Scholarly Communication

IRis Highlight: Talker-Specific Phonetics

In the past semester, I cannot even count how many times I have overheard my roommate reciting “HOW NOW BROWN COW” loudly, slowly and often repetitively in our apartment. Although I first attributed this new habit to her unique personality, I soon learned it was part of her “Voice and Articulation” homework to record herself speaking. We started talking about this regularly, and as a result I began paying more attention to my “regional” accent. This new interest in accents and pronunciation led me straight to Rachel Marie Theodore’s dissertation, “Some characteristics of talker-specific phonetic detail,” a paper on the IRis database  highlighting the specific sounds and details that make talkers differ. The dissertation includes an interesting experiment in which “two groups of listeners were differentially exposed to characteristic VOTs [voice-onset-time] for two talkers, one talker produced short VOTs and the other talker produced longer VOTs. Exposure was provided during training phases in which listeners heard both talkers produce one voiceless stop consonant, either /p/ or /k/, in the context of a word (e.g., pain or cane). In test phases, listeners were presented with a short-VOT and a long-VOT variant of the word presented during training as well as a novel word that began with a different voiceless stop than presented during training. In both cases, listeners were asked to select which of the two VOT variants was most representative of a given talker.” If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the paper in full!

IRis Highlight: Studies in American Fiction

Founded by the Northeastern University English Department and published for over three decades, Studies in American Fiction is a well-regarded, peer-reviewed journal that covers both “emergent writers and canons, as well as American literary classics.” IRis has a small selection of recent articles, and will hopefully include more backfiles in the future. In Studies in American Fiction you can find articles on authors as diverse as John Cheever, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and on topics as diverse as missionary literature, Orientalism, and temperance. IRis also includes additional contributions from the Northeastern English Department, and you can even browse in IRis for more exposure to the fascinating array of subjects being studied by Northeastern’s other departments and research centers.

IRis Reveals Undergraduate Research Gems

It’s not just faculty and graduate students who are doing research at Northeastern. Undergraduates at NU are doing some interesting stuff. (Talk to your professor to find out how you can get involved in undergraduate research at NU.) At the Library, we are trying to capture as much of the university output as possible through IRis, and that includes undergraduate research and projects done through the Honors Program. Here are some interesting Honors Projects of undergraduates from past years that are currently in IRis: Drugs versus psychotherapy, which would you choose? : a cognitive investigation of a clinical problem, by Jennelle E. Yopchick. Introduction to linguistics study guide, Laura E. Hughes and Anna Gartsman One insider’s view of the research process, Wendy Lewis Kesl. This student describes her experience participating in a study of nurses and nursing students in England. If you are in the Honors Program or doing undergraduate research yourself, we hope to get your final project to put into IRis.

IRis Highlight: Sport in Society

In addition to its academic departments, Northeastern University hosts multiple interdisciplinary research centers and institutes. These centers are the source of a great deal of original research. Many of them have chosen to place their publications and presentations in IRis, the Libraries’ digital archive that collects, manages, preserves, and shares the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. One such center is Sport in Society, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. This center conducts research and offers programming and outreach with a mission of using the power and appeal of sport to foster diversity, prevent violence, and improve the health of local and global communities. Sport in Society has submitted an extensive set of reports, presentations, and research articles to IRis. You can read about athletes with disabilities and their legal rights to participate in recreational and sporting opportunities, or about violence linked to teams or universities with Native American mascots, among many other topics. Browse in IRis and you can find out about the fascinating array of subjects being studied by Sport in Society and many of Northeastern’s other research centers.

What Kind of Work is in IRis?

IRis is a digital archive that collects, manages, preserves, and shares the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. It is a service of the University Libraries. To answer the question posed in my post title–one type of work that is in IRis are academic dissertations.  I studied English in college, and it’s still one of my big interests, so I took a look at the English Language and Literature materials that are listed in IRis. Today, I’d like to highlight the dissertation of Nichole DeWall of Northeastern’s English Department. Her 2008 dissertation is entitled ‘A Plague ‘O Both Your Houses’: Shakespeare and Early Modern Plague Writing, and as the title suggests, it concerns itself with the intersection of Shakespeare’s drama with the plague experience in the early modern era, and it particularly focuses on Romeo and Juliet and Coriolanus. Nichole’s dissertation is 205 pages, and as it’s in IRis, it’s indexed by Google, and easily shared with the world.  I really liked her initial list of questions, and I want to quote them here:
Moreover, my inquiry seeks to understand what kind of cultural and psychical work Shakespeare’s plays performed, both for himself and for his audience members. What was it about the plague experience that compelled Shakespeare to return to it in his works, despite how devastating it was to his creative and financial prospects to remind people of the disease? And what compelled his audience members to venture into the playhouses, despite the fact that these sites were thought to be uniquely capable of spreading the plague? How did the plays provide for Shakespeare and his audiences a language to know the unknowable, or communicate the unspeakable? How do we begin to think about literature in a way that recognizes the demands of trauma, yet still preserves, to some extent, the artist’s ability to make actively make aesthetic choices? These questions emerged as the ones most at stake as I moved within this project. In an attempt to understand the scope and nature of this particular traumatic event—the early modern bubonic plague—I worked with a sample of over 300 archival plague texts.”
You can read all of Nichole DeWall’s dissertation here.  After reading, I was a bit curious, and it looks like Nichole, after successfully earning her doctorate, is now an assistant professor of English at McKendree University in Illinois.