Prospective Readers Research Articles

CONDENZA:A System for Extracting Abstract from a Given Source Document

Despite the increasingly availability of documents in electronic form and the availability of desktop publishing software, abstracts continue to be produced manually. The purpose of CONDENZA is to develop a system for abstract extraction from a given source document. CONDENZA describes a system on automatic methods of obtaining abstracts. The rationale of abstracts is to facilitate quick and accurate identification of the topic of published papers. The idea is to save a prospective reader time and effort in finding useful information in a given article or report. The system generates a shorter version of a given sentence while attempting to preserve its meaning. This task is carried out using summarization techniques. CONDENZA implements a method that combines apriori algorithm for keyword frequency detection with clustering based approach for grouping similar sentences together. The result from the system shows that our approach helps in summarizing the text documents efficiently by avoiding redundancy among the words in the document and ensures highest relevance to the input text. The guiding factors of our results are the ratio of input to output sentences after summarization.

"'It's Grisly!' 'It's Disgusting!'": Children's History through the Tourist Gaze

"'It's Grisly!' 'It's Disgusting!'":Children's History through the Tourist Gaze Ivy Linton Stabell (bio) These days, children's history is not for the lily-livered. A quick perusal of the nonfiction in your local bookstore's children's section will likely reveal a number of history texts that advertise themselves as action adventure stories, with plots chock-full of shocking discoveries, tantalizing intrigue, and narrow escapes. The You Wouldn't Want to Be picture-book series exemplifies this approach to children's history, which operates under the assumption that young readers are captivated by the dangerous and the foul. The back cover description of one installment offers characteristic assurance that readers will not be bored: "You Wouldn't Want to Be an Egyptian Mummy! Get ready . . . as a wealthy ancient Egyptian, you are about to drop dead! To enter the afterlife, your body must go through extraordinary processes to become a mummy. It's Disgusting!" (Stewart). This series, marked by its appealing cartoon illustrations, zany font, and titles that practically dare the reader to explore their pages, pitches its nonfiction content as an astonishing participatory adventure not to be resisted. These books, and the other popular history series this article will explore, promise prospective readers exciting excursions into the past, where they will be mind-boggled, scared stiff, and grossed out, but above all, captivated. Hazardous histories, as I term such texts, mark a powerful trend in contemporary children's literature: they promise historical engagement in the form of gruesomely true tales. In recent decades, books of this sort have grown in number and popularity in the American and British marketplaces. The series this article will examine have all deployed the hazardous history approach with great success, yielding awards, numerous installments and editions, positions on bestseller lists, and legions of young readers.1 To deliver the gut-wrenching thrills they promise, hazardous histories use a narrative technique designed to position the reader close to the action. Unlike history books that recount the past in a dispassionate voice, hazardous [End Page 302] histories must pull the reader closer to the past to evoke terror and amazement. Narrative time travel has thus become a common characteristic of the hazardous history type, and those series considered here invite their readers to see each installment as an expedition back in time. The You Wouldn't Want to Be picture-book histories suggest travel directly, conveying history by assigning the reader a specific undesirable role to play in each historical plot: an eighteenth-century Spanish merchant in Malam's You Wouldn't Want to Be a Pirate's Prisoner, a wealthy dead Egyptian in Stewart's You Wouldn't Want to Be an Egyptian Mummy. In Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, a nonfiction series in graphic novel format, the famed Revolutionary War spy is granted knowledge of the nation's future when he is (briefly) eaten by a giant American history book, which allows him to relate the exciting bits of American history to his hangman in order to delay his own execution.2 Readers do not take part in Hale's stories, but many of the books, especially the early installments that set the narrative formula, open with Nathan Hale beginning a lengthy yarn, and the corresponding panels display each of the frame narrative's characters peering into a new panel-within-the-panel that depicts the historical moment about to be narrated. These images act as a visual cue to the reader that they, like the narrator and executioner, must consciously step out of their present and back into another time. In her author's notes, Lauren Tarshis, author of the beginning reader historical fiction series I Survived, likens reading history to a "trip back in time" (Tarshis Destruction "Back in Time"), and the highly visible and continuously repeated series tagline "Do you have what it takes to survive?" uses the engaging second person address to prompt the reader to envision themselves in the place of the child at the center of each story. However, despite these series' interest in making history appear accessible, their use of time travel, a narrative technique meant to immerse young readers, acts more powerfully...

Using Scaffolding and Deliberate Practice to Improve Abstract Writing in an Introductory Biology Laboratory Course

s play the pivotal role of selling an article to a prospective reader, and for students, the ability to communicate science in concise written form may foster scientific thinking. However, students struggle with abstract composition, and we lack evidence-based educational innovations to help them develop this skill. We designed, implemented, and assessed an intervention for abstract composition with elements of scaffolding and transparency to ask whether deliberate practice improves concise scientific writing in early career undergraduate biology majors. We evaluated student performance by analyzing abstracts written before and after the intervention and by assessing pre- and posttest student concept maps. We found that scaffolded learning improved student abstract writing, with the greatest gains in students’ ability to describe the motivation for their work. Using a set of tested tools to teach scientific writing has important implications for strengthening students’ capacity to reinforce and synthesize content in the future, whether that is in laboratory course exercises, in independent research, or as a transferable skill to general critical thinking.

The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered by Erwin Dekker

Reviewed by: The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered by Erwin Dekker Michael Burri Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. 215 pp. With its two central figures, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, well-represented by biographical literature and intellectual histories, it cannot be said that the “Austrian Economists” are unfamiliar to English-language scholarship. Indeed, so well established is this branch of economic theory that it is possible to be labeled an “Austrian” in some academic departments without ever having set foot in Austria. Associated with laissez-faire economics and libertarianism, the Austrian Economists are also known to policymakers and politicians. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said that she always carried a copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in her purse. In The Viennese Students of Civilization, Erwin Dekker seeks neither to introduce the Austrian school of economics, nor to bulldoze the current consensus readings of Hayek and Mises as thinkers of methodological individualism and free-market liberalism. His argument is, rather, that the historical, social, and political context of Habsburg and First Republic Austria, as seen from Vienna, significantly shaped the theories of the Austrian Economists. Today, an “Austrian” may never have set foot in Austria, but for Dekker, a greater understanding of the school of Austrian economics can be gained by examining its Austrian context. That context is one in which the Austrian Economists were greatly motivated by concerns about the future of their civilization. Here, prospective readers of The Viennese Students of Civilization might wonder if the term civilization in the title phrase will be too unwieldy to be applied critically. And indeed, the book does apply the term broadly. At times, for example, the Austrian Economists’ concern about “civilization” means the invocation of an apocalyptic infrastructural collapse that is equal parts Karl Kraus and the Hollywood disaster film. Thus, Dekker twice cites Ludwig von Mises’s prediction to a student as they strolled along the well-paved Ringstrasse that “grass will grow right here where we are standing,” while Joseph Schumpeter is presented describing his time as a finance minister in postwar socialist Vienna as helping the state to commit suicide (3, 89, 121). Elsewhere, however, the Austrian concern about “civilization” means an appreciation for continuity, where the achievements of civilization are understood as the product of “restraint.” Borrowing from Norbert Elias the sense of civilization as a process of increasing individual and social restraint, Dekker understands the Austrian [End Page 146] Economists to be working through a problematic of civilization in order to study economics. According to this reading, Hayek is not primarily concerned with the individual freedom that the market enables but rather privileges the market because it is a form of civilization that restrains, or disciplines, social and individual behavior. Of Hayek, Dekker observes, “Markets do not work because individuals are rational, but markets allow individuals to make rational choices” (89). Approaching the Austrian Economists as students of restraint and civilization, The Viennese Students of Civilization creates a context in which contributions in economic theory can be seen as contiguous with other intellectual currents in Vienna. This is a great strength of the book. Dekker notes, for example, how closely Hayek’s interest in civilization and restraint aligns with the work of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. Like Karl Popper and Hermann Broch, moreover, Hayek is said to have balanced his own skepticism about the certainty of knowledge and the prospects for the future with personal courage and a resolve to press forward. Dekker’s attention to the milieu of the postwar Austrian capital also suggests how trends in economic thinking were bolstered by “typically Viennese” means of intellectual association. Like other philosophical “circles” that convened in postwar Vienna (for example, the Geist Circle, the Kelsen Circle, the Spann Circle, and the Vienna Circle), the Mises Circle helped establish research premises, model behavior, and define a coherent intellectual agenda. Of course, members of the biweekly Wednesday Mises Circle connected with other circles, especially the Geist Circle. And it also engendered its own forms of camaraderie. Decades later, for...

Republishing Pre-World War II Hungarian Women Writers After the Fall of Socialism

Immediately before and shortly after the collapse of socialism in 1989, a large number of private publishing houses were founded in Hungary. Some of them began their career by republishing the novels of selected popular Hungarian women writers of the preWorld War II era that had been banned following the Soviet occupation of the country in 1945. The lack of comprehensive literary criticism on the works of women authors drove the new publishers to rely on the so-called “oral canon” of collective memory, which had saved some of their names from oblivion. To grab the attention of prospective readers, the books selected for publication were provided with modern book cover designs, reflecting new, but still patriarchal values. After a brief overview of how prewar literature was censored after 1945, focusing on the editors’ inevitable reinterpretation of the writings of Renée Erdős, Mrs. Kosáry Lola Réz, and Anna Tutsek through book cover designs, Kádár aims in this paper to survey in what ways and how successfully the re-editions of the novels by women writers have contributed to their inclusion in the literary canon since 1989.

Increasing Navigation Speed at Endoluminal CT Colonography Reduces Colonic Visualization and Polyp Identification.

Purpose To investigate the effect of increasing navigation speed on the visual search and decision making during polyp identification for computed tomography (CT) colonography Materials and Methods Institutional review board permission was obtained to use deidentified CT colonography data for this prospective reader study. After obtaining informed consent from the readers, 12 CT colonography fly-through examinations that depicted eight polyps were presented at four different fixed navigation speeds to 23 radiologists. Speeds ranged from 1 cm/sec to 4.5 cm/sec. Gaze position was tracked by using an infrared eye tracker, and readers indicated that they saw a polyp by clicking a mouse. Patterns of searching and decision making by speed were investigated graphically and by multilevel modeling. Results Readers identified polyps correctly in 56 of 77 (72.7%) of viewings at the slowest speed but in only 137 of 225 (60.9%) of viewings at the fastest speed (P = .004). They also identified fewer false-positive features at faster speeds (42 of 115; 36.5%) of videos at slowest speed, 89 of 345 (25.8%) at fastest, P = .02). Gaze location was highly concentrated toward the central quarter of the screen area at faster speeds (mean gaze points at slowest speed vs fastest speed, 86% vs 97%, respectively). Conclusion Faster navigation speed at endoluminal CT colonography led to progressive restriction of visual search patterns. Greater speed also reduced both true-positive and false-positive colorectal polyp identification. © RSNA, 2017 Online supplemental material is available for this article.

Large-Scale Data, Big Possibilities: A Review of Large-Scale Studies in Mathematics Education

Large–Scale Studies in Mathematics Education, edited by James A. Middleton, Jinfa Cai, and Stephen Hwang, presents mathematics education research covering a broad range of topics using a variety of data sources and analysis techniques. By spotlighting this work, the editors hope to encourage the use of large–scale data sets, which they argue are underutilized by mathematics education researchers. Middleton, Cai, and Hwang contend that “large scale studies can be both illuminative—uncovering patterns not yet seen in the literature, and critical—changing how we think about teaching, learning, policy, and practice” (p. 12). With its inclusion of studies using large–scale data sets and expository papers concerning methodological considerations, the book effectively challenges the reader to consider issues of scale. The book has 18 chapters organized into four sections on curriculum, teaching, learning, and methodology. Although the volume is organized by these areas of interest, we suggest that prospective readers peruse chapters in all sections. As the book editors note, the boundaries between sections are far from clear–cut, and readers may find work relevant to their area of interest throughout the book.

Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales by Roger Welsch

Reviewed by: Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales by Roger Welsch Dwayne Strasheim Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales. By Roger Welsch. Foreword by Dick Cavett. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xv + 189 pp. $19.95 paper. As a first-year student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln during the fall of 1958, I enrolled in a beginning German course to apply toward the foreign language requirement of the College of Arts and Sciences. The course not only helped me meet the requirement, but it also changed my life. The instructor was a young, bespectacled, crew-cut teaching assistant, standing in front of his first class ever. His name was Roger Welsch. The teaching approach was the traditional grammar-translation method, but with a twist. Instead of the dull, boring, tedious lectures about grammar that many of us twenty-seven students might have anticipated, we were regaled with fascinating stories about how human language works. Roger demonstrated that grammar didn't have to be dull and boring at all. For us, it became vital, exciting, and even fun. I went on to major in German, acquired two graduate degrees in linguistics, and completed a fifty-year teaching career, forty-nine of those years at Hastings College. Roger's intellectual focus shifted over the years from language to folklore, but that was hardly a stretch because language is the medium of folklore, and linguists and folklorists share a keen appreciation of how ordinary people talk in ordinary situations. Welsch begins his forty-fourth book with three introductory chapters—one autobiographical and two scholarly—about his philosophy of folklore. Roger defines folklore as "that part of culture that is transmitted primarily from person to person by informal means . . . word of mouth, example, demonstration, daily activity . . . rather than through formal conduits of knowledge like classrooms, books, galleries, or concert halls" (22). The most delightful part of Why I'm an Only Child is the collection of dozens of Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales, which are best described by Roger's oxymoronic term "civil ribaldry"—stories that are only "slightly naughty," suggestive without being explicitly dirty, bawdy but with little or no offensive language. These are stories that might be heard around the table over coffee at the Chew 'n' Chat Café or around the table over drinks at the Dannebrog Tavern. "As are the Plains, the ribald tales are [mostly] rural, agricultural, subtle, and civil" (23). I read the whole book in one day and experienced several chuckles, quite a few laughs out loud, and even a few tears. I'd heard some of the stories before, mostly at Roger's speaking engagements that I had attended, and there might also have been others from his "Postcards from Nebraska" segment on CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. In any case, even if I was experiencing the tales for the second or third time, I was totally captivated by them. I couldn't put the book down. I was having too much fun. Of all the stories collected in this volume, my favorite is Roger's father's answer to his son's question referenced in the title of the book. I was tempted to repeat it here, but thought better of it because I don't want to spoil that one for prospective readers. My conclusion is that Roger Welsch is a superb writer and folklorist for the same reasons that he was a superb classroom teacher in our German class back in 1958. He has mastered his subject, he admires and respects his audience, he has an extraordinary sense of humor, and he is a thoroughly gifted storyteller. Those of us who value the language and culture of [End Page 326] the Great Plains are indeed fortunate that he has created in Why I'm an Only Child such a fitting capstone of his productive and distinguished career. Dwayne Strasheim English Language and Linguistics, Professor Emeritus, Hastings College Broken Arrow, Oklahoma Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

CONDENZA: A System for Extracting Abstract from a Given Source Document

Despite the increasingly availability of documents in electronic form and the availability of desktop publishing software, abstracts continue to be produced manually. The purpose of CONDENZA is to develop a system for abstract extraction from a given source document. CONDENZA describes a system on automatic methods of obtaining abstracts. The rationale of abstracts is to facilitate quick and accurate identification of the topic of published papers. The idea is to save a prospective reader time and effort in finding useful information in a given article or report. The system generates a shorter version of a given sentence while attempting to preserve its meaning. This task is carried out using summarization techniques. CONDENZA implements a method that combines apriori algorithm for keyword frequency detection with clustering based approach for grouping similar sentences together. The result from the system shows that our approach helps in summarizing the text documents efficiently by avoiding redundancy among the words in the document and ensures highest relevance to the input text. The guiding factors of our results are the ratio of input to output sentences after summarization.

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: Biography, by Elizabeth Maslen. Northwestern University Press, 2014. 556 pages. After decades of neglect, at best making cameo appearances in lists of little-read writers of the or as a star in recovery scholarship, Storm Jameson might well be on the cusp of a true revival. As part of Northwestern University Press's series Cultural Expressions of II, the second major biography of this always engaging, never flawless, luminary of twentieth-century British letters and political activism may hopefully accelerate a growing wave of critical evaluation to match the historical interest. Jameson was a vital part of world historical events of the 1930s and 1940s, working diligently through the interwar years in the peace movement and serving as a Sponsor in the Peace Pledge Union. In the years leading up to the Second War, she began assisting political refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe, the most famous of these being Czeslaw Milosz, who would be a friend to the end of her life. During the war, Jameson was elected president of PEN, the international organization of writers that, under her leadership, changed from being avowedly apolitical to becoming directly engaged with advocating for social justice against fascist regimes. It was at her behest that PEN would publish An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (1940), urging allied countries and all PEN centers to fight for universal free speech. And it was as PEN's president, though not officially speaking on its behalf, that she would publish her pamphlet End of This War (1941), the document that announced her formal break with the absolute pacifism that was crucial to her activist politics after the Great War. This impressive resume of political activity during a much studied time in European history might have been enough to merit biographical scrutiny, but Jameson was first and foremost a writer, the staggeringly prolific author or editor of seventy books of fiction, criticism, drama, politics, and memoir. Her productivity was spurred along partly by financial need, but unlike other highly productive writers--Georgette Heyer, say, or Jameson's much admired Georges Simenon--she never quite managed to make formulaic genre fiction a forte. Her letters often show a desire to have either more time to spend on a big serious novel or the capacity to crank out hack work that could readily sell. She would have neither. Reading Maslen's biography, one finds a lifelong saga of mixed reviews that fail to fully comprehend the complex, formally experimental, politically engaged fiction that it seems Jameson could not help but write. She also never seemed to be a truly rapid writer, revising heavily and spending fourteen-hour days with her fiction as well as her political activities, along with, as Maslen notes, keeping house for her husband and son. All of Jameson's Yorkshire-bred hardiness and work ethic combines with a distinct challenge for any biographer--the thicket of harsh self-criticism that pervades her letters and her monumental autobiography Journey from the North (published in Britain in two volumes, 1969-1970). Maslen is an adept reader of Jameson's writings, both the published works and the archival materials, and throughout her biography there are signs of the combative approach Maslen takes to her subject, a necessary measure it one does not wish to accept Jameson's nearly constant self-deprecation as fact. For instance, her novel That Was Yesterday (1932), which she sometimes regarded as her first mature work, begins with this disclaimer on the copyright page: A few sentences in this book, chiefly conversational, have been lifted with slight alterations from an earlier novel of the writer's. This earlier book was fortunately not much read: even more fortunately it was printed on quickly perishable paper. The pity is that it was printed at all. This, one thinks, would not inspire confidence in the prospective reader. …

Rady, Martyn Customary Law in Hungary: Courts, Texts, and the ‘Tripartitum (review)

REVIEWS 541 the reader is denied the possibility of understanding that much more closely something of the substance of Latvian identity. Of course the book does contain some interesting material. For instance, we learn of the founding of a Baltic University in Hamburg in 1945 and the fact that it soon enrolled 1,200 students (p. 154). Unfortunately, however, the book also says a number of things that are of much less value. Some readers will scratch their heads at a sentence reading, ‘When Adolf Hitler came to power as president of Germany on 19 August 1934’ (p. 139). (Surely the ‘seizure of power’ had begun the previous year?) That the Baltic States managed to overcome serious economic problems in the late 2000s is said to be ‘greatly to the credit and hard work of their peoples, who stoically endured the necessary austerity measures’ (p. 198). The comments barely qualify as scholarly analysis. But maybe Kalnins had to cut corners on account of running out of words towards the end of the text, so you find comments such as the following: ‘The visitor today will be struck by the dynamic and optimistic atmosphere and the modern facilities but will also notice the social and economic disparities that still exist, particularly in urban areas where the dismal legacy of Soviet slums remains, a painful contrast to the affluent and renovated areas’ (p. 200). The comment is true enough, but nonetheless leaves you wanting much more. Certainly the book is nicely produced and quite possibly it would be appreciated by travellers heading off for Latvia for a holiday, but academics especially will be left wanting more. This lack of ‘something’ is perhaps touched on once again when you look through the notes and selected bibliography. There are titles in English, French and German, but no titles in Latvian. For a book supposed to reveal the character of Latvian identity and which is dedicated to this very people, it’s a strange omission. University of Bradford Martyn Housden Rady, Martyn. Customary Law in Hungary: Courts, Texts, and the ‘Tripartitum’. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. xii + 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. This book should not be seen as a narrow work about law. The focus on custom should not lead prospective readers to think it is concerned with a minor part of the legal system. As Martyn Rady argues through the book, customary law was (and in a sense, still is) of central importance to the history of government, law and the administration of justice in Hungary. A book on customary law in Hungary is to a considerable extent a book simply on law in, and to an extent the constitution of, Hungary. SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 542 The focus of the book is on medieval law and practice. Of the twelve chapters, four are on aspects of medieval law (principally, some later developments are considered) and another on the medieval courts (chapters 4–8). The first chapter is a brief overview of early and medieval Hungarian history, as well as consideration about the idea of customary law. Chapter two considers the most influential source of Hungarian law, one which purported to set out contemporary custom, the Tripartitum of Stephen Werbőczy and the various sources of customary law in Hungary, the roles of which are considered in chapter three. Themes throughout these chapters include the relative unimportance of legislation in medieval Hungarian law and the dangers of an uncritical reliance on the Tripartitum as a guide to Hungarian custom both before and after its publication in 1517. Chapters nine to twelve run through various later developments. Each of these chapters covers a wide range of substance, such that the chapter titles do not fully reveal the substance addressed. Chapter nine considers procedural and jurisdictional changes in the Habsburg context. While chapter ten is described as addressing early-modern attempts to put the law into writing, attempts to do this risked affecting established beliefs, ideas and practices, especially about governance and the constitution. Much more than ‘codification’ (as the title describes the chapter) is considered here. Chapter eleven, about law and practice in the long-eighteenth century, also...

A cross cultural analysis of conjuncts as indicators of the interaction and negotiation of meaning in research articles

Abstract The role of English as a global lingua franca of academia has become indisputable in the on-going process of internationalization of all scholarship, even though the majority of writers and readers of academic texts are non-native speakers of English. Thus it is questionable whether there is any justification for imposing on international academic communication written in English the style conventions typical of the dominant Anglophone discourse community. Recommendations usually comprise qualities such as clarity, economy, linearity and precision in communication (cf. Bennett, 2015), which can be achieved, among other means, by certain overt guiding signals including conjuncts (Quirk et al., 1985). Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to reveal cross-cultural variation in the use of these important text-organizing means as it is believed that conjuncts can enhance the interaction and negotiation of meaning between the author and prospective readers of academic texts. The paper explores which semantic relations holding between parts of a text tend to be expressed overtly by conjuncts and which semantic classes, such as appositive, contrastive/concessive, listing and resultive conjuncts, contribute most to the interactive and dialogic nature of written academic discourse. The data are taken from research articles (RAs) selected from two journals, one representing academic discourse written by native speakers of English (Applied Linguistics) and the other representing academic texts written in English by Czech and Slovak scholars (Discourse and Interaction).

A Brief Literature Review of Studies on Lexical Chunks at Home and Abroad

<p>This paper attempts to offer a general review of studies on lexical chunks at home and abroad to reveal prospective readers a clear path to approach this promising language phenomenon. It starts with definitions of chunks, followed by an exemplification of the essential characteristics, different classifications, and functions proposed by researchers, and then it summarizes some major findings both theoretically and empirically. Based on these, some crucial aspects are pointed out that previous studies fail to cover but a worthwhile attempt for the future study.</p>

‘La dolce vita’ meets ‘the nature of evil’: the paratextual positioning of Italian crime fiction in English translation

ABSTRACTIn this article I explore the way Italian crime fiction is presented to prospective Anglophone readers through paratextual bindings: titles, cover images and blurbs. I focus in particular on the way Italian settings are – variously – described, elucidated, emphasised and promoted, as publishers and their marketing teams seek to place a text within a space of familiarity or exoticism. Through the very act of circulation across cultures and languages, new forms of national allegory are attributed to these crime novels, on the basis of the perceived needs and prior associations of their new readership.

The Comprehensibility of Readable English Texts and Their Back-Translations

<p>This paper presents the results of a study initiated by the potential employment of readability measures to assess the equivalence of reading ease and grade level indices between source texts and their translations as well as back-renderings. It was questionable whether there was a causal relation between the indices and their comprehensibility levels, because whereas the former concentrated merely on quantities of linguistic elements and their formal relations, the latter considered such factors as particular characteristics of each element, meaning coverage, and readers’ socio-psychological background. This study aimed to disclose the relation between the readability measures and the comprehensibility levels of source texts and their translations, as well as back-renderings. A number of English texts, along with their translations in Indonesian, were deliberately chosen for that purpose. The translations were then back-rendered to the source language utilizing <em>Google Translate</em>. Comparison between the source texts and their translations as well as back-renderings was capable of showing their similarities in the readability levels and average number of characters, words, sentences, and words per sentence in the texts. And asking prospective readers about their perception concerning their understanding of such texts was capable of disclosing the causal relation between the readability and the comprehensibility levels of the texts.</p>

Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865 by Allen Carden (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865 by Allen Carden Michael D. Robinson (bio) Keywords Emancipation, Slavery, Abolition, Thirteenth Amendment Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865. By Allen Carden. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Pp. 355. Paper, $29.95.) Students searching the stacks of their local library for an explanation of the long and winding effort to rid slavery from the soil of the United States often discover that a profusion of books have been devoted to this complicated subject. Bookshelves sag from an impressive harvest of scholarship, but a quick scan of titles often leaves prospective readers overwhelmed and unnerved. Allen Carden seeks to make this formidable subject a little less daunting by synthesizing much of the extant literature in Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865. The Emancipation Proclamation and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment delivered a deathblow to American slavery, but in this study Carden casts his attention on the meandering path that led to the finish line. As the author richly catalogs in this narrative, many hazards, obstructions, and detours cluttered the road to emancipation. Carden illustrates how for the bulk of the period between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of the Civil War, politicians soft-pedaled most emancipation initiatives because they could [End Page 197] potentially imperil the Union. Statesmen who so often waxed eloquent about the blessings of liberty ironically found that extracting slavery, the very antithesis of liberty, from the United States endangered the political harmony of the republic. The sectional compromises built into the Constitution and the difficulties of eliminating slavery in the states above the Mason-Dixon Line, Carden observes, foreshadowed southerners’ fierce resistance to emancipation in the four decades following the Missouri Compromise, when the peculiar institution became more deeply embedded in the South’s economy, society, and culture. Thus, politicians time and again postponed the slavery question until secession and war left no alternative to confrontation. Carden argues that resistance to emancipation during this extended period demonstrates how white Americans in both the antebellum North and South subscribed to a racial outlook that subordinated blacks to an inferior status in a nation ostensibly devoted to equality. Carden reconstructs this bumpy journey for his reader, highlighting aspects of the quest to end slavery that a general audience might find surprising. The author sets out to destroy five myths about slavery, emancipation, and abolition: the belief that the institution of slavery was inconsequential to northerners; the notion that slavery’s demise came about easily in the North; the misconception that blacks left the work of abolition to whites; the delusion that the South seceded in defense of states’ rights rather than slavery; and the idea that the North immediately accepted emancipation as the primary objective in the Civil War. Specialists of the period will find that the scholarly community has already discarded these myths and will discover no innovative new interpretations of the struggle to eradicate slavery. A trailblazing analysis of emancipation, however, is not the professed goal of this book. Rather, Carden provides an accessible, one-volume account of this complex historical problem grounded in his impressive grasp of the voluminous array of secondary literature related to slavery and emancipation. Although Carden offers an extensive account of America’s plodding course toward emancipation, Freedom’s Delay suffers from a few drawbacks. At times the narrative deviates from the author’s stated purpose and the discussion of the struggle to end slavery is eclipsed by a familiar retelling of the events that brought about the Civil War. The quest to end slavery and the coming of the Civil War are without a doubt intricately entwined, and Carden goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the political mainstream prioritized compromise over African American [End Page 198] freedom, which makes it necessary for him to chronicle the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and so forth. Unfortunately, Carden’s account of conventional political maneuvering sometimes overshadows the efforts of antislavery agitators, the very men and women who worked so assiduously to make slavery’s termination an unavoidable political issue...

A response to Norman Etherington’s ‘Jeff Guy’s Theophilus Shepstone: a study in character’

A response to Norman Etherington’s ‘Jeff Guy’s Theophilus Shepstone:a study in character’ August 29, 2014 Fifty years ago it was unusual for researchers in the humanities to use typewriters. The British Museum Reading Room allowed them in but they were directed to a small, windowless, claustrophobic annex in the library’s bowels. It was here I met Norman Etherington, both of us to our astonishment searching for the same unusual sources on South African history. We later met in South Africa to continue our research – spoke with people who bridged a great span of South African history – Selby Msimang, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Anthony Barker – and explored what was then still Zululand in an old, yellow Ford Anglia on roads so vulnerable to the weather that on one occasion Norman, delayed by the mud, missed not only an appointment with Edgar Brookes but playing the bassoon in the Pietermaritzburg Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s Seventh. Except for the past few years, we kept in contact and I have been the recipient of his exceptional generosity, personal and academic. I must admit therefore to be taken aback not by a critical review of my book on Theophilus Shepstone and colonial Natal but by a hostile one. I also believe that it is a misreading of my book and I must respond to it, for the same reason that he gives for his review: ‘Here is a challenge that cannot be left unanswered, lest it be thought silence signifies assent’ (p51).1 I have tried not to give the impression, not only uninteresting but unedifying, of two grumpy old men slugging it out. I’m not sure if I have succeeded. Etherington’s review of my book Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African autonomy and settler colonialism in the making of traditional authority is long, ranges back and forth, selecting different [End Page 81] targets for a range of the historical weapons he has collected in a lifetime of research, some of them to mount major attacks with the intent of inflicting major damage, others minor, made in passing. I have ignored the latter and concentrated my defence on the former and built it around the title of the book: a rather clumsy title I admit but passable as a succinct summary of the book’s dominant themes and quite able I feel to fend off the assaults made on it. The review begins at the very beginning with Theophilus Shepstone, the opening two words of the title as they appear on the cover. These are larger than the rest of the title and this will lead, the reviewer maintains, to ‘prospective readers’ expecting a biography. And not only prospective readers but the reviewer himself for he follows this up with the assertion that ‘almost everything that might be expected in a full-blown biography is missing’. This absent biography is targeted throughout the review. The problem is that while Shepstone is certainly central to the book, it is not and was not intended to be a ‘full blown biography’. This should be apparent from the wording of the title as a whole for which I take full responsibility, and not from its visual appearance for which I do not. It should also be apparent from the words that head the first sub-section of the ‘Introduction’, ‘Historical biography/biographical history’, in which I explain why I felt it necessary to shift ‘away from historical biography towards biographical history’ (page 2). No matter: Etherington wanted a full blown biography and didn’t get it, and criticises the book not for what it is but what he wants it to be: a comprehensive biography, structured around an evenly paced narrative, dealing with those topics that Etherington holds to be significant for a life of Shepstone. But even if I could, if anyone could, write the comprehensive biography that he insists upon, I chose not to do so. Of course I read the sources as widely as possible, but I knowingly selected certain themes and then developed them as broader issues, within a context which Etherington ignores or dismisses in this review. I regret leaving out certain important aspects of...

Tedious Reading: The Untimeliness of Anne Brontë

Tedious Reading:The Untimeliness of Anne Brontë Joel Simundich (bio) In Agnes Grey (1847), Anne Brontë's eponymous heroine routinely voices a concern about how her narrative may affect her readers. "I have not enumerated half the vexatious propensities of my pupils, or half the troubles resulting from my heavy responsibilities," Agnes states, "for fear of trespassing too much upon the reader's patience, as, perhaps, I have already done" (36). Despite the brevity of Brontë's single-volume novel, as a narrator, Agnes is anything but brief. Her sustained attention to the "vexatious propensities" of her young charges and oft-expressed boredom with life at Wellwood and Horton Lodge together lend torpidity to her narrative, limiting its transformative potential for any "unfortunate governess" (37) perusing its pages and diminishing its interest for prospective readers—the consequence that troubles Agnes most. Agnes's boredom is a product of the time she has spent in successive yet unsuccessful service positions, and, considering the working title for the novel, Passages in the Life of an Individual, Brontë may have thought Agnes's account applicable to any reader familiar with the demands of daily work.1 Brontë's novel routinely draws a parallel between the tedious nature of Agnes's everyday life and the tedium of her narrative. Conscious of this problem, Agnes leads readers to question the merits of what she chooses to represent and to wonder with her, toward the end of the novel, "Well! what is there remarkable in all this?" (163). Critics have questioned the historicity of Anne Brontë's fiction along the lines of this problem of readerly interest: What is remarkable about Agnes's life? Does her narrative simply reflect the sociohistorical conditions that consigned women to domestic labour? Or is Agnes's boredom, and the acuity with which it is reproduced in her narrative, particular to her lived experience? Terry Eagleton concludes his 1975 work on the Brontës, Myths of Power, with a condemnation of Anne Brontë's ahistoricism, claiming that her characters are "too abstractly individuated, too internally unpressured by the strains and frictions of their social world" to be "linked by capillary fibres to the central nerves of history" and that as a result, Brontë presents "no historical life" in her novels (136–37). More recently, Amanda Claybaugh has argued the very opposite. In "Everyday Life in Anne Brontë," Claybaugh claims that it is Brontë's attempt to represent the diffuse nature of lived experience that makes the tedium depicted in her works historically significant, even if her experimental narratives fail to hold interest. [End Page 323] The difficulty of reading Anne Brontë today, it seems, is that both critical perspectives hold true. As Eagleton claims, Brontë's works do not depict the harried sensations typically associated with life in mid-century England at the moment of the acceleration of industrial capitalism. Yet, as Claybaugh argues, Brontë's novels borrowed from and helped shape conspicuously reformist literary works of the 1840s, such as works of temperance fiction, which stressed historical context and verisimilitude in their struggle to represent everyday life.2 In debating the historicity of Brontë's works, critics tend to rely on assumptions about readerly interest. For Eagleton and Claybaugh alike, a sense of excitement is curiously (if not dangerously) absent from Brontë's writing, and the experience of reading her novels comes unbearably close to the very historical conditions her novels represent, as if reading Brontë's novels amounts to experiencing the same historical conditions undergone by her characters. Yet by pursuing this strong connection between a certain mode of historicity and readerly interest, a connection that Brontë's narrators insist upon within their narratives, critics overlook how the tedium engendered by reading Brontë is actually in service of an alternative mode of temporality and an alternative model of novel reading. In what follows, I argue that the tedium of reading Anne Brontë's novels is instrumental to the sense of untimeliness that her works seek to represent, an experience of being out of sync with one's historical moment and its temporally contingent strategies for interpretation. By wedding the durational experience of novel reading to the diminution of...

Dawn of the Intercontinental Sniper: The Drone's Cascading Contribution to the Modern Battlefield's Complexity: A Review Essay of Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution, by Richard Whittle

This review essay discusses a unique book that chronicles the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or drone revolution with a focus on the Predator weapon system. Although brought to market by a mainstream publisher, the book offers a thought-provoking, heavily researched, non-fiction case study involving national security, defense acquisition, and international law. We congratulate author Richard Whittle for crafting a thrilling and highly informative history of technological innovation, government contracting, and weapons system development and deployment, while introducing complex issues of national security and international law, that nonetheless left us eagerly anticipating a forthcoming action movie. This review essay introduces prospective readers to a handful of the captivating characters that propel the Predator saga; identifies many interesting national security and international law issues raised in Whittle’s book; offers a disturbing anecdote about the extent to which the government’s post-millennial outsourcing has eroded the government’s monopoly over the use of force; paints a pessimistic picture of the Defense Acquisition System; and concludes that a broad range of sophisticated readers will enjoy the book.Ultimately, however, the book’s success makes the bottom line no less troubling. As much as Predator celebrates the initiative, creativity, ingenuity, commitment, and drive of exceptional people, it bemoans the stifling and inefficient acquisition regime that appears to value process over outcomes.

Book Review: I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New and Selected Poems

I Scrape Window of Nothingness: New and Selected Poems. By Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Asheville, N.C.: Orison Books, 2015. 227 pp. $30.00 (cloth).I Scrape Window of Nothingness wears its title not to appeal, but to intrigue. With ragged letters against a black background, cover poses a further challenge to prospective reader whom it dares to look inside. Initially it may summon bleak, even nihilistic views of some existentialist writers, but book surprises at each turn, holding readers in suspense, while we wait for an insight or revelation on verge of being unveiled. Radulescu does not allow entry into total despair, but she pulls us into a world of angels in shadow, while we work to extract from it what indefinable is (might it be hope?) that keeps us reading.Abandoning conventional order, poet places her recent work at front of book, so that one views her world in reverse chronology from 1989 to 2014. It is noteworthy that title is drawn from final poem ars poetic, which by its position would act as a consummation or summation of books message, in fact poet wrote it before time and experience could season a more current perspective.Radulescu s work covers a cultural and philosophical breadth one cannot overlook. Born and raised in Romania during communist era surveillance of citizens was common, along with reprisal for dissent, poet introduces reader to an environment of repression. She gives only a hint of personal loss in poem 1955, where she writes, when my father was taken away, / melted dripped from gutters (p. 123). Other times, she relies on graphic images to refer to unspeakable acts: their corpses our trees, our roads, / tons of blood evaporating in air we breathe (p. 122). These become all more appalling considered not too far from moments of tenderness and optimism, peace comes like snow (p. 197) and the deer came closer to my hand / looking for / flowers (p. 101).Because she writes in Romanian, French, and English (the language in which this collection was written), Radulescu is able to stretch boundaries of words-boundaries she expands with sparse, irregular punctuation and unexpected spacing. As a device, these serve to destabilize language, accenting disjointed world she presents, while inviting a fluid interpretation. Theater of Absurd techniques add another dimension to her poetry, which demands and deserves a close (and second) reading. …