Revolutionary Research Insider | Issue XV

Language has incredible power. It can bridge gaps across centuries and continents to speak to universal themes of humanity and love. Or, it can create barriers between students sitting in the same classroom who speak different variants of the same language. Meanwhile, a single word can evoke entirely opposite meanings in the minds of different individuals, and its definition can shift wildly over time.

Claudia Matachana, a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics in the University of Massachusetts Amherst 's Spanish and Portuguese Studies Department, studies beliefs and discrimination around language. She conducts research in nearby Holyoke, MA—where over half of the residents are Hispanic—that explores the experiences of young speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish, a minoritized version of the language, in school and out in the community. Her research is supported by a competitive National Science Foundation Linguistics Program–Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant.

“Language is the first thing, apart from your physical appearance, that people perceive about you,” she says. “I’ve long been fascinated by the power of language to build bridges through communication, but also to construct barriers between certain social groups.”

Read more about Matachana and her research.

The Power of Love

UMass Amherst music historian Emiliano Ricciardi studies the work of Torquato Tasso, widely seen as the most prominent poet of late-16th century Italy. Tasso's expansive body of poetry was set to music by virtually all composers of secular vocal music in Europe at the time and also served as inspiration for visual artists. Though these works are hundreds of years old, Ricciardi finds that the themes they address are universal.

“Tasso’s poetry explores in depth human passions and affects. It’s almost like a lesson in love. Even though these pieces were meant for a specific context hundreds of years ago, they still tell us a lot about human beings in the year 2024.”

Using digital technology, Ricciardi is bringing new life to these works, including enabling contemporary musicians to perform them for audiences. In partnership with the Stanford Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH), he has created and directs the Tasso in Music Project, a leading digital humanities project devoted to the study of Renaissance culture. The project features critical editions of more than 800 settings of Tasso’s works, encoded in a variety of non-commercial electronic formats.

Learn more about Ricciardi's research and the Tasso in Music Project.

Are You "Woke"?

What do you think of when you hear the word "woke"?

As it turns out, this four-letter word contains a multitude of different meanings for different people—meanings that have changed dramatically over time. The meaning of the word has twisted so much over the past 70 years that the Merriam-Webster dictionary issued an explainer before adding the term's new definition in 2017, saying that woke "gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement."

The UMass Poll surveyed about 1,100 Americans about their take on the word "woke," and heard a wide array of responses, speaking to the loaded nature of the word and Americans' underlying anxieties about a changing society. Respondents described "woke" across a spectrum, with meanings including stupid, discrimination, minority, progressive, liberal, Republican, racist and ideology.

Read more in UMass Magazine and check out detailed results from the UMass Poll.

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