Proper captions should not only fit the right words to a video’s audio content—a feat that automation struggles to achieve—but also use correct grammar and punctuation, describe sounds like the eerie creak of a door or the crackle of gunfire, and differentiate between speakers so deaf audiences know who’s talking. – The Atlantic
Indigenous Women Are Publishing the First Maya Works in Over 400 Years
“Taller Leñateros is Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. Founded in 1975 [in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas] by the Mexican-American poet Ambar Past, the workshop is dedicated to documenting and disseminating the endangered Tzotzil language, culture, and oral history. And it does so environmentally, using only recycled materials (leñateros alludes to those who get their firewood from deadwood, rather than felled trees).” – Atlas Obscura
The Cultural Appropriation Wars Come To Bang On A Can
The controversy at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival (aka Banglewood) in Massachusetts broke out over the use of didgeridoos in the 1990 work Thousand Year Dreaming by 80-year-old New Zealand-American composer Annea Lockwood. Several of the festival’s young Fellows raised concerns about Lockwood’s deployment of the indigenous Australian instrument, including, in this performance, its being played by women (traditionally taboo). But those concerns were not shared by everyone there. – New Sounds (WNYC)
Mini Cardboard Theatres: How The 19th-Century English Bourgeoisie Staged Plays At Home
“The characters were laid out on sheets of paper, frozen in dramatic poses … [and] the sets [were] storybook illustrations of extravagant palaces and howling wildernesses, to be slotted in and out of the back of the theater, behind the cavorting characters. The scripts that came with them were as miniaturized as the stage.” – JSTOR Daily
Why Widely-Spoken Languages Have Simpler Grammar (Okay, Except For Russian)
It’s not only because so many people learn them as second or third languages. Recent research has indicated that, even when a language is new or developing, it has to have simple rules in order for large groups of people who don’t know each other well to make themselves understood. – The Economist
The Fascinating Ways How An AI Machine Learns Ideas From Stories
“Genesis was capable of making dozens of inferences about the story and several discoveries. It triggered concept patterns for ideas that weren’t explicitly stated in the story, recognizing the themes of violated belief, origin story, medicine man, and creation. It seemed to comprehend the elements of Crow literature, from unknowable events to the concept of medicine to the uniform treatment of all beings and the idea of differences as a source of strength.” – Nautilus
Almost All Languages Have Some Version Of The Expression, ‘It’s Greek To Me’
Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, along with English, assign Greek this particular honor. In the Baltic languages, it’s Spanish; the Bulgarians use “Patagonian.” And the Greeks? They, along with more nations than any other, use Chinese to signify the incomprehensible. Dan Nosowitz looks into the origins of the expression. – Atlas Obscura
12-Year-Old Debuts His First Broadway Musical
“I was bitten by the theater bug from a very, very young age,” he tells The Post in his high-pitched voice. Just weeks after the family moved to New York from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Josh, then 8, signed with an agent and booked a job. He’s hardly stopped working since. – New York Post
How Do Bubbles Happen? When The Stories We Tell Get Detached From The Evidence
“Bubbles inflate as the distance between fiction and reality increases. Contexts – such as investor liquidity, regulatory frameworks and cultural and macro-economic factors – establish boundaries on how far our stories can depart from reality. But entrepreneurs are also creatures of context, and some are better than others at ‘entrepreneuring’, stretching the limits of plausibility and maximising time for their imagined realities to catch up to their promises.” – Aeon
Is Education Innovating?
To my mind, perhaps the most striking and significant innovation is higher education’s heightened emphasis on community engagement, community service, and local and regional economic development. So what, then, do critics mean when they decry higher education’s alleged failure to innovate? – Inside Higher Ed
We Value Originals. So What Are Translations?
Are we ready to argue that translation is not merely an interpretative task, but also an artistic one, and that translators are artists? As tempting as this upgrade in status seems, I would argue for something else. – Public Books
How “Bookstagramming” Is Changing How People Read
In these sprawling but welcoming communities, readers have found one another, banding together in a global, aesthetically pleasing book club that’s open for discussion 24/7. More than 33 million Instagram posts are tagged “#bookstagram,” and BookTube videos can amass millions of views — luring publishers and authors who actively court the most popular accounts. – Washington Post
UK Theatre Leaders Warn Of Crisis In Arts Education
Leaders from 13 of England’s biggest theatres have collectively cautioned that their ability to work with schools is being significantly impacted by a narrowing curriculum and cuts to arts subjects, following the introduction of the English Baccalaureate. – The Stage
Who Was Ira Glass’s Biggest Influence? Roland Barthes (Yes, The Semiotician)
“At college, we were assigned Barthes’s S/Z , which made me understand what I could do in radio. … In S/Z, Barthes takes apart a short story by Balzac, line by line. He asks: How does this story pull you in, engage, and give you pleasure? He … explains: here’s how to structure a narrative by creating a sequence of events that will create forward motion that will create narrative suspense, planting questions along the way that can be answered. That turned out to be an enormously useful way to think about how to do an interview.” – The New York Review of Books
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critic Problem
The movie review aggregation site is only as good as the critics it aggregates. But are the critics representative of the real movie audience? Assuredly not. So there’s a problem. How to fix it? – Columbia Journalism Review
Study: Here Are The Conditions Under Which People Lie
It seems there’s a moral spectrum in play: Scientists found that people would probably lie if they thought a big corporation, like say, Starbucks or Walmart, would foot the bill for the deceit. They told the truth if they felt like an individual proprietor of a business or a specific employee would have to pay for their dishonesty. – Mic
What Artists Studios Tell Us
There are two questions surrounding artists and their archives. Why do artists keep them? And what is worth keeping? – The New York Times
As Plantation Museums Turn Their Focus To Enslaved People, Certain Tourists Are Not Happy
“‘It was just not what we expected.’ ‘I was depressed by the time I left.’ ‘… the tour was more of a scolding of the old South.’ ‘The brief mentions of the former owners were defamatory.’ ‘Would not recommend.’ These are a few of the apparently negative reviews posted online about guided tours of Southern plantations.” – The Washington Post
The Rise Of The ‘Catalyst-Conductor’
Lidiya Yankovskaya (a fine example of the phenomenon herself): “In addition to their traditional duties within established institutions, an increasing number of conductors run independent organizations, launch musical and civic initiatives, serve as catalysts for the development of new work, and use their positions to cross disciplinary boundaries. In bypassing institutional gatekeepers, these conductors have brought relevance, vitality, and an expanding number of previously unrepresented voices into the field. Indeed, the dynamic new ‘catalyst-conductor’ could help bring the revitalization that the classical music industry so desperately seeks.” – NewMusicBox
You Think Venice And Barcelona Have Too Many Tourists? Pity This Poor Austrian Village
Hallstatt, a pretty lakeside hamlet of 800 people, got 19,344 tour buses last year (that’s an average of 53 a day, year-round) and more than a million visitors. Residents have encountered strangers in their bathrooms and camera drones by their bedroom windows. The flood began after Chinese developers, unbeknownst to Hallstatters, built a life-size replica of the village in Guangdong and Asian tourists came flocking to see the real thing. – The Washington Post
Woodstock May Have Been An Amazing Event, But It Derailed American Rock Festivals For Decades
“In almost all the ways that concert promoters measure the success and smooth operation of their events, Woodstock was a failure.” Crowd control. Sanitation. Traffic. Profit. (The producers ended up more than $1 million in debt.) What’s more, “what young fans saw as groovy gatherings, with clothing optional, were viewed by local governments around the country as dangerous and disruptive events that they did not want in their backyards, and they passed laws accordingly.” – The New York Times
Can The Man Who Saved Waterstones Turn Around Barnes And Noble?
Britain’s biggest bookstore chain was near bankruptcy when James Daunt became CEO in 2011, and “[he] steered Waterstones out of a death spiral by rethinking every cranny of the company, from small (those shelves) to large (the business model).” Now, as he takes over B&N, which has been contracting for two decades, “his guiding assumption is that the only point of a bookstore is to provide a rich experience in contrast to a quick online transaction. And for now, the experience at Barnes & Noble isn’t good enough.” – The New York Times