title: The Kingston Trio

text: Furthermore, over $100,000 appeared to be missing from the Trio's publishing royalties, an accounting error eventually rectified, which created an additional irritant to both sides. Guard regarded it as inexcusable carelessness while to Shane and Reynolds it highlighted what they perceived as Guard's propensity to claim individual copyright for some of the group's songs, including "Tom Dooley" (though Guard eventually lost a suit over copyright for that number to Alan Lomax, Frank Warner, and Frank Proffitt) and "Scotch and Soda".


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Following a meeting with attorneys on May 10, 1961, intended to resolve the dispute, Dave Guard resigned from the Kingston Trio, though pledging to fulfill group commitments through November of that year. Shane, Reynolds, and Werber bought out Guard's interest in the partnership for $300,000 to be paid over a number of years and moved to replace him immediately. The remaining Trio partners settled quickly on John Stewart, a 21-year-old member of the Cumberland Three, one of the many groups that sprang up hoping to imitate the Kingston Trio's success. Stewart was well-acquainted with Reynolds and Shane, having sold two songs to the Trio, and he was a proficient guitarist, banjoist, and singer. Stewart began rehearsing and recording with the group nearly immediately, commencing public appearances with the Trio in September 1961.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: According to Shane, "We did nearly as well with John as we did with Dave." Six of the group's next seven albums between 1961 and 1963 continued to place in "Billboard's" Top Ten and several of the group's most successful singles, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Greenback Dollar", charted as well.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Beginning in 1964, however, the Kingston Trio's dominance in record sales and concert bookings began to wane, due partly to imitators in the pop-folk world and also to the rise of other commercial folk groups like Peter, Paul and Mary whose music had a decidedly more political bent than the Trio's. The British Invasion spearheaded by The Beatles, who were signed by EMI/Capitol just as the Trio's seven-year contract was running out, depressed sales of acoustic folk albums significantly, and Capitol did not make a serious effort to re-sign the group. According to critic Ken Barnes, the British Invasion played a significant role in curtailing the sales of the Trio's recordings.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Werber secured a generous signing bonus from Decca Records, and the last four albums of the Kingston Trio's first decade were released by that label. Without the production facilities of Capitol, however, and the expertise of Voyle Gilmore and engineer Pete Abbott, the Decca releases lacked the aural brilliance of the Capitol albums, and none of the four sold especially well.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: By 1966, Reynolds had grown weary of touring and Stewart wanted to strike out on his own as a singer-songwriter, so the three musicians and Werber developed an exit strategy of playing as many dates as possible for a year with an endpoint determined to be a final two-week engagement at the hungry i in June 1967. The group followed this strategy successfully, and on June 17, 1967, the Kingston Trio ceased to be an actively performing band.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Following the hungry i engagement, Reynolds moved to Port Orford, Oregon and pursued interests in ranching, business, and race cars for the next twenty years. Stewart commenced a long and distinguished career as a singer-songwriter, composing hit songs like "Daydream Believer" for The Monkees and "Runaway Train" for Rosanne Cash. He recorded more than 40 albums of his own, most notably the landmark "California Bloodlines", and found chart success in the top forty with "Midnight Wind", "Lost Her in the Sun", and "Gold", the latter reaching number 5 in 1979.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Bob Shane decided to stay in entertainment, and he experimented with solo work. He recorded several singles, including a well-received but under-marketed version of the song "Honey" that later became a million-seller for Bobby Goldsboro, and with different configurations with other folk-oriented performers. Though finances were not an immediate concern—the Kingston Trio partners Werber, Shane and Reynolds still owned an office building, a restaurant, other commercial real estate, and a variety of other lucrative investments—Shane wanted to return to a group environment and in 1969 secured permission from his partners to use the mutually owned group name for another band, with Reynolds and Werber insisting only that Shane's group be musically as accomplished as its predecessors and that Shane prefix "new" to the band's title.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Shane agreed and organized two troupes under the name of "The New Kingston Trio". The first consisted of guitarist Pat Horine and banjoist Jim Connor in addition to Shane and lasted from 1969 to 1973, the second including guitarist Roger Gambill and banjoist Bill Zorn from 1973 until 1976. Shane tried to create a repertoire for these groups that included both the older and expected Kingston Trio standards like "Tom Dooley" and "M.T.A." but that would also feature more contemporary songs as well, including country and novelty tunes. The attempt did not meet with any significant success. The only full-length album released by either group was "The World Needs a Melody" in 1973 (though 25 years later FolkEra Records issued "The Lost Masters 1969–1972", a compilation of previously unreleased tracks from the Shane-Horine-Connor years), and its sales were negligible. Though both troupes of the New Kingston Trio made a limited number of other recordings and several television appearances, neither generated very much interest from fans or the public at large.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In 1976, Bill Zorn left the New Kingston Trio to work as a solo performer and record producer in London. Shane and Gambill replaced him with George Grove, a professionally trained singer and instrumentalist from North Carolina who had been working in Nashville as a studio musician.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: The same year, Shane secured from Werber and Reynolds the unencumbered rights to use the band's original name of the Kingston Trio without the appended "new" in exchange for relinquishing his interest in the still-profitable corporation, whose holdings included copyrights and licensing rights to many of the original Trio's songs. Since 1976, the various troupes owned by Shane have performed and recorded simply as the Kingston Trio.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: The Shane-Gambill-Grove Kingston Trio existed from 1976 through 1985, when Gambill died unexpectedly from a heart attack on March 2 at the age of 42. The nine years of this configuration was to that point the longest period of time that any three musicians had worked together as the Kingston Trio, and the group released two albums of largely original material.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: It was during this period as well that PBS producers JoAnne Young and Paul Surratt approached Shane and the other principals of the original group with the idea of arranging a reunion concert that would be taped and used as a fundraiser for the network. Agreement was reached, and on November 7, 1981, Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and John Stewart joined the Shane-Gambill-Grove Trio and guest performers Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, and Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac at the Magic Mountain amusement park north of Los Angeles for a show billed as "The Kingston Trio and Friends Reunion." The different configurations of the Trio took turns performing sets of the group's best-known songs with all the artists joining onstage for a finale.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: More than twenty years had passed since Dave Guard had left the group, but residual tension surfaced between Guard and Shane in a preview article in "The Wall Street Journal" that appeared in March 1982 in advance of the national broadcast of the taped show. Guard implicitly disparaged Shane's current group, and Shane asserted a distaste for performing again with Guard, who had spent the intervening decades living and performing in Australia, touring sporadically as a soloist, and writing about and teaching music. Despite the unpleasantness, Shane and Guard reconciled to a large degree (even to the point of planning a possible reunion tour) prior to Guard's death at age 56 from lymphoma nine years later in March 1991.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Following the 1985 death of Roger Gambill, Kingston Trio personnel changed several times, though Shane and Grove remained constants. Bob Haworth, a veteran folk performer who had worked as a member of The Brothers Four for many years, initially replaced Gambill from 1985 through 1988 and again from 1999 through 2005. In 1988, original member Nick Reynolds rejoined the band until his final retirement in 1999. When heart disease forced Bob Shane's retirement from touring in March 2004, he was replaced by former New Kingston Trio member Bill Zorn. A year later, following Haworth's departure, Grove and Zorn were joined by Rick Dougherty, who had performed for a time with Zorn as second-generation members of another popular folk group from the 1960s, The Limeliters.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Both the Grove–Zorn–Haworth and Grove–Zorn–Dougherty troupes of the Kingston Trio released original CDs and DVDs, and the latter configuration toured extensively for 12 years under the direction of original member Bob Shane. Capitol Records, Decca Records, Collector's Choice Music, and Folk Era Records have released and continue to release compilations of older albums as well as previously unreleased tapes of both studio and live recordings from the Kingston Trio's first ten years.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In July 2017, "Billboard" reported that a lawsuit had been filed in Los Angeles by Josh Reynolds, son of Nick Reynolds, and his cousin Gerald "Mike" Marvin. Defendants included Kingston Trio performers George Grove, William Zorn and Richard Dougherty, as well as Nikki Gary, who books concerts. The lawsuit alleged that Shane and his associates accepted $100,000 from the Reynolds group in exchange for exclusive rights to use the trademarked name of the band but then allowed Grove, Zorn and Dougherty to perform as the Kingston Trio at concerts booked by Gary.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: On August 11, 2017, the case against Grove, Zorn, and Dougherty was dismissed with prejudice in the same Los Angeles court and consequently cannot be re-filed.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In early August 2017, sole Kingston Trio owner Bob Shane announced the licensing of his trademark to the Josh Reynolds/Mike Marvin group of investors. Shane wrote on what was then the group's official website that:


title: The Kingston Trio

text: I am pleased to announce the Kingston Trio legacy will be carried forth by Josh Reynolds, Mike Marvin and Tim Gorelangton, who will begin performing as the Kingston Trio in October 2017. As you all know, Josh is the son of founding member, and my friend and partner Nick Reynolds, and Mike Marvin is Nick’s cousin. Rounding it out is Tim Gorelangton, one of the only people Nick ever recorded with outside the Trio. It was Nick Reynolds’ and my fondest hope that Josh and Mike would carry on the Trio and family legacy.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Consequently, in October 2017, Grove, Zorn, and Dougherty were replaced as the Trio by new licensees Reynolds and Marvin and their friend, Tim Gorelangton. In 2018, Josh Reynolds left the group and was replaced by Bob Haworth, who became a member of the band for the third time. At the end of 2018, Haworth left the group and was replaced by another former Limeliter, Don Marovich. to be replaced by Americana artist Buddy Woodward in 2022.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Almost from its inception, the Kingston Trio found itself at odds with the traditional music community. Urban folk musicians of the time (to whom Bob Dylan referred in "Rolling Stone" as "the left-wing puritans that seemed to have a hold on the folk-music community") frequently associated folk music with leftist politics and were contemptuous of the Trio's deliberate political neutrality. Peter Dreier of Occidental College observed that "Purists often derided the Kingston Trio for watering down folk songs in order to make them commercially popular and for remaining on the political sidelines during the protest movements of the 1960s." A series of scathing articles appeared over several years in "Sing Out!" magazine, a publication that combined articles on traditional folk music with political activism. Its editor Irwin Silber referred to "the sallow slickness of the Kingston Trio" and in an article in the spring 1959 issue Ron Radosh said that the Trio brought "good folk music to the level of the worst in Tin Pan Alley music" and referred to its members as "prostitutes of the art who gain their status as folk artists because they use guitars and banjos". Following the Trio's performance at the premier Newport Folk Festival in 1959, folk music critic Mark Morris wrote: "What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me... except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Frank Proffitt, the Appalachian musician whose version of "Tom Dooley" the Trio rearranged, watched their performance of his song on a television show and wrote in reaction, "They clowned and hipswung. Then they came out with 'This time tomorrow, reckon where I'll be/If it hadn't a' been for Grayson/I'd a been in Tennessee.' I began to feel sorty sick. Like I'd lost a loved one. Tears came to my eyes. I went out and bawled on the ridge." Proffitt had learned the song from his father and his grandmother, who had known Tom Dula and Laura Foster, the killer and the victim in the actual 1866 murder related in the song. Both Proffitt and fellow North Carolina musician Doc Watson sang the older version of the tune, which had "a lively mocking tempo... that retained some of the ghastliness and moral squalor of an actual murder", according to folk historian Robert Cantwell, who also notes that the Kingston Trio's version of the song omitted several verses from the traditional lyric. The slower, harmonized Trio version of the Dooley song and other traditional numbers struck Proffitt as a betrayal of "the strange mysterious workings which has made Tom Dooly [sic] live..." In 2006, folk traditionalist and influential banjo master Billy Faier remarked: "I hear and see very little respect for the folk genre" in their music and described the Trio's repertoire as "a mishmash of twisted arrangements that not only obscure the true beauty of the folk songs from which they derive, but give them a meaning they never had."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: However, Trio members never claimed to be folksingers and were never comfortable with the label. The liner notes for the group's first album featured a quotation from Dave Guard asserting that "We don't really consider ourselves folksingers in the accepted sense of the word..." Guard later told journalist Richard Hadlock in "Down Beat" magazine: "We are not students of folk music; the basic thing for us is honest and worthwhile songs that people can pick up and become involved in." Nick Reynolds added in the same article: "We don't collect old songs in the sense that the academic cats do... We get new tunes to look over every day. Each one of us has his ears open constantly to new material or old stuff that's good." Bob Shane remarked years later: "To call the Kingston Trio folksingers was kind of stupid in the first place. We never called ourselves folksingers... We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff. But they didn't know what to call us with our instruments, so Capitol Records called us folksingers and gave us credit for starting this whole boom."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Over the years, the Kingston Trio expanded its song selection beyond the rearranged traditional numbers, calypso songs, and Broadway show tunes that had appeared on its first several albums. In an obituary for Nick Reynolds (d. October 1, 2008), Spencer Leigh wrote in Britain's "Independent on Sunday":


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Looking at their repertoire now, it is apparent that the Kingston Trio was far more adventurous than is generally supposed. They introduced "It Was A Very Good Year" in 1961, later a standard for Frank Sinatra, and they were one of the first to spot the potential of English language versions of Jacques Brel's songs by recording "Seasons in the Sun" in 1963. They encouraged young songwriters including Hoyt Axton ("Greenback Dollar"), Rod McKuen ("Ally Ally Oxen Free", "The World I Used to Know") and Billy Edd Wheeler ("Reverend Mr Black"). Best of all, in 1962 they introduced listeners to one of the most poignant songs ever written, the anti-war ballad "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" by Pete Seeger, formerly with the Weavers.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Further, Peter Dreier points out that "the group deserves credit for helping to launch the folk boom that brought recognition to older folkies and radicals like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and for paving the way for newcomers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, who were well known for their progressive political views and topical songs. By the time these younger folk singers arrived on the scene, the political climate had changed enough to provide a wide audience for protest music." Additionally, writing in the British daily "The Guardian", also in an obituary for Reynolds, Ken Hunt asserted that "[the Kingston Trio] helped to turn untold numbers of people on to folk music... [T]hey put the boom in folk boom... They were the greatest of the bands to emerge after the McCarthy-era blacklisting of folk musicians and breathed new air into the genre."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: The Kingston Trio's influence on the development of American popular music has been considerable. According to music critic Bruce Eder writing for Allmusic.com:


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In the history of popular music, there are a relative handful of performers who have redefined the content of the music at critical points in history—people whose music left the landscape, and definition of popular music, altered completely. The Kingston Trio were one such group, transforming folk music into a hot commodity and creating a demand—where none had existed before—for young men (sometimes with women) strumming acoustic guitars and banjos and singing folk songs and folk-like novelty songs in harmony. On a purely commercial level, from 1957 until 1963, the Kingston Trio were the most vital and popular folk group in the world, and folk music was sufficiently popular as to make that a significant statement. Equally important, the original trio—Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane—in tandem with other, similar early acts such as the Limeliters, spearheaded a boom in the popularity of folk music that suddenly made the latter important to millions of listeners who previously had ignored it.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Discussing his earliest musical influences in a 2001 "Rolling Stone" interview, Bob Dylan remembered:


title: The Kingston Trio

text: There were other folk-music records, commercial folk-music records, like those by the Kingston Trio. I never really was an elitist. Personally, I liked the Kingston Trio. I could see the picture...the Kingston Trio were probably the best commercial group going, and they seemed to know what they were doing.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In his autobiography "", Dylan added: "I liked the Kingston Trio. Even though their style was polished and collegiate, I liked most of their stuff anyway."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: In February 1982, "Chicago Tribune" writer Eric Zorn praised the Kingston Trio's impact on the popular music industry, claiming that "for almost five years, they overshadowed all other pop groups in America." He also noted that they "so changed the course of popular music that their impact is largely felt to this day."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Jac Holzman, co-founder of the originally folk-based Elektra Records, remarked that his formerly struggling company's new-found prosperity in the late 1950s resulted from "The Kingston Trio which has the ability to capture the interest of a large number of people who have never been conscious of folk music before. In this respect, the Kingston Trio has put us on the map."


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Even some staunch traditionalists from both the urban and rural folk music communities had an affinity for the Kingstons' polished commercial versions of older songs. In her memoir "And A Voice To Sing With", singer and activist Joan Baez recalled that "Traveling across the country with my mother and sisters, we heard the commercial songs of the budding folk boom for the first time, the Kingston Trio's 'Tom Dooley' and 'Scotch and Soda.' Before I turned into a snob and learned to look down upon all commercial folk music as bastardized and unholy, I loved the Kingston Trio. When I became one of the leading practitioners of 'pure folk,' I still loved them..." Arthel "Doc" Watson of North Carolina, one of the most respected and influential musicians performing traditional music, remarked, "I’ll tell you who pointed all our noses in the right direction, even the traditional performers. They got us interested in trying to put the good stuff out there—the Kingston Trio. They got me interested in it!"


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Among the many other artists who cite the Kingston Trio as a formative influence in their musical careers are comedian, actor, and banjo player Steve Martin, Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, singer-songwriter Paul Simon, Timothy B. Schmit of The Eagles, pioneering folk-rock artist Gram Parsons, Stephen Stills and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, The Beach Boys' Al Jardine, Big Brother and the Holding Company founding member Peter Albin, Denny Doherty of The Mamas and the Papas, banjo master Tony Trischka, pop groups ABBA and The Bee Gees, Jefferson Airplane founding members Marty Balin and Paul Kantner, Buffalo Springfield founding member Richie Furay, Byrds co-founder Gene Clark, roots musician and master mandolin player David Grisman, singer-songwriters Tom Paxton,Harry Chapin, Jimmy Buffett, Tim Buckley, Steve Goodman, Steve Gillette, Michael Smith (composer of "The Dutchman"), and Shawn Colvin, folk-rock group We Five co-founder Jerry Burgan, folk and rock musician Jerry Yester, rock photographer and Modern Folk Quartet musician Henry Diltz, and progressive jazz vocal group Manhattan Transfer.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: The classic stage look of The Beach Boys from the early to late 1960s, blue and white striped button-down shirts with either black or grey pants, was inspired by the Kingston Trio.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: The guitar manufacturer C.F. Martin & Company has attributed the dramatic rise in demand for its instruments in the early 1960s in large part to the Kingston Trio's use of the company's guitars, which are featured prominently and without compensation on nearly all of their album covers. A Martin company press release in 2007, announcing a fourth Kingston Trio commemorative model guitar, stated that


title: The Kingston Trio

text: ...The Kingston Trio changed everything about popular music—and the entire acoustic guitar industry along with it...


title: The Kingston Trio

text: It was the rise of the Kingston Trio that really established Martin as "America's Guitar"...The Kingston Trio wasn't just a musical group. It was a phenomenon, as influential in its time as The Beatles would become in theirs.


title: The Kingston Trio

text: Satirist Tom Lehrer has acknowledged the Trio's pioneering of college concerts, observing that before the Kingstons "there was no real concert circuit...The Kingston Trio started all that," and in "Time" magazine, critic Richard Corliss asserted, "In my youth, they changed pop music, and me with it."


title: Polysemy

text: Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from "monosemy", where a word has a single meaning.


title: Polysemy

text: Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as "bear" the animal, and the verb "bear"); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not. In discerning whether a given set of meanings represent polysemy or homonymy, it is often necessary to look at the history of the word to see whether the two meanings are historically related. Dictionary writers often list polysemes (words or phrases with different, but related, senses) in the same entry (that is, under the same headword) and enter homonyms as separate headwords (usually with a numbering convention such as "¹bear" and "²bear").


title: Polysemy

text: A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related, senses. Since the test for polysemy is the vague concept of the relatedness, judgments of polysemy can be difficult to make. Because applying pre-existing words to new situations is a natural process of language change, looking at words' etymology is helpful in determining polysemy but not the only solution; as words become lost in etymology, what once was a useful distinction of meaning may no longer be so. Some seemingly unrelated words share a common historical origin, however, so etymology is not an infallible test for polysemy, and dictionary writers also often defer to speakers' intuitions to judge polysemy in cases where it contradicts etymology. English has many polysemous words. For example, the verb "to get" can mean "procure" ("I'll get the drinks"), "become" ("she got scared"), "understand" ("I get it") etc.


title: Polysemy

text: In linear or vertical polysemy, one sense of a word is a subset of the other. These are examples of hyponymy and hypernymy, and are sometimes called autohyponyms. For example, 'dog' can be used for 'male dog'. Alan Cruse identifies four types of linear polysemy:


title: Polysemy

text: In non-linear polysemy, the original sense of a word is used figuratively to provide a different way of looking at the new subject. Alan Cruse identifies three types of non-linear polysemy:


title: Polysemy

text: There are several tests for polysemy, but one of them is zeugma: if one word seems to exhibit zeugma when applied in different contexts, it is probable that the contexts bring out different polysemes of the same word. If the two senses of the same word do not seem to "fit," yet seem related, then it is probable that they are polysemous. This test again depends on speakers' judgments about relatedness, which means that it is not infallible, but merely a helpful conceptual aid.


title: Polysemy

text: The difference between homonyms and polysemes is subtle. Lexicographers define polysemes within a single dictionary lemma, while homonyms are treated in separate entries, numbering different meanings (or lemmata). Semantic shift can separate a polysemous word into separate homonyms. For example, "check" as in "bank check" (or "Cheque"), "check" in chess, and "check" meaning "verification" are considered homonyms, while they originated as a single word derived from chess in the 14th century. Psycholinguistic experiments have shown that homonyms and polysemes are represented differently within people's mental lexicon: while the different meanings of homonyms (which are semantically unrelated) tend to interfere or compete with each other during comprehension, this does not usually occur for the polysemes that have semantically related meanings. Results for this contention, however, have been mixed.


title: Polysemy

text: For Dick Hebdige, polysemy means that, "each text is seen to generate a potentially infinite range of meanings," making, according to Richard Middleton, "any homology, out of the most heterogeneous materials, possible. The idea of "signifying practice"—texts not as communicating or expressing a pre-existing meaning but as 'positioning subjects' within a "process" of semiosis—changes the whole basis of creating social meaning".


title: Polysemy

text: Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins' definition stipulates three elements: (i) the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, (ii) the links between these senses form a network, and (iii) understanding the 'inner' one contributes to understanding of the 'outer' one.


title: Polysemy

text: One group of polysemes are those in which a word meaning an activity, perhaps derived from a verb, acquires the meanings of those engaged in the activity, or perhaps the results of the activity, or the time or place in which the activity occurs or has occurred. Sometimes only one of those meanings is intended, depending on context, and sometimes multiple meanings are intended at the same time. Other types are derivations from one of the other meanings that leads to a verb or activity.


title: Polysemy

text: This example shows the specific polysemy where the same word is used at different levels of a taxonomy.


title: Polysemy

text: A lexical conception of polysemy was developed by B. T. S. Atkins, in the form of lexical implication rules. These are rules that describe how words, in one lexical context, can then be used, in a different form, in a related context. A crude example of such a rule is the pastoral idea of "verbizing one's nouns": that certain nouns, used in certain contexts, can be converted into a verb, conveying a related meaning.


title: Polysemy

text: Another clarification of polysemy is the idea of predicate transfer—the reassignment of a property to an object that would not otherwise inherently have that property. Thus, the expression ""I am parked out back"" conveys the meaning of "parked" from "car" to the property of "I possess a car". This avoids incorrect polysemous interpretations of "parked": that "people can be parked", or that "I am pretending to be a car", or that "I am something that can be parked". This is supported by the morphology: ""We are parked out back"" does not mean that there are multiple cars; rather, that there are multiple passengers (having the property of being in possession of a car).


title: Jessica Oyelowo

text: She was born Jessica Watson in Ipswich and spent her childhood in Suffolk, England. She attended Woodbridge School as a child and was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre.


title: Jessica Oyelowo

text: In 2006, she starred as Detective Sergeant Alex Jones in "Mayo" and went on to appear in "Murphy's Law" alongside James Nesbitt, in 2007. She provided the voice of Mrs. Equiano (alongside her husband as Olaudah Equiano) in "Grace Unshackled – The Olaudah Equiano Story", a radio play adapting Equiano's 1789 autobiography "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano". This was first broadcast on BBC 7 on 8 April 2007.


title: Jessica Oyelowo

text: Oyelowo resides in Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California with her husband, actor David Oyelowo. They met while attending the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. They have four children. They formerly resided in Brighton, England.


title: Jessica Oyelowo

text: As the wife of a Yoruba tribal prince, Oyelowo is entitled to the honorific style "Olori". She currently doesn't make use of it, however.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The (Latin for "supreme pontiff") was the chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs ("Collegium Pontificum") in ancient Rome. This was the most important position in the ancient Roman religion, open only to patricians until 254 BC, when a plebeian first occupied this post. Although in fact the most powerful office in the Roman priesthood, the "pontifex maximus" was officially ranked fifth in the ranking of the highest Roman priests ("ordo sacerdotum"), behind the "rex sacrorum" and the "flamines maiores" ("Flamen Dialis", "Flamen Martialis", "Flamen Quirinalis").


title: Pontifex maximus

text: A distinctly religious office under the early Roman Republic, it gradually became politicized until, beginning with Augustus, it was subsumed into the position of emperor in the Roman imperial period. Subsequent emperors were styled "pontifex maximus" well into Late Antiquity, including Gratian (), but during Gratian's reign the phrase was replaced in imperial titulature with the ("honourable pontiff"), an example followed by Gratian's junior co-emperor Theodosius the Great and which was used by emperors thereafter including the "co"-"augusti" Valentinian III () and Marcian () and the "augustus" Anastasius Dicorus (). The first to adopt the "inclytus" alternative to "maximus" may have been the rebel "augustus" Magnus Maximus ().


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The word "pontifex" and its derivative "pontiff" became terms used for Christian bishops, including the Bishop of Rome, and the title of "pontifex maximus" was applied to the Roman Catholic Church for the pope as its chief bishop and appears on buildings, monuments and coins of popes of Renaissance and modern times. The official list of titles of the pope given in the "Annuario Pontificio" includes "supreme pontiff" () as the fourth title, the first being "bishop of Rome".


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The etymology of "pontifex" is uncertain, but the word has been used since Roman times. The word appears to consist of the Latin word for "bridge" and the suffix for "maker". However, there is a possibility that this definition is a folk etymology for an Etruscan term, since Roman religion was heavily influenced by Etruscan religion, and very little is known about the Etruscan language, which is not Indo-European and thus has different origins from Latin.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: According to the common interpretation, the term "pontifex" means "bridge-builder" ("pons" + "facere"); "maximus" means "greatest". This was perhaps originally meant in a literal sense: the position of bridge-builder was indeed an important one in Rome, where the major bridges were over the Tiber, the sacred river (and a deity): only prestigious authorities with sacral functions could be allowed to "disturb" it with mechanical additions. However, it was always understood in its symbolic sense as well: the pontifices were the ones who smoothed the "bridge" between gods and men.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The interpretation of the word "pontifex" as "bridge-builder" was that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Marcus Terentius Varro. Plutarch pointed out that the term existed before there were any bridges in Rome and derived the word from Old Latin "pontis" meaning a powerful or absolute master, while others derived it from "potis facere" in the sense of "able to sacrifice". The last derivation is mentioned also by Varro, who rejected it, but it was the view of "pontifex maximus" Quintus Scaevola. Others have held that the word was originally "pompifex" (leader of public processions). The word "pons" originally meant "way" and "pontifex" would thus mean "maker of roads and bridges".


title: Pontifex maximus

text: Another opinion is that the word is a corruption of a similar-sounding but etymologically unrelated Etruscan word. Yet another hypothesis considers the word as a loan from the Sabine language, in which it would mean a member of a college of five, from Osco-Umbrian "ponte", five. This explanation takes into account the fact that the college was established by Sabine king Numa Pompilius and the institution is Italic: the expressions "pontis" and "pomperias" found in the Iguvine Tablets may denote a group or division of five or by five. The pontifex would thence be a member of a sacrificial college known as "pomperia" (Latin "quinio").


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The Roman title "pontifex maximus" was rendered in Greek inscriptions and literature of the time as or by a more literal translation and order of words as . The term is used in the Greek Septuagint text of the Old Testament and in the New Testament to refer to the High Priest of Israel, including in 2 Maccabees ().


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The word "pontifex", Latin for "pontiff", was used in ancient Rome to designate a member of the College of Pontiffs. In the Latin Vulgate translation of the New Testament, it is sometimes used to designate the Jewish high priest, as in the "Gospel of John" and "Epistle to the Hebrews" (; ). From perhaps as early as the 3rd century, it has been used to denote a Christian bishop. In the Vulgate, the term was originally applied to the High Priest of Israel, as in the "Book of Judith" (), whose place, each in his own diocese, the Christian bishops were regarded as holding, based on an interpretation of the "First Epistle of Clement" (I Clement 40).


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The "Collegium Pontificum" (College of Pontiffs) was the most important priesthood of ancient Rome. The foundation of this sacred college and the office of "pontifex maximus" is attributed to the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius. Much of what is known about the Regal period in Roman history is semi-legendary or mythical. The "Collegium" presumably acted as advisers to the "rex" (king) in religious matters. The "collegium" was headed by the "pontifex maximus", and all the "pontifices" held their office for life. But the pontifical records of early Rome were most likely destroyed when the city was sacked by the Gauls in 387 BC, and the earliest accounts of Archaic Rome come from the literature of the Republic, most of it from the 1st century BC and later.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: According to the Augustan-era historian Livy, Numa Pompilius, a Sabine, devised Rome's system of religious rites, including the manner and timing of sacrifices, the supervision of religious funds, authority over all public and private religious institutions, instruction of the populace in the celestial and funerary rites including appeasing the dead, and expiation of prodigies. Numa is said to have founded Roman religion after dedicating an altar on the Aventine Hill to Jupiter Elicius and consulting the gods by means of augury. Numa wrote down and sealed these religious instructions, and gave them to the first "pontifex maximus", Numa Marcius.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In the Roman Republic, the "pontifex maximus" was the highest office in the state religion of ancient Rome and directed the College of Pontiffs. According to Livy, after the overthrow of the monarchy, the Romans created the priesthood of the "rex sacrorum", or "king of sacred rites," to carry out certain religious duties and rituals previously performed by the king. The "rex sacrorum" was explicitly deprived of military and political power, but the "pontifices" were permitted to hold both magistracies and military commands.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The official residence of the "pontifex maximus" was the "Domus Publica" ("State House") which stood between the House of the Vestal Virgins and the Via Sacra, close to the Regia, in the Roman Forum. His religious duties were carried out from the Regia. Unless the "pontifex maximus" was also a magistrate, he was not allowed to wear the "toga praetexta", i.e. toga with the purple border. In artistic representations, he can be recognized by his holding an iron knife "(secespita)" or the "patera", and the distinctive robes or toga with part of the mantle covering the head "(capite velato)", in keeping with Roman practice.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In practice, particularly during the late Republic, the office of "pontifex maximus" was generally held by a member of a politically prominent family. It was a coveted position mainly for the great prestige it conferred on the holder; Julius Caesar became pontifex in 73 BC and "pontifex maximus" in 63 BC.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The major Republican source on the pontiffs would have been the theological writings of Varro, which survive only in fragments preserved by later authors such as Aulus Gellius and Nonius Marcellus. Other sources are Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch's "Life of Numa Pompilius", Festus's summaries of Verrius Flaccus, and in later writers, including several of the Church Fathers. Some of these sources present an extensive list of everyday prohibitions for the "pontifex maximus"; it seems difficult to reconcile these lists with evidence that many "pontifices maximi" were prominent members of society who lived normal, non-restricted lives.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The number of Pontifices, elected by "co-optatio" (i.e. the remaining members nominate their new colleague) for life, was originally five, including the "pontifex maximus". The "pontifices", moreover, could only come from the old nobility, the patricians. However, in 300–299 BC the "lex Ogulnia" opened the office of "pontifex maximus" to public election and permitted the "plebs" (plebeians) to be co-opted as priests, so that part of the exclusivity of the title was lost. But it was only in 254 BC that Tiberius Coruncanius became the first plebeian "pontifex maximus".


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The "lex Ogulnia" also increased the number of pontiffs to nine (the "pontifex maximus" included). In 104 BC the "lex Domitia" prescribed that the election of all pontiffs would henceforward be voted by the "comitia tributa" (an assembly of the people divided into voting districts); by the same law only 17 tribes, chosen by lot from the 35 tribes of the city, could vote. The law's promulgator, L[ucius] Domitius Ahenobarbus, was shortly afterwards elected pontifex maximus after the death of the incumbent Metellus Dalmaticus: Something of a personal revenge because, the previous year, he had expected to be co-opted as a pontiff to replace his late father, but the pontifical college had appointed another candidate in his place. The office's next holder, Q[uintus] Mucius Scaevola, was also elected under the same law, though without controversy or opposition since he was a former consul and long-serving pontiff.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: This law was abolished in 81 BC by Sulla in his dictatorship, in the "lex Cornelia de Sacerdotiis", which restored to the great priestly colleges their full right of "co-optatio". Also under Sulla, the number of pontifices was increased to fifteen, the "pontifex maximus" included, and Sulla nominated Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius as the next holder of the office – the only truly unelected "pontifex maximus" in history, since even the other pontiffs did not get a vote in the matter.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In 63 BC, the law of Sulla was abolished by the tribune Titus Labienus, and a modified form of the "lex Domitia" was reinstated providing for election by "comitia tributa" once again: Gaius Julius Caesar followed Ahenobarbus's precedent by being elected by public vote, although Caesar at least had previously been a pontiff. Marcus Antonius later restored the right of "co-optatio" to the college, in time for the election of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Also under Julius Caesar, the number of pontifices were increased to sixteen, the "pontifex maximus" included. (Possibly because Caesar's own long absences from Rome necessitated the appointment of a deputy pontiff for those occasions when fifteen needed to be present.) The number of pontifices varied during the Empire but is believed to have been regular at fifteen.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The office came into its own with the abolition of the monarchy, when most sacral powers previously vested in the King were transferred either to the "pontifex maximus" or to the Rex Sacrorum, though traditionally a (non-political) dictator was formally mandated by the Senate for one day, to perform a specific rite.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: According to Livy in his "History of Rome", an ancient instruction written in archaic letters commands: "Let him who is the Praetor Maximus fasten a nail on the Ides of September." This notice was fastened up on the right side of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, next to the chapel of Minerva. This nail is said to have marked the number of the year.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: It was in accordance with this direction that the consul Horatius dedicated the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the year following the expulsion of the kings; from the Consuls the ceremony of fastening the nails passed to the Dictators, because they possessed greater authority. As the custom had been subsequently dropped, it was felt to be of sufficient importance to require the appointment of a Dictator. L[ucius] Manlius was accordingly nominated but his appointment was due to political rather than religious reasons. He was eager to command in the war with the Hernici. He caused a very angry feeling among the men liable to serve by the inconsiderate way in which he conducted the enrolment. At last, in consequence of the unanimous resistance offered by the tribunes of the plebs, he gave way, either voluntarily or through compulsion, and laid down his Dictatorship. Since then, this rite has been performed by the Rex Sacrorum.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The immense authority of the sacred college of pontiffs was centered on the "pontifex maximus", the other pontifices forming his "consilium" or advising body. His functions were partly sacrificial or ritualistic, but these were the least important. His real power lay in the administration of "ius divinum" or divine law; the information collected by the pontifices related to the Roman religious tradition was bound in a "corpus" which summarized dogma and other concepts.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The pontifices had many relevant and prestigious functions such as being in charge of caring for the state archives, the keeping the official minutes of elected magistrates and list of magistrates, and they kept the records of their own decisions ("commentarii") and of the chief events of each year, the so-called "public diaries", the "Annales maximi".


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The "pontifex maximus" was also subject to several taboos. Among them was the prohibition to leave Italy. Plutarch described Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio (141–132 BC) as the first to leave Italy, after being forced by the Senate to do so, and thus break the sacred taboo. Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus (132–130 BC) was the first to leave Italy voluntarily. Afterwards it became common and no longer against the law for the "pontifex maximus" to leave Italy. Among the most notable of those who did was Julius Caesar (63–44 BC).


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The Pontifices were in charge of the Roman calendar and determined when intercalary months needed to be added to synchronize the calendar to the seasons. Since the Pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate's term of office corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a Pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power. A Pontifex with other political responsibilities, especially away from Rome, might also have been simply distracted from his calendrical duties as chief priest. This caused the calendar to become out of step with the seasons; for example, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in January 49 BC actually took place in mid-autumn.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: Under his authority as "pontifex maximus", Julius Caesar introduced the calendar reform that created the Julian calendar, with a fault of less than a day per century, and which remained the standard till the Gregorian reform in the 16th century.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: After Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, his ally Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was selected as "pontifex maximus". Though Lepidus eventually fell out of political favor and was sent into exile as Augustus consolidated power, he retained the priestly office until his death in 13/12 BC, at which point Augustus was selected to succeed him and given the right to appoint other pontifices. Thus, from the time of Augustus, the election of pontifices ended and membership in the sacred college was deemed a sign of imperial favour. Augustus took the title of "pontifex maximus" for political gain, in an attempt to restore traditional Roman values. With this attribution, the new office of Emperor was given a religious dignity and the responsibility for the entire Roman state cult. Most authors contend that the power of naming the Pontifices was not really used as an "instrumentum regni", an enforcing power.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: From this point on, "pontifex maximus" was one of the many titles of the Emperor, slowly losing its specific and historical powers and becoming simply a referent for the sacral aspect of imperial duties and powers. During the Imperial period, a "promagister" (vice-master) performed the duties of the "pontifex maximus" in lieu of the emperors whenever they were absent.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In post-Severan times (after 235 AD), the small number of pagan senators interested in becoming pontiffs led to a change in the pattern of office holding. In Republican and Imperial times no more than one family member of a gens was member of the College of Pontiffs, nor did one person hold more than one priesthood in this collegium. However, these rules were obviously loosened in the later part of the 3rd century A.D. In periods of joint rule, at first only one of the emperors bore this title, as it occurred for the first time during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, when only Marcus Aurelius was "pontifex maximus", but later two "pontifices maximi" could serve together, as Pupienus and Balbinus did in 238 AD—a situation unthinkable in Republican times.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: When Tertullian, a Montanist, furiously applied the term to some bishop with whom he was at odds (either Pope Callixtus I or Agrippinus of Carthage), "c" 220, over a relaxation of the Church's penitential discipline allowing repentant adulterers and fornicators back into the Church, it was in bitter irony:


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In the Crisis of the Third Century, emperors continued to assume the title "pontifex maximus". The early Christian emperors, including Constantine the Great () and the rest of the Constantinian dynasty, continued to use it; it was only relinquished by Gratian, possibly in 376 at the time of his visit to Rome, or more probably in 383 when a delegation of pagan senators implored him to restore the Altar of Victory in Roman Senate's "Curia Julia". Its last use with reference to the emperors is in inscriptions of Gratian.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: The Edict of Thessalonica of 27 February 380 was enacted in Thessalonica (Thessaloniki) and published in Constantinople (Istanbul) for the whole empire. By it, Theodosius I established Nicene Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire. The Latin text refers to the bishop of Rome, Damasus, as a "pontifex", and the bishop of Alexandria, Peter, as an "episcopus":... the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition and which is now professed by the "Pontiff" Damasus and by Peter, "Bishop" of Alexandria ... We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title Catholic Christians ...Various forms of ('highest pontiff' or bishop) were for centuries used not only of the Bishop of Rome but of other bishops also. Hilary of Arles (d. 449) is styled by Eucherius of Lyon ("P. L.", vol. L, col. 773)


title: Pontifex maximus

text: During Gratian's reign or immediately afterwards the phrase "pontifex maximus" – which had unwelcome associations with traditional Roman religion during the Christianization of the Roman Empire – was replaced in imperial titulature with the . The first to adopt the "inclytus" alternative to "maximus" may have been the rebel "augustus" and devout Christian close to bishop Martin of Tours, Magnus Maximus (), who killed Gratian in August 383.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: This practice was followed by Gratian's junior co-emperor Theodosius the Great and was used by emperors thereafter, including the "co"-"augusti" Valentinian III () and Marcian () and the "augustus" Anastasius Dicorus (), for whom examples of official usage survive. Another inscription dedicated to Justin II () and naming him "pontifex" has long been recognized as a forgery, though there is no evidence to suggest the title could not have been used by Justinian the Great () or even by Constantine IV ().


title: Pontifex maximus

text: Lanfranc is termed by his biographer, Milo Crispin (P. L., vol. CL, 10). but from the 11th century it appears to be applied only to the Pope.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In the 15th century, when the Renaissance stirred up new interest in ancient Rome, "pontifex maximus" became a regular title of honour for Popes. After the Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire with the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire and the death of the final Roman emperor Constantine XI in 1453, "pontifex maximus" became part of the papacy's official titulature of the Bishop of Rome. The name given to the book containing the liturgical rites to be performed by any bishop, the "Roman Pontifical", and to the form of liturgy known as Pontifical High Mass witness to the continued use of "pontifex" to refer to bishops in general.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: While the title "pontifex maximus" has for some centuries been used in inscriptions referring to the Popes, it has never been included in the official list of papal titles published in the "Annuario Pontificio". The official list of titles of the Pope given in the includes "Supreme Pontiff of the whole Church" (in Latin, ) as the fourth title, the first being "Bishop of Rome". The title "pontifex maximus" appears in inscriptions on buildings and on coins and medallions.


title: Pontifex maximus

text: In December 2012 Pope Benedict XVI adopted "@pontifex" as his Twitter handle, prompting users to pose questions with the "#askpontifex" hashtag. This has been maintained by his successor Pope Francis, who now uses it as his Twitter handle.


title: User-generated content

text: User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion forums and wikis. It is a product consumers create to disseminate information about online products or the firms that market them.


title: User-generated content

text: User-generated content is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, entertainment, customer engagement, advertising, gossip, research and many more. It is an example of the democratization of content production and the flattening of traditional media hierarchies. The BBC adopted a user-generated content platform for its websites in 2005, and TIME Magazine named "You" as the Person of the Year in 2006, referring to the rise in the production of UGC on Web 2.0 platforms. CNN also developed a similar user-generated content platform, known as iReport. There are other examples of news channels implementing similar protocols, especially in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe or terrorist attack. Social media users can provide key eyewitness content and information that may otherwise have been inaccessible. By 2020 businesses are increasingly leveraging User Generated Content to promote their products, as it is seen as a cost effective and authentic way to grow a brand's image and sales. Due to new media and technology affordances, such as low cost and low barriers to entry, the Internet is an easy platform to create and dispense user-generated content, allowing the dissemination of information at a rapid pace in the wake of an event.


title: User-generated content

text: The advent of user-generated content marked a shift among media organizations from creating online content to providing facilities for amateurs to publish their own content. User-generated content has also been characterized as citizen media as opposed to the "packaged goods media" of the past century. Citizen Media is audience-generated feedback and news coverage. People give their reviews and share stories in the form of user-generated and user-uploaded audio and user-generated video. The former is a two-way process in contrast to the one-way distribution of the latter. Conversational or two-way media is a key characteristic of so-called Web 2.0 which encourages the publishing of one's own content and commenting on other people's content.


title: User-generated content

text: The role of the passive audience, therefore, has shifted since the birth of new media, and an ever-growing number of participatory users are taking advantage of the interactive opportunities, especially on the Internet to create independent content. Grassroots experimentation then generated an innovation in sounds, artists, techniques, and associations with audiences which then are being used in mainstream media. The active, participatory and creative audience is prevailing today with relatively accessible media, tools, and applications, and its culture is in turn affecting mass media corporations and global audiences.


title: User-generated content

text: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined three central schools for UGC:


title: User-generated content

text: It is important to have an objective before attempting to become part of the UGC/social networking environment. For example, companies may ask users to post their reviews directly to their Facebook page. This could end up disastrous if a user makes a comment that steers people away from the product.


title: User-generated content

text: Mere copy & paste or hyperlinking could also be seen as user-generated self-expression. The action of linking to a work or copying a work could in itself motivate the creator, express the taste of the person linking or copying. Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and leaptag.com are good examples of where such linkage to work happens. The culmination of such linkages could very well identify the tastes of a person in the community and make that person unique.


title: User-generated content

text: User-generated content occurs when a product's customers create and disseminate online ideas about a product or the firm that markets it. These ideas are often in the form of text but also come in other forms such as music, photos, or videos. UGC has three key characteristics: (1) The contribution is by users of a product rather than the firm that sells this product; (2) it is creative in nature and the user adds something new; (3) it is posted online and generally accessible.


title: User-generated content

text: According to Cisco Systems, in 2016 an average of 96,000 petabytes was transferred monthly over the Internet, more than twice as many as in 2012. In 2016, the number of active websites surpassed 1 billion, up from approximately 700 million in 2012. This means the content we currently have access to is more diverse than ever before.


title: User-generated content

text: Reaching 1.66 billion daily active users in Q4 2019, Facebook has emerged as the most popular social media platform globally. Other social media platforms are also dominant at the regional level such as: Twitter in Japan, Naver in the Republic of Korea, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) in Africa, VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki (eng. "Classmates") in Russia and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, WeChat and QQ in China.


title: User-generated content

text: However, a concentration phenomenon is occurring globally giving the dominance to a few online platforms that become popular for some unique features they provide, most commonly for the added privacy they offer users through disappearing messages or end-to-end encryption (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat, Signal, and Telegram), but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences.


title: User-generated content

text: Production of freely accessible information has been increasing since 2012. In January 2017, Wikipedia had more than 43 million articles, almost twice as many as in January 2012. This corresponded to a progressive diversification of content and increase in contributions in languages other than English. In 2017, less than 12 percent of Wikipedia content was in English, down from 18 percent in 2012. Graham, Straumann, and Hogan say that increase in the availability and diversity of content has not radically changed the structures and processes for the production of knowledge. For example, while content on Africa has dramatically increased, a significant portion of this content has continued to be produced by contributors operating from North America and Europe, rather than from Africa itself.


title: User-generated content

text: The massive, multi-volume "Oxford English Dictionary" was exclusively composed of user-generated content. In 1857, Richard Chenevix Trench of the London Philological Society sought public contributions throughout the English-speaking world for the creation of the first edition of the "OED". As Simon Winchester recounts:


title: User-generated content

text: So what we're going to do, if I have your agreement that we're going to produce such a dictionary, is that we're going to send out invitations, were going to send these invitations to every library, every school, every university, every book shop that we can identify throughout the English-speaking world... everywhere where English is spoken or read with any degree of enthusiasm, people will be invited to contribute words. And the point is, the way they do it, the way they will be asked and instructed to do it, is to read voraciously and whenever they see a word, whether it's a preposition or a sesquipedalian monster, they are to... if it interests them and if where they read it, they see it in a sentence that illustrates the way that that word is used, offers the meaning of the day to that word, then they are to write it on a slip of paper... the top left-hand side you write the word, the chosen word, the catchword, which in this case is 'twilight'. Then the quotation, the quotation illustrates the meaning of the word. And underneath it, the citation, where it came from, whether it was printed or whether it was in manuscript... and then the reference, the volume, the page and so on... and send these slips of paper, these slips are the key to the making of this dictionary, into the headquarters of the dictionary.


title: User-generated content

text: In the 1990s several electronic bulletin board systems were based on user-generated content. Some of these systems have been converted into websites, including the film information site IMDb which started as "rec.arts.movies" in 1990. With the growth of the World Wide Web the focus moved to websites, several of which were based on user-generated content, including Wikipedia (2001) and Flickr (2004).


title: User-generated content

text: User-generated Internet video was popularized by YouTube, an online video platform founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen in April 2005. It enabled the video streaming of MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) user-generated content from anywhere on the World Wide Web.


title: User-generated content

text: The BBC set up a pilot user-generated content team in April 2005 with 3 staff. In the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the team was made permanent and was expanded, reflecting the arrival in the mainstream of the citizen journalist. After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. The BBC does not normally pay for content generated by its viewers.


title: User-generated content

text: In 2006 CNN launched CNN iReport, a project designed to bring user-generated news content to CNN. Its rival Fox News Channel launched its project to bring in user-generated news, similarly titled "uReport". This was typical of major television news organizations in 2005–2006, who realized, particularly in the wake of the London 7 July bombings, that citizen journalism could now become a significant part of broadcast news. Sky News, for example, regularly solicits for photographs and video from its viewers.


title: User-generated content

text: User-generated content was featured in "Time" magazine's 2006 Person of the Year, in which the person of the year was "you", meaning all of the people who contribute to user-generated media, including YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace. A precursor to user-generated content uploaded on YouTube was "America's Funniest Home Videos".


title: User-generated content

text: The benefits derived from user-generated content for the content host are clear, these include a low-cost promotion, positive impact on product sales, and fresh content. However, the benefit to the contributor is less direct. There are various theories behind the motivation for contributing user-generated content, ranging from altruistic, to social, to materialistic. Due to the high value of user-generated content, many sites use incentives to encourage their generation. These incentives can be generally categorized into implicit incentives and explicit incentives. Sometimes, users are also given monetary incentives to encourage them to create captivating and inspiring UGC.


title: User-generated content

text: The distribution of UGC across the Web provides a high volume data source that is accessible for analysis, and offers utility in enhancing the experiences of end users. Social science research can benefit from having access to the opinions of a population of users, and use this data to make inferences about their traits. Applications in information technology seek to mine end user data to support and improve machine-based processes, such as information retrieval and recommendation. However, processing the high volumes of data offered by UGC necessitate the ability to automatically sort and filter these data points according to their value.


title: User-generated content

text: Determining the value of user contributions for assessment and ranking can be difficult due to the variation in the quality and structure of this data. The quality and structure of the data provided by UGC is application-dependent, and can include items such as tags, reviews, or comments that may or may not be accompanied by useful metadata. Additionally, the value of this data depends on the specific task for which it will be utilized and the available features of the application domain. Value can ultimately be defined and assessed according to whether the application will provide service to a crowd of humans, a single end user, or a platform designer.


title: User-generated content

text: The variation of data and specificity of value has resulted in various approaches and methods for assessing and ranking UGC. The performance of each method essentially depends on the features and metrics that are available for analysis. Consequently, it is critical to have an understanding of the task objective and its relation to how the data is collected, structured, and represented in order to choose the most appropriate approach to utilizing it. The methods of assessment and ranking can be categorized into two classes: human-centered and machine-centered. Methods emphasizing human-centered utility consider the ranking and assessment problem in terms of the users and their interactions with the system, whereas the machine-centered method considers the problem in terms of machine learning and computation. The various methods of assessment and ranking can be classified into one of four approaches: community-based, user-based, designer-based, and hybrid.


title: User-generated content

text: There are many types of user-generated content: Internet forums, where people talk about different topics; blogs are services where users can post about many topics, product reviews on a supplier website or in social media; wikis such as Wikipedia and Wikia allow users, sometimes including anonymous users, to edit the content. Another type of user-generated content are social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, TikTok or VK, where users interact with other people via chatting, writing messages, posting images or links, and sharing content. Media hosting sites such as YouTube allow users to post content. Some forms of user-generated content, such as a social commentary blog, can be considered as a form of citizen journalism.


title: User-generated content

text: Blogs are websites created by individuals, groups, and associations. They mostly consist of journal-style text and enable interaction between a blogger and reader in the form of online comments. Self-hosted blogs can be created by professional entities such as entrepreneurs and small businesses. Blog hosting platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Medium; Typepad is often used by media companies; Weebly is geared for online shopping. Social networking blogging platforms include Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Sina Weibo. Among the many blogs on the web, Boing Boing is a group blog with themes including technology and science fiction; HuffPost blogs include opinions on subjects such as politics, entertainment, and technology. There are also travel blogs such as Head for Points, Adventurous Kate, and an early form of The Points Guy.


title: User-generated content

text: Entertainment social media and information sharing websites include Reddit, 9Gag, 4chan, Upworthy and Newgrounds. Sites like 9Gag allow users to create memes and quick video clips. Sites like Tech in Asia and Buzzfeed engage readers with professional communities by posting articles with user-generated comment sections. Other websites include fanfiction sites such as FanFiction.Net; imageboards; artwork communities like DeviantArt; mobile photos and video sharing sites such as Picasa and Flickr; audio social networks such as SoundCloud; crowd funding or crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and ArtistShare; and customer review sites such as Yelp.


title: User-generated content

text: After launching in the mid-2000s, major UGC-based adult websites like Pornhub, YouPorn and xHamster and became the dominant mode of consumption and distribution of pornographic content on the internet. The appearance of pornographic content on sites like Wikipedia and Tumblr led moderators and site owners to institute stricter limits on uploads.


title: User-generated content

text: The travel industry, in particular, has begun utilizing user-generated content to show authentic traveler experiences. Travel-related companies such as The Millennial, Gen Z, and Busabout relaunched their websites featuring UGC images and social content by their customers posted in real time. TripAdvisor includes reviews and recommendations by travelers about hotels, restaurants, and activities.


title: User-generated content

text: The restaurant industry has also been altered by a review system the places more emphasis on online reviews and content from peers than traditional media reviews. In 2011 Yelp contained 70% of reviews for restaurants in the Seattle area compared to "Food & Wine" Magazine containing less than 5 percent.


title: User-generated content

text: Video games can have fan-made content in the form of mods, fan patches, fan translations or server emulators. Some games come with level editor programs to aid in their creation. A few massively multiplayer online games including "Star Trek Online", "Dota 2", and "EverQuest 2" have UGC systems integrated into the game itself. A metaverse can be a user-generated world, such as "Second Life". "Second Life" is a 3-D virtual world which provides its users with tools to modify the game world and participate in an economy, trading user content created via online creation for virtual currency.


title: User-generated content

text: A popular use of UGC involves collaboration between a brand and a user. An example is the "Elf Yourself" videos by Jib Jab that come back every year around Christmas. The Jib Jab website lets people use their photos of friends and family that they have uploaded to make a holiday video to share across the internet. You cut and paste the faces of the people in the pictures to animated dancing elves.


title: User-generated content

text: Some brands are also using UGC images to boost the performance of their paid social ads. For example, Toyota leveraged UGC for their "Feeling the Streets" Facebook ad campaign and were able to increase their total ad engagement by 440%.


title: User-generated content

text: Some bargain hunting websites feature user-generated content, such as eBay, Dealsplus, and FatWallet which allow users to post, discuss, and control which bargains get promoted within the community. Because of the dependency of social interaction, these sites fall into the category of social commerce.


title: User-generated content

text: Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, is one of the largest user-generated content databases in the world. Platforms such as YouTube have frequently been used as an instructional aide. Organizations such as the Khan Academy and the Green brothers have used the platform to upload series of videos on topics such as math, science, and history to help aid viewers master or better understand the basics. Educational podcasts have also helped in teaching through an audio platform. Personal websites and messaging systems like Yahoo Messenger have also been used to transmit user-generated educational content. There have also been web forums where users give advice to each other.


title: User-generated content

text: Students can also manipulate digital images or video clips to their advantage and tag them with easy to find keywords then share them to friends and family worldwide. The category of "student performance content" has risen in the form of discussion boards and chat logs. Students could write reflective journals and diaries that may help others. The websites SparkNotes and Shmoop are used to summarize and analyze books so that they are more accessible to the reader.


title: User-generated content

text: Photo sharing websites are another popular form of UGC. Flickr is a site in which users are able to upload personal photos they have taken and label them in regards to their "motivation". Flickr not only hosts images but makes them publicly available for reuse and reuse with modification. Instagram is a social media platform that allows users to edit, upload and include location information with photos they post. Panoramio.com and Flickr use metadata, such as GPS coordinates that allows for geographic placement of images.


title: User-generated content

text: Video sharing websites are another popular form of UGC. YouTube and TikTok allow users to create and upload videos.


title: User-generated content

text: The incorporation of user-generated content into mainstream journalism outlets is considered to have begun in 2005 with the BBC's creation of a user-generated content team, which was expanded and made permanent in the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. The incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies into news websites allowed user-generated content online to move from more social platforms such as MySpace, LiveJournal, and personal blogs, into the mainstream of online journalism, in the form of comments on news articles written by professional journalists, but also through surveys, content sharing, and other forms of citizen journalism.


title: User-generated content

text: Since the mid-2000s, journalists and publishers have had to consider the effects that user-generated content has had on how news gets published, read, and shared. A 2016 study on publisher business models suggests that readers of online news sources value articles written both by professional journalists, as well as users—provided that those users are experts in a field relevant to the content that they create. In response to this, it is suggested that online news sites must consider themselves not only a source for articles and other types of journalism but also a platform for engagement and feedback from their communities. The ongoing engagement with a news site that is possible due to the interactive nature of user-generated content is considered a source of sustainable revenue for publishers of online journalism going forward.


title: User-generated content

text: Journalists are increasingly sourcing UGC from platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, as news shifts to a digital space. This form of crowdsourcing can include using user content to support claims, using social media platforms to contact witnesses and obtain relevant images and videos for articles.


title: User-generated content

text: The use of user-generated content has been prominent in the efforts of marketing online, especially among millennials. A good reason for this may be that 86% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support, and 60% believe user-generated content is not only the most authentic form of content, but also the most influential when making purchasing decisions.


title: User-generated content

text: An increasing number of companies have been employing UGC techniques into their marketing efforts, such as Starbucks with their "White Cup Contest" campaign where customers competed to create the best doodle on their cups.


title: User-generated content

text: The effectiveness of UGC in marketing has been shown to be significant as well. For instance, the "Share a Coke" by Coca-Cola campaign in which customers uploaded images of themselves with bottles to social media attributed to a two percent increase in revenue. Of millennials, UGC can influence purchase decisions up to fifty-nine percent of the time, and eighty-four percent say that UGC on company websites has at least some influence on what they buy, typically in a positive way. As a whole, consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above those of professionals.


title: User-generated content

text: There are many opportunities in user-generated content. The advantage of UGC is that it is a quick, easy way to reach the masses. Here are some examples:


title: User-generated content

text: The term "user-generated content" has received some criticism. The criticism to date has addressed issues of fairness, quality, privacy, the sustainable availability of creative work and effort among legal issues namely related to intellectual property rights such as copyrights etc.


title: User-generated content

text: Some commentators assert that the term "user" implies an illusory or unproductive distinction between different kinds of "publishers", with the term "users" exclusively used to characterize publishers who operate on a much smaller scale than traditional mass-media outlets or who operate for free. Such classification is said to perpetuate an unfair distinction that some argue is diminishing because of the prevalence and affordability of the means of production and publication. A better response might be to offer optional expressions that better capture the spirit and nature of such work, such as EGC, Entrepreneurial Generated Content (see external reference below).


title: User-generated content

text: Sometimes creative works made by individuals are lost because there are limited or no ways to precisely preserve creations when a UGC Web site service closes down. One example of such loss is the closing of the Disney massively multiplayer online game "VMK". VMK, like most games, has items that are traded from user to user. Many of these items are rare within the game. Users are able to use these items to create their own rooms, avatars and pin lanyard. This site shut down at 10 pm CDT on 21 May 2008. There are ways to preserve the essence, if not the entirety of such work through the users copying text and media to applications on their personal computers or recording live action or animated scenes using screen capture software, and then uploading elsewhere. Long before the Web, creative works were simply lost or went out of publication and disappeared from history unless individuals found ways to keep them in personal collections.


title: User-generated content

text: Another criticized aspect is the vast array of user-generated product and service reviews that can at times be misleading for consumer on the web.


title: User-generated content

text: A study conducted at Cornell University found that an estimated 1 to 6 percent of positive user-generated online hotel reviews are fake.


title: User-generated content

text: Another concern of platforms that rely heavily on user-generated content, such as Twitter and Facebook, is how easy it is to find people who holds the same opinions and interests in addition to how well they facilitate the creation of networks or closed groups. While the strength of these services are that users can broaden their horizon by sharing their knowledge and connect with other people from around the world, these platforms also make it very easy to connect with only a restricted sample of people who holds similar opinions (see Filter bubble).


title: User-generated content

text: There is also criticism regarding whether or not those who contribute to a platform should be paid for their content. In 2015, A group of 18 famous content creators on Vine attempted to negotiate a deal with Vine representatives to secure a $1.2 million contract for a guaranteed 12 videos a month. This negotiation was not successful.


title: User-generated content

text: The ability for services to accept user-generated content opens up a number of legal concerns, from the broader sense to specific local laws. In general, knowing who committed the online crime is difficult because many use pseudonyms or remain anonymous. Sometimes it can be traced back. But in the case of a public coffee shop, they have no way of pinpointing the exact user. There is also a problem with the issues surrounding extremely harmful but not legal acts. For example, the posting of content that instigates a person's suicide. It is a criminal offense if there is proof of "beyond reasonable doubt" but different situations may produce different outcomes. Depending on the country, there is certain laws that come with the Web 2.0. In the United States, the "Section 230" exemptions of the Communications Decency Act state that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This clause effectively provides a general immunity for websites that host user-generated content that is defamatory, deceptive or otherwise harmful, even if the operator knows that the third-party content is harmful and refuses to take it down. An exception to this general rule may exist if a website promises to take down the content and then fails to do so.


title: User-generated content

text: Copyright laws also play a factor in relation to user-generated content, as users may use such services to upload works—particularly videos—that they do not have the sufficient rights to distribute. In many cases, the use of these materials may be covered by local "fair use" laws, especially if the use of the material submitted is transformative. Local laws also vary on who is liable for any resulting copyright infringements caused by user-generated content; in the United States, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA)—a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), dictates safe harbor provisions for "online service providers" as defined under the act, which grants immunity from secondary liability for the copyright-infringing actions of their users, as long as they promptly remove access to allegedly infringing materials upon the receipt of a notice from a copyright holder or registered agent, and they do not have actual knowledge that their service is being used for infringing activities.


title: User-generated content

text: In the UK, the Defamation Act of 1996 says that if a person is not the author, editor or publisher and did not know about the situation, they are not convicted. Furthermore, ISPs are not considered authors, editors, or publishers and they cannot have responsibility for people they have no "effective control" over. Just like the DMCA, once the ISP learns about the content, they must delete it immediately. The European Union's approach is horizontal by nature, which means that civil and criminal liability issues are addressed under the Electronic Commerce Directive. Section 4 deals with liability of the ISP while conducting "mere conduit" services, caching and web hosting services.


title: User-generated content

text: A study on YouTube analyzing one of the Video On Demand systems was conducted in 2007. The length of the video had decreased by two-fold from the non-UGC content but they saw a fast production rate. The user behavior is what perpetuates the UGC. The act of P2P (Peer-to-Peer) was studied and saw a great benefit to the system. They also studied the impact of content aliasing, sharing of multiple copies, and illegal uploads.


title: User-generated content

text: A study from York University in Ontario in 2012 conducted research that resulted in a proposed framework for comparing brand-related UGC and to understand how the strategy used by a company could influence the brand sentiment across different social media channels including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The three scholars of this study examined two clothing brands, Lulu Lemon and American Apparel. The difference between these two brands is that Lulu Lemon had a social media following while American Apparel was the complete opposite with no social media following. Unsurprisingly, Lulu Lemon had much more positive contributions compared to American Apparel which had less positive contributions. Lulu Lemon has three times the number of positive contributions, 64 percent vs 22 percent for American Apparel on Twitter while on Facebook and YouTube, they had roughly an equal number of contributions. This proves that social media can influence how a brand is perceived, usually in a more positive light. A study by Dhar and Chang, published in 2007, found that the volume of blogs posted on a music album was positively correlated with future sales of that album.


title: La Tène culture

text: The La Tène culture (; ) was a European Iron Age culture. It developed and flourished during the late Iron Age (from about 450 BC to the Roman conquest in the 1st century BC), succeeding the early Iron Age Hallstatt culture without any definite cultural break, under considerable Mediterranean influence from the Greeks in pre-Roman Gaul, the Etruscans, and the Golasecca culture, but whose artistic style nevertheless did not depend on those Mediterranean influences.


title: La Tène culture

text: La Tène culture's territorial extent corresponded to what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, England, Southern Germany, the Czech Republic, parts of Northern Italy and Central Italy, Slovenia and Hungary, as well as adjacent parts of the Netherlands, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Transylvania (western Romania), and Transcarpathia (western Ukraine).


title: La Tène culture

text: The Celtiberians of western Iberia shared many aspects of the culture, though not generally the artistic style. To the north extended the contemporary Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, including the Jastorf culture of Northern Germany and Denmark and all the way to Galatia in Asia Minor (today Turkey).


title: La Tène culture

text: Centered on ancient Gaul, the culture became very widespread, and encompasses a wide variety of local differences. It is often distinguished from earlier and neighbouring cultures mainly by the La Tène style of Celtic art, characterized by curving "swirly" decoration, especially of metalwork.


title: La Tène culture

text: It is named after the type site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where thousands of objects had been deposited in the lake, as was discovered after the water level dropped in 1857. La Tène is the type site and the term archaeologists use for the later period of the culture and art of the ancient Celts, a term that is firmly entrenched in the popular understanding, but presents numerous problems for historians and archaeologists.


title: La Tène culture

text: Extensive contacts through trade are recognized in foreign objects deposited in elite burials; stylistic influences on La Tène material culture can be recognized in Etruscan, Italic, Greek, Dacian and Scythian sources. Date-able Greek pottery and analysis employing scientific techniques such as dendrochronology and thermoluminescence help provide date ranges for an absolute chronology at some La Tène sites.


title: La Tène culture

text: La Tène history was originally divided into "early", "middle" and "late" stages based on the typology of the metal finds (Otto Tischler 1885), with the Roman occupation greatly disrupting the culture, although many elements remain in Gallo-Roman and Romano-British culture. A broad cultural unity was not paralleled by overarching social-political unifying structures, and the extent to which the material culture can be linguistically linked is debated. The art history of La Tène culture has various schemes of periodization.


title: La Tène culture

text: The preceding final phase of the Hallstatt culture, HaD, c. 650–450 BC, was also widespread across Central Europe, and the transition over this area was gradual, being mainly detected through La Tène style elite artefacts, which first appear on the western edge of the old Hallstatt region.


title: La Tène culture

text: Though there is no agreement on the precise region in which La Tène culture first developed, there is a broad consensus that the centre of the culture lay on the northwest edges of Hallstatt culture, north of the Alps, within the region between in the West the valleys of the Marne and Moselle, and the part of the Rhineland nearby. In the east the western end of the old Hallstatt core area in modern Bavaria, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland formed a somewhat separate "eastern style Province" in the early La Tène, joining with the western area in Alsace.


title: La Tène culture

text: In 1994 a prototypical ensemble of elite grave sites of the early 5th century BCE was excavated at Glauberg in Hesse, northeast of Frankfurt-am-Main, in a region that had formerly been considered peripheral to the La Tène sphere. The site at La Tène itself was therefore near the southern edge of the original "core" area (as is also the case for the Hallstatt site for its core).


title: La Tène culture

text: The establishment of a Greek colony, soon very successful, at Massalia (modern Marseilles) on the Mediterranean coast of France led to great trade with the Hallstatt areas up the Rhone and Saone river systems, and early La Tène elite burials like the Vix Grave in Burgundy contain imported luxury goods along with artifacts produced locally. Most areas were probably controlled by tribal chiefs living in hilltop forts, while the bulk of the population lived in small villages or farmsteads in the countryside.


title: La Tène culture

text: By 500 BCE the Etruscans expanded to border Celts in north Italy, and trade across the Alps began to overhaul trade with the Greeks, and the Rhone route declined. Booming areas included the middle Rhine, with large iron ore deposits, the Marne and Champagne regions, and also Bohemia, although here trade with the Mediterranean area was much less important. Trading connections and wealth no doubt played a part in the origin of the La Tène style, though how large a part remains much discussed; specific Mediterranean-derived motifs are evident, but the new style does not depend on them.


title: La Tène culture

text: Barry Cunliffe notes localization of La Tène culture during the 5th century BCE when there arose "two zones of power and innovation: a Marne – Moselle zone in the west with trading links to the Po Valley via the central Alpine passes and the Golasecca culture, and a Bohemian zone in the east with separate links to the Adriatic via the eastern Alpine routes and the Venetic culture".


title: La Tène culture

text: From their homeland, La Tène culture expanded in the 4th century BCE to more of modern France, Germany, and Central Europe, and beyond to Hispania, northern and central Italy, the Balkans, and even as far as Asia Minor, in the course of several major migrations. La Tène style artefacts start to appear in Britain around the same time, and Ireland rather later. The style of "Insular La Tène" art is somewhat different and the artefacts are initially found in some parts of the islands but not others. Migratory movements seem at best only partly responsible for the diffusion of La Tène culture there, and perhaps other parts of Europe.


title: La Tène culture

text: By about 400 BCE, the evidence for Mediterranean trade becomes sparse; this may be because the expanding Celtic populations began to migrate south and west, coming into violent conflict with the established populations, including the Etruscans and Romans.


title: La Tène culture

text: The settled life in much of the La Tène homelands also seems to have become much more unstable and prone to wars. In about 387 BCE, the Celts under Brennus defeated the Romans and then sacked Rome, establishing themselves as the most prominent threats to the Roman homeland, a status they would retain through a series of Roman-Gallic wars until Julius Caesar's final conquest of Gaul in 58-50 BCE. The Romans prevented the Celts from reaching very far south of Rome, but on the other side of the Adriatic Sea groups passed through the Balkans to reach Greece, where Delphi was attacked and sacked in 279 BCE, and Asia, where Galatia was established as a Celtic area of Anatolia. By this time, the La Tène style was spreading to the British Isles, though apparently without any significant movements in population.


title: La Tène culture

text: After about 275 BCE, Roman expansion into the La Tène area began with the conquest of Gallia Cisalpina. The conquest of Gallia Celtica followed in 121 BCE and was complete with the Gallic Wars of the 50s BCE. Gaulish culture quickly assimilated to Roman culture, giving rise to the hybrid Gallo-Roman culture of Late Antiquity.


title: La Tène culture

text: Ancient Celtic culture had no written literature of its own, but rare examples of epigraphy in the Greek or Latin alphabets


title: La Tène culture

text: Current knowledge of this cultural area is derived from three sources comprising archaeological evidence, Greek and Latin literary records, and ethnographical evidence suggesting some La Tène artistic and cultural survivals in traditionally Celtic regions of far western Europe.


title: La Tène culture

text: Some of the societies that are archaeologically identified with La Tène material culture were identified by Greek and Roman authors from the 5th century onwards as "Keltoi" ("Celts") and "Galli" ("Gauls"). Herodotus (iv.49) correctly placed "Keltoi" at the source of the Ister/Danube, in the heartland of La Tène material culture: "The Ister flows right across Europe, rising in the country of the Celts".


title: La Tène culture

text: Whether the usage of classical sources means that the whole of La Tène culture can be attributed to a unified Celtic people is difficult to assess; archaeologists have repeatedly concluded that language, material culture, and political affiliation do not necessarily run parallel. Frey (2004) notes that in the 5th century, "burial customs in the Celtic world were not uniform; rather, localised groups had their own beliefs, which, in consequence, also gave rise to distinct artistic expressions".


title: La Tène culture

text: La Tène metalwork in bronze, iron and gold, developing technologically out of Hallstatt culture, is stylistically characterized by inscribed and inlaid intricate spirals and interlace, on fine bronze vessels, helmets and shields, horse trappings and elite jewelry, especially the neck rings called torcs and elaborate clasps called "fibulae". It is characterized by elegant, stylized curvilinear animal and vegetal forms, allied with the Hallstatt traditions of geometric patterning.


title: La Tène culture

text: The Early Style of La Tène art and culture mainly featured static, geometric decoration, while the transition to the Developed Style constituted a shift to movement-based forms, such as triskeles. Some subsets within the Developed Style contain more specific design trends, such as the recurrent serpentine scroll of the Waldalgesheim Style.


title: La Tène culture

text: Initially La Tène people lived in open settlements that were dominated by the chieftains' hill forts. The development of towns—"oppida"—appears in mid-La Tène culture. La Tène dwellings were carpenter-built rather than of masonry. La Tène peoples also dug ritual shafts, in which votive offerings and even human sacrifices were cast. Severed heads appear to have held great power and were often represented in carvings. Burial sites included weapons, carts, and both elite and household goods, evoking a strong continuity with an afterlife.


title: La Tène culture

text: Elaborate burials also reveal a wide network of trade. In Vix, France, an elite woman of the 6th century BCE was buried with a very large bronze "wine-mixer" made in Greece. Exports from La Tène cultural areas to the Mediterranean cultures were based on salt, tin, copper, amber, wool, leather, furs and gold.


title: La Tène culture

text: Artefacts typical of the La Tène culture were also discovered in stray finds as far afield as Scandinavia, Northern Germany, Poland and in the Balkans. It is therefore common to also talk of the "La Tène period" in the context of those regions even though they were never part of the La Tène culture proper, but connected to its core area via trade.


title: La Tène culture

text: The La Tène type site is on the northern shore of Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where the small river Thielle, connecting to another lake, enters the Lake Neuchâtel.