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Politics, health terms feature in new words added to Hebrew dictionary The Jerusalem PostFriday, June 10, 2022
Lost in Translation: two tales of getting it wrong - WBUR News - Translation
Grace: It’s true.
Amory: I'm all ears.
Grace: So, yeah. So I recently was scrolling through TikTok as one does, and I got to one that posed a question. It's from an account called pumpkinheadgirl, and her real name is Maddie. And yeah, I'm going to I'm going to play a little bit of it for you.
[Maddie: I've held my silence long enough. I desperately need to know what the f*** is wrong with the person who writes the Russian Duolingo questions.]
Grace: Okay, so you are Duolingo. Right. I feel like I have. I have heard this before.
Amory: Sí, pero por Español. Or maybe it's para Español. The difference between por and para will will haunt me forever.
Grace: So I have also been dabbling with Duolingo. I don't think I'm as dedicated as you, so I don't know the difference between para and por either. But my curiosity was piqued because I do use the Duolingo app. And so –
Amory: What are you learning? Are you learning Spanish as well?
Grace: I'm also learning Spanish, total beginner. And I'm like refreshing myself with French. So I kind of like go between the two.
Amory: Oh, wow. Okay, that's, that's advanced.
Grace: Yeah. So I was curious about what the heck is going on with the person who writes the Russian Duolingo question. So I kept watching the video.
[Maddie: When I first started, I got “my blood”, and I thought that's weird that they're teaching me how to say “my blood” before they're teaching me how to say numbers, but maybe it's so I can say my blood type so that, you know, if I'm ever bleeding out in an emergency, I can say what my blood type is to the hospital right? No.]
Grace: So I, like I said, I've been doing this for two languages and I have never gotten the word for “my blood” in French or Spanish. Definitely done a lot of numbers. I don't know. Have you? Maybe. Is it just, is it just my phrases? Have you gotten anything that exciting?
Amory: I am convinced that, like, Duolingo listens to me and knows my life because it will — I'll get fed sentences like, “I'm sorry, we don't have anything vegan in this restaurant.”
Grace: Oh!
Amory: Or I just had a sentence yesterday about mi colega Ben, and I was like, “How do they know? How do they know that my colleague is Ben!” And I got ones about traveling while I was traveling. I don't know, man. I'm usually not conspiratorial like that, but I just think Duolingo knows me personally.
Grace: Okay, yeah. Well, okay. We'll see? Something is going on with Duolingo. Like this app is smarter than we think. So the next phrase that she learns or that she shows on this Tik Tok it's a little bit more dramatic. It says, “I want to live.” So, I don't know if Duolingo is listening to Maddie–I don't know what she's doing. (Laughs.) Yeah. I mean, as we've pointed out, we are in a pandemic, so I guess it is a useful phrase. But anyway, so Maddie gets this phrase, “I want to live” in Russian. And she says...
[Maddie: That's a weird thing to teach somebody, just learning. Um, I guess I can beg for my life now in Russian. Okay.]
Grace: And like also, I guess maybe this would hit a little bit differently if the language wasn't Russian and there wasn't a pretty terrible war going on right now with Russia. So, it's like funny, but it also feels a little like, sad and scary.
Amory: Yeah, I have gotten the sentence before, “Everybody has to die,” or “Everybody is going to die,” in Spanish. I know you have.
Grace: Wow, that’s really deep. And does it have like one of those, like, funny cartoon characters, though.
Amory: Of course, the big bear, that's like making kind of a grumpy face. I've taken a ton of screenshots of strange Duolingo sentences. So now immediately after this, I'm going to scroll through those and send you some. Maybe we can post some on our, on our web page.
Grace: Totally, yeah. And then we take a turn into the nonsensical kind of the next phrase is, “She has good blood.” So here's Maddie again.
Amory: Oh, God. (Laughs.)
[Maddie: Am I begging for my life from a Russian vampire and is my, is my strategy not to just fight the vampire, but to instead direct them to go kill somebody else. What?]
Grace: Then she shows another one. The next phrase is, “Why is there blood here?” And there's like a little cartoon character going, like, I don't really know how to describe it. Like, when you make guns with your fingers, but it's not violent. It's like.
Amory: Yeah, it's like pew pew pew. Yeah.
Grace: Exactly. Like a happy thing.
Amory: Yeah.
Grace: So it's like, why is there blood here? But it's fun. That's, that's the tone that the cartoon character is conveying. So here's Maddie again.
[Maddie: I don't know, Duolingo, why is there blood here? What does she know that I don't know? Why is there blood here?]
Grace: Duolingo raising all the questions, not giving us a lot of answers. And then there's one more.
[Maddie: And today there is blood on it. Why is there blood on the ticket? Duolingo, what did you do? I still don't know numbers, but I don't.]
Grace: And then the video abruptly cuts off. So, blood on the ticket. I mean, it does seem like they're telling us a little story here. Right? That does maybe seem like, violent and disturbing?
Amory: Do we have any answers? Has she tried reaching out to Duolingo or has Duolingo responded to her TikTok video?
Grace: They did respond to her TikTok video. And the official Duolingo’s account comment is pinned there. And it's, it's kind of coy. It's from their official account. So I'm picturing like their mascot Duo, the green bird, typing this and it says, “I don't get it. These are all useful phrases.”
So like, kind of like nonchalant, like nothing, nothing weird to see here. But I did some really hard hitting investigative journalism and I emailed Duolingo’s media team and they got back to me right away. I sent them the TikTok video.
Amory: Okay.
Grace: And I was like, first I was like, “Is this real?” Because, you know, people are smart. They can make Duolingo — they could probably make it look like Duolingo was saying something that it wasn't, but they said, yes. The TikTok video contains real examples from a Duolingo Russian for English lesson
Amory: Okay.
Grace: Although they did say the way that they are presented in the video is out of context of how they would be encountered in a Duolingo lesson, which makes it seem a bit more dramatically foreboding. So it wasn't like in the same lesson she was getting like, “What's your blood? I want to live. Why is there blood on the ticket?” I mean, like, in the same lesson, it would sound like a story about I don't know. I don't know what the story would be, but it wouldn't be a fun story.
Amory: Hmm.
Grace: They actually also gave me a reason for why the word blood comes so much in the Russian lessons. It's one of a relatively small number of words that end in a consonant, but take feminine agreement. So blood is being used to teach a particular grammatical agreement pattern. So that's actually a very boring way. They're not trying to freak Maddie out.
Amory: Hmmmm. Okay. But I still want to know if they're like, if they know my life to some extent
Grace: (Laughs.)
Amory: Or the extent to which more, more practically speaking, like, does Duolingo try to create any sort of a custom experience based on your cookies? Because I probably do search for vegan restaurants a lot, you know? Or is it just like, no, man, you guys are all learning the same stuff.
Grace: Yeah, and they didn't answer that. I will say that they did send me an article about how they try to use phrases and sentences that are memorable, which I don't know, maybe that maybe if what makes them memorable is that they're mirroring our lives. But a lot of times those are silly sentences. And so this is where the Norwegian sentence comes in. Did you do Duolingo for Norway — for Norwegian or just sticking to Spanish?
Amory: You know, I didn't. And I was feeling really badly about it, but I felt like I kind of need to stay in the Spanish zone. My sister did a little bit, but then she didn't — I didn't witness her using any of that Norwegian (laughs) in real life. So no, I don't. Tell me tell me the phrase.
Grace: This was a phrase that was used in 2020 and it was actually ended up being voted by Duolingo users as The Most 2020 Phrase of the Year. But I feel like you actually could have used it given your experience, given your experience. The phrase was, I am eating bread and crying on the floor.
Amory: Do you know how to say it?
Grace: It was “Jeg spiser brød og gråter på gulvet.”
Amory: Okay, I'm definitely going to ask my cousin to say for now. No offense to your pronunciation, but maybe well, maybe we'll leave it to the Norwegians. I am eating bread and crying on the floor.
[Harald (Amory’s Norwegian cousin): Jeg spiser brød og gråter på gulvet.]
Well, Grace, thank you so much. This was fascinating and thought provoking, and I feel like I have more questions than answers at this point. But in the best of ways.
Grace: Yeah. We're always happy to share my my tidbits from my TikTok scrolling.
Amory: See, never time wasted on TikTok. Well, after the break, Grace, I have a story for you.
[SPONSOR BREAK]
Amory: Okay. Grace, I have a story that originally came to me through our colleague Megan McGinnes, who writes the WBUR newsletter. This goes back eight years now. I think is when the original post was made, and it was made to the TIFU subreddit. Are you familiar with this one, Grace?
Grace: I am not. TIFU. I can't even – what does that stand for?
Amory: It stands for Today I F’d Up.
Grace: Uh. And you know what? You have to give it.
Amory: Well, I do all the time. And this is a well-loved subreddit among the endless thread and the Reddit crowd in general. I'm going to abridge the post for the sake of time, but — and I won't read the subject line because that's going to give it away. So I'm just going to jump in here. Okay. Come along for the ride.
This person posts: “About 17 years ago, my wife and I adopted a baby from an Asian-American family. I made very little inquiries as they seemed embarrassed, I didn't want to pry. I was just excited to have a son and couldn't have cared less about the parents history besides their current and future well-being.
Anyway, around about eight months we start to feel a little bit of guilt about not raising him in his own ethnic culture. And given that we live in an area with a major Chinese population, it would be very easy to introduce him to his roots. So for the next 17 years, we do everything we can to honor his ethnicity. We sent him to Chinese language courses and by five he's fluent in Mandarin and English. He gets, quote, adopted by a Chinese aunt and uncle. They taught him cultural things and celebrate certain holidays and take him for dim sum every couple of weeks. We've been taking him to China every two years since he was eight. We weren't trying to force him to take up his culture, as in, quote, other in our family. But we didn't want to rob him of it or completely whitewash him either. We try and be PC as possible and we thought we were doing the right thing. He's the best thing that's ever happened to me and my wife. There's not a day where I don't just look at him and smile warmly. I love him.”
Okay. Grace, anything jump out to you yet at this point?
Grace: It's interesting. I've actually been talking a lot to friends about transracial adoption because I'm a lot of my friends are thinking about having families and kids. So I'm very interested to see where this is going, because I think that there are a lot of complicated questions about transracial adoption.
Amory: Yeah. So this person writes, “Anyway, we're filling out his college app, slash financial aid applications and doing that whole thing. I go to my home office and go through some files and find his old adoption records. I'm not really paying much attention to them. And then his biological parents' surnames pop out and basically punch me in the face. His parents’ last names were Park and Kim.
Amory: For those of you who do not know, those are Korean last names. My son is not Chinese. Not even a little bit. He's Korean. I've dedicated nearly two decades to helping my son be close to his roots that aren't even his. I feel like a complete a****** to the nth degree. I have yet to disclose this to my son or wife. I honestly don't even know if I will.”
So this is quite a predicament.
Grace: Oh, my gosh. And yeah, I had my hands on my face the entire time, like, ooh! Because I mean, I'm just thinking about that kid. Like, I feel like it is really important to, you know, kind of have a sense of your roots. And even if people weren't purposefully lying… yeah, his past and like a really possibly important part of his identity has been obscured from him or like he's been, ugh! It's just. It's bad.
Amory: Yeah. And it didn't. There are there were certain things that didn't occur to me until reading it a second time, like, oh yeah, he didn't say a Chinese American family in the beginning. He said an Asian-American family. And so where — how did the leap happen? Which he explains, number one, but also number two, like, I have not had to do this. I'm not going to cast stones here. But it seems really well intentioned and also kind of impossible to impart a culture to a child that one is not your own and two is not just one culture. Right? It's like it's China. It's… Like, even if the, if the child becomes fluent in Mandarin, what if his parents spoke Cantonese? Oh, wait, they don't even speak Cantonese, they are Korean, you know? So I feel for this person because it seems like it was, it was going to be a hard task no matter what. But also like to go back to the adoption papers when you're filling out college applications and not in the 17 years in between.
Grace: Well, yeah! It reminds me I actually just finished this memoir called All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung. And she's an adoptee, a Korean-American adoptee, actually.
Amory: Okay.
Grace: And she talks a lot about her feelings about her adoptive parents not being very curious about her birth parents and kind of, you know, that did end up causing her some pain down the line. And it sounds like now, though, with adoptions that there's a lot more, that there are a lot more open adoptions so like, maybe a story like this would be less likely to happen in another 18 years.
Amory: Yeah. So there was an update that I think was posted pretty shortly after the original post. The guy wrote: “So last night I broke the news to my son after consulting with my wife. We sort of just told him straight up and explained our mistake. There were some tears and some laughter, and like many of you pointed out in the comments, there was still lots of love. He's confused, but as happy as he can be in this situation. My son isn't on Reddit, but within a few hours after my confession, a friend texted him, basically saying, ‘This sounds exactly like you and something your dad would do.’'' Oy. (Laughs.) “He read the post, which he thought was sort of funny, but we agree on a “no reading the comments” policy for our own well-being. I think out of everything, he was only really pissed that I posted it without telling him first, which in hindsight was awful on my part. Once again, I've proven I'm a complete a******.”
So as you mentioned, like you, what your first reaction was mine as well, Grace like, just thinking about this kid and this keeps resurfacing in the best of and Best of Redditor updates because the OP deleted the post and like we don't know who they are, we don't know who the son is, but it's been eight years, so the son is mid-twenties now. And I'm dying to know how this has affected his life, how this has shaped him, what he just what he makes of it all like, to say that he is as happy as he can be in this situation is like a tantalizingly vague and frustrating statement. And I'm sure it was written just kind of in the heat of all of this, but I'd love to now with eight years of distance, know how does this actually affect someone when you've been raised your whole life thinking one thing, finding out another, and the extent to which you just want to kind of like start over and figure out who you are without this extra unintentional baggage?
Grace: And it's a big lesson in like intent versus impact, only it sounds like a very loving family. But yeah, I really hope that the son has found the answers that he needs and continues to be able to have conversations about this.
Amory: Yeah. Well, Grace, we've learned some new phrases. We've learned about learning languages that maybe you thought were your native language and are not, learning languages that are not your native language, but you want to learn them. And we've learned that sometimes you just need to sit on the floor and eat bread and cry. Right? Something like that?
Grace: Exactly. It's universal. That is a sentiment that crosses all languages.
Amory: That's true.
[Harald: Jeg spiser brød og gråter på gulvet.]
Amory: Grace Tatter, thanks again for joining me this week.
Grace: Thank you.
Amory: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and myself with help from Megan Cattel. Special shout out to my Norwegian cousin-in-law — is that a thing? That should be a thing. Harald in Heggedal. Tusen takk, Harald! Mix and sound design by Matt Reed. ¡Hasta luego!
A DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONS IN A TIME OF WAR Comes to the Finborough Theatre - Broadway World - Dictionary
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A DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONS IN A TIME OF WAR Comes to the Finborough Theatre Broadway WorldThursday, June 9, 2022
The Ever-Shifting Challenge of Promoting Literature in Translation - Publishers Weekly - Translation
How can independent publishers get works of translated literature to readers in an era marked by media saturation and increased dominance by major companies over the book business, all after years of general apathy from consumers toward books in translation? That was the central question at an industry roundtable on "How to Promote Italian Literature in the USA" held by Multipli Forti, the Italian literary fiction festival, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York on June 6.
The panel, moderated by Roman publisher Minimum Fax's editorial director, Luca Briasco, and Michael Reynolds, the editorial director of Europa Editions, brought together a number of key figures in the translated literature sector: Terrie Akers, Other Press marketing director; Beniamino Ambrosi, foreign rights director and agent at the Cheney Agency; Tynan Kogane, senior editor at New Directions Publishing; Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Bookstores; and Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press.
At Seven Stories, Simon said, “We believe in that slow work” of discovering authors and then sticking by them. “Once we fall in love, then we’re kind of stuck.” In terms of how those authors are discovered, New Directions’ Kogane said foreign rights departments at literary agencies, translators coming to them directly, and the recommendations of friends all play a role: “We like to take things from people who we trust,” he said. Akers added that literary scouts also played a big role in recommending potential acquisitions at Other Press.
Ambrosi and McNally, for their part, pointed out that bigger publishers are starting to take more of an interest in publishing works of translation over the past decade. “There are publishers for whom this is a mission, then there’s a more commercial track,” Ambrosi said. “I think [publishing in translation] used to be a smaller pool in the U.S., and the history of it is a little bit random, made up of sporadic successes.” But such surprise bestsellers as Elena Ferrante, Han Kang, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, he said, helped to open up the market: “Every one of these books widens the scope a little bit.” As a result, Ambrosi noted, agents and acquiring editors both have gotten used to seeing these names frequently as comp titles during the acquisition stage.
McNally cited Knopf as one of the Big Five imprints starting to get better at presenting these books for American readers. Still, she said, publishers have a ways to go, at least from a bookseller’s perspective. “If you’re publishing international books, you could really seduce somebody, the way a travel brochure could,” she said.
In terms of discovery, Simon said that the “Amazonification” of the book business has made things more difficult than the sheer number of promotional tools available to publishers today might imply: “You can do everything right, right now, and it might still not work.” He wished, he said, that the commercial houses would go back to publishing commercial books only, calling imprints like Riverhead “unfortunately very good.” He added that he hoped that the bigger houses' attention span for international literature will prove “short, and they’ll move onto something else.”
Kogane's philosophy is a bit different, relying more on longevity than buzzworthiness. "New Directions has always sort of thought about publishing writers' writers, and writers who appeal to other writers," he said. "Publishing so many great mid-century American writers enriched Italian literature through translation. I think we're trying to approach Italian literature in the same way. With a writer like Natalia Ginzburg, I think so many American writers, both young and old, have found some model for what fiction could do in the English language."
How influential a book’s reception in its native market is to publishers’ promotions was a matter of debate. When it comes to countries like France, Italy, and Spain, Simon said, people “love the films, they love the food, they want to visit, they love the landscape, and then it suddenly gets all blurry when it comes to literature.” For books in translation on these books, it’s better to get American blurbers, he said: “I believe in publishing up to people in terms of the quality of the work, and publishing down to them in terms of the marketing. They just want to hear from some movie star or influencer they love…. They want it made American.”
McNally disagreed. “Maybe Dan's thinking nationally and I'm just thinking of New York, but when I find out that something was, say, the biggest book in Norway last year, I find that interesting, exciting, and I think my customers do too.” She added that highlighting a title's country of origin has proven successful in selling books at her stores.
“I have always [organized] the literature section in my stores in terms of countries, and at one point, when the original store was maybe five or six years old, I thought, maybe I'm wrong,” she said. “When I switched the organization to A-Z [by author], [sales] numbers [for international literature] went down by about 30% immediately, so we switched them back. Now, what we've been doing at our stores, more and more, is switching the front tables from [showcasing] fiction and nonfiction to American and international [books], and international book sales have gone up.”
Akers split the difference. Other Press does use press and bestseller placement from native countries on their books, and "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." She conceded that, when it came to blurbs, “an American author is more likely to make it on the cover, and foreign press is more likely to go on the back cover.”
Opportunities for promotion of international literature in the U.S. and how they’ve changed over the past two decades was also a point of contention. Kogane and Ayers were mostly upbeat on the situation. Thanks to Ferrante and Knausgaard, Kogane said, publishers are more willing to take chances on translated literature: “success,” he said, “begets success.” Akers pointed to the increasingly “robust community” of publishers of literature in translation in the U.S., calling it “a bit of a ground swell,” although she hedged that by saying that they “need to get past that 3%” market share for translated books.
Simon and McNally were a bit less optimistic about avenues for promotion, despite McNally’s nod to TikTok. That skepticism centered on the diminished influence of bookish publications. “A lot of the things that would move the needle in terms of books, like the New York Times Book Review, are not as important than they used to be,” Simon said.
McNally agreed, and noted that, despite the welcome nature of an increased number of prizes highlighting books in translation—the Booker International Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Literature among them—she wasn’t sure that they were quite making up for what was lost.
“In the last 15 years, we've watched almost every place from which people used to get book news stop providing book news,” McNally said. “So yes, I think they do make a difference, but it also feels like something as simple as, as the tides recede, something else is left on the beach. Back in the day, a cover review in the New York Times [Book Review] would have sold more than the Booker, but a cover review at the Times isn't impactful anymore. So the Booker International is what's still on the beach."
A Guangxi County Removes Xinhua Dictionary Over 'Vulgar' Content - Sixth Tone - Dictionary
A county in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has withdrawn the country’s most authoritative Chinese language dictionary as local authorities initiated a campaign to “purify the reading environment for minors.”
The 11th edition of the Xinhua Dictionary, along with a few other children’s books, were removed from the shelves in Quanzhou County for including “vulgar content,” according to a now-deleted article posted by the local procuratorate Thursday. Authorities didn’t specify the dictionary entries that were deemed vulgar, but many online had accused the dictionary of using sexist explanations to describe certain words.
For example, the word “tease” was explained using derogatory references to women.
The move came after a county-wide inspection of school textbooks and children’s books on June 1.
Last week, China’s top education authority issued a nationwide review of school textbooks in response to controversial illustrations in sixth grade math textbooks. However, the inspections in Quanzhou were initiated by local authorities instead of the central government.
The deleted article was accompanied by several photos, showing two local procuratorate officials in uniform flipping through a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore and photographing the content deemed objectionable. Many online criticized the action as “performative law enforcement.”
On Sunday, the municipal procuratorate in Guilin, which administers Quanzhou County, determined the action as a “misconduct.” The statement didn’t elaborate further and asked Quanzhou officials to make the dictionary available again in stores.
Editor: Bibek Bhandari.
(Header image: Local procuratorate officials in uniform check a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore in Quanzhou County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 1, 2022. From Weibo)
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Rotary Club Has Donated 15K Dictionaries To Montclair, Verona Schools - Patch - Dictionary
MONTCLAIR, NJ — The following news release comes courtesy of the Montclair Foundation. Learn more about posting announcements or events to your local Patch site.
The Montclair Rotary Club has helped a generation of elementary school students in Montclair and Verona get a jump start in building their vocabulary. Over the past 18 years the club has donated more than 15,500 student dictionaries to third-grade students in both communities. The first groups of students to receive their dictionaries have graduated from high school and finished college.
Montclair Rotarian Georgia Brown brought The Dictionary Project to the two communities in 2004 and has coordinated the effort the entire time. Annually, Ms. Brown and volunteers from the club distribute student dictionaries to pupils at 15 private, parochial, and public elementary schools in Montclair and Verona. This winter and spring, Ms. Brown and the club's team delivered a total of 1,401 dictionaries to third and fourth graders in both communities.
Students from the following schools received dictionaries this year:
- Montclair: Bradford Elementary School, Charles H. Bullock School, Edgemont Montessori Elementary School, Hillside Elementary School, Lacordaire Academy, Montclair Cooperative School, Northeast Elementary School, St. Cassian Elementary School, Watchung Elementary School
- Verona: Brookdale Avenue School, Forest Avenue School, Laning Avenue School, Our Lady of the Lake School, Spectrum360 School, F.N. Brown School
Ms. Brown's enthusiasm for the project earned her the nickname "Dictionary Peach," a reference to her home state of Georgia.
The Montclair Rotary Foundation, which is a nonprofit, has funded the purchase of dictionaries along with contributions by individuals. The Foundation also supplies financial grants to hunger relief efforts, affordable housing initiatives, and international youth exchange programs. The Montclair Rotary Club is celebrating 100 years of serving the local community during 2022.
Pandemic Disrupts Dictionary Distribution
Typically, the Rotary club gives dictionaries to third graders. But when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted that schedule during 2020 and 2021, Ms. Brown decided to expand the project this year to include fourth grade classes in the dictionary distribution.
Longest Word in the English Language
The soft-bound books have more than 370 pages of words and definitions plus maps, biographies of U.S. presidents and information about America's states and nations of the world. In the past, Ms. Brown brought dictionaries to each classroom and encouraged to lookup a word each day. She showed students that the dictionaries included the longest word in the English language, which has more than 1900 letters.
Ms. Brown said, "I was a natural choice to chair The Dictionary Project committee because I have always loved words. And I am a curious person and good dictionaries have thousands of words plus an abundance of useful information."
The late Robert Pityo, a longtime member of the Cedar Grove Rotary Club, mentored Ms. Brown in the dictionary project. Brown embraced the project because she believes that learning is a lifetime habit. Dictionaries, she added, are tools people can always use.
During a recent dictionary delivery to Verona's Lanning Avenue School, Principal Howard Freund said, "I am grateful for the opportunity to give our third and fourth graders their own dictionaries. They hold the dictionary in their hands and flip through pages filled with thousands of words. Students get to discover different words and find out what they mean."
Marking the End of an Era
Ms. Brown, who is retired from the U.S. Postal Service's office in Montclair, is completing her last year as chairperson of the annual dictionary project. She said, "I have many wonderful memories meeting and speaking with students at each of the local schools. When I hand the dictionary to students, I often see a sparkle of gratitude in their eyes and that makes all the effort worthwhile."
The Rotary Club is marking its 100 Anniversary year in 2022. The club that serves the communities of Montclair and Verona by supporting not-for-profit organizations, schools, and community groups. Rotarians volunteer their time and contribute resources to aid local hunger-relief and food insecurity programs, affordable housing efforts, the local animal shelter, and programs for veterans and the elderly. Members also sponsor community service projects. For more information about the Rotary, which meets each Tuesday at 12:15 p.m., contact Club President Paul Metcalfe at montclairrotaryclub@gmail.com. The club currently alternates between virtual meetings and in-person sessions held at the Greek Taverna Restaurant in Montclair.
Don't forget to visit the Patch Montclair Facebook page. Send local news tips and correction requests to eric.kiefer@patch.com.
Digital justice through data dictionaries | River Campus Libraries - University of Rochester - Dictionary
Anyone who has ever used a computer to search a library’s collection has benefitted from or been let down by metadata, the information which librarians, archivists, and researchers create to make resources findable and accessible.
Historically, collections have been described in ways that reflect not only academic priorities and academic privilege, but also the frequently white, heterosexual perspective of the academy. So, the chosen terminology may also not reflect what is important to particular communities about content they may have created or resources that address their experiences. For members of the Black or LGBTQAI+ communities, this practice could make some resources virtually undiscoverable.
The River Campus Libraries (RCL) is participating in a new University of Rochester project that seeks to bring long-overdue change to this realm.
Led by principal investigator Joel Burges, associate professor of English and visual and cultural studies, the Rochester Digital Annotation Project (RDAP) will explore the process of creating metadata that better reflects the sometimes complementary and sometimes competing interests of scholars and communities.
The RDAP team includes the following members:
- Maggie Dull, director of Metadata Strategies for RCL
- Steven Fullwood, archivist and cofounder of the Nomadic Archivists Project
- Miranda Mims, archivist and cofounder of the Nomadic Archivists Project
- Tara Nelson, curator of Moving Image Collections for Visual Studies Workshop
- Emily Sherwood, director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X for RCL
They will use a selection of materials from the Portable Channel collection held by the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) to prototype five “data dictionaries”: two grounded in the interests of Black and LGBTQAI+ communities and three in the interests of Black studies, queer studies, and media studies.
Five data dictionaries, two primary objectives
RDAP has two primary objectives in prototyping these dictionaries. The team will first explore how digital annotation can empower community members and scholarly researchers to understand the racial and sexual histories contained in local audiovisual archives such as the VSW’s. The second objective is to investigate the possibilities for generating accurate and inclusive data and metadata about those archives, over which community members and scholarly researchers will have shared authority.
With a seed grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the RDAP team will begin developing the five data dictionaries around the Portable Channel videos using Mediate, a time-based media annotation tool developed by Burges in partnership with RCL Digital Scholarship.
“To find those documentaries online, you would have to know to Google ‘Portable Channel’ or maybe ‘Rochester history’—something specific like that,” Sherwood says. “To make them more accessible, we’ll look to scholars for terms they would use to describe and document the collections, but we’ll also go out into the community and ask them how we should be talking about, describing, and teaching these histories.”
The ACLS grant is part of the Digital Justice Grant Program, which is designed to promote and provide resources for digital humanities projects that aim to diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues, especially those that elevate the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities including Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people.
RDAP is among the first eight projects to receive this award.
“The inaugural ACLS Digital Justice Grantees highlight a wonderful convergence between publicly engaged humanities and digital humanities,” said Keyanah Nurse, ACLS program officer of Higher Education Initiatives. “These teams exemplify the move away from extractive practices around data collection and towards collaborative knowledge production with those outside the academy. ACLS is proud to support the robust engagement with data ethics at the core of these projects.” ∎
To learn more about Rochester Digital Annotation Project or Mediate, contact Emily Sherwood, director of Digital Scholarship, at esherwood@library.rochester.edu.
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