Humanities

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    India's new relationship with Sri Lanka through Yoga
    (International Conference on Sanskrit and Eastern Studies, 2018 Department of Sanskrit and Eastern Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Wijesooriya, G.H.L.H.
    The word "Yoga" has its origins in the ancient Sanskrit language and means "to attach, join, harness, yoke". Yoga achieves the spiritual development of a human being. Yoga first appeared in ancient text such as the sacred Hindu epic the Bagavad Gita, written between the fifth and second centuries BC. Yoga became known around the world in the end of 19th century. Today yoga becomes a global phenomenon. The relationship between India and Sri Lanka is more than 2,500 years old. Both countries have similar culture, tradition. Today powerful states mostly use Soft Power to spread the power towards the developing countries. Soft Power is the ability to attract to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Methods of Soft Power are specially culture and political values. Especially in today, Modi's government spread Indian culture and tradition around the world. In 2014, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken yoga as an emblem of India's flourishing in the world. According to that fact in here can be taken as how India re-built their relationship with Sri Lanka by using Yoga as the tool of culture. Therefore, this study has been conducted in order to identify the trends of India's new route in Sri Lanka through Yoga. The main objectives of the study are, identify the yoga and lifestyle in India and focus about the relationship with India and Sri Lanka. Finally, the study focuses on the possibility of India to spreading their power in Sri Lanka, using yoga. The methodology that has followed for the study is qualitative in nature while only based on secondary sources of data like books, journal articles, reports, institutional and official documents and applied qualitative descriptive analysis. This research findings how India make their relationship strong with Sri Lanka using Soft Power (culture) should be analyzed in detail
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    A Study about Language Rights Violation in the Post War Sri Lanka.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Wickramasinghe, D. D.
    Language constitutes a fundamental right of all citizens of Sri Lanka. According to Chapter III, Article 12 (2), no citizen shall be discriminated against on grounds of language. The constitutional provisions thus entitle a citizen to transact business with and access government in the language of his/her choice. Language as a right defines a set of duties and obligations on the part of the State and of the citizen that would enable the fulfillment of such rights. Language emerged as a crucial factor in political mobilization of the two major communities, the Sinhala and Tamil in the post war scenario. However, the language rights continued to be flouted in certain state sectors in the postwar Sri Lanka. The objective of this study was to find out which sectors in the society have the most tendency to breach the language policy and there forth to recommend a proper mechanism. The findings reveal that the non-compliance of language policy occurs to a degree in terms of visibility and ambience and service delivery in the government offices. It is recommended to perform a revision in the language policy act and the proper decentralization of the language policy provisions to the ground level and to create designated bilingual positions in the government sector. The study was of qualitative nature and the data for the study was accumulated from the complaints and investigation Division Official Languages Commission of Sri Lanka where the language complaints was analyzed in terms of the nature of the violation of the language policy.
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    A Study on the Utility of Hierarchical Phrase-Based Model for Low Resource Languages.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Shanmugarasa, Y.; Thayasivam, U.
    With the rebellion of internet, people got more opportunities to go global. There is the issue of communication, which is made more challenging due to difference in languages. English is the generally spoken language and there is no assurance that everyone is proficient in it. Therefore, translation plays a major role. Currently, South Asian languages are dominantly translated using traditional statistical and neural machine translation approaches. South Asian languages lack necessary natural language resources and tools, hence are classified as low resourced languages. This limits the effectiveness achievable in machine translation of those languages. Compared to English language, South Asian languages are morphologically rich and are commonly used in different sentence structures. For example, the structure of a sentence is subject-verb-object in English while it is subject-object-verb in most South Asian languages. As official languages of Sri Lanka are low resourced, when it is used to translate using traditional statistical machine translation, it is impossible to produce sentences with acceptable sentence structure because of sub-phrases which can only be reordered using distortion reordering model, are independent of their context. In addition, using phrases longer than three words barely improves the translation because such phrases are infrequent in the corpora due to data sparsity. To overcome this problem hierarchical phrase model translation, which uses grammar rules formed by the Synchronous Context Free Grammar, can be used. Moses is selected to build the baseline system. In the experiments, the system used 50000 parallel sentences for Tamil and English. Using BLEU as a metric, the hierarchical phrase-based model achieves 3.42 for Tamil to English translation and 1.73 for vice-versa. This score improves 0.72 from traditional approach. For Sinhala to Tamil, it achieves 11.18 and 10.73 for vice-versa. Moreover, the system could further be improved by establishing certain rules.
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    The Great Epic Ramayana and its impact in Sri Lanka.
    (International Conference on Sanskrit Studies, 2017 Department of Sanskrit, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Swastika, R.
    The Ramayana is one of the great Indian epic written by Valmiki. In Sanskrit literature it is known as Adi-Kavya and the writer Adi-Kavi. This Ramayana contains the history of Rama and royal tradition in 24,000 verses and in seven Kandas. In these seven Kandasthe Sundara Kanda and Yuddha Kanda describes the incidents that took place in Srilanka. There is a special bond between India and Srilanka geographically, historically, culturally and spiritually- The Ramayanais one such link. It is learnt from Ramayana that Sita who was separated from Rama, was brought to Srilanka that the country was ruled by king Ravana. Ramayana links up India and Srilankawithin one spiritual compass, it also emphasizes the basic commonness of the two major cultures of Srilanka- Sinhala Buddhist culture and Tamil Hindu culture. The connection between Srilanka and Ramayana are depicted through the illustrations such as Hanumans search for Sita in Srilanka and the construction of Rama Bridge from Rameswaram by monkey forces. Further, evidence for this relationship can be noted from instance such as Asokavanam is located in Srilanka; the places Asokavanam, Sitaelliya, Ravana ella ; where Sita is believed to have lived; Hanuman worshiped; and Vibishana’s coronation. Ramayana is a great epic at the same time first literature in Sanskrit literary tradition. Influence of literature have impact on Srilankan literary tradition they are Arasakesari’sRaguvamsa in Tamil and Kumaradasa’sJanakiharana in Sanskrit. The Impact of Ramayana could also be seen in the personal names Srilankans have. Similarly, various literary traditions, uniqueness and spiritualities are continuously found in Srilankan history and connected to Ramayana as impact and as story tradition. This research is based on the original text of Ramayana and research is carried out through the descriptive and literary research methodology.
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    An Assessment of Urban Sprawl in Colombo District, Sri Lanka.
    (International Conference on the Humanities (ICH), 2017 Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Jayathilaka, K.M.D.A.S.
    Rapid urbanization is a common trend in developing countries with the movement of people from sparsely populated areas to densely populated areas in search of a better standard of living. As a result, the increase of the population in central business district and its suburbs leading to urban sprawl has now become a challenging matter to most cities in the world. Geographic information systems and remote sensing techniques are frequently used to analyze urban sprawl. The signs of urban sprawl appear in Colombo district, Sri Lanka with the population growth and better transport network. The problem of the research is the increasing growth of sprawl based on the fact that many lands being converted in to buildings at an alarming rate. The objective of this research is to examine how the application of GIS technology and remote sensing can be used to determine the spatial extent of urban sprawl in Colombo district between 1997 - 2016. To achieve this objective, three satellite images in the years of 1997, 2007 and 2016 were classified using unsupervised classification to determine the extent of four land use categories named water, built up areas, forest and others in the Colombo district. The pattern of urban sprawl was identified using built up area maps, built up area change calculation maps and using population density maps of 2001 and 2012. There is a significant difference at about 239 km2 (50 %) of built up areas in Colombo district over a period of nineteen years. Urban sprawl patterns of clustered and leapfrog sprawl patterns were also identified. The land has been converted in to build up areas in an increasing rate with future urban growth to the east where land is available for development.
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    Impact of Digital Musical components on usage of Folk Music in Applied Musical Creations in Sri Lanka.
    (International Conference on the Humanities (ICH), 2017 Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Bulathsinhala, H.
    Folk culture in any community plays a major role in portraying the authentic and indigenous cultural elements, and many communities incorporate such elements to engrave their cultural identity in their creative work for that folk music is not an exception. Yet, in current Sri Lankan music compositions, it can be noted that, the Folk Music has been disregarded and as a result, the modern pieces of music appear more westernized than what it needs to be. Among the various factors, the use of digital devices in compositions has become more vigilant, due to the fact that many of the musical equipment and sound systems are embedded in one device and can be operated through computerized mechanism, thus by making it one person’s skill and the marvels of technological devices. The conflict behind such compositions is the use of western musical equipment rather than utilizing authentic Sri Lankan music patterns and sound that creates a recession in the usage of authentic elements. Therefore, the primary objective of the present study is to conduct an extensive study whether the use of digital music has become a reason to reduction in usage of folk music in applied music field. Music work of ten selected musicians were studied to examine their use of digital and folk music in their creative work. Data was gathered by interviews with the selected musicians, and listening to their creations. It could be highlighted that digital music has a considerable influence in reducing the use of folk music in their compositions, and many musicians have used digital music according to their potential. Further, it revealed that many musicians have created compositions which were influenced by western music and other music styles, while staying away from native music. Thus, it can be concluded that the use of digital music itself among the many factors that have affected the use and application of folk and native music in their productions. This situation needs extensive studies and discussions on further development of software like “Reason” which has used native percussion instruments and give more knowledge on the production and use of software that are based on native musical instruments in terms of bringing folk music towards their compositions.
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    The Importance of using Digital Technology in Archiving Temple Murals in Sri Lanka: Case study based on the Southern Coastal Region (Galle District).
    (International Conference on the Humanities (ICH), 2017 Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Peduruhewa, C.D.
    A large number of temple murals belong to Kandyan era in Sri Lanka are being in an endangered stage due to negligence, vandalism, and natural causes such as water seepage, sunlight, insects, bats, soot etc., Many of these temple murals are at a poor level of conservation despite they are in the list of ‘Protected Monuments’ or recognized as National Heritage in Sri Lanka. Moreover, many of the murals located in these temples are not archived in a proper way. The particular situation emerges a rationale to addresses some ways and means of restoring the temple murals that have a historic and artistic significance of Sri Lankan traditional painting with regard to its form, style and techniques applied. Thus, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the significance of using digital technology for the purpose of archiving and preserving the heritage of temple murals. The study is mainly based on fifteen (15) selected temples of the Southern Coastal Region (Galle District) in terms of restoring and archiving them for future purposes. Field visits, museum visits, and literature survey were conducted to identify and obtain the background knowledge on both traditional painting of the particular period and the specific aspects of digital tools and techniques. The results suggest that many of the temple murals that are not properly conserved physically can be archived using available digital technology and can be utilized as informative sources of Sri Lankan temple paintings during the particular period.
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    Impact of Digital Technology in the Graphic Design Process in Sri Lankan Context.
    (International Conference on the Humanities (ICH), 2017 Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Amarakoon, A.
    The transition from analog to digital technology has affected both the design process and the working environment of graphic design industry. While the digital technology enhances the production process, it also has a negative impact in the elementary stages of design process such as ideation and conceptualization. This has created a conflict between the realization of the design concept and the enhancement of the production on demand in the modern society. Thus, the present study aims to identify the factors that affect the design process of commercial graphic designers in Sri Lanka, and to determine the impact of digital technology in the ideation and conceptualization. The study is mainly based on a literature survey on the history of design and the impact of digital technology on design process, and a field survey based on a questionnaire with the aim of obtaining data about the implementation of digital tools in the design process of commercial graphic designers. Approximately about sixty commercial graphic designers working in small-scale design or advertising companies in Sri Lanka were participated in the data collection. The results suggest that most of the designers neglect the initial ideation and conceptualization process due to two factors: negligence or lack of awareness of the holistic idea of the design and its process, and over reliance in digital tools and techniques. Moreover, lack of proper training and understanding about the design process is evident in the extremely limited time spent on the creative process.
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    A Comprehensive Study on Kuzanthai M. Shanmugalingam’s Plays of 1980-1990
    (Drama & Theatre and Image Arts Unit, Department of Fine Arts, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Rajakaruna, R.H.W.P.W.A.C.
    The period of 1980-1990 is remembered as perhaps the most violent period in Sri Lanka’s history with the growing ethnic tension leading to a civil war with the LTTE against the Sri Lankan state. Due to the adverse situation faced by the Tamils during the war, their theatre was limited to the Northern Province and Mr Kuzanthai M. Shanmugalingam played a significant role in developing the Tamil theatre at this stage. Shanmugalingam has mainly focused on the influence of the outcomes of the ethnic conflict on both the civil population and terrorists. Most of Shanmugalingam’s plays are in fact restricted to the Jaffna region. Most of the critics who have done empirical research on the topic have also argued that the dramas of Shanmugalingam are the best guide for a researcher to attain a comprehensive idea of the Tamil theatre during the war. The present research is focused on how Shanmugalingam’s plays depict themental condition of the war-affected civilians in the war-torn areas. This study is based on three of his acclaimed dramas; ‘Man Sumanda Maniyar’, ‘Annei Ittaththi’, ‘Endeiyum Thayum’ which presents a clear picture on the Psychological effect of war on unarmed civilians who suffered from war. The analytical facts of this study are based on the primary data collected from interviews conducted with the experts on the subject and secondary data collected from various scholarly sources.
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    Promoting Cave Tourism in Sri Lanka
    (Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Rathnayake, S.
    Cave tourism is an environmental based tourism product. It means exploring natural caves and tunnels. It is also known as spelunking in the United States and Canada and potholing in the United Kingdom. Speleology is the scientific study of caves and the cave environment. Cave tourism can be named as a part of sport and adventure tourism. There are many caves in Sri Lanka which have pre-historical and natural values. Pahiyangala, Batadombalena, Belilena, Waulpane, Rawana Ella are some examples. Though there are many caves in Sri Lanka, promoting these caves for tourism is at a very low level. But many countries such as Australia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, promote cave tourism for tourist industry. The main objective of this study was to identify the potential for promoting cave tourism in Sri Lanka. Research was based on both primary sources including interviews while secondary sources included web sites, books and those qualitative data were analyzed to arrive at the conclusions. Inclusion of cave tourism for tour packages of travel agencies, developing hotel promotions of caving, government and private sector involvement, raising awareness of heritage managers, developing visitor related facilities and introducing proper management plan are the recommendations for promoting cave tourism in Sri Lanka in future.