LING 270: Language, Technology and Society

Richard Sproat

Spring 2008

MW 2-3:20, Armory 429

Office Hours: Wednesdays 8-9:50, FLB 4016D

Materials Grades Academic Integrity Syllabus

Note on GenEd

This course qualifies for General Education requirements in Behavioral Sciences, and Western & Comparative Cultures.

Materials

The following materials will be used in this course:

Grades

Your grade will depend upon the following components:

Homeworks are due at the end of class on the due date. Unless I say otherwise, homework should be submitted in hardcopy. In general late homeworks will not be accepted without a documented legitimate excuse (illness, family emergency, etc.). However, I will allow TWO such undocumented excuses. In calculating your grade, your lowest scoring homework will be dropped.

Academic Integrity

It is expected that you understand the basics of academic integrity particularly as it applies to plagiarism. We will review this point briefly on the first day of class. This issue will come up particularly in homeworks and other exercises that require you to write summaries of other people's ideas. It is expected that you know how to quote appropriately, that you know not to use other people's material without proper attribution (including close paraphrases of other scholars' prose). For further information see here and here.

Syllabus

The following units correspond roughly to three days' worth of lectures. We will cover all of the material listed here, but there may be some slippage with respect to when some of the material is covered.

Unit 1 (1/14, 1/16, 1/23)

  1. Introduction and overview: language technology from the Sumerians to today;
  2. What is writing?
  3. The invention of writing

Slides: Unit 1.

Lecture Notes: Unit 1.

Reading: Schmandt-Besserat (all). Robinson, Introduction, Chapters 2-3

Links:

Homework:

Unit 2 (1/28, 1/30, 2/4, 2/6)

  1. How does writing work? An overview of how different writing systems encode language.

Slides: Unit 2.

Lecture Notes: Unit 2.

Homework:

Reading: Daniels & Bright, sections 3, 4, 12, 14, 15, 17, 30, 31, 37

Unit 3 (2/11, 2/13, 2/18)

  1. A Very English Genius: BBC Documentary about Michael Ventris (decipherer of Linear B).
  2. The decipherment of ancient scripts.
  3. Non-decipherment: how to evaluate claims of decipherment.

Slides: Unit 3, Pseudodecipherment

Lecture Notes: Unit 3.

Homework: Unit 3

Reading: Parkinson, chapters 1, 4; Robinson Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Links:

Unit 4 (2/20, 2/25)

  1. The spread of writing: how writing was adapted to different languages.
  2. (The esthetics of writing: calligraphy and script styles)

Slides: Unit 4.

Lecture Notes: Unit 4.

Reading: Daniels & Bright, sections 16, 21, 22, 24, 53, 61, 20

Homework: Unit 3-4

Midterm exam (2/27)

Unit 5 (3/3, 3/5)

  1. Script and writing engineering

Slides: Unit 5.

Lecture Notes: Unit 5.

Reading: DeFrancis, chapter 15.

Links:

Unit 6 (3/10, 3/12)

The written portion of the homework for this unit is due 3/5: 3/10 and 3/12 will be in-class discussion. See below for the homework. 3/5 we will leave open since there may be some slippage from the previous units.

  1. East versus West: the alphabet and technological creativity.

Slides: No slides for this unit: we'll have an in-class discussion.

Homework: This homework will be a little different. See here for how we will do this one.

Lecture Notes: Unit 6.

Reading: Hannas; My review of Hannas. (See the course reserves for the version that appeared in Language, or the lecture notes for the same text.)

Unit 7 (3/24)

  1. Precursors to language and computing from Swift to the early 20th century.

Slides: Unit 7.

Homework: Unit 7

Lecture Notes: Unit 7.

Reading: Excerpt from Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubdubdrib and Japan, Chapter V.

We will also read a paper by Dudley and Tarnoczy on von Kempelen's speaking machine: I will email you the link.

Links:

Unit 8 (3/26, 3/31, 4/2, 4/7, 4/9)

  1. The Jupiter mission from 2001: A Space Odyssey
  2. Talking machines: speech synthesis and how it works
  3. Automatic speech recognition and how it works.

Slides: TTS; ASR.

Homework: Unit 8

Lecture Notes: For the remainder of this course, we will dispense with separate notes, and just rely on the slides to summarize what was covered in class.

Reading: Wikipedia entry on speech synthesis; Stork, chapter 6.

Chapter on speech technology from my forthcoming book on language, technology and society.

Wikipedia entry on speech recognition; Stork, chapter 7, 11

Links:

Unit 9 (4/14)

  1. The holy grail: machine translation; history of machine translation
  2. Machine translation: the current state of the art

Reading: Wikipedia entries on machine translation and NLP; Stork, chapter 8.

Slides: Machine Translation

Homework:

Links:

Unit 10 (4/16)

  1. Information transmission standards: Unicode. Useful background on Unicode here.

Slides: Encodings; Implementation of Nastaliq Script

Reading: Wikipedia entry on Unicode; Unicode Consortium, chapters 1 and 2.

TV. Raman. 1997. "Net Surfing Without A Monitor," Scientific American (Internet Special), March. Access via UIUC Library.

Unit 11 (4/21, 4/23, 4/28)

  1. In-class discussion of Language and the internet.
  2. 4/23: Guest lecture by Matt Garley, graduate student in Linguistics. slides
  3. 4/28: Guest lecture by Cecilia Ovesdotter

Reading: Crystal, chapters 1-8

Homework:

In-Class Final Exam (4/30)