title: Paper trains

authors: Abbott, Amber

subjects: poetry

abstract: In the end, it keeps coming back to that. How we’ve got to move past each other. I tell your story 
in a way that somehow still makes it all about me. I count the trains, burn Bible paper. I’m left 
inconsolable on the dance floor. I try to paint a bowl of fruit and it always ends up being a self-portrait. I suppose that’s life. You reach your hands out for others, but they’re still your hands.

A train is late to the station. Dogs howl in the night. A kitchen tap drips without sound. Lungs fill 
with lake water. Books remain unread. Words, unspoken.

Paper Trains is a narrative-driven collection of poems exploring how people move through grief 
and the places it can take them. After losing her best friend, the narrator of these poems latches 
on to everything she can to keep herself afloat. Bad omens, old jackets, blue paper cranes.

We follow her journey as she navigates both devastating loss and the unrest of her early 20s. 
There are ways to stay busy: house parties, coffee shops, home renovation, self-pity, gardening. 
She moves through spaces to delay moving on.

We witness the effects that death has on her relationships with others and the burdens that she 
must now carry. 

This is a tale of violence, anger, and isolation. Of forgetting and remembering 
again. Betrayal. Begrudging hope. Superstitions and bad life choices. Trains always running late.

text: Paper trains In the end, it keeps coming back to that. How we’ve got to move past each other. I tell your story 
in a way that somehow still makes it all about me. I count the trains, burn Bible paper. I’m left 
inconsolable on the dance floor. I try to paint a bowl of fruit and it always ends up being a self-portrait. I suppose that’s life. You reach your hands out for others, but they’re still your hands.

A train is late to the station. Dogs howl in the night. A kitchen tap drips without sound. Lungs fill 
with lake water. Books remain unread. Words, unspoken.

Paper Trains is a narrative-driven collection of poems exploring how people move through grief 
and the places it can take them. After losing her best friend, the narrator of these poems latches 
on to everything she can to keep herself afloat. Bad omens, old jackets, blue paper cranes.

We follow her journey as she navigates both devastating loss and the unrest of her early 20s. 
There are ways to stay busy: house parties, coffee shops, home renovation, self-pity, gardening. 
She moves through spaces to delay moving on.

We witness the effects that death has on her relationships with others and the burdens that she 
must now carry. 

This is a tale of violence, anger, and isolation. Of forgetting and remembering 
again. Betrayal. Begrudging hope. Superstitions and bad life choices. Trains always running late.

year: 2024

title: The nature and scope of student search strategies in using a web derived corpus for writing

authors: Franken, Margaret

subjects: online language corpus

abstract: The use of online language corpora in L2 teaching and learning is gaining momentum largely because corpora are an easily accessed source of language input that potentially provide rich and authentic lexico-grammatical data. This can be of particular use for students' writing as its incorporation can enhance the appearance of native-like fluency. We describe a particular online web-derived corpus constructed by means of digital library software, and we describe the nature of the concordancer that services it. This is a system we have named FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition). Because the system incorporates not only a useful and authentic corpus but also linked databases, we maintain that it meets the need for an easily accessible online resource that gives explicit information about typical lexical and syntactic collocations. While online corpus-based resources are becoming more readily available, and their effective incorporation into language teaching is being documented, we seem to know little about how learners access them and make use of the results they generate. This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the search strategies used by learners in a university general English course as they make use of FLAX, tracking the way they exploit the search results in their texts, and presenting their relevant comments about the system. In such a way, we seek to explain variation in students' use and effectiveness of search strategies to support their writing. This type of research, although exploratory, is critical if we are to acknowledge the need for students to become ‘research workers’.

text: The nature and scope of student search strategies in using a web derived corpus for writing The use of online language corpora in L2 teaching and learning is gaining momentum largely because corpora are an easily accessed source of language input that potentially provide rich and authentic lexico-grammatical data. This can be of particular use for students' writing as its incorporation can enhance the appearance of native-like fluency. We describe a particular online web-derived corpus constructed by means of digital library software, and we describe the nature of the concordancer that services it. This is a system we have named FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition). Because the system incorporates not only a useful and authentic corpus but also linked databases, we maintain that it meets the need for an easily accessible online resource that gives explicit information about typical lexical and syntactic collocations. While online corpus-based resources are becoming more readily available, and their effective incorporation into language teaching is being documented, we seem to know little about how learners access them and make use of the results they generate. This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the search strategies used by learners in a university general English course as they make use of FLAX, tracking the way they exploit the search results in their texts, and presenting their relevant comments about the system. In such a way, we seek to explain variation in students' use and effectiveness of search strategies to support their writing. This type of research, although exploratory, is critical if we are to acknowledge the need for students to become ‘research workers’.

year: 2012

title: Radiocarbon dates on desiccated moa (Dinornithiformes) flesh from Inland Otago, New Zealand

authors: Anderson, Atholl

subjects: New Zealand

abstract: Remains of soft tissues from extinct moa (Dinornithiformes), mainly desiccated sinew, muscle, skin, and feathers have been recovered rather seldom but their distribution is distinctive. Of 22 records of such finds accumulated between 1864 and 1987, 15 came from inland Otago (Anderson 1989: 67–68, Table 5.2), west of Dunedin in the southern South Island. Most were found in the late nineteenth century (13 records) in rockshelters, clefts or alluvial sediments and were regarded at the time as evidence of the survival of moa up to about AD 1800 (Hutton and Coughtrey 1874a). Improbable as this latter point is, it has not been tested by radiocarbon dating until now. Our particular impetus to do so, however, arises in another way. It is from research, again largely within inland Otago, on Maori artefacts which have also been made from various other kinds of soft tissues (flax, grasses, dog skin, bird skin, feathers etc.). A series of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates on these (Anderson et al., n.d.) shows that they are exclusively late, post-AD 1650, which begs the question of why the age range does not extend across the full prehistoric period, beginning about AD 1300.

text: Radiocarbon dates on desiccated moa (Dinornithiformes) flesh from Inland Otago, New Zealand Remains of soft tissues from extinct moa (Dinornithiformes), mainly desiccated sinew, muscle, skin, and feathers have been recovered rather seldom but their distribution is distinctive. Of 22 records of such finds accumulated between 1864 and 1987, 15 came from inland Otago (Anderson 1989: 67–68, Table 5.2), west of Dunedin in the southern South Island. Most were found in the late nineteenth century (13 records) in rockshelters, clefts or alluvial sediments and were regarded at the time as evidence of the survival of moa up to about AD 1800 (Hutton and Coughtrey 1874a). Improbable as this latter point is, it has not been tested by radiocarbon dating until now. Our particular impetus to do so, however, arises in another way. It is from research, again largely within inland Otago, on Maori artefacts which have also been made from various other kinds of soft tissues (flax, grasses, dog skin, bird skin, feathers etc.). A series of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates on these (Anderson et al., n.d.) shows that they are exclusively late, post-AD 1650, which begs the question of why the age range does not extend across the full prehistoric period, beginning about AD 1300.

year: 2010