow students will read and comment on their posts, they focus on at least two distinct levels of audience (1-the professor; 2-classmates).

The full set of My Language Experience blog posts can be found on the LING 101 website.

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Crafting a Group Identity

LING 101 students considered the importance of “audience” by creating a unified “identity” for their group-work partners– the Diverse Linguists did a particularly good job on this task.

[see more]

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Accent Challenge Vlog

Accent Challenge Vlog for LING 101 :: [see more]

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Nadsat vs Newspeak - Rap Battle

Appy polly loggies, while we taking all your pretty polly,
It’s all horrorshow, when my droogies itty through the door.
My luscious glory locks got ptitsas wetter than a yahzich,
All I see is smiling zoobies on my merzky yardstick.
You reppin biddiwad, with your shriveled tiny yarbles,
Got your sharp at my domy, sladky rot around yarbles.
My bezoomny shaika, got you creeching in your spatchka,
And or deng prods shilarny, like the lines around Nasca.

[read more]

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Kidspeak

by Lucy Maloney and Meghan Yamamoto

I like this new word I keep hearing today: birthday. Mommy and daddy are saying it over and over with big, goofy smiles on their faces, showing all their teeth. I start to feel fadakai and smile and clap how they taught me to.  I like how they look at me when they say it, it makes me feel so special and I don’t know why.

Then, mommy is holding me. I don’t know what’s happening now; there are a lot of people in the house.  New faces are grinning at me, touching my cheeks and feet. And they all say the same words: “Happy Birthday Katherine!” Oh, they are here because of me, because of this word. Am I a ‘birthday’??  Then, all the people crowd around me. The room is suddenly dark and their faces disappear. I look up to mommy and I can barely see her.  I can’t help but shabu. Then, my attention shifts to two small, yellow lights floating toward me and suddenly people start singing. I completely jatimi.  I recognize those words again: happy and birthday, and toward the end they say my name in a long and drawn out way. The two little lights disappear and it becomes bright again. I see everyone happy and smiling and I’m not scared anymore. I am fadakai again.

[read more]

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