But now you´re always rushing, and I´m always in the way. You´re always angry, and makeing me lonely…so very lonely. I have gotten used to it although no one should get used to feeling this way. Just, once in a while, I wish you´d sing songs for me again because, I miss being your little girl…

For some reason people are very lazy when comes to reading anything, but specially books. How many times have I heard fellow students and friends say: How can you reed that? it is so long!. But they don´t understand that length has no relevance when comes to novels. They seem to look at it as a race, and the shorter the race, the better.

But, where is the hurry? Personally, when I´m enjoying a novel, I want it to last forever and have to restrain myself from devaouring it all in one day. There is nothing like getting into bed, with nothing to do, and peeking into other people´s lifes: I have suffered with Anna Karennina´s jelousy and with Raskolnikov´s torment; I laughed with Death and the MacFeegles in every Terry Pratchett Discworld novel; I cried when Aslan died and when Elizabeth finally had her happy ever after with Darcy. All of those moments are part of my life as much as my own experiences, thanks to them I have come to understand aspects of humanity I never thought I could.

So when I see people staring at me like I am some madperson because I carry arround Les Miserables with me, I can only sigh and feel sorry for them, because they will never understand, they are handycapped. My therapist says that life and emotions ARE literature, an if they cannot understand literature…then they are missing something

The reason for this aversion to written humanity may reside in the family or education… Personally I blame the deadlines and compulsory essays in school, but it is too complicated and extense for me to go into.

Going back to the origin of this article I have to say, with all the pain of my heart that, eventually, books will belong in a closed library where only the elite will have acess to them. People will read from screens and little electronic gadgets resembling books, and me, and people like me, will never feel the texture of the pages or smell that special scent that the old books come.

CoSy: cognitive sistems for cognitive assistants.

HUMAINE: Human-Machine interaction network in emotions.

HyLaP: Hybrid Language Processing Technologies for a personal associative information access and management application.

LIRICS: linguistic infraestructure for introperable resources and sistems.

At NCLT:

Machine Translation: translating DVD subtitles using example-based machine translation.

At LTG:

EASIE: Combining Shallow Semantics and Domain Knowledge.

Synthesis: Integrated Models and Tools for Fine-Grained Prosody in Discourse.

At Stanford NLP:

Computational Semantics.

Parsing and Tagging

Another center is the Edinburgh LTG (Language Technology Group). It is a resaearch and development group that has been working in the area of natural language engineering since the early 1990′s. The LTG´s work is application oriented.

Finally, the Portuguese center of Human Technology and Bioinformatics of Beira University. It was founded by professor Gael Dias to investigate the areas of Human Language Technologies and Bioinformatics gathering researchers from Computer Science, Statistics and Linguistics.The HULTIG currently focuses its research in the following areas: automatic text summarization, topic segmentation, sentence compression, medical thesauri and dictionaries, automatic construction of ontology, word sense disambiguation, text and mobile technologies, data warehouse, efficent algorithms for Natural Language Processing…and some more.

Hans Uszkoreit is a Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as the Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. By cooptation he is also Professor of the Computer Science Department. Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas in Austin.During his time in Austin he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center.

In 1984 Uszkoreit received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. From 1982 until 1986, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca. During this time he was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University as a senior researcher and later as a project leader. In 1986 he spent six months in Stuttgart on an IBM Research Fellowship at the Science Division of IBM Germany. In December 1986 he returned to Stuttgart to work for IBM Germany as a project leader in the project LILOG (Linguistic and Logical Methods for the Understanding of German Texts).

During this time, he also taught at the University of Stuttgart.In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the newly founded Language Technology Lab at DFKI. He has been a co-founder and principal investigator of the Special Collaborative Research Division (SFB 378) “Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Process” of the DFG (German Science Foundation). He is also co-founder and professor of the “European Postgraduate Program Language Technology and Cognitive Systems”, a joint Ph.D. program with the University of Edinburgh.

But at the age of twelve none if this matters. You dream of what is going to be like, what you´ll learn, how your classes will look like and that maybe some day, you say something at home, something extremely cult, which will make your father proud. 

Then when they started to take me seriously and researching my future, we found out that there´s no such thing as Literature as a degree nowhere in Spain The odds of being acceptd in a foreign college without a scollarship are very very low. So I thought that was it.

Luckyly enough for me, a percentage of English Philology focuses on literature so I had to take it. That´s the ral reason why I decided to do this. But for future generations – though I know this article will mean nothing to anyone – I wished the horizons were widened towards what always have been the classic studies. Computers are very practicle and fun, but it seems like everyone has left aside and forgotten the books.

J. Austin

Quoting Wlter Ong, “A deeper understanding of primary orality enables us better to undertsand the new world of writing. Without writing the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. Writing has transformed human conciousness.”

He also said that witing establishes what has been called “autonomous” discourse, which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can because written discourse has been detached from its author. 

Ong, backed up his work on Eric Havelock´s book and said that there is a coincidence between a change of mind and a change from orality to literacy in Ancient Greeece.

Ong says that the skill of writing must be laboriously learned because it is essential to perform that first change in human thought from “the world of sound to the world of sight”

The abuse of natural resources for our everyday use is a common matter for everyone, especially for organisations like Greenpeace and similar.

There are many things that we can do and have been taught to us like separating our rubbish, recycling, saving water etc. These measures are a step, though tiny, towards restoring the natural balance.

 It would be easy to think that new technologies, such as computers, mobile phones, PDA´s and so on are harmful for our goal. But what if they are not?

The use of e-books could save millions of trees, which would mean the saving of more living creatures than just trees, like little plants and diffrent kind of fungi. It is true that the use of e-books has limitations, for example, they require the use of a specific software which not all computers posses. We should also be prepared to adjust to what an e-book does to the traditional customs with physical books (like lending them to someone else).

But nevertheless, these complications are small and insignificant compared to the state of the enviroment. So I think we should prepare ourself for more products like e-books and just learn to adapt for the sake of the planet.