title: Is it about a typewriter? Brian O’Nolan and technologies of inscription

authors: Long, Maebh

subjects: Friedrich Kittler

abstract: This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Brian O’Nolan’s oeuvre. It briefly examines Myles na gCopaleen’s play with posthuman hybrids in Cruiskeen Lawn, seeing his vignettes as extravagant, humorous depictions of the ways our bodies and symbolic order are determined by the mechanical. It then maps the movement between typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.

text: Is it about a typewriter? Brian O’Nolan and technologies of inscription This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Brian O’Nolan’s oeuvre. It briefly examines Myles na gCopaleen’s play with posthuman hybrids in Cruiskeen Lawn, seeing his vignettes as extravagant, humorous depictions of the ways our bodies and symbolic order are determined by the mechanical. It then maps the movement between typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.

year: 2020

title: PolyLM: Learning about polysemy through language modeling

authors: Ansell, Alan

abstract: To avoid the “meaning conflation deficiency” of word embeddings, a number of models have aimed to embed individual word senses. These methods at one time performed well on tasks such as word sense induction (WSI), but they have since been overtaken by task-specific techniques which exploit contextualized embeddings. However, sense embeddings and contextualization need not be mutually exclusive. We introduce PolyLM, a method which formulates the task of learning sense embeddings as a language modeling problem, allowing contextualization techniques to be applied. PolyLM is based on two underlying assumptions about word senses: firstly, that the probability of a word occurring in a given context is equal to the sum of the probabilities of its individual senses occurring; and secondly, that for a given occurrence of a word, one of its senses tends to be much more plausible in the context than the others. We evaluate PolyLM on WSI, showing that it performs considerably better than previous sense embedding techniques, and matches the current state-of-the-art specialized WSI method despite having six times fewer parameters. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlanAnsell/PolyLM.

text: PolyLM: Learning about polysemy through language modeling To avoid the “meaning conflation deficiency” of word embeddings, a number of models have aimed to embed individual word senses. These methods at one time performed well on tasks such as word sense induction (WSI), but they have since been overtaken by task-specific techniques which exploit contextualized embeddings. However, sense embeddings and contextualization need not be mutually exclusive. We introduce PolyLM, a method which formulates the task of learning sense embeddings as a language modeling problem, allowing contextualization techniques to be applied. PolyLM is based on two underlying assumptions about word senses: firstly, that the probability of a word occurring in a given context is equal to the sum of the probabilities of its individual senses occurring; and secondly, that for a given occurrence of a word, one of its senses tends to be much more plausible in the context than the others. We evaluate PolyLM on WSI, showing that it performs considerably better than previous sense embedding techniques, and matches the current state-of-the-art specialized WSI method despite having six times fewer parameters. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlanAnsell/PolyLM.

year: 2021

title: Research and development absorptive capacity: a Māori perspective

authors: Ruckstuhl, Katharina

subjects: computer science

abstract: This paper presents a view of research and development absorptive capacity from a Māori perspective. The assessment is part of a case study of a longitudinal programme – Science for Technological Innovation: Kia kotahi mai – Te Ao Putaiao me te Ao Hanagarau that aims to increase Aotearoa New Zealand’s capacity to use sci-tech for economic benefit. The paper finds that while Aotearoa New Zealand’s macro policy and meso institutional levels have become more responsive to Māori research and development demands, at the micro level of the individual or the firm there are still constraints given the small numbers of Māori in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In response to this, a novel model of Māori sci-tech capacity is under development that considers not only research and development technical capacities, but also the human and relational capacities required to accelerate absorptive capacity to respond to Māori social and economic aspirations.

text: Research and development absorptive capacity: a Māori perspective This paper presents a view of research and development absorptive capacity from a Māori perspective. The assessment is part of a case study of a longitudinal programme – Science for Technological Innovation: Kia kotahi mai – Te Ao Putaiao me te Ao Hanagarau that aims to increase Aotearoa New Zealand’s capacity to use sci-tech for economic benefit. The paper finds that while Aotearoa New Zealand’s macro policy and meso institutional levels have become more responsive to Māori research and development demands, at the micro level of the individual or the firm there are still constraints given the small numbers of Māori in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In response to this, a novel model of Māori sci-tech capacity is under development that considers not only research and development technical capacities, but also the human and relational capacities required to accelerate absorptive capacity to respond to Māori social and economic aspirations.

year: 2019