Interpret, 6/21/2013 We interpret marble statues interpreting people from the past in long hallways, interpret the twitch of a lip and the murder of an instrument interpreting the words of a dead playwright interpreting people from the past under the evening sunlight, interpret images and jewels and dioramas and sidewalks and it all leads …
Category Archives: Courses
Ecological Restoration Week 1
Well, the first week of Ecological Restoration just ended! We have two professors, Marion Hourdequin, a philosophy professor from Colorado College, and David Havlick, her husband, a geography professor from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. We’ve already read a lot of material, from ecological articles trying to pin down a technical definition of “ecological …
Miracolo a Milano
The last couple days have introduced a bit of levity to our material. As we learned last week, neorealist films focus on real life, everyday experiences of average people – usually the underdog – and often addressed World War II and contemporary social justice issues. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) is another film by De Sica, …
Neorealism
In the second half of the week, we shifted our focus to the post-World War II reaction to fascism, exemplified in a cinematic and literary movement known as neorealism. Neorealist directors like Rossellini sought to strip away the artificiality of propagandist films of the previous decades and explore not only the effects of reality – …
Italian Political Cinema
As a Romance Languages major who chose Italian as one of my specialties, I’m lucky that the few upper-level Italian courses we’re offered are so interesting! Many, like this one, are cross-listed courses, so I get to take class with not only Italian students (it’s a pretty small department – the few of us overlap …
Machine Learning: Classifying Films
In the era of netflix, there’s a wide array of available films to watch online. One of the features that made Netflix so successful was its ability to recommend new movies. This ability is equivalent to answering the following questions: If a person likes a particular movie, what are some similar movies? If a person likes a …
Menorcan Excursion #2
Elementary Chinese
好久不见！(Translation: Long time no see!) I’m back blogging for CC, but this time I am not blogging about a grueling 400 level Environmental Science class… This time I’ll be filling you in on a class that is difficult in an entirely different way: Elementary Chinese. And my name is no longer Margo Davis. In this …
Menorcan Excursion #1
On Pottery
I confess to not being a pottery person. What gets my neurons firing are human remains and the stories that these ancient remnants of life can tell about a persons life and environment. Earlier this year in Osteology, where we studied both human and comparative skeletal anatomy and pathologies, I mentally declared myself a bones …
