[COSEAfaculty] Innovative courses relating to computational sciences program

[Grady P Blount]

Greeting CoSEA-ers:

Please see the note below from Robin Reid. These looks like some outstanding elective courses for our students.

-Grady

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Grady Price Blount (근덕), Ph.D., Professor of Physics and Dean
College of Science, Engineering & Agriculture (CoSEA)
Regional Representative, Texas Engineering Experiment Station 
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, Texas 75429-3011
Telephones:  903-886-5781 (office)      325-716-0450 (cell)
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Talent hits a target no one else can hit.
Genius hits a target no one else can see.
                                    -Schopenhauer


-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Reid 
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 11:28 AM
To: Salvatore Attardo; Grady P Blount
Cc: Christian Hempelmann; Robin Reid; Hunter Hayes; Lucy Pickering
Subject: innovative courses relating to computational sciences program 

Dear Sal and Grady:

Dr. Hempelmann and I are working on creating a unique opportunity for graduate students interested in digital humanities and computational sciences areas.  

Could you circulate the information below to departments heads in your colleges and ask them to make the information available to graduate students?

Thank you!


The Department of Literature and Languages is offering a unique opportunity in Fall 2013 to graduate students in literatures, linguistics, and computer science who are interested in the growing field of corpus stylistics.  Courses taught by two faculty members will involve cross-over assignments and activities relating to a corpus stylistics project. 

Dr. Robin Anne Reid's course, English 579 "Style and Stylistics" (Wed 4:30-7:10), and Dr. Christian Hempelmann's course, English 685 "Computational Linguistics" (Wednesday 7:20-10:00 pm), will be offered in the same classroom (BA 339) but scheduled back to back. Students may sign up for one course, or both courses, for credit. Each class is taught by the faculty member, with separate content and grading, but with selected assignments in each class focusing on the beginning steps of creating and using a corpus.  

Stylistics is a methodology that applies linguistic theories to literature, and corpus stylistics allows for analysis of literary texts on a larger scale by using programs.  Dr. Reid is engaged in the long-term project of creating the first corpus (annotated database) on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Students in English 579 will engage in the hands-on project to learn how to create a corpus (no experience in programming, corpus studies, J. R. R. Tolkien, or stylistics is necessary) as we read current articles on the theory and methods of such interdisciplinary work.

Dr. Christian F. Hempelmann's students in Computational Linguistics course will explore one of the most cutting-edge fields of scientific research in the age of the Internet. The course will address such questions as: how do you make computers understand and produce human language, how can you extract meaningful information from very large archives such as Internet, and will androids ever learn to laugh?

This course is intended as an introduction and therefore requires no prior expertise in programming or linguistics. It will be a core course for the Graduate Certificate in Computational Linguistics (under development) The course is also an introduction to the work of the Ontological Semantics Technology Lab, a newly founded research lab on campus looking to recruit and educate students in this field (www.tamuc.edu/ontology). We will learn how all fields of linguistics contribute to solving real-life issues in what we call "natural language processing." We will also learn what impact the computational application has on linguistics itself. Obviously, our main focus applications will be automatic corpus stylistics applied to the works of Tolkien.

The faculty members have applied for a Faculty Enhancement Research Project grant to support further work on the project, and will be developing grants to submit on the national level as well. Students in the class who may be interested in developing a specialization in corpus stylistics/computational linguistics beyond the class will be invited to continue working with the Tolkien Corpus Project (TCP) after the classes have closed. 

The TCP will contribute to scholarship on the range of aesthetic effects and discursive elements in Tolkien's work and will address the largest gap in Tolkien Studies, the lack of critical challenges to the claim that Tolkien's styles of writing, which are not consistent with modern, realistic literary conventions, is therefore not good literature.