Books on the topic 'Analyse immersive'

The monograph is devoted to the analysis of the current topic of hybrid war, in which the thin red lines separating it from peaceful life can both turn into an impenetrable iron curtain, and become a bright and attractive advertisement for another country and culture, forcing you to immerse yourself in another world, and not perceive it as a rival. Neither international law, nor the tools for identifying all the figures of international relations involved in resolving issues of war and peace, nor culture can correct the mutual distortions of hybrid war and hybrid peace. And yet, it is possible to find such facts that help to remove hybrid layers and reach the true interests, goals and means of those geopolitical actors who benefit from such a complex hybrid game of war and peace. It is intended for specialists in the field of international relations, history, culture. It will also arouse the interest of a wide range of readers.

The textbook offers a comprehensive look covering a wide range of topics related to the role of information technology in the modern world. Starting with an overview of the history of information technology and its evolution, the book introduces the reader to professions in the field of information and digital technologies, emphasizing them in various professional fields. The content of the textbook includes a detailed analysis of key concepts such as Data Science, Data Mining and Machine Learning, and their role in healthcare, law, education, science and business. The textbook provides a detailed overview of Data Science methods and algorithms, including teaching methods with and without a teacher, as well as specific methods such as Dematel. In the section on business intelligence tools, special attention is paid to Yandex Cloud DataLens, its data analysis functionality, and practical recommendations on registration, the use of intelligent detection of patterns in data, visualization and the development of analytical panels are provided. The section of the textbook devoted to the R and Python programming languages contains recommendations on the use of the R and Python programming languages for statistical data analysis, a description of the main data types, operations, and specific algorithms used for analytical purposes. This section provides a quick guide on how to use the RStudio and PyCharm tools. The final section is devoted to the application of data analysis tools in real projects, providing the reader with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of data processing using advanced technologies and techniques. The presentation of the material of each chapter is accompanied by control questions and tests to consolidate the theoretical material, located at the end of the chapter. This textbook will be an indispensable resource for students, professionals and researchers who want to deeply understand and apply information and digital technologies in their professional activities.

The workshop is an addition to the textbook "Business communication and cross-cultural communication" and includes practice-oriented tasks that can be carried out online in all sections of the textbook. The workshop contains three sections, 10 chapters and consists of group and individual tasks, business games, analysis of video clips and discussions, reflection exercises aimed at developing skills in the sections "Cross-cultural communication as the interaction of different cultures", "Business communication as the basis of cross-cultural communications", "Ethical standards in professional activity". A special feature of the workshop is a detailed description of the methodology of conducting classes online to form students' practical experience on each topic of the workshop. The publication is provided with parables and tales for the successful entry of students into the subject of the lesson. At the end of each chapter, tasks are given for self-completion in order to more fully immerse yourself in the specifics of cross-cultural business communications. The workshop contains: 40 training sessions; 83 video clips illustrating business communication and cross-cultural communication; 200 exercises, business and role-playing games for interactive interaction adapted to the online format; 300 tasks for self-completion. Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation. For undergraduate students studying in the areas of "Economics", "Management", "Personnel Management", "State and Municipal Management", "Business Informatics", "Trade", "Commodity Science", "Housing and communal infrastructure", as well as for anyone interested in business problems cross-cultural communications.

Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance proposes dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theatre, more broadly known as immersive performance. The idea of tandemness—suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another—is critical throughout the book. Author Julia M. Ritter persuasively argues that practitioners of immersive productions deploy choreography as a structural mechanism to mobilize the bodies of cast and audience members to perform together. Furthermore, choreography is contextualized as an effective tool for facilitating audience participation towards immersion as an affect. Ritter’s close choreographic analysis of immersive productions, along with unique insights from choreographers, directors, performers, and spectators enlivens discourse across dramaturgy, kinesthesia, affect, and co-authorship. By foregrounding the choreographic in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater, Tandem Dances explores choreography as a discursive domain that is fundamentally related to creative practice, agendas of power and control, and concomitant issues of freedom and agency.

This chapter discusses recent and future developments in horror entertainment. It argues that future horror media will give consumers access to a wider range of experiences, some of which are more immersive and much more emotionally powerful than those offered by traditional horror media. The chapter analyzes horror videogames such as Until Dawn (2015), as well as so-called survival horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), which foster immersion through interaction, and immersive virtual reality, which increases the sense of presence in a frightening computer-generated world. The chapter also analyzes haunted attractions and live-action horror experiences which situate consumers as protagonists in horror stories that unfold around them. Finally, the chapter argues that horror research needs to engage more actively with science, in theory as well as method.

Theme Park Fandom argues that serious study of theme parks and their adult fans has much to tell us about contemporary transmediality and convergence, themed and immersive spaces, and audience relationships with places of meaning. Considering the duopoly of Disney and Universal in Orlando, the book explores a range of theme park experiences including planning trips, meeting characters, eating and drinking, engaging in practices such as cosplay and re-enactment, and memorializing lost attractions. Highlighting key themes such as immersion, materiality, cultural distinctions, and self-identity, the book argues that theme parks are a crucial site for the exploration of transmediality and the development of paratexts. Proposing the key concepts of spatial transmedia and haptic fandom, the book offers analysis of the intersections between fandom, media texts, and merchandise, as well as fans’ own affective and physical responses to visiting the parks.

Explores the possibility of an alternative experience of time, one that is closer to the pure duration described by philosopher Henri Bergson. Contributes to contemporary performance analysis, philosophy and Bergson studies and examines aspects of immersive and participatory performance, ritual and online performance.

The Hôtel de Beauharnais (1803–1806) in Paris was originally built by Germain Boffrand in 1713 for the Colbert family. It was redecorated by Jean Auguste Renard and others for Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s adopted son. It is one of the earliest monuments of Empire Style domestic architecture, combining Roman and Egyptian motifs. This analysis takes the concept of transformation and its related methods of adaptation and appropriation as its starting point to see what kinds of agency the Hôtel was intended to exercise, and how it functioned as immersive architecture within the poetics of eclecticism. In particular this paper examines the effect of the eighteenth-century theories of ornament by Julien-David Le Roy, Piranesi, and Jean-François Sobry.

The conclusion briefly summarizes the argument of Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. Stories on screens are rhetorically powerful in large part due to the emotions they elicit. The conclusion goes on to list ten tenets or features of an ethics of engagement that constitute an ethical response to that power. In addition to the claims about emotion, these tenets include an insistence on the consideration of mainstream stories on an individual basis, an affirmation of celebration and praise as well as critique, the avoidance of reductive “lumping” criticism, the claim that the immersive experience may also elicit critical thinking, an affirmation of possible ethical values other than critical thinking, the claim that attention to characters as moral agents is sometimes compatible with sociopolitical analysis, and an affirmation of the importance of form in the determination of ethical significance.

This chapter explores altered states of consciousness in interactive video games and virtual reality applications. First, a brief overview of advances in the sound and graphics of video games is provided, which has led to ever-more immersive capabilities within the medium. Following this, a variety of games that represent states of intoxication, drug use, and hallucinations are discussed, in order to reveal how these states are portrayed with the aid of sound and music, and for what purpose. An alternative trajectory in games is also explored, as various synaesthetic titles are reviewed, which provide high-adrenaline experiences for ravers, and simulate dreams, meditation, or psychedelic states. Through the analysis of these, and building upon the previous chapters of Inner Sound, this chapter presents a conceptual model for ‘Altered States of Consciousness Simulations’: interactive audio-visual systems that represent altered states with regards to the sensory components of the experience.

This book explains the appeals and functions of horror entertainment by drawing on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. It is the first book to integrate the study of horror with the sciences of human nature and to offer a sustained analysis of the ways in which our evolutionary heritage constrains and directs horror in literature, film, and computer games. The central claim of the book is that horror entertainment works by targeting ancient and deeply conserved neurobiological mechanisms. We are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. This book offers a detailed theoretical account of the biological underpinnings of the paradoxically and perennially popular genre of horror. The theoretical account is bolstered with original analyses of a range of well-known and popular modern American works of horror literature and horror film to illustrate how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms to fulfill their function of absorbing, engaging, and horrifying audiences: I Am Legend (1954), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jaws (1975), The Shining (1977), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The book’s final chapter expands the discussion to include interactive, highly immersive horror experiences offered through horror video games and commercial haunted attractions.

Ancient tragedy has played a well-documented role in contemporary theatre since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the often-commented-upon watershed productions, however, is a significant but overlooked history involving classical tragedy in experimental and avant-garde theatre. Postdramatic Tragedies focuses upon such experimental reinventions. It analyses receptions of Greek and Roman tragedy that come under the banner of ‘postdramatic theatre’, a style of performance in which the traditional components of drama, such as character and narrative, are subordinate to the immediate, affective power of more abstract elements, such as image and sound. The book is in three parts, each of which explores classical reception within a specific strand of postdramatic theatre: text-based theatre, devised theatre, and theatre that transcends the usual boundaries of time and space, such as durational and immersive theatre. Across the three sections the author conducts a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of seven case studies, of productions from 1995 to 2015 from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Continental Europe. The book covers a mixture of widely known productions, such as Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, alongside works largely unknown in Anglophone scholarship, such as Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino and Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus. It reveals that postdramatic theatre is related to the classics at its conceptual core, and that the study of postdramatic tragedies reveals a great deal about both the evolution of theatre in recent decades, and the status of ancient drama in modernity.

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, every night, sound systems stage dancehall sessions for the crowd to share the immediate, intensive and immersive visceral pleasures of sonic dominance. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature sound of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "sets" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks to play; and MCs(DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates - at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in a disembodied mind, that communication is an exchange of information, and that meaning is only ever representation.

This book investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from popular media predating film. It explores Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of Joyce’s experimental fiction, showing how his style and themes share the cinematograph’s roots in Victorian optical entertainment and science. The book’s scope reveals and elucidates Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows; while abundant close analysis shows how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’, making Joyce’s writing appear in advance of the narrative forms of early film itself. The introduction historicises the visual culture during Joyce’s youth, as well as optical science, Dublin’s first screenings and the context of his Volta Cinematograph. Chapter 1 focuses on the key role of magic lantern themes and techniques in Dubliners’ breakthrough into Modernist style and form. Chapter 2 how experiments in photographic analysis and reanimation of movement furnished a model for Joyce’s representation of the dynamic development of consciousness through the three versions of A Portrait of the Artist. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Joyce created a literary equivalent to the moving panorama in Ulysses, providing an influential template for immersive representations of the city in both Modernist fiction and film. Finally, a Coda qualifies ‘radiophonic’ readings of Finnegans Wake arguing instead that it extends Joyce’s interest in the history and future of cinematicity, through ‘verbal dissolves’ and engaging with the emergent medium of television.

This introductory chapter examines the early career of Vincent de Paul between 1581 and 1611, moving from his birth and education to his arrival in Paris in 1608, and his immersion in the dévot environment there. It begins with a summary of his birth in south-west France and his years of education to university level. It then outlines his appointment as an almoner in the royal household of Marguerite de Valois in early 1610, after he had taken up residence in Paris two years earlier. It concludes with an analysis of the other aspects of his material livelihood during these years, including his acquisition of the abbey of Saint-Léonard-de-Chaumes in western France.

Taylor Swift, arguably the most prolific and acclaimed singer-songwriter of the 21st century, has shaped her listeners’ collective consciousness and challenged her industry’s often limiting attitudes toward genre, revision, and collaboration. Although Swift is a perennial subject in the media, cast in both a positive and a negative light, few professional scholars have considered her ever-growing body of work.The Literary Taylor Swiftexamines Swift’s significance and timeliness through literary analysis and theory. Taylor Swift has been celebrated for her ability to craft immersive narratives and to articulate, with lyrical acuity, a broad range of emotional experiences, and her lyrics underscore her profound relationship with text.The Literary Taylor Swiftexplores Swift’s engagements, intertextual and otherwise, with literature and treats her songs as literature—as, that is, stories, poems, and other textual forms to which literary-critical theories and methodologies can and should be productively applied. This collection offers carefully curated arguments constellated around four key relationships: Swift and the literary-historical canon; Swift and the language of gender and sexuality; Swift and the relationship between writing and memory; and Swift and the nature of literary craft.

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

This chapter analyses the ways nineteenth-century Anglicanism has been studied by scholars. Three different traditions of historiography are identified and explored. The first approach is interested in internal ecclesiastical debates, in relations between Church and state, and in wider social change. A brief discussion of the historiography of the Oxford Movement illustrates how academic approaches to this topic have developed since the 1840s. The second approach is scholarly immersion in nineteenth-century Anglican theology, which remained influential for most of the twentieth century. However, it fell out of favour from the 1980s, as new styles of theology became more fashionable. The third approach is the study of Anglicanism outside the British Isles. This developed from a focus on mission history and the development of the Anglican Communion, to more recent appreciation of global Anglicanism, seeking to do justice to the experience of Anglicans, wherever they live in the world.

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded – by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and “immersion”. The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford’s westerns to Chantal Akerman’s claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller’s Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao’s award-winning NOMADLAND.

This chapter examines three white hip-hop artists whose youth was spent consuming and producing hip-hop in interracial neighborhoods or friendship groups: Eminem, Danny Hoch, and Adam Mansbach. Their cultural immersion facilitated and strengthened social ties to black people. Here, the chapter uncovers long-term manifestations of racial sincerity, but it also registers moments of failure, when one or another succumbs to the privileges of whiteness or opts for the easier postures of authenticity rather than the ongoing work of struggle against racial injustice. Treating these three artists as consumers and producers of hip-hop culture, the chapter analyzes the racial politics and sincerity of their rap lyrics, theater performances, film, fiction, essays, interviews, and social activism. Without reducing the artistic complexity of their imaginative work, it considers their creative products as reception documents that reflect their understanding of the meanings and significance of hip-hop culture.

The gestures of participatory art offers a critical investigation of key debates in relation to participatory art, spanning the domains of applied and community theatre, immersive performance as well as the visual arts. Rather than seeking a genre-based definition, it asks how artists, audiences and art practices approach the subject of participation beyond the predetermined options allocated to them. In doing so, it inquires into the ways that artworks participate in civic life. Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a rewarding way of theorizing participatory art. The gesture is simultaneously an expression of an inner attitude as well as a social habitude; it is situated in between image, speech and action. The study reads the gestural as a way to link discussions on participatory art to broader issues of citizenship and collective action. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation or refusal, the book examines a range of practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It engages with the critiques of participation and pleads for a critical reclaiming of participatory practices.

Robert V. Kozinets and Manuela Nocker explain how data can be collected using online ethnography or netnography—unconventional in organizational research. A netnography is a specific set of related data collection, analysis, ethical, and research practices. The approach has been used to study online collaboration, and the conversations, languages, online behaviours, and symbolic repertoires of different groups. Online netnography is distinct from traditional in-person ethnography. Ethnography focuses on single field sites; netnography addresses the dispersed nature of online sociality. Prolonged field immersion is less meaningful in netnographic investigations. And the pace of internet technology development encourages a pace of research faster than that of traditional ethnography. As our social and corporate worlds become intertwined, widening access to personal information, ownership of that information is contentious, raising research ethics dilemmas. Ethnography and netnography are not value-neutral, and technology is encouraging us to question what we wish to achieve with our research.

This chapter argues that the Internet and its broad array of social media effectively constitute an endless historical archive that immerses historians “in an expanded, and expanding, collection of fragments.” This immersion coincides time-wise with changing historical approaches that embrace cultural forms and new ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. Using three historical genres—reconstructionism, constructionism, and deconstructionism—the chapter analyzes the ways that sport historians do, and could, engage with the Internet. For reconstructionists, the Internet facilitates research by providing access to sites, artifacts, news, and official documents, but does not fundamentally alter practice. Constructionists use social theory to investigate not only the documents and other remnants of the past but also the repositories of those items, such as libraries, archives, museums, and the Internet itself. Meanwhile, for deconstructionists—who focus on the production and form of historical narratives—the Internet changes the way narratives are represented and understood and enables new ways of arranging and presenting subject matter.

Deindividuation is among the classic phenomena researched by the early pioneers of social psychology. Building on the theorizing of LeBon (1895/1985), deindividuation provided an explanation for aggression in the crowd, a concern as relevant today as it was in the previous two centuries. The theory predicts that behavior becomes more antinormative and aggressive under conditions of anonymity, associated with group immersion, and that this occurs because of reduced self-awareness and deregulated behavior. However, close scrutiny of the deindividuation literature provides scant evidence for the deindividuation process. Revisiting the primary literature reveals at best mixed support for the original claims and many contradictions, often belied by accounts in secondary sources and textbooks. Reformulation and refinement of the theory has not helped. I present a reinterpretation, in terms of social influence by group norms, in line with social identity principles, supported by experimental evidence and a meta-analysis of the original deindividuation literature.

Drawing on methods from religious studies, philosophy, and cognitive science, Jack Williams develops a unique and interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious conversion. This is the first major philosophical study of conversion to treat the phenomenon as a long-term process, shaped by the convert’s embodiment and immersion in a linguistic, social, and ritual community. Williams’ analysis of the conversion process is rooted in a view of cognition as both embodied and affective, and is informed by the latest research in phenomenology, affect theory, neuroscience, and enactivist cognitive science. In conversation with diverse conversion narratives, he advances a theory of conversion that is not restricted to a modern, Western context but that can be applied to experiences of conversion across global history and culture. Rethinking Religious Conversiondisplays an original approach to the philosophical study of diverse religious practices. By bringing together a diverse array of contemporary and historical scholarship, it revitalizes the study of conversion for both philosophy and religious studies.

Abstract This book aims to demonstrate how, over the past 25 years, the field of organization theories (OTs) has been providing stimulating, thoughtful, and innovative perspectives. Junior researchers and PhD students will find everything they need to know about key academic conversations central to the field today. The book offers a selective immersion in organizational institutionalism, convention analysis, network analysis, knowledge studies, discourse studies, and practice studies. For each of these perspectives, the book explores its different research streams and zooms in on the research communities that give rise to them. In addition, it highlights how these perspectives all intersect with each other to form a mosaic of ideas that define today’s organizations. This book also invites early career researchers and graduate students to learn how recent theories view and portray the organization and, more specifically, to understand current research questions, conceptual resources, and methods. A deep knowledge of recent OTs is key when building a compelling literature review and making meaningful theoretical contributions. This book offers readers the opportunity to develop their theory-building skills and more by taking a deep dive into the complexities and controversies of OTs. The main arguments of each perspective are illustrated by specific exemplars from academic journals. Each chapter contains a synoptic table summarizing the main scholarly components within each perspective and its research substreams.

Situated within the interrelated disciplines of applied sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, this book explores the language use and attitudinal perceptions of a sample of 130 adults who received Gaelic-medium education (GME) at primary school, during the first years of that system’s availability in Scotland. The school is viewed by policymakers as a crucial site for language revitalisation in such diverse contexts as Hawai’i, New Zealand and the Basque Country – as well as throughout the Celtic-speaking world. In Scotland, GME is seen as a key area of language development, regarded by policymakers as a strategic priority for revitalising Gaelic, and maintaining its use by future generations of speakers. Yet theorists have stressed that school-based policy interventions are inadequate for realising this objective in isolation, and that without sufficient support in the home and community, children are unlikely to develop strong identities or supportive ideologies in the language of their classroom instruction. For the first time, this book provides an in-depth assessment of language use, ideologies and attitudes among adults who received an immersion education in a minority language, and considers subsequent prospects for language revitalisation in contemporary society. Based on detailed analyses using mixed methods, the book offers empirically grounded suggestions for individuals and policymakers seeking to revitalise languages internationally.

This book is a collection of articles, prepared for the 1st State Congress of Fashion Law in Santa Catarina, which took place in Brusque / SC in 2019. There are several topics addressed by the authors, since the Law of Fashion covers all spheres of law. Law and fashion are social elements, both linked to the Economy and the Market, where intellectual property has a strong presence. But, it is not only the intellectual property that should be known by the lawyer who seeks to act and research this segment. Fashion Law covers several spheres of law, which in this market are well intertwined, as you can study in this work. You will have contact with topics of intellectual property, contracts, Labor Law, among others, in order to be able to make a small immersion in the matter, whose view is always the fashion industry, one of the most powerful economic and market spheres today. Obviously, there will be subjects that you will prefer, however, an analysis of all of them in this collection will provide you with a broadening of horizons and a journey through the world of fashion law. Good reading!

An in-depth exploration of the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. In Unboxed, Gordon Calleja explores the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience—the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion—to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, Calleja—himself a board game designer—provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked. After considering different conceptions of play, Calleja discusses the nature and role of attention and goes on to outline the key forms of involvement that make up the board game playing experience. In subsequent chapters, Calleja explores each of these forms of involvement, considering both the experience itself and the design considerations that bring it into being. Calleja brings this analysis together in a chapter that maps how these forms of involvement come together in the moment of gameplay, and how their combination shapes the flow of player affect. By tracing the processes through which players experience these moments of rule-mediated, imagination-fueled sociality, Calleja helps us understand the richness of the gameplay experience packed into the humble board game box.

Incorporating a reassessment of John Hill Burton, a significant figure in Nineteenth-century Scottish thought, the book presents a revision of the predominant interpretation of how nineteenth-century Scotland perceived its past. It traces Burton’s diverse social and intellectual acquaintance, and equally varied literary endeavours, from his early life and education in 1820s Aberdeen to his increasingly prominent profile in the Edinburgh of Scott, Jeffrey and Cockburn. A detailed assessment of Burton’s History of Scotland(1873) uncovers prominent themes captured in the terms of Utilitarian History, Romantic History, Gothic History and History as Theatre. In chapters analysing these discourses the relation of historiography and biography is maintained in examining Burton’s immersion in the social and cultural world of his time. An analysis of the highly positive reception of Burton’s historical efforts deals firstly with the impact of his initial, more limited 1853 History since this was published at a particular juncture – the height of the ‘Scottish Rights’ agitation of the early 1850s – and functioned, it is argued, to charge that discontent with a new historical dimension centring on the 1707 Union. An extended analysis of the reception of his later multi-volume History includes a comparison with the characteristics of contemporary national histories across Europe. The response to his magnum opus is viewed as overturning orthodox assumptions of the ‘death’ of Scottish history in the nineteenth century; and together with the contemporary development of Scottish cultural institutions, as evidencing a revival of national identity founded on a new engagement with the nation’s past.

Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent does our perception of the fictional nature of movies differ from our daily perception of the real world? The authors, a neuroscientist and a film theorist, propose a new multidisciplinary approach to images and film that can provide answers to these questions. According to the authors, film art, based on the interaction between spectators and the world on the screen, and often described in terms of immersion, impressions of reality, simulation, and involvement of the spectator’s body in the fictitious world he inhabits, can be reconsidered from a neuroscientific perspective, which examines the brain and its close relationship to the body. They propose a new model of perception—embodied simulation—elaborated on the basis of neuroscientific investigation, to demonstrate the role played by sensorimotor and affect-related brain circuits in cognition and film experience. Scenes from famous films, like Notorious, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Persona, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story are described and analyzed according to this multidisciplinary approach, and used as case studies to discuss the embodied simulation model. The aim is to shed new light on the multiple resonance mechanisms that constitute one of the great secrets of cinematographic art, and to reflect on the power of moving images, which increasingly are part of our everyday life.

This book offers a fresh interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of substance, taking as starting point his claims that he introduced his monads to solve the problem of the composition of the continuum. It is argued that they can only perform this function if they are understood as requisites for each of the actual parts into which matter is divided, and as sources of the actions distinguishing and making actual these parts. Bodies are not composed of monads, but presuppose them for their reality; and motions are not composed of monadic states, but presuppose their tendencies to change and resist changes. This comprises an original contribution to mereology, which is given a formal rendering using Leibniz’s own logical concepts and notation. The reading is supported by a thorough analysis of the development of Leibniz’s thought, showing how his embodied monads emerge from his long dalliance with atomism, and how his doctrine of dominant and subordinate monads derives from his immersion in the scholastic tradition of the Plurality of Forms, as he seeks to preserve the role of substantial forms in enacting God’s providential plans in a way compatible with a thoroughgoing mechanism. New insight is offered into Leibniz’s construal of bodies and motions as phenomena, his simultaneous advocacy of simple and corporeal substances, his attempt to provide a theory of substantial bonds, the status of passive force in his dynamics, his endorsement of continuous creation and the discreteness of change, and the status of monadic states as momentary.

This book deals with contemporary relationships between opera and the media. It is concerned with both the use of media on stage and opera on screen. Drawing on the concept of hypermediacy from media studies, it situates opera within the larger context of contemporary media practices, and particularly those that play up the multiplicity, awareness, and enjoyment of media. The discussion is driven by the underlying question of what politics of representation and perception opera performs within this context. This entails approaching operas as audiovisual events (rather than works or texts) and paying attention to what they do by visual means, along with the operatic music and singing. The book concentrates on events that foreground their use of media and technology, drawing attention to opera’s inherently hypermedial aspects. It works with the recognition that such events nevertheless engender powerful effects of immediacy, which are not contingent on illusionism or the seeming transparency of the medium. It analyzes how effects like presence, liveness, and immersion are produced, contesting some critical claims attached to them. It also sheds light on how these effects, often perceived as visceral or material in nature, are related to the production of meaning in opera. The discussion pertains to contemporary pieces such as Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s Rosa and Writing to Vermeer, as well as productions of the canonical repertory such as Wagner’s Ring Cycle by Robert Lepage at the Met and La Fura dels Baus in Valencia.

The monograph reflects the problems of Russian psycholinguistics from the moment of its inception in Russia to the present day and presents its main directions that are currently developing. In addition, theoretical developments and practical results obtained in the framework of different directions and research centers are described in a concise form. The task of the book is to reflect, as far as it is possible in one edition, firstly, the history of the formation of Russian psycholinguistics; secondly, its methodology and developed methods; thirdly, the results obtained in different research centers and directions in different regions of Russia; fourthly, to outline the main directions of the further development of Russian psycholinguistics. There is no doubt that in the theoretical, methodological and applied aspects, the main problems and the results of their development by Russian psycholinguistics have no analogues in world linguistics and psycholinguistics, or are represented by completely original concepts and methods. We have tried to show this uniqueness of the problematics and the methodological equipment of Russian psycholinguistics in this book. The main role in the formation of Russian psycholinguistics was played by the Moscow psycholinguistic school of A.A. Leontyev. It still defines the main directions of Russian psycholinguistics. Russian psycholinguistics (the theory of speech activity - TSA) is based on the achievements of Russian psychology: a cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena L.S. Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontyev. Moscow is the most "psycholinguistic region" of Russia - INL RAS, Moscow State University, Moscow State Linguistic University, RUDN, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Sechenov University, Moscow State University and other Moscow universities. Saint Petersburg psycholinguists have significant achievements, especially in the study of neurolinguistic problems, ontolinguistics. The most important feature of Russian psycholinguistics is the widespread development of psycholinguistics in the regions, the emergence of recognized psycholinguistic research centers - St. Petersburg, Tver, Saratov, Perm, Ufa, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Kursk, Chelyabinsk; psycholinguistics is represented in Cherepovets, Ivanovo, Volgograd, Vyatka, Kaluga, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Abakan, Maikop, Barnaul, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Syktyvkar, Armavir and other cities; in Belarus - Minsk, in Ukraine - Lvov, Chernivtsi, Kharkov, in the DPR - Donetsk, in Kazakhstan - Alma-Ata, Chimkent. Our researchers work in Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, China, France, Switzerland. There are Russian psycholinguists in Canada, USA, Israel, Austria and a number of other countries. All scientists from these regions and countries have contributed to the development of Russian psycholinguistics, to the development of psycholinguistic theory and methods of psycholinguistic research. Their participation has not been forgotten. We tried to present the main Russian psycholinguists in the Appendix - in the sections "Scientometrics", "Monographs and Manuals" and "Dissertations", even if there is no information about them in the Electronic Library and RSCI. The principles of including scientists in the scientometric list are presented in the Appendix. Our analysis of the content of the resulting monograph on psycholinguistic research in Russia allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about some of the distinctive features of Russian psycholinguistics: 1. cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena of L.S.Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontiev as methodological basis of Russian psycholinguistics; 2. theoretical nature of psycholinguistic research as a characteristic feature of Russian psycholinguistics. Our psycholinguistics has always built a general theory of the generation and perception of speech, mental vocabulary, linked specific research with the problems of ontogenesis, the relationship between language and thinking; 3. psycholinguistic studies of speech communication as an important subject of psycholinguistics; 4. attention to the psycholinguistic analysis of the text and the development of methods for such analysis; 5. active research into the ontogenesis of linguistic ability; 6. investigation of linguistic consciousness as one of the important subjects of psycholinguistics; 7. understanding the need to create associative dictionaries of different types as the most important practical task of psycholinguistics; 8. widespread use of psycholinguistic methods for applied purposes, active development of applied psycholinguistics. The review of the main directions of development of Russian psycholinguistics, carried out in this monograph, clearly shows that the direction associated with the study of linguistic consciousness is currently being most intensively developed in modern Russian psycholinguistics. As the practice of many years of psycholinguistic research in our country shows, the subject of study of psycholinguists is precisely linguistic consciousness - this is a part of human consciousness that is responsible for generating, understanding speech and keeping language in consciousness. Associative experiments are the core of most psycholinguistic techniques and are important both theoretically and practically. The following main areas of practical application of the results of associative experiments can be outlined. 1. Education. Associative experiments are the basis for constructing Mind Maps, one of the most promising tools for systematizing knowledge, assessing the quality, volume and nature of declarative knowledge (and using special techniques and skills). Methods based on smart maps are already widely used in teaching foreign languages, fast and deep immersion in various subject areas. 2. Information search, search optimization. The results of associative experiments can significantly improve the quality of information retrieval, its efficiency, as well as adaptability for a specific person (social group). When promoting sites (promoting them in search results), an associative experiment allows you to increase and improve the quality of the audience reached. 3. Translation studies, translation automation. An associative experiment can significantly improve the quality of translation, take into account intercultural and other social characteristics of native speakers. 4. Computational linguistics and automatic word processing. The results of associative experiments make it possible to reveal the features of a person's linguistic consciousness and contribute to the development of automatic text processing systems in a wide range of applications of natural language interfaces of computer programs and robotic solutions. 5. Advertising. The use of data on associations for specific words, slogans and texts allows you to predict and improve advertising texts. 6. Social relationships. The analysis of texts using the data of associative experiments makes it possible to assess the tonality of messages (negative / positive moods, aggression and other characteristics) based on user comments on the Internet and social networks, in the press in various projections (by individuals, events, organizations, etc.) from various social angles, to diagnose the formation of extremist ideas. 7. Content control and protection of personal data. Associative experiments improve the quality of content detection and filtering by identifying associative fields in areas subject to age restrictions, personal information, tobacco and alcohol advertising, incitement to ethnic hatred, etc. 8. Gender and individual differences. The data of associative experiments can be used to compare the reactions (and, in general, other features of thinking) between men and women, different social and age groups, representatives of different regions. The directions for the further development of Russian psycholinguistics from the standpoint of the current state of psycholinguistic science in the country are seen by us, first of all:  in the development of research in various areas of linguistic consciousness, which will contribute to the development of an important concept of speech as a verbal model of non-linguistic consciousness, in which knowledge revealed by social practice and assigned by each member of society during its inculturation is consolidated for society and on its behalf;  in the expansion of the problematics, which is formed under the influence of the growing intercultural communication in the world community, which inevitably involves the speech behavior of natural and artificial bilinguals in the new object area of psycholinguistics;  in using the capabilities of national linguistic corpora in the interests of researchers studying the functioning of non-linguistic and linguistic consciousness in speech processes;  in expanding research on the semantic perception of multimodal texts, the scope of which has greatly expanded in connection with the spread of the Internet as a means of communication in the life of modern society;  in the inclusion of the problems of professional communication and professional activity in the object area of psycholinguistics in connection with the introduction of information technologies into public practice, entailing the emergence of new professions and new features of the professional ethos;  in the further development of the theory of the mental lexicon (identifying the role of different types of knowledge in its formation and functioning, the role of the word as a unit of the mental lexicon in the formation of the image of the world, as well as the role of the natural / internal metalanguage and its specificity in speech activity);  in the broad development of associative lexicography, which will meet the most diverse needs of society and cognitive sciences. The development of associative lexicography may lead to the emergence of such disciplines as associative typology, associative variantology, associative axiology;  in expanding the spheres of applied use of psycholinguistics in social sciences, sociology, semasiology, lexicography, in the study of the brain, linguodidactics, medicine, etc. This book is a kind of summarizing result of the development of Russian psycholinguistics today. Each section provides a bibliography of studies on the relevant issue. The Appendix contains the scientometrics of leading Russian psycholinguists, basic monographs, psycholinguistic textbooks and dissertations defended in psycholinguistics. The content of the publications presented here is convincing evidence of the relevance of psycholinguistic topics and the effectiveness of the development of psycholinguistic problems in Russia.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!