Research and Innovation

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.

The notion of a socially engaged dandyism – let alone a political one – seems to be antithetical to the definition proposed by Charles Baudelaire, that “A Dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a Dandy speaking to the people, except to scoff?” Yet it is from within the inherently political framework of a cultural revolution, undertaken in the first half of the nineteenth century by young adepts of the Romantic movement, that many of the poses and clichés surrounding the figure of the fin-de-siècle dandy originate. Examining the texts that Gautier, Borel, and their peers publish during this period, as well as satirical articles written about them in the press, this essay theorizes the young Romantics’ transgressive self-fashioning in the aftermath of Hernani as a kind of militant dandyism.

1968 and Global Cinema addresses a notable gap in film studies. Although scholarship exists on the late 1950s and 1960s New Wave films, research that puts cinemas on 1968 into dialogue with one another across national boundaries is surprisingly lacking. Only in recent years have histories of 1968 begun to consider the interplay among social movements globally. The essays in this volume, edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, cover a breadth of cinematic movements that were part of the era's radical politics and independence movements. Focusing on history, aesthetics, and politics, each contribution illuminates conventional understandings of the relationship of cinema to the events of 1968, or "the long Sixties."

Among current educational challenges are an increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) and a lack of bilingual special educators adequately prepared in the areas of bilingualism, cultural diversity and disability. This chapter begins by exploring learning disabilities (LD) in ELLs, the nature of LD and the need for bilingual special educators. It next considers research on the lack of appropriate assessments, disproportionality of ELLs in special education, and best instructional practices. It ends by looking at future issues such as appropriate teacher certification, new uses of technology and college age students and adults with learning disabilities. Lavine, R. Z. & Goode, C. “Special Educators and Spanish”. Ed. Manel Lacorte. In The Routledge Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics, New York: Routledge, 2015: 438-456.

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) team—building on the foundational open-source OCR work of the Leipzig University (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for printed classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines. These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for printed classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software called Kraken (developed by Benjamin Kiessling, LU), thus enabling us to make this Arabic-script OCR technology freely available to the broader Islamicate, Persian, and Arabic Studies communities in the near future.

This study presents the results of a qualitative metasynthesis conducted on teaching-oriented research publications for Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The main goal of this metasynthesis is to provide teachers and researchers with a panoramic view of SHL pedagogical research in its current state and identify its blind spots in order to promote and favor its progress. Based on the analysis of studies published between the years 2000–2017, trends, approaches, variables, results, and limitations of SHL pedagogical research are identified. Moreover, relevant gaps in the research that need to be addressed are underscored, and possible future pedagogical trends are posited.

In the last decade tremendous advances have been made in the tools and platforms available for the digital study of manuscripts. Much work, however, remains to be done in order to address the wide range of pedagogical, cataloging, preservation, scholarly (individual and collaborative), and citizen science (crowdsourcing) workflows and use cases in a user-friendly manner. This study (1) summarizes the feedback of dozens of technologists, manuscript experts, and curators obtained through survey data and workshop focus groups; (2) provides a “state of the field” report which assesses the current tools available and their limitations; and, (3) outlines principles to help guide future development. The authors in particular emphasize the importance of producing tool-independent data, fostering intellectual “trading zones” between technologists, scholars, librarians, and curators, utilizing a code base with an active community of users, and re-conceptualizing tool-creation as a collaborative form of humanistic intellectual labor.

L’article se penche sur la problématique de la secondarité dans une œuvre considérée comme secondaire dans le corpus nervalien – son premier récit en prose, paru en 1832 sous le titre de « La Main de Gloire, histoire macaronique ». Trace de l’éphémère camaraderie du bousingo, ce conte, où dominent l’autoparodie et la dénégation, laisse deviner un jeune Nerval aux prises avec les préoccupations de sa génération et représentant génial de « l’école du désenchantement ».

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a non-discrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in 8 conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and non-humorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence of humorous events across conversations, thus confirming the value of smiling as a marker of humor. The results show that the occurrence of humor correlates positively with an increase of smiling intensity relative to the baseline of the conversation and it is foreshadowed by a localized increase of smiling both generally and when humor is predictable. Moreover, during humorous events, participants displayed framing smiling patterns, often preceded or followed by smiling accommodation or inverted smiling gestures, which are representative of the conversational dynamics of the dyad and the ongoing negotiation of meaning.