Category: All Levels

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Investigating Narrative Levels in the Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

For a semester project here in the language lab, I chose to investigate narrative levels and how they interact and change in stories. To do this, I attempted to replicate a project published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics, a journal focusing on the intersection of data and human action. The project aimed to understand how narrative levels work, as well as how uniformly standard definitions of them could be identified by different scholars in different places. The project lays out three main types of narrative that deviate from the main speaker, narrator, or story:

Uninterrupted narrative: this is just a narrative by itself. It has the same speaker, the same time period, and the same point of view. 

Embedded narrative: A story within the original narrative. The original narrative will always signal a reason for an embedded narrative. These typically take place in dialogue, when a character is prompted to tell a story.

Interruptive narrative: a structural separate narrative in the midst of the original narrative. It is usually signaled by some sort of stopping point in the original narrative, such as a chapter end or a section break, and often changes narrator or time period. Unlike the embedded narrative, there is nothing within the original narrative that prompts an interruptive narrative. 

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Crowdsourcing Ed-Tech Resources for Higher Education

Speculating on how COVID-19 will shape the future of higher education, Mousumi Mukherjee, an Associate Professor and Deputy Director for the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building, asks, “When we have failed to build respectful and inclusive on-campus teaching and learning environments to build societies, how can we do it online?”

The challenges educational institutions are currently forced to grapple with illuminate existing difficulties that arise from stark disparities. Consequently, Mukherjee emphasizes that solely relying on digital alternatives to resolve the current educational crisis is inadequate. However, educators and scholars speculate on whether the recent turn to ed-tech platforms represents a “watershed moment,” foreshadowing a long-term educational innovation, or whether it functions as an unsustainable stopgap to long unaddressed issues.

Regardless of what the future holds, institutions and schools struggle to find suitable and equitable solutions to manage the present crisis. Below, I provide an overview of crowdsourced resources that educational technology platforms, strategies, and resources that higher education institutions have adopted in the transition to online education and distance learning.

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COVID-19 and the Digital Divide

Students in Peru use laptops from the OPLC Initiative. The initiative asserted its goal to revolutionize education in the developing world through the distribution of innovative software and educational devices. When Negroponte pitched the idea at a Tunis summit, a participant emphasized the greater urgency of facilitating the obtainment of “clean water and real schools.”

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the capacity of education technology to overcome the the national and global digital divide was already under debate. In late December of 2019, blogger Audrey Watters published a commentary highlighting ed tech’s exacerbation, appropriation, and oversight of the structural inequalities — including educational, racial, social, and economic inequities — that constitute the digital divide. Watters discussed the catastrophic failures of the self-serving projects of Ed-Tech philanthropists and initiatives, such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) Initiative.

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Film Recommendation: Зеркало (Mirror)

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of, if not the most famous Russian film director of all time. One of his most beloved films by Russian people, Зеркало (1975) is a semi-autobiographical sequence of clips playing with memory, war, and daily life in Moscow.

The film features stunning creative techniques, such as Tarkovsky’s famous long shots. The one above is considered not only one of his best shots, but one of the best in film history. Other techniques include color schemes and themes such as the mirror, time, and poetry, which is read by different characters and narrators throughout the film.

The plot is kind of tricky to explain. A dying poet is the narrator (something that isn’t revealed until the end), but the story is far from linear or clear. The scenes switch between different time periods, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with which one you’re actually in.

I’m no film buff, but this is definitely one of Tarkovsky’s most important works. He’s a hard director to understand no matter what, so you might as well start here! The Russian is fairly hard to understand, and I did need the help of subtitles to understand what was going on.

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Try out a French-only dictionary!

Transitioning from English-French dictionaries to French-only dictionaries is a big step towards fluency but it can be intimidating. Luckily, online resources exist to help make French dictionaries more accessible.

For intermediate to advanced French learners seeking to take their vocabulary and understanding to the next level, The Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL) is an invaluable online resource. It is a searchable compendium of French language dictionaries, most notably Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé and the 9th edition of the official Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. For those interested in French outside l’Hexagone, CNRTL also has a searchable “Francophone” dictionary.

As a pedagogical tool, CNRTL, particularly when set to the TLFi (Le Trésor), does an excellent job of breaking definitions down into more digestible parts while also clearly differentiating between different uses of the words (metaphoric, literal, etc). Rather than struggling through an entire entry, the website quickly draws your attention to short portions of the text that are most essential.

By clicking “options d’affichage” you can toggle the color-coding settings to highlight what you’re looking for. The default settings use yellow for definitions, green for the word as it is used in a phrase, and orange to specify a certain technical domain or context in which the word may be used. Most un-colored text consists of examples of the word used in a sentence.

Beyond dictionaries, the portal also offers additional tabs such as etymology, synonyms, and antonyms, for those interested in the relations between words. The synonym tab is particularly useful when it comes to spicing up your writing (for example, when you’ve used “aussi” far too many times in one paper). It can also be helpful when it comes to making connections between the literal and metaphorical senses of words.

Here we can see, for instance, that while “esprit” has many definitions and connotations, the most often invoked synonym in English is “intelligence”. Esprit can be difficult to parse in French, since it can mean both mind and spirit, whereas in English we tend to clearly differentiate between the two. The analysis of synonyms here suggests that, outside of religious contexts, it is far more common for esprit to signify ‘mind’.

The website is full of other resources worth exploring, including several collections of works in French, and a database of “ghost” words lost to time.

You can access the dictionaries and pages pictured here at https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/

Bonne exploration!

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Museums in St. Petersburg

If you’re planning a trip to Russia soon or hoping to go there eventually, museums are a great way to learn about a city’s history and culture. Of course there’s the Hermitage in St. Petersburg: Peter the Great’s old palace that is now one of the largest art museums in the world. If you go to Russia’s cultural capital, you’ll have to stop by that one, but here are a few others that you can’t miss.

The Russian Museum

Established by Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Museum is the first and largest collection of Russian art in the world. It is housed in the Mikhailovsky Palace right off of Nevsky Prospect by the Gostini Dvor metro stop. The collection features Russian art from the 10th to the 21st centuries, along with a sizable amount of modern art from other countries. You can find names from Rublev to Picasso, and the layout is much less intimidating than that of a big museum like the Hermitage.

The Menshikov Palace

Built for Alexander Menshikov, a royal official and one of Peter the Great’s closest friends, Menshikov palace was the first palace in St. Petersburg, and the only one to survive from the beginning of the 18th century. The admission is free for students, and inside you’ll see rooms and furniture both from the time period of the palace and after. It’s located right on the Neva river, and is beautiful to walk around inside and outside.

Dostoevky’s House

Though only one of many house museums, this is perhaps the most famous, as it is for one of Russia’s most iconic writers. Dostoevsky was a known wanderer, drifting from house to house. This is partially his childhood building, and the last apartment he and his family lived in until his death. The museum is only a few rooms and features his own furniture and pictures from his family and daily life. After seeing this museum, be sure to check out the other house museums such as that of Nabokov and Akhmatova!

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Elite! Your Next Netflix-Binge

Much of the cast during a scene. Courtesy of Netflix.

Looking for a new Spanish tv show filled with dramatic teenagers and a series of incredibly unlikely but intriguing events? Elite has you covered. 

Netflix released season 1 of Elite in 2018, and although being a Spanish show, it gained popularity around the world. Elite follows 3 scholarship students from a working-class part of town as they begin attending Las Encinas, a rich private high school, for Spain’s most elite. This parallels flashforwards to the main character’s mysterious murder. Throughout the series, viewers are watching the events that led up to the killing along with police interrogations following the murder. This leads a viewer to constantly ponder who was killed, who was the killer, and what was their motive. 

Elite has also been recognized for the diversity of its characters and storylines, taking on tough subjects especially for a dramatic teen tv show. There’s an inclusion of a gay storyline between two male characters, and their struggle to be accepted by one boy’s Muslim family. Additionally, one girl struggles with her religious identity when her school requires her not to wear a hijab to school. One main character even deals with the trials of being HIV-positive for the rest of their life. 

Elite tries to cover a large variety of themes, from those mentioned above, to class and race struggles. The show has been criticized for often glossing over these themes in order to focus on flashy drama. However, in comparison to other shows of the same genre, it still introduces many issues relevant to young people of this time. 

Elite does a good job of developing its characters as well. Many tropes are used at the beginning of the show, but it soon becomes clear that each character has a rich and interesting backstory explaining their actions as the show progresses.

Samuel during the murder scene that the show is focused on. Courtesy of Netflix.

For Spanish-language learners, Elite offers great practice. The show is meant for native Spanish speakers and uses Spain-centric Spanish. Characters give beautiful dialogues, some slow and some fast. For any level of Spanish learner, Elite offers a learning opportunity. Beginners may opt to listen in Spanish but use English subtitles, intermediates may rely on Spanish subtitles, and expert speakers can face a challenge by watching the show completely subtitle-free. 

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The Bell Jar, as Read by Voyant

Voyant is a web-based text analysis tool that summarizes and visualizes multiple trends and patterns in a text entered by users. I passed the entire corpus of the 1961 novel, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath into Voyant tosee what would happen. The results were telling of both the strength and limits off educational technology tools built on the potential of machine learning.

Wordcloud view of the most frequently occurring words in The Bell Jar

While Voyant provides many visualizations of its results, the majority of its tools seems to build on the analysis of the most frequently occurring words in the text. As I explored Voyant’s analysis of The Bell Jar, it occurred to me that using word frequency as the sole analytical foundation of reading text is a particularly narrow interpretive lens. Moreover, it does not come near to capturing the scope, depth, or arc of the book. Nevertheless, I was surprised at how much more the results could actually reflect about a work’s central themes, characters, and motifs and its capacity to serve as a helpful supplement to the reader and user’s more nuanced and personal interpretation.

Line graph of relative frequencies of most frequent words from the beginning to end of The Bell Jar: Pink = “thought,” Purple = “buddy,” Light Blue = “doctor,” Green = “like,” Dark Blue = “said”

The figure above maps the frequencies of the most common words in the text across the entire novel. I was especially struck by the appearance of characters that were particularly meaningful to the main character, Esther. Moreover, the fluctuating frequencies of the characters’ mentions are particularly insightful indicators of how and when these characters were meaningful in Esther’s perception and narrative. For example, the light blue trend traces the consistent mention of “doctor,” and corresponds to Esther’s constant wrestling with her mental health and various treatments. The spike in the “doctor” mentions represents Esther finally finding some safety and sense of recovery in the psychiatric institution in the last moments of the book. The fluctuations in the mention of “Buddy,” her former love interest, are also particularly interesting in allowing me, as the user and reader, to identify, and further reflect on, moments when he haunted her thoughts or self-perception and moments when his irrelevance may have indicated something else about her sense of healing or growth. The word frequency of “thought” also guided me towards thinking about how the majority of the novel is narrated through self-introspection and the way in which that served as a mode of storytelling.

In a way, the limitations of the word frequency trends and relationships visualized by Voyant also facilitate and emphasize the software’s potential for enabling the analytical process of its users. Given diverse visualizations of a limited word-frequency analysis, I was compelled to use the visualizations to think more creatively about the content before me and trace these ideas through specific points in the text.

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SpanishDict: The Best Online Spanish-English Dictionary

SpanishDict is a super helpful English-Spanish Translator website, specializing in helping English speakers learn Spanish. The app is very comprehenisze with its definitions, offering examples, pronounciation help, a conjugation chart, popular phrases, a thesaurus section, and examples from the web. 

The website also has hundreds of articles explaining each type of conjugation, common grammar mistakes, and a range of other issues faced by native English speakers while learning the language. A new section of the website now also offers vocabulary practice.

A screenshot of a popular article detailing the difference between “ser” and “estar”.

Unlike Google Translate, SpanishDict can translate words and entire phrases. When translating a word, the site will pull up a dictionary-styled page explaining each definition for the word and when to use each one. This prevents beginner speakers from making mistakes when translating a word such as “fly,” which has very distinct meanings between the noun and verb form. Additionally, when translating entire phrases, SpanishDict gives you the results of Microsoft, SDL, and PROMT. In my experience, SpanishDict has yet to mistranslate any word or phrase I’ve entered, and it’s my go to for looking up a Spanish word I don’t know. 

The newest addition to the SpanishDict website offers basic vocabulary exercises. The majority of “flashcards” are grouped by topic, such as ‘animals’ or ‘foods’, but may be useful for an introductory Spanish learner.

To access, go to https://www.spanishdict.com/.