Showing posts with label Events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Events. Show all posts
31/05/2013
21/03/2013
Thursday March 21 6pm - Joanna Gavins speaking about Text World Theory
From 6 pm tonight Joanna Gavins, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Sheffield University, will talk about her work with Text World Theory.
Text World Theory is a cognitive-linguistic model of human discourse processing. Its theoretical origins can be traced to a number of diverse academic disciplines, including cognitive psychology, possible worlds theory, cognitive linguistics and literary theory.
The basic premise of Text World Theory is that human beings process and understand all discourse by constructing mental representations of it in their minds. Text World Theory aims to provide the analytical tools necessary for the systematic examination and discussion of these mental representations, or text-worlds.
The text-world approach to discourse was originally developed by Professor Paul Werth during the 1980s and 90s. Werth provided a detailed account of the fundamental workings of the text-world framework in his monograph Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, which was published posthumously in 1999.
Werth claimed to have devised a methodological framework capable of accounting for the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of all forms of human communication; from telephone conversation to dramatic performance, from church sermons to newspaper reports. These ambitious objectives, coupled with Werth’s infectious enthusiasm and inspiring prose, have continued to generate great interest in Text World Theory beyond their author’s lifetime.
In recent years, Text World Theory has been tested, enhanced and expanded by a growing number of text-world researchers and students. Their work and that of Paul Werth is collected together in the Text World Theory Special Collection at the University of Sheffield. http://www.textworldtheory.net/
13/03/2013
Reading Group 3 - Unpacking the portmanteau and slips of the pun
Wednesday 20th March, 6pm
Two essays that explore portmanteaus and puns for the last reading group at Site:
Derek Attridge - Unpacking the portmanteau, or who's afraid of Finnegan's Wake?
Soeren Hattesen Balle - Slips of the pun: signifying sex in the poetry of John Ashbery
>> to book a place and to receive both texts by email
Two essays that explore portmanteaus and puns for the last reading group at Site:
Derek Attridge - Unpacking the portmanteau, or who's afraid of Finnegan's Wake?
Soeren Hattesen Balle - Slips of the pun: signifying sex in the poetry of John Ashbery
>> to book a place and to receive both texts by email
puns and ambiguities are to common language what adultery and perversion are to ‘chaste’, that is, socially orthodox, sexual relations. They both bring together entities (meanings/people) that have ‘conventionally’ been differentiated and kept apart; and they bring them together in deviant ways, bypassing orthodox rules governing communications and relationships. (A pun is like an adulterous bed in which two meanings that should be separate are coupled together.) It is hardly an accident that Finnegans Wake, which arguably demonstrates the dissolution of bourgeois society, is almost one continuous pun (the connection with sexual perversion being quite clear to Joyce).
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 1979, quoted by Derek Attridge in Peculiar Language, quoted by Soeren Hattesen Balle in Slips of the pun.
20/02/2013
Reading Group 2 - The Gutenberg Galaxy and Sesame Street
Wednesday 6th March, 6pm
Leading on from the first reading group meeting where we discussed Brian Rotman's take on alphabetic writing, its affect on Western subjectivity and its displacement by new technologies in Becoming Beside Ourselves, we will be reading two more texts about the alphabet:
An extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
And Brought to you by the letter I - Jessica Winter
>> to book a place and to receive an email with both texts
Written in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes a much more nuanced analysis of the affect of alphabetic technology in two stages - pre and post the advent of the printed word following Gutenberg's first use of moveable type around 1439.
Jessica Winter - Brought to you by the letter I
I. The pleasure of the text
“I invited a friend of mine over for dinner,” says the man ruefully. The gray-faced, middle-aged fellow is a squiggly animation, made of skinny, put-upon lines that form sluggish shapes. His dinner guest is nothing like him. The little friend who bounces through the French doors is the letter M, angular and robust. M has googly eyes at the tops of his twin peaks, which extend downward to become super-springy legs and dancing feet that also serve as his hands. M hops into his host’s outstretched palm, then rubs against his jowls like a cat. The gray man, beleaguered by these shows of affection, trudges toward a grand table piled with a colorful smorgasbord, plus candelabra. He slumps in his seat and invites the bug-eyed M to dig in. “Mmmmm, marvelous!” the M cries. “Meat! Munch! Magnificent!” M’s center of gravity is his mouth; a rib-eye steak, a loaf of bread, a glass of wine vanish into the V-shaped dip. The bottom point of this center “V” is also a straw, slurping up a glass of milk in one go. “Milk!” he says. The two upside-down Vs on either side of M’s mouth are pincers, chomping instantaneously through an entire melon. “Mmm-melon!” he says.
Leading on from the first reading group meeting where we discussed Brian Rotman's take on alphabetic writing, its affect on Western subjectivity and its displacement by new technologies in Becoming Beside Ourselves, we will be reading two more texts about the alphabet:
An extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
And Brought to you by the letter I - Jessica Winter
>> to book a place and to receive an email with both texts
Written in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes a much more nuanced analysis of the affect of alphabetic technology in two stages - pre and post the advent of the printed word following Gutenberg's first use of moveable type around 1439.
Jessica Winter - Brought to you by the letter I
I. The pleasure of the text
“I invited a friend of mine over for dinner,” says the man ruefully. The gray-faced, middle-aged fellow is a squiggly animation, made of skinny, put-upon lines that form sluggish shapes. His dinner guest is nothing like him. The little friend who bounces through the French doors is the letter M, angular and robust. M has googly eyes at the tops of his twin peaks, which extend downward to become super-springy legs and dancing feet that also serve as his hands. M hops into his host’s outstretched palm, then rubs against his jowls like a cat. The gray man, beleaguered by these shows of affection, trudges toward a grand table piled with a colorful smorgasbord, plus candelabra. He slumps in his seat and invites the bug-eyed M to dig in. “Mmmmm, marvelous!” the M cries. “Meat! Munch! Magnificent!” M’s center of gravity is his mouth; a rib-eye steak, a loaf of bread, a glass of wine vanish into the V-shaped dip. The bottom point of this center “V” is also a straw, slurping up a glass of milk in one go. “Milk!” he says. The two upside-down Vs on either side of M’s mouth are pincers, chomping instantaneously through an entire melon. “Mmm-melon!” he says.
16/02/2013
Language Sounds and Artificial Voices
Discussion on Wednesday 20th February at 6pm with
Roger K Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Sheffield.
Ranjan Sen, Researcher in the sounds of language and language change, School of English, University of Sheffield.
Click here to book
After some preliminary conversations with Roger and Ranjan last week I began to think about how although they are from very different fields, both of them work to construct voices that are in some sense artificial - either computer generated for use in technology (Roger), or reconstructing the sounds of dead languages and tracking phonetic change over time (Ranjan). And while their approaches have different aims I wonder if there may be some overlap in their methodology, and the insights each gains into how language is stored and processed in the mind.
Roger K Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Sheffield.
Ranjan Sen, Researcher in the sounds of language and language change, School of English, University of Sheffield.
Click here to book
After some preliminary conversations with Roger and Ranjan last week I began to think about how although they are from very different fields, both of them work to construct voices that are in some sense artificial - either computer generated for use in technology (Roger), or reconstructing the sounds of dead languages and tracking phonetic change over time (Ranjan). And while their approaches have different aims I wonder if there may be some overlap in their methodology, and the insights each gains into how language is stored and processed in the mind.
30/01/2013
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being
We will be reading three chapters from this book for the first reading group meeting on Wednesday 13th February:
Chapter 1 - The Alphabetic Body
Chapter 2 - Gesture and Non-alphabetic Writing
Chapter 5 - Ghost Effects
To book a place and to receive a copy of the text via email please click here
A synopsis:
Chapter 1 - The Alphabetic Body
Chapter 2 - Gesture and Non-alphabetic Writing
Chapter 5 - Ghost Effects
To book a place and to receive a copy of the text via email please click here
A synopsis:
"Becoming Beside Ourselves" continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books "Signifying Nothing" and "Ad Infinitum...the Ghost in Turing's Machine": exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In "Becoming Beside Ourselves", Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West's dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as the alphabet did centuries ago. Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to "lettered selves," they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language.Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.
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