|
|
|||
|
CS Graduate Student Nathan Green receives Fulbright Scholarship Nathan Green, a master's student in Computer Science at GW, has received a Fulbright Scholarship to study applications of narrative coding at the University of Iceland during the 2006/2007 academic year. Nathan is developing a system that takes computer code and generates a descriptive paragraph in Basic English prose. This paragraph will give programmers an additional way to view the logic of their software and algorithms. For the Fulbright-funded project, Nathan will translate the paragraph into Icelandic, and test how it may benefit non-English speaking programmers. The testing will consist of one objective metric - the time it takes the student to find logic errors in an algorithm by reading the corresponding narrative, and a subjective one - the student's rating of his or her comprehension of the code after reading the narrative. Nathan also plans to study the differences in the paragraph's logic between the two languages. Nathan chose Iceland because of its ancient language, historical use of narrative, and its bilingual society. Whether it was the Latin influence during its earlier years or the English influence today, Iceland has not modified its language. For new technical words some languages adapt a modified version of the English word but Iceland modifies ancient words to form a new word with a similar meaning. This allows Nathan to see how his narrative can be interpreted differently in a language with little or no influence from English logic constructs. Narrative is one natural form of instruction and explanation in Iceland, which has a long tradition of narrative story telling called Sagas. These Saga tellers have been a source of instruction and explanation throughout Iceland's history. Nathan hopes that his research will show that with a new emerging technical sector, old traditions can still be applied. Acknowledgements: Most of this text was provided by Nathan Green. |
|
||||||||||||||||
801 22nd Street NW, Washington DC 20052 :: T (202) 994-7181 :: F (202) 994-4875
contact us :: sitemap :: directions :: Email webmaster :: SEAS Homepage |
||||||||||||||||||