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Ted Cohen, Philosopher Who Found the Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 1939–2014
Ted Cohen, a philosopher whose agile intellect and wry humor made him a UChicago campus legend, died Friday after a brief hospitalization. He was 74.
Berthold Hoeckner Discusses Links Between Music and Memory
Why do some songs immediately bring back old memories, and how does that impact what we hear in the song? Berthold Hoeckner, associate professor of Music, explains this phenomenon on Stylus, a documentary radio series on sound.
"Because" is 2013 Word of the Year; Jason Riggle Explains Why
While there were many promising choices, such as “sharknado,” “struggle bus,” and “slash,” the American Dialect Society voted “because” the 2013 Word of the Year. Jason Riggle, associate professor of Linguistics and voting member of the society, explained the choice for Chicago Tonight.
“This is the year that language nerds had their day,” said Riggle. The recent update in usage of “because” allows the word to introduce a noun, adjective, or other part of speech, and no longer requires it to be followed by “of” or a full clause.
Learn more about the language trends of 2013 and watch Riggle’s full interview online at Chicago Tonight.
Robert Morrissey-Led Project Receives Digital Humanities Grant from NEH
With help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a collaborative project between UChicago and Oxford University will digitize books essential to eighteenth–century intellectual history. The “Commonplace Cultures” project will use data analysis techniques to develop a digital commonplace book.
In the eighteenth century, commonplace books gathered excerpts and quotations from many different works and organized them by subject, helping readers to track new thinkers and ideas. Identifying and analyzing these commonplaces will shed light on how knowledge spread and transformed in the early modern period, according to Robert Morrissey, one of the leaders of the “Commonplace Cultures” project.
Commonplace books were “a way of managing information that made texts, ideas, and words accessible,” explained Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. "Commonplace Cultures" builds on Morrissey's ongoing ARTFL project that collaborates with the French government to digitize and offer full-text versions of French sources.
To read more about the “Digging Into Data” award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, visit UChicago News.
