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Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Video
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Year
2022
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Video
In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.
Event date: 13/5/2022
Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages and Chinese Language
- Keywords:
- History China Written communication Chinese characters Chinese language -- Written Chinese East Asia
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The notion of expertise is integral to all forms of institutional and professional practice in many domains – in education, healthcare, social welfare, law, journalism, banking, information technology, marketing, translating and interpreting services etc. It is a concept addressed by scholars across many disciplines – cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, language/communication studies, among others. There are, however, enduring problems of definition, description and measurement of expertise. Some scholars draw attention to the ongoing ‘crisis in expertise’ and others pronounce the ‘death of expertise’ in contemporary society.
More humbly, I begin with a characterisation of professional expertise very broadly to include scientific, experiential, technological, organisational, legal, ethical and communicative knowledge. This then leads me to the notion of ‘distributed expertise’, which extends beyond the individual remit and the conventional lay-expert divide. For instance, in the healthcare domain, a significant development afforded by internet-based technology is the increased level of patients’ e-health literacy and, consequently, democratisation of expertise. This amounts not only to accessing health information digitally, but also the phenomenon of patients ‘doctoring’ themselves in ‘the now of its presence’, i.e., ‘expert patients’ becoming instrumental in self-diagnosis and even self-treatment.
Additionally, ‘distributed expertise’ is also constitutive of ‘expert systems’, e.g., diagnostic and interventionist technologies as well as decision aids mediated by algorithms and templates. This is what I refer to as the technologization of expertise. I suggest that there is overreliance on ‘expert systems’ by both experts and lay persons in everyday decision making. Access to and use of ‘expert systems’ in optimal ways inevitably necessitates a reconfiguration of the very conditions and consequences of professional expertise.
Event Date: 25/11/2022
Speaker: Prof. Srikant Sarangi (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Keywords:
- Information technology -- Social aspects Democratization Expertise
- Resource Type:
- Video