University of Bordeaux

This course highlights 1960s, or the “Sixties,” as a puzzling concept in many respects. It uses the concept of the “Sixties” to move beyond both the chronological limits of 1960-1969 and the purely temporal framing of the term. It studies a longer timeframe spanning almost twenty years from the start of the Civil Rights movement (Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955) to the end of the Vietnam War (fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975). It addresses the historical period as defined in international and domestic terms, but also according to geopolitical, political, economic, social, and cultural change; as an era but also a zeitgeist, a time of specific social and cultural effervescence. The course develops a nuanced knowledge of this key period of United States history. Topics include the counterculture, social activism, feminism, and the rises of a New Left and a New Right.

This course consults primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and analyzes these documents by reading numerous works presenting the history of the United States. The course develops text commentary techniques, and oral participation and group work form an integral part of the tutorials.

This course is an introduction to digital image processing and analysis. Students benefit from an overview of image processing methods (histogram restauration, convolution filters, mathematical morphology, segmentation) and image analysis methods (pattern recognition, identification, etc.). During the course students: learn how to manage 2D, 3D, and animated images; understand human perception and image acquisition; discover image segmentation, registration, and analysis; concrete implementation through existing tools or simple script development; study algorithms to obtain features from images (histogram, filters, descriptors).

This course studies the theories and concepts of Judaism. It examines its principal texts and practices as the literature and customs of this religion serve as a gateway to understanding its fundamental philosophical structure.

This course provides an introduction to the existence of phonetic variation and change in modern English, as well as tools to detect and analyze this variation. Far from being a theoretical course on the major changes that took place in the history of English, this course focuses on language as can be directly accessed using recent and contemporary sources and tools. The first part of the course discusses how pronunciation was indicated in older dictionaries as objects of knowledge and culture, starting from 16th and 17th century books, and mainly focusing on 18th to 20th century dictionaries. The second part investigates how a collection of dictionaries from various periods can be used as a relevant corpus to identify and explain phonetic variation and change in present-day English as well as from a historical perspective, including the way new linguistic features can be born and spread through the language. The final part of the course demonstrates how to collect, annotate, and analyze oral English. It includes an introduction to the use of the speech analysis software PRAAT.