Search results

Due to the important role of orthography in society, the project called IDeRBlog presented in this paper created a web-based tool to motivate pupils to write text as well as to read and to comment on texts written by fellow students. In addition, IDeRBlog aims to improve student’s German orthography skills and supports teachers and parents with training materials for their students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

With the aid of learning analytics, the submitted text is analyzed and special feedback is given to the students so that they can try to correct the misspelled words themselves. The teachers as well as the parents are benefiting from the analysis and exercises suggested by the system.

A recent study showed the efficiency of the system in form of an improvement of the students’ orthographic skills. Over a period of four months 70 percent of the students achieved a significant reduction of their spelling mistakes.

IDeRBlog is an innovative approach to improving orthography skills combining blogging and new media with writing and practice.

[Many complaints have been directed against existing union catalogues of periodicals because their scope and the principles on which they were compiled have been inadequately set out, or not at all. A special effort has therefore been made to draw up a comprehensive code of rules and definitions for the British union catalogue of periodicals, which is now in an advanced state of preparation. Such a code obviously has an interest far exceeding its immediate purpose: hence its publication here.]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation and exploitation of a historical corpus in an attempt to contribute to the preservation and availability of cultural heritage documents.

At first, the digitization process and attempts to the availability and awareness of the books and manuscripts in a historical library in Greece are presented. Then, processing and exploitation, taking into account natural language processing techniques of the digitized corpus, are discussed.

In the course of the project, methods that take into account the state of the documents and the particularities of the Greek language were developed.

In its present state, the use of the corpus facilitates the work of theologians, historians, philologists, paleographers, etc. and in the same time, prevents the original documents from further damage.

The results of this undertaking can give useful insights as for the creation of corpora of cultural heritage documents and as for the methods for the processing and exploitation of the digitized documents which take into account the language in which the documents are written.

Micronesia, a term that means “small islands,” refers to a region of Western Pacific islands scattered across an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than the continental United States (see figure 1). This vast area, located in the tropics almost entirely north of the Equator, covers more than 4,500,000 square miles of ocean and includes more than 2,100 palm tree‐studded islands, islets, and coral atolls. Yet its total land area is fewer than 1,200 square miles—only slightly larger than Rhode Island (see figure 2). Only about 125 of the islands are inhabited on a permanent basis, by some 350,000 people.

Whereas the geography of a certain area is certainly linked in many ways to the ethnic group occupying it (or who used to occupy it), the link between the land and the language/s spoken (or that used to be spoken) can only become visible through the linguistic landscape, which not only asserts identity and ownership but can also help to reinforce prestige and vitality of the languages employed. The problem is that if the local heritage language is a minority or regional one, only in few cases can it be used to affirm the identity and ownership of its speakers. There are two sine qua non conditions for the local language to appear in the linguistic landscape: 1) The language must have gone beyond the 'threshold of literacy', i.e. it must have developed as a written language, with its own orthography and literature; 2) The language must be allowed to be used in the linguistic landscape and/or enjoy a degree of official recognition. This article presents five case studies on the presence of local minority/regional languages in the linguistic landscape based on the author’s research: two in Italy (Udine and Milan) and two in Southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur and Bandar Seri Begawan, the capitals of Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam respectively). The very interesting situation in Macao will also be touched on, where the colonial language, Portuguese, has been given prominence in the linguistic landscape in spite of the fact that only a tiny percentage of the population can speak it. In this case, Portuguese is portrayed as a kind of heritage language (as well as an international language) that does not need to be mastered as its main function is symbolic, i.e. to help Macao retain its special status as a Special Administration Region of China.

IT is always something of an embarrassment for a West German librarian to address his British colleagues on the problems of public libraries. What is there of interest in a system which in almost every respect is years behind the development of the English libraries? When I begin to think along these lines of the considerable and, indeed, natural role which the library plays in British society (almost a traumatic experience for a German librarian), then the inequalities of the situation become particularly clear. Even though there are many historical and political causes for this state of affairs, it is still impossible for any correspondent to free himself of a certain psychological handicap.

Discusses the linguistic influences on an electronic publishing infrastructure in an environment with unstable linguistic standardization from the computational point of view. Essentially, in Serbia in the last half of the century (at least) publishing is based on the following facts: two alphabetic systems are regularly in use with the possibility to mix both alphabets in the same document; the various dialects are accepted as a part of a linguistic norm; orthography is unstable ‐ presently, several linguistic attitudes that have different views of the orthographic norm are under discussion; and, in Serbia, many minority languages are in use, which makes it difficult to provide efficient contact between different communities through electronic publishing. In this context, a systematic solution that responds to this complex situation has not been developed in the frame of traditional Serbian linguistics and lexicography in a way that enables the adequate incorporation of the new publishing technologies. Owing to these constraints, the direct application of electronic publishing tools frequently causes the degradation of the linguistic message. In such an environment, the promotion of electronic publishing therefore needs specific solutions. The paper discusses the general frame based on the specifically encoded system of electronic dictionaries that makes electronic texts independent of some of the mentioned constraints. The objective of such a frame is to enable the linguistic normalization of texts at the level of their internal representation, and to establish bridges for communicating with other language societies. Some aspects of electronic text representation that ensures its correct interpretation in different graphical systems and in different dialects are described. This also allows text indexing and retrieval using the same techniques that are available for languages not burdened with these problems.

Researchers, subject specialists, and information professionals have long been aware of scientific and technical (sci‐tech) dictionaries available from the U.S. government. Yet these reference sources often remain invisible to the general public, especially in libraries that exclude government documents from the main catalog or that maintain separate documents collections. However, as more libraries automate their holdings and load cataloging records for government publications into their online public access catalogs (OPACs), government documents should become more visible. Until then, it may surprise some to learn that many U.S. government agencies have allocated vast resources into compiling, publishing, and updating technical dictionaries in print, microfiche, and electronic format.

Last year we spoke to Alexander Plemnek of the St Petersburg State Technical University (http://www.unilib.neva.ru), Jennifer Treherne of the University of Surrey (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Library/library.html) and Paul S. Ulrich of the Zentral‐ und Landesbibliothek Berlin (http://www.kulturbox.de/berlin/zlb/index‐e.htm) about the ways in which their libraries were networked and how they saw things were going. Alexander Plemnek is also heavily involved in RUSLANet, an advanced library information system in Russia that is an initiative of St Petersburg State Technical University.