Proper captions should not only fit the right words to a video’s audio content—a feat that automation struggles to achieve—but also use correct grammar and punctuation, describe sounds like the eerie creak of a door or the crackle of gunfire, and differentiate between speakers so deaf audiences know who’s talking. – The Atlantic
Tag: 08.08.19
The Cultural Appropriation Wars Come To Bang On A Can
The controversy at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival (aka Banglewood) in Massachusetts broke out over the use of didgeridoos in the 1990 work Thousand Year Dreaming by 80-year-old New Zealand-American composer Annea Lockwood. Several of the festival’s young Fellows raised concerns about Lockwood’s deployment of the indigenous Australian instrument, including, in this performance, its being played by women (traditionally taboo). But those concerns were not shared by everyone there. – New Sounds (WNYC)
Mini Cardboard Theatres: How The 19th-Century English Bourgeoisie Staged Plays At Home
“The characters were laid out on sheets of paper, frozen in dramatic poses … [and] the sets [were] storybook illustrations of extravagant palaces and howling wildernesses, to be slotted in and out of the back of the theater, behind the cavorting characters. The scripts that came with them were as miniaturized as the stage.” – JSTOR Daily
Why Widely-Spoken Languages Have Simpler Grammar (Okay, Except For Russian)
It’s not only because so many people learn them as second or third languages. Recent research has indicated that, even when a language is new or developing, it has to have simple rules in order for large groups of people who don’t know each other well to make themselves understood. – The Economist
The Fascinating Ways How An AI Machine Learns Ideas From Stories
“Genesis was capable of making dozens of inferences about the story and several discoveries. It triggered concept patterns for ideas that weren’t explicitly stated in the story, recognizing the themes of violated belief, origin story, medicine man, and creation. It seemed to comprehend the elements of Crow literature, from unknowable events to the concept of medicine to the uniform treatment of all beings and the idea of differences as a source of strength.” – Nautilus
Almost All Languages Have Some Version Of The Expression, ‘It’s Greek To Me’
Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, along with English, assign Greek this particular honor. In the Baltic languages, it’s Spanish; the Bulgarians use “Patagonian.” And the Greeks? They, along with more nations than any other, use Chinese to signify the incomprehensible. Dan Nosowitz looks into the origins of the expression. – Atlas Obscura
12-Year-Old Debuts His First Broadway Musical
“I was bitten by the theater bug from a very, very young age,” he tells The Post in his high-pitched voice. Just weeks after the family moved to New York from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Josh, then 8, signed with an agent and booked a job. He’s hardly stopped working since. – New York Post
How Do Bubbles Happen? When The Stories We Tell Get Detached From The Evidence
“Bubbles inflate as the distance between fiction and reality increases. Contexts – such as investor liquidity, regulatory frameworks and cultural and macro-economic factors – establish boundaries on how far our stories can depart from reality. But entrepreneurs are also creatures of context, and some are better than others at ‘entrepreneuring’, stretching the limits of plausibility and maximising time for their imagined realities to catch up to their promises.” – Aeon
Is Education Innovating?
To my mind, perhaps the most striking and significant innovation is higher education’s heightened emphasis on community engagement, community service, and local and regional economic development. So what, then, do critics mean when they decry higher education’s alleged failure to innovate? – Inside Higher Ed
We Value Originals. So What Are Translations?
Are we ready to argue that translation is not merely an interpretative task, but also an artistic one, and that translators are artists? As tempting as this upgrade in status seems, I would argue for something else. – Public Books