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1

Zhang, Yanjie, Zhe Xu, Qingmin Zhang, Jun Dai, and Haisheng Ji. "Sunspot Shearing and Sudden Retraction Motion Associated with the 2013 August 17 M3.3 Flare*." Astrophysical Journal Letters 933, no. 1 (July 1, 2022): L20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac79b7.

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Abstract In this Letter, we give a detailed analysis of the M3.3 class flare that occurred on 2013 August 17 (SOL2013-08-17T18:16). It presents a clear picture of mutual magnetic interaction initially from the photosphere to the corona via the abrupt rapid shearing motion of a small sunspot before the flare, and then suddenly from the corona back to the photosphere via the sudden retraction motion of the same sunspot during the flare’s impulsive phase. About 10 hr before the flare, a small sunspot in the active region NOAA 11818 started to move northeast along a magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL), creating a shearing motion that changed the quasi-static state of the active region. A filament right above the PIL was activated following the movement of the sunspot and then got partially erupted. The eruption eventually led to the M3.3 flare. The sunspot was then suddenly pulled back to the opposite direction upon the flare onset. During the backward motion, the Lorentz force underwent a simultaneous impulsive change both in magnitude and direction. Its directional change is found to be conformable with the retraction motion. The observation provides direct evidence for the role of the shearing motion of the sunspot in powering and triggering the flare. It especially confirms that the abrupt motion of a sunspot during a solar flare is the result of a backreaction caused by the reconfiguration of the coronal magnetic field.
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Kumar, Anuj, Michael D. Smith, and Rahul Telang. "Information Discovery and the Long Tail of Motion Picture Content." MIS Quarterly 38, no. 4 (April 4, 2014): 1057–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.25300/misq/2014/38.4.06.

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Huang, Dongling, Andrei Strijnev, and Brian Ratchford. "Role of Advertising and Consumer Interest in the Motion Picture Industry." Review of Marketing Science 13, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 1–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/roms-2014-0005.

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AbstractAdvertising is commonly used as a major marketing tool by many firms to support their new product release. Quantifying the effectiveness of pre-release advertising campaigns, however, is both challenging, since no sales data are available, and costly, because of the need to conduct consumer surveys. This is especially true for movie industry for which the majority of advertising dollars are spent before the movie’s release. Using the recent availability of online data on consumer search behaviors on a popular website dedicated to the movie industry, we construct a consumer interest measure to help the decision makers evaluate their advertising effectiveness. We build a dynamic model to show how this cost-efficient measure of consumer interest can be used to capture pre-release advertising dynamics, and the impact of advertising on weekly movie revenues starting with the opening week. Using a procedure based on
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Schuster, Christina, Marwa Elamin, Orla Hardiman, and Peter Bede. "Presymptomatic and longitudinal neuroimaging in neurodegeneration—from snapshots to motion picture: a systematic review." Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 86, no. 10 (January 28, 2015): 1089–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jnnp-2014-309888.

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Siregar, Epi Supriyani, Imanuddin Siregar, Dicky Edwar Daulay, and Lady Rodearni Jawak. "Pengembangan Model Pembelajaran Picture and Picture Terhadap Materi Gerak Lokomotor Siswa Kelas V SD." Journal on Education 5, no. 2 (January 29, 2023): 5304–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.31004/joe.v5i2.1273.

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This study aims to determine the development of a picture and picture learning model for locomotor motion material for fifth grade students at SD Negeri 060890. The research method used by researchers is the Research and Development method. Research and development (R&D) is a basic research activity to obtain information on user needs (needs assessment), then proceed with development activities to produce products and examine the effectiveness of these products (Sugiyono, 2014). Based on the table presented on the previous page, it can be seen that the total score achieved by the teacher in learning through locomotor motion using the picture and picture model with media images at meetings is 35 with Enough criteria. It can be seen in the table, at the meeting that the teacher's skills have not achieved success according to the indicators set. Therefore, at the next meeting the researcher must be able to carry out improvements in learning using poetry writing strategies using picture and picture models with picture media. An effective way for students to avoid pressure is by playing rock-paper-scissors or throwing the ball while singing the rabbit and when the ball stops, it comes forward to show pictures and imitate its movements. After that, the exploration stage. At this stage the teacher forms a discussion group to discuss locomotor movements based on the images shown. The teacher forms this group to make it interesting. In his creations, groups can be made with animal names. And the group imitated the movement based on the animal's name. Next, the teacher provides a learning evaluation. The teacher calls students one by one to imitate what the teacher shows in the picture. Finally, teachers and students reflect on learning. This activity is to get students' responses to the material that has been implemented.
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Slobin, Dan I., Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Anetta Kopecka, and Asifa Majid. "Manners of human gait: a crosslinguistic event-naming study." Cognitive Linguistics 25, no. 4 (November 1, 2014): 701–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0061.

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AbstractCrosslinguistic studies of expressions of motion events have found that Talmy's binary typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages is reflected in language use. In particular, Manner of motion is relatively more elaborated in satellite-framed languages (e.g., in narrative, picture description, conversation, translation). The present research builds on previous controlled studies of the domain of human motion by eliciting descriptions of a wide range of manners of walking and running filmed in natural circumstances. Descriptions were elicited from speakers of two satellite-framed languages (English, Polish) and three verb-framed languages (French, Spanish, Basque). The sampling of events in this study resulted in four major semantic clusters for these five languages: walking, running, non-canonical gaits (divided into bounce-and-recoil and syncopated movements), and quadrupedal movement (crawling). Counts of verb types found a broad tendency for satellite-framed languages to show greater lexical diversity, along with substantial within group variation. Going beyond most earlier studies, we also examined extended descriptions of manner of movement, isolating types of manner. The following categories of manner were identified and compared: attitude of actor, rate, effort, posture, and motor patterns of legs and feet. Satellite-framed speakers tended to elaborate expressive manner verbs, whereas verb-framed speakers used modification to add manner to neutral motion verbs.
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Kumb, Florian, and Reinhard E. Kunz. "Winner-Takes-All”: Influencing Factors of the Post-Theatrical Supply and Demand in Motion Picture Exhibition." Journal of Creative Industries and Cultural Studies 8 (2017): 77–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.56140/jocis-v8-4.

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The post-theatrical exhibition has become essential for motion pictures to break even. Nevertheless, besides the first attempts to study TV broadcasters and streaming providers as release windows, academic research in marketing has concentrated primarily on the initial theat-rical release. This article examines factors influencing supply and demand during the sequential release process of the motion picture industry. The authors build a modelling framework to ana-lyze the drivers resulting in comprehensive supply and strong demand in major exhibition win-dows (i.e., during the home video, video-on-demand, and free-to-air TV exhibition). They esti-mate the conceptual model of regressions using market data from Germany, including all 5 200 theater-released motion pictures between 2005 and 2014. The authors expand the existing suc-cess-breeds-success theory and use a winner-takesall theory to explain market supply and de-mand in sequential distribution. The results reveal a limited set of influencing factors (e.g., word-of-mouth communication or certain genres) that increase the probability of comprehensive exhibition and strong demand. Other influencing factors depend on the exhibition window (e.g., age ratings). The results add to existing theories of sequential distribution and can help research-ers and managers improve movie-specific exhibition strategies.
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Sadeghi, J., and F. Pourasadollah. "Langevin Diffusion in Holographic Backgrounds with Hyperscaling Violation." Advances in High Energy Physics 2014 (2014): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/670598.

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We consider a relativistic heavy quark which moves in the quark-gluon plasmas. By using the holographic methods, we analyze the Langevin diffusion process of this relativistic heavy quark. This heavy quark is described by a trailing string attached to a flavor brane and moving at constant velocity. The fluctuations of this string are related to the thermal correlators and the correlation functions are precisely the kinds of objects that we compute in the gravity dual picture. We obtain the action of the trailing string in hyperscaling violation backgrounds and we then find the equations of motion. These equations lead us to constructing the Langevin correlator which helps us to obtain the Langevin constants. Using the Langevin correlators we derive the spectral densities and simple analytic expressions in the small- and large-frequency limits. We examine our works for planar andR-charged black holes with hyperscaling violation and find new constraints onθin the presence of velocityv.
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Carlson, Gretchen. "Antonio Sanchez, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Milan M2-36689, 2014, CD." Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 2 (May 2016): 229–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196316000158.

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Holbrook, Morris B. "Reflections on jazz training and marketing education." Marketing Theory 16, no. 4 (July 31, 2016): 429–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470593116652672.

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In recent years, numerous marketing and organizational theorists have called attention to the analogy between jazz and management strategy. From the perspective of this jazz metaphor, key questions concern the implications of jazz training for marketing education. Too often—say, in motion pictures or television dramas—jazz is portrayed as an innocent folk music whose performance requires more feeling than knowledge. This inaccurate stereotype colors the treatment of music instruction found in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). A contrasting view of jazz as a technically demanding art form appears in the movie Whiplash (2014). These two films also represent diametrically opposed teaching styles—the first nurturing and customer-oriented, the second sadistic and product-oriented. A third motion picture entitled Keep On Keepin’ On (2014) presents a resolution of this dialectic in the form of a marketing-oriented instructor whose method of teaching combines kindness (the customer-oriented thesis) with rigor (the product-oriented antithesis) to achieve a balanced reconciliation (the marketing-oriented synthesis). From this perspective, like jazz training, marketing education is itself embarked on a marketing project that benefits from a rapprochement of customer-oriented and product-oriented impulses to attain a marketing-oriented synthesis. Thus, insights about jazz training become relevant to the challenges of marketing education—as illustrated by various examples from the author’s own experiences.
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Breeze, Andrew. "Andrew James Johnston, Beowulf Global: Konstruktionen historisch-kultureller Verflechtungen im altenglischen Epos. Zürich: Chronos Verlag. 2022, 70 pp." Mediaevistik 35, no. 1 (January 1, 2022): 428–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/med.2022.01.83.

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Abstract An instructor at Berlin’s Free University, who has analyzed “Robin auf der Leinwand” in his Robin Hood: Geschichte einer Legende (Munich 2013) and co-edited The Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation (New York 2014), now focuses on Beowulf. In three lectures (given at Zurich) he deals with its international setting, styled as “tatsächlich kosmopolitisch” (p. 16). The theme is promising, as he relates it to physical entities: a Roman mosaic “auf dem Orpheus abgebildet” (p. 20) at Bath; Sutton Hoo; a sword-hilt described in Beowulf as wyrmfah (“having snake-like ornaments”); and a gold coin (after an Arabic original) of King Offa. But there are problems. Despite a worthy subject and reference to postcolonialism or theories of Derrida and others, nothing ever seems proved.
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Lavoie, Sophie M. "Film Review: Huicholes: The last peyote guardians.Huicholes: The last peyote guardians. [Motion picture]. StefaniP. (Producer), & VilchezH. (Director). (2014). 128mins. Argentina-México: Kabopro Films." AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 11, no. 2 (June 2015): 205–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/117718011501100212.

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Zago, Matteo, Andrea Francesco Motta, Andrea Mapelli, Isabella Annoni, Christel Galvani, and Chiarella Sforza. "Effect of Leg Dominance on The Center-of-Mass Kinematics During an Inside-of-the-Foot Kick in Amateur Soccer Players." Journal of Human Kinetics 42, no. 1 (October 1, 2014): 51–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/hukin-2014-0060.

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Abstract Soccer kicking kinematics has received wide interest in literature. However, while the instep-kick has been broadly studied, only few researchers investigated the inside-of-the-foot kick, which is one of the most frequently performed techniques during games. In particular, little knowledge is available about differences in kinematics when kicking with the preferred and non-preferred leg. A motion analysis system recorded the three-dimensional coordinates of reflective markers placed upon the body of nine amateur soccer players (23.0 ± 2.1 years, BMI 22.2 ± 2.6 kg/m2), who performed 30 pass-kicks each, 15 with the preferred and 15 with the non-preferred leg. We investigated skill kinematics while maintaining a perspective on the complete picture of movement, looking for laterality related differences. The main focus was laid on: anatomical angles, contribution of upper limbs in kick biomechanics, kinematics of the body Center of Mass (CoM), which describes the whole body movement and is related to balance and stability. When kicking with the preferred leg, CoM displacement during the ground-support phase was 13% higher (p<0.001), normalized CoM height was 1.3% lower (p<0.001) and CoM velocity 10% higher (p<0.01); foot and shank velocities were about 5% higher (p<0.01); arms were more abducted (p<0.01); shoulders were rotated more towards the target (p<0.01, 6° mean orientation difference). We concluded that differences in motor control between preferred and non-preferred leg kicks exist, particularly in the movement velocity and upper body kinematics. Coaches can use these results to provide effective instructions to players in the learning process, moving their focus on kicking speed and upper body behavior
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Ponnamma Divakaran, Pradeep Kumar, and Sladjana Nørskov. "Are online communities on par with experts in the evaluation of new movies? Evidence from the Fandango community." Information Technology & People 29, no. 1 (March 7, 2016): 120–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/itp-02-2014-0042.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate two questions. First, are movie-based online community evaluations (CE) on par with film expert evaluations of new movies? Second, which group makes more reliable and accurate predictions of movie box office revenues: film reviewers or an online community? Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from a movie-based online community Fandango for a 16-month period and included all movies released during this time (373 movies). The authors compared film reviewers’ evaluations with the online CE during the first eight weeks of the movie’s release. Findings – The study finds that community members evaluate movies differently than film reviewers. The results also reveal that CE have more predictive power than film reviewers’ evaluations, especially during the opening week of a movie. Research limitations/implications – The investigated online community is based in the USA, hence the findings are limited to this geographic context. Practical implications – The main implication is that film studios and movie-goers can rely more on CE than film reviewers’ evaluation for decision making. Online CE can help film studios in negotiating with distributors, theatre owners for the number of screens. Also, community reviews rather than film reviewers’ reviews are looked upon by future movie-goers for movie choice decisions. Originality/value – The study makes an original contribution to the motion picture performance research as well as to the growing research on online consumer communities by demonstrating the predictive potential of online communities with regards to evaluations of new movies.
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Yetimova, Serhat, and Abdrasul İsakov. "An Analysis of the Kurmanjan Datka Movie in the Context of Historical and Ideological Film Criticism." Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies 6, no. 2 (May 20, 2024): 96–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.46539/gmd.v6i2.434.

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Kurmanjan Datka Queen of the Mountains (2014) is a Kyrgyz historical drama film directed by Sadyk Sher-Niyaz tells the story of Kurmanjan Datka from Kyrgyz history. In this article, how the mentioned motion picture is discussed in Central Asian, Russian, Turkish and Western digital media is analyzed comparatively in the context of historical and ideological film criticism. It is tried to be understood how each country interprets the film in their own media, how they look at the history of Kyrgyzstan and its ideological discourse. In the research, critical discourse analysis method was used and conceptual and thematic classifications were made. At the end of the research, while more history and politics were discussed in the Central Asian media, the Russian and Turkish digital media did not show enough attention to the historical flow, while the Western digital media discussed the film in a multifaceted way in the context of economy-political, identity, gender and aesthetics. Another remarkable difference was that some of the Kyrgyz or Kazakh critics (especially statesmen, historians or artists) criticized the film on the economic-political axis. The in-depth and multidimensional criticisms of the film developed by the eastern critics were found in the Western media or Western journalists gave place to these views in their own digital media.
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Kenis, V., A. Kozhevnikov, E. Melchenko, and D. Petrova. "AB0990 SECONDARY SUBACUTE ARTHRITIS IN CHILDREN WITH DIASTROPHIC DYSPLASIA AND RMED." Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 79, Suppl 1 (June 2020): 1789.1–1789. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-eular.3484.

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Background:Progressive osteoarthritis is common in skeletal dysplasias. In the most of these disorders progress is relatively slow and acute pain with severe disability secondary to osteoarthritis is rare during childhood. Diastrophic dysplasia and rMED are quite unique among other skeletal dysplasias for secondary subacute arthritis (SSA). Protracted course of SSA can mimic JIA.Objectives:To analyse incidence and features of SSA in group of patients with DD/rMED.Methods:We retrospectively analysed for SSA our series of 39 patients with DD/rMED. Clinical, radiological and laboratory data were collected. Clinical assessment included pain (VAS), ROM (range of motion) and postural/walking disturbances. Radiological type by Yasunaga classification, neck-shaft angle (NSA) and articulo-trochanteric distance (AT distance) were estimated. MRI data regarding cartilage damage, joint effusion and bone marrow condition were noticed. Biomarkers of inflammation and immune response (ANA, RF, vimentin antibodies) were assessed in blood samples.Results:We identified 17 patients with hip joint SSA among 39 patients with DD/rMED (43%). Bilateral involvement was identified in 13 children with asynchronous appearance in all cases (from 2 to 18 months before the symptoms on the other side). Trauma (including iatrogenic damage during physiotherapy) preceded SSA in 9 cases. Pain, limited range of motion, limping and antalgic posture throughout the day were noticed in all the cases. Duration of these symptoms was from 4 weeks to 9 months. Progressive phase (increasing symptoms) took from 2 weeks to 4 months. General laboratory data were normal or indicated moderate inflammatory response without any specific changes. Radiolodgical data shows predictive sighs like NSA<110o, AT distance <10mm, fair or poor congruency by Yasunaga classification. Also radiological data demonstrated progressive subluxation with narrowing of articular space, osteoporosis, subchondral cysts.MRI revealed pseudo-erosive damaged cartilage in contact area with joint effusion and bone marrow oedema. Total cartilage matrix also visualized like intermittent and multi-layered = erosive-like chondrolysis (defective articular hyaline cartilage) in 11 patients (65%).Management included bed rest or partial weight bearing. NSAID were prescribed for 2-4 weeks with following usage according to the symptoms. Physical therapy to maintain range of motion was provided. One patient was operated (containment surgery for subluxation). In follow-up (2-7 years) 12 patients were painless at the daily life. 4 patients had intermittent pain and one patient (operated) - daily moderate pain. Range of motion was restored in 11 patients. Those patients who underwent in-hospital rehabilitation immediately after appearing of the symptoms demonstrated better outcome.Conclusion:SSA is typical for DD/rMED and leads to remarkable disability. Early recognition and non-surgical management are important for recovery. The quick reversibility of the clinical picture arthritis against the background of a short course of NSAIDs and rehabilitation is a characterized of non-autoimmune secondary inflammatory process (SSA). SSA not requiresanti-rheumatic treatment in childrenwith DD/rMED.References:[1]Al Kaissi, A., Kenis, V., Melchenko, E., Chehida, F. B., Ganger, R., Klaushofer, K., & Grill, F. (2014). Corrections of lower limb deformities in patients with diastrophic dysplasia.Orthopaedic surgery,6(4), 274-279.[2]Baindurashvili A.G., Kenis V.M., Melchenko E.V., Grill F., Al-Kaissi A. Complex orthopaedic management of patients with skeletal dysplasias.Traumatology and Orthopedics of Russia. 2014;(1):44-50. doi.org/10.21823/2311-2905-2014-0-1-44-50Disclosure of Interests:None declared
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Inoue, Hajime. "Origin of cool cores, cold fronts, and spiral structures in cool core clusters of galaxies." Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan 74, no. 1 (December 20, 2021): 152–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pasj/psab114.

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Abstract We consider a situation in which a brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) moves in ambient hot gas in the central region of a cool core cluster of galaxies, following the study by Inoue (2014, PASJ, 66, 60). In the rest frame of the BCG, the hot gas is supposed to flow toward the BCG in parallel from a sufficiently large distance. Then, it is expected that only the gas flowing with an impact parameter less than a critical value is trapped by the gravitation field of the BCG because of the efficient radiative cooling, getting a cooling flow, and that the remaining outer gas can get over the potential well. In such a circumstance, we can draw the following picture: A boundary layer between the out-flowing gas and the trapped gas arises around the stagnation point at the back side of the BCG. Since the boundary temperature is so low as to be X-ray dim, the boundary could be observed as the cold front in X-rays. The trapped gas stagnates on the inner side of the boundary and starts in-falling toward the BCG. Since the wandering motion of the BCG is likely to have a rotational component, the Coriolis force induces a rotational motion in the in-falling flow from the stagnation place to the BCG, forming a spiral structure around the BCG. The spiraling flow turns the BCG on the up stream side of the main flow from the far outside, and another boundary layer arises that has contact discontinuity with the main hot gas flow. These pictures reproduce the observed features such as cool cores, cold fronts, and spiral structures well. It can also be resolved how the cooling flow is suppressed from what the cooling flow hypothesis predicts, without any heating mechanism.
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Copeland, Kameron J. "Blackbird [Motion picture], by P. Polk (Director/Producer), K. L. Brown, C. A. Shine, I. Washington, & M. Young (Producers), United States of America, KBiz Entertainment and Tall Skinny Black Boy Productions, 2014." Journal of GLBT Family Studies 14, no. 4 (September 2017): 400–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1550428x.2017.1362847.

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Howell, Stephen E. L., Mike Brady, and Alexander S. Komarov. "Generating large-scale sea ice motion from Sentinel-1 and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission using the Environment and Climate Change Canada automated sea ice tracking system." Cryosphere 16, no. 3 (March 31, 2022): 1125–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-1125-2022.

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Abstract. As Arctic sea ice extent continues to decline, remote sensing observations are becoming even more vital for the monitoring and understanding of sea ice. Recently, the sea ice community has entered a new era of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites operating at C-band with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014 and Sentinel-1B (S1) in 2016 and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) in 2019. These missions represent five spaceborne SAR sensors that together routinely cover the pan-Arctic sea ice domain. Here, we describe, apply, and validate the Environment and Climate Change Canada automated sea ice tracking system (ECCC-ASITS) that routinely generates large-scale sea ice motion (SIM) over the pan-Arctic domain using SAR images from S1 and RCM. We applied the ECCC-ASITS to the incoming image streams of S1 and RCM from March 2020 to October 2021 using a total of 135 471 SAR images and generated new SIM datasets (7 d 25 km and 3 d 6.25 km) by combining the image stream outputs of S1 and RCM (S1 + RCM). Results indicate that S1 + RCM SIM provides more coverage in the Hudson Bay, Davis Strait, Beaufort Sea, Bering Sea, and directly over the North Pole compared to SIM from S1 alone. Based on the resolvable S1 + RCM SIM grid cells, the 7 d 25 km spatiotemporal scale is able to provide the most complete picture of SIM across the pan-Arctic from SAR imagery alone, but considerable spatiotemporal coverage is also available from 3 d 6.25 SIM products. S1 + RCM SIM is resolved within the narrow channels and inlets of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, filling a major gap from coarser-resolution sensors. Validating the ECCC-ASITS using S1 and RCM imagery against buoys indicates a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 2.78 km for dry ice conditions and 3.43 km for melt season conditions. Higher speeds are more apparent with S1 + RCM SIM as comparison with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) SIM product and the Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) SIM product indicated an RMSE of u=4.6 km d−1 and v=4.7 km d−1 for the NSIDC and u=3.9 km d−1 and v=3.9 km d−1 for OSI SAF. Overall, our results demonstrate the robustness of the ECCC-ASITS for routinely generating large-scale SIM entirely from SAR imagery across the pan-Arctic domain.
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Musse, Christina Ferraz, and Ana Clara Campos dos Santos. "Memória e filmes domésticos em Super 8: a família Assis em Juiz de Fora - MG." Revista Observatório 1, no. 3 (December 26, 2015): 181. http://dx.doi.org/10.20873/uft.2447-4266.2015v1n3p181.

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Neste trabalho abordamos a memória como objeto de estudo, a película cinematográfica Super 8 e os filmes domésticos. No embasamento teórico, utilizamos autores como Andreas Huyssen e Pierre Nora (memória), Roger Odin e Lila Foster (filmes domésticos). Nosso objetivo é apresentar os filmes em Super 8 feitos pelo fotógrafo Márcio Assis na década de 1970, a fim de verificar as relações entre sua narrativa oral atual por meio da gravação em áudio de seus comentários do filme, em comparação a sua narrativa visual sobre a própria família na década de 1970. Também fazemos um estudo de como os familiares de Márcio Assis assistem a esses filmes, cerca de quarenta anos depois, por meio da coleta de depoimentos nas redes sociais e entrevistas.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Audiovisual; memória; Super 8; filmes domésticos. ABSTRACTIn this paper we address the memory as an object of study, the motion picture film and Super 8 home movies. On theoretical basis, we use authors like Andreas Huyssen and Pierre Nora (memory), Roger Odin and Lila Foster (home movies). Our goal is to present Super 8 films made by the photographer Marcio Assis in the 1970s in order to verify the relationship between his current oral narrative through the audio recording of his comments the film, compared to its visual narrative about his own family in the 1970s. We also do a study as family Marcio Assis watch these movies, some forty years later, by collecting testimonials on social networks and interviews.KEYWORDS: Audiovisual; memory; Super 8; home movies. RESUMENEn este artículo, abordamos la memoria como un objeto de estudio, la película cinematográfica Súper 8 y el cine doméstico. En la base teórica, utilizamos autores como Andreas Huyssen y Pierre Nora (memoria), Roger Odin y Lila Foster (cine doméstico). Nuestro objetivo es presentar las películas en Súper 8 realizadas por el fotógrafo Marcio Assis en la década de 1970 con el fin de verificar la relación entre la narrativa oral actual mediante el registro de información de audio de la película en comparación con su narrativa visual acerca de la propia familia, en la década de 1970. También hacemos un estudio de cómo la familia de Marcio Assis asiste a estas películas, unos cuarenta años más tarde, mediante la recopilación de testimonios en las redes sociales y entrevistas. PALABRAS CLAVE: Audiovisual; memoria; Súper 8; cine doméstico. ReferênciasÁLVAREZ, Efrén Cuevas. De vuelta a casa: Variaciones del documental realizado con cine doméstico. In: La casa abierta: el cine doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos. Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2010. p. 121-166.ASSIS, Bianca Vieira Marques. Filmes domésticos de Júlio e Márcio Assis. 25 jun. 2014. Depoimento concedido a Ana Clara Campos dos Santos por meios eletrônicos.ASSIS, Ana Carolina Furtado de. Filmes domésticos de Júlio e Márcio Assis. Juiz de Fora. 16 mai. 2014. Depoimento concedido a Ana Clara Campos dos Santos em áudio.ASSIS, Márcio de Alcântara. Comentários dos filmes do acervo de Super 8 de Márcio Assis. Juiz de Fora. 11 mai. 2014. Depoimento dado a Ana Clara Campos dos Santos em áudio.ASSIS, Mariana Furtado. Filmes domésticos de Júlio e Márcio Assis. 26 jun. 2014. Depoimento concedido a Ana Clara Campos dos Santos por meios eletrônicos.CARUSO, Carlos Alberto Antonio. Conceitos fundamentais para o estudo do filme doméstico. In: O filme de família: O Fascínio da Preservação da Imagem, Histórias e Memórias. 2012. Dissertação (Mestrado em Comunicação) - Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, São Paulo, 2012. cap. 01, p. 13-32. Disponível em: <http://portal.anhembi.br/wp-content/uploads/Dissertacao_Carlos_Alberto_Antonio_Caruso1.pdf>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2015.DARGY, P. A prática do super 8 / P. Dargy, N. Bau; adaptação e prefácio da ed. Brasileira de Abrão Berman; (tradução de Luiz Roberto S. Malta). - 4. ed. - São Paulo: Summus, 1979.FOSTER, Lila Silva. Conceitos fundamentais para o estudo do filme doméstico. In: Filmes domésticos: uma abordagem a partir do acervo da Cinemateca Brasileira. 2010. Dissertação (Mestrado em Imagem e Som) - Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, 2010. cap. 01, p. 17-53. Disponível em: <http://www.bdtd.ufscar.br/htdocs/tedeSimplificado/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=2965>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2015.HOME Movie Day Rio. 2013. Apresenta informações sobre inscrições e programação do evento Home Movie Day Rio, ano de 2013. Disponível em: <http://homemoviedayrio.wordpress.com/>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2015. Site.HUYSSEN, Andreas. Passados presentes: mídia, política, amnésia. In: Seduzidos pela memória: arquitetura, monumentos, mídia. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2004. cap. 01, p. 09-40.LEAL, Marília Muniz. Filmes de família: lembrança e documento. 2013. 62 f. Monografia (Bacharel em Comunicação Social, habilitação cinema). Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, 2013. Disponível em: <http://www.rascunho.uff.br/ojs/index.php/rascunho/article/view/49/31>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2015.LINS, Consuelo; BLANK, Thais. Filmes de família, cinema amador e a memória do mundo. Significação. Vol. 39, nº 37, 2012. p. 52-54. Disponível em: <http://www.revistas.usp.br/significacao/article/view/71254>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2015.NORA, Pierre. Entre memória e história: a problemática dos lugares. In: Projeto História. São Paulo, dez. 1993. p. 07-28.ODIN, Roger. El cine doméstico en la instituición familiar. In: La casa abierta: el cine doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos. Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2010. p. 39-60.SILVA, Armando. O arquivo do álbum de fotografias. In: Álbum de família: a imagem de nós mesmos. São Paulo: Senac, 2008. cap. 02, p. 41-75. Disponível em:Url: http://opendepot.org/2705/ Abrir em (para melhor visualização em dispositivos móveis - Formato Flipbooks):Issuu / Calameo
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Purba, Natalina, and Martua Reynhat Sitanggang Gusar. "Clean and Healthy Lifestyle Behavior (PHBS Program) for Children with Intellectual Disability." JPUD - Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini 14, no. 2 (November 30, 2020): 275–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.21009/jpud.142.06.

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The achievement of children's quality of life is undoubtedly linked to the development of positive habits that will continue to be practiced in future lives. This can be done by developing awareness and behavior of a balanced clean and healthy lifestyle. The purpose of this study was to determine the increase in the PHBS ability of children. Various efforts have been made so that children with intellectual disabilities can maintain their cleanliness. The efforts made by the teacher are still not maximal so that the delivery of information about PHBS must be completed by another method, namely demonstration. This research was conducted at SDLB 127710 Pematangsiantar5 with an action research method that refers to the Kurt Lewin model. Data collection techniques used purposive sampling and data analysis with the Wilcoxon test. The results showed an increase in understanding of the PHBS of children with intellectual disabilities able to learn SDLB 127710 Pematangsiantar through the demonstration method. This is evidenced by the increase in the score, where the initial assessment was obtained (59%), while in the first cycle, the average score was good (69.9%). In short, the understanding of children with intellectual disabilities being able to learn about PHBS is increased by using the demonstration method. Keywords: Intellectual Disability Children, PHBS program, Demonstration methods References Agarwal, R. (2017). Importancia de la atención primaria de salud en la sociedad. International Journal of Health Sciences, 1(1), 5–9. Aiello, A. E., Coulborn, R. M., Perez, V., & Larson, E. L. (2008). Effect of hand hygiene on infectious disease risk in the community setting: A meta-analysis. American Journal of Public Health, 98(8), 1372–1381. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2007.124610 Arip, M. pdfo., & Emilyani, D. (2018). Strategy to improve knowledge, attitude, and skill toward clean and healthy life behaviour. International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2(3), 125–135. https://doi.org/10.29332/ijssh.v2n3.222 Basheer, A., Hugerat, M., Kortam, N., & Hofstein, A. (2017). The effectiveness of teachers’ use of demonstrations for enhancing students’ understanding of and attitudes to learning the oxidation-reduction concept. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 13(3), 555–570. https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2017.00632a Bloomfield, S. F., Aiello, A. E., Cookson, B., O’Boyle, C., & Larson, E. L. (2007). The effectiveness of hand hygiene procedures in reducing the risks of infections in home and community settings including handwashing and alcohol-based hand sanitizers. American Journal of Infection Control, 35(10 SUPPL. 1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2007.07.001 Cavanaugh, L. K. (n.d.). Intellectual Disabilities (D. L. Porretta (Ed.); 6 th). Human Kinetics. Chang, Y. J., Lee, M. Y., Chou, L. Der, Chen, S. F., & Chen, Y. C. (2011). A Mobile Wetness Detection System Enabling Teachers to Toilet Train Children with Intellectual Disabilities in a Public School Setting. Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, 23(6), 527–533. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-011-9243-3 Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726715577707 Dirjen P2P Kemkes RI. (2019). Rencana Aksi Program Pencegahan Dan Pengendalian Penyakit 2015-2019 ( Revisi I - 2018 ). Rencana AKSI Program P2P 2015-2019, 2019, 86. Flanagan, D. P., Alfonso, V. C., & Hale, J. B. (2010). The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Fourth Edition in Neuropsychological Practice. Handbook of Pediatric Neuropsychology, January, 397–414. Giridharan, K., & Raju, R. (2017). Impact of Teaching Strategies: Demonstration and Lecture Strategies and Impact of Teacher Effect on Academic Achievement in Engineering Education. International Journal of Educational Sciences, 14(3), 174–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/09751122.2016.11890491 Hooman, N., Safaii, A., Valavi, E., & Amini-Alavijeh, Z. (2013). Toilet training in Iranian children: A cross-sectional study. Iranian Journal of Pediatrics, 23(2), 154–158. Hung, J.-W., Chang, Y.-J., & Han, W.-Y. (2016). Game technology to increase range of motion for adolescents with cerebral palsy: a feasibility study. International Journal on Disability and Human Development, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.1515/ijdhd-2016-0026 Kang, Y. S., & Chang, Y. J. (2019). Using a motion-controlled game to teach four elementary school children with intellectual disabilities to improve hand hygiene. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 32(4), 942–951. https://doi.org/10.1111/jar.12587 Kementerian, & Indonesia, R. (2011). Profil Kesehatan Indonesia. Kemenenterian Kesehatan RI. Kesehatan, K. (2011). PHBS di Sekolah. Kementerian Kesehatan Republik Indonesia. Ketut Sudiana, I., Adiputra, N., & Budi Adnyana, P. (2020). Integrative Health Thematic Strategy Increases Learning Outcomes and Students ’Clean and Healthy Living Behaviors. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1503(1). https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1503/1/012050 Koh, W. M., Bogich, T., Siegel, K., Jin, J., Chong, E. Y., Tan, C. Y., Chen, M. I. C., Horby, P., & Cook, A. R. (2016). The epidemiology of hand, foot and mouth disease in Asia: A systematic review and analysis. Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, 35(10), e285–e300. https://doi.org/10.1097/INF.0000000000001242 Kroeger, K., & Sorensen, R. (2010). A parent training model for toilet training children with autism. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 54(6), 556–567. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01286.x Laporan Akuntabilitas Kinerja Kementerian Kesehatan tahun 2014. (n.d.). Lee, R. L. T., & Lee, P. H. (2014). To evaluate the effects of a simplified hand washing improvement program in schoolchildren with mild intellectual disability: A pilot study. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 35(11), 3014–3025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2014.07.016 Lee, R. L. T., Leung, C., Tong, W. K., Chen, H., & Lee, P. H. (2015). Comparative efficacy of a simplified handwashing program for improvement in hand hygiene and reduction of school absenteeism among children with intellectual disability. American Journal of Infection Control, 43(9), 907–912. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2015.03.023 Levato, L. E., Aponte, C. A., Wilkins, J., Travis, R., Aiello, R., Zanibbi, K., Loring, W. A., Butter, E., Smith, T., & Mruzek, D. W. (2016). Use of urine alarms in toilet training children with intellectual and developmental disabilities: A review. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 53–54, 232–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2016.02.007 Noah Ekeyi, D. (2013). Effect of Demonstration Method of Teaching on Students’ Achievement in Agricultural Science. World Journal of Education, 3(6), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.5430/wje.v3n6p1 Pedoman Umum Program Indonesia Sehat dengan Pendekatan Keluarga. (2015). Kementerian Kesehatan Republik Indonesia. Purba, N., Handini, M. C. H., & Yetti, E. (2018). Development of Media Vocabulary Cards to Improve the Speech Competence of Children with Intellectual Disabilities. 6. Puspita, W. A., Sulistyorini, M. P., & Wibowo, B. (2020). Learning Clean, Healthy and Safe Life Behavior in Inclusive Early Childhood Education. 454(Ecep 2019), 270–274. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200808.053 Putri, R. M., Rosdiana, Y., & Nisa, A. C. (2019). Application of Clean and Healthy Living Behavior (PHBS) From The Household Knowledge and Attitude Study. Journal Of Nursing Practice, 3(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.30994/jnp.v3i1.64 Rosenberg, N. E., Schwartz, I. S., & Davis, C. A. (2010). Evaluating the utility of commercial videotapes for teaching hand washing to children with autism. Education and Treatment of Children, 33(3), 443–455. https://doi.org/10.1353/etc.0.0098 Ruan, F., Yang, T., Ma, H., Jin, Y., Song, S., Fontaine, R. E., & Zhu, B. P. (2011). Risk factors for hand, foot, and mouth disease and herpangina and the preventive effect of hand-washing. Pediatrics, 127(4). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-1497 Shen, K., Yang, Y., Wang, T., Zhao, D., Jiang, Y., Jin, R., Zheng, Y., Xu, B., Xie, Z., Lin, L., Shang, Y., Lu, X., Shu, S., Bai, Y., Deng, J., Lu, M., Ye, L., Wang, X., Wang, Y., & Gao, L. (2020). Diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in children: experts’ consensus statement. World Journal of Pediatrics, 16(3), 223–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-020-00343-7 Steenkamp, L., Williams, M., Ronaasen, J., Feeley, A., Truter, I., & Melariri, P. (2020). Handwashing knowledge and practices among caregivers of pre-school children in underprivileged areas of Nelson Mandela Bay. South African Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 0(0), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/16070658.2020.1769336 van Nunen, K., Kaerts, N., Wyndaele, J. J., Vermandel, A., & van Hal, G. V. (2015). Parents’ views on toilet training (TT): A quantitative study to identify the beliefs and attitudes of parents concerning TT. Journal of Child Health Care, 19(2), 265–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367493513508232 Walpole, R. E. (1955). Pengantar Statistika. Gramedia.
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Newman, William R. "Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire"." Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 73, no. 1 (March 2021): 46–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.56315/pscf3-21newman.

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NEWTON THE ALCHEMIST: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire" by William R. Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xx + 537 pages, including four appendices and an index. Hardcover; $39.95. ISBN: 9780691174877. *If there is one person associated with developments in the physical sciences, it is Isaac Newton (1642-1727). For many, he represents the culmination of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution: its point of convergence and simultaneously the point from which science began to exercise its full influence on society. His work is often considered as thoroughly modern: well-designed experiments; precise and clearly articulated mathematical-physical principles which invite deductions further tested by measurement and experiment; and great discoveries in astronomy (universal law of gravitation), in optics, in mechanics, and in mathematics (the calculus). For many, Newton provided the model for physical theory for the next two hundred years. *And yet, this generally accepted description of Newton fails to capture the tension and diversity in Newton's work. The discovery of Newton's alchemical manuscripts (containing no fewer than one million words) by the economist John Maynard Keynes at an auction at Sotheby's in 1936 partially lifted the veil. In 1947, Keynes offered his rather candid assessment of Newton's alchemical work: he "was not the first of the age of reason" but rather "the last of the magicians." *However, in the last two decades, we have come to understand and appreciate that alchemy was not simply deviant behavior by "magicians" or charlatans, but rather part and parcel of the make-up of the Scientific Revolution. Alchemy, or better, chymistry, was a central part of the early modern study of nature. One of the leaders of this historiographical revolution has been William Newman, distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University. [For more on this revolution, see my review of Lawrence Principe's book The Secrets of Alchemy in PSCF 66, no. 4 (2014): 258-59.] Newman has written several seminal books: for example, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (2006) and Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (2004). *Newton the Alchemist displays Newman's fifteen-year dedicated study of Newton's alchemical manuscripts. This is the book for anyone who wishes to understand the background, implementation, and experimentation characteristic of Newton's long and abiding interest in alchemy. Newman introduces us to a Newton who wished to be an adept alchemist (even as a student at the Free Grammar School in Grantham) and kept the alchemical fires burning throughout his life, not only in Trinity College at Cambridge University, but also as warden of the Royal Mint. Newman also shows that alchemy is not inherently unscientific or irrational, nor that Newton was an outlier. Such contemporary luminaries as Robert Boyle, Gottfried Leibniz, and John Locke were also involved in alchemical endeavors. *In the first chapter, "The Enigma of Newton's Alchemy: The Historical Reception," Newman addresses the claims of two of Newton's most illustrious interpreters: Richard Westfall and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. For Dobbs, Newton's belief in alchemical transmutation was a religious quest, with the "philosophic mercury" acting as a spirit mediating between the physical and divine realms. For Westfall, Newton's alchemical research, involving invisible forces acting at a distance, allowed him to develop his theory of universal gravitation, published in the Principia of 1687. Newman calls both claims into question based on his close reading of the extant alchemical papers, many of which Dobbs and Westfall were not able to see. Newman wishes to determine the "hidden material meaning of the text" (p. 46), rather than advance any broad metaphysical or soteriological claims on Newton's part. *In chapter 4, "Early Modern Alchemical Theory," Newman reveals how heavily influenced Newton was by European alchemists, above all by the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius. Drawing on their experiments, Newton, in the 1670s, developed an all-encompassing geochemical theory of nature, according to which the earth functions as "a 'great animall' or rather an 'inanimate vegetable'" (p. 64). In Newton's view, this process explained gravitation (among many other things), although he would abandon this idea when he came to write the Principia. *In collaboration with others, many at Indiana University, Newman has organized, read, and carefully compared Newton's alchemical manuscripts. [Readers can see the results at www.chymistry.org.] In his analysis, Newman employs an approach which he calls "experimental history." This involves at least two elements: (1) a careful textual linguistic analysis of alchemical manuscripts and their experimental details; and (2) an effort to repeat the experiments in a modern laboratory setting. To understand alchemical manuscripts is indeed a challenging undertaking involving an understanding of "materials, technology, and tacit practices," as well as deciphering "hidden terms or Decknamen" used for chemical substances, and the intricate symbols employed to designate them (see "Symbols and Conventions," pp. xi-xvii). *Newman repeated many of Newton's experiments, revealing many of his laboratory practices for the first time. The results are sometimes spectacular (see, for example, the colored plates 4-10 between pages 314 and 315). They clearly show how dedicated Newton was in his efforts to improve his knowledge of the natural world. Newman's final assessment: "Nowhere in Newton's scientific work can we see the same degree of combined textual scholarship and experiment that we encounter in his alchemy" (p. 498). *What may we learn from reading Newton the Alchemist? One thing for sure: that our contemporary scientific textbooks and enlightened culture celebrating Newton's "positive" results--the astronomical "System of the World" and his three laws of motion in mechanics--are a one-sided picture of Newton's work and life. By blithely neglecting his interests in alchemy, cabbalism (number mysticism), theology, chronology, and biblical prophecy, as well as Newton's deep sense of vocation (calling), they all too frequently divide his work into two predetermined categories: science and pseudo-science. It is certain that Newton's alchemy is not pseudo-science. History, and scientific practice as well, are never, if ever, so tidy. Newton's passionate pursuit of a coherent worldview is a reminder to us of the rich context in which science is embedded. Newman's book underscores the fact that science, our science too, is impelled by deep commitments, social and political factors, and personal ambition and motives. *Reviewed by Arie Leegwater, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.
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Nur Ulfah, Rena Al Asyifa, and Resti Afrilia. "AN ANALYSIS OF FLOUTING MAXIM IN “THE B.F.G” MOVIE." PROJECT (Professional Journal of English Education) 1, no. 5 (September 1, 2018): 687. http://dx.doi.org/10.22460/project.v1i5.p687-695.

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This research studies about flouting maxim in The B.F.G movie. The research concerns on finding the flouting maxims in The B.F.G movie. This research employed mainly descriptive qualitative method to support in interpreting and analysing the data. The data of this research were utterances produced by Sophie and BFG as main characters in The B.F.G movie. The context of the research was the dialogues of the movie. The data sources of this research were The B.F.G and its script. Meanwhile, the primary instrument of this research was the researcher ourselves. The data were collected by downloading the movie and the script, watching the movie, and then collecting the data which reflects the phenomena of maxim flouting. The paper examines the use of flouts in different situations and explores in what situations the different characters flout the maxims for any conversation. The results show that there were 10 flouting maxims of quantity (42%); 10 flouting maxims of relevance (42%); 2 flouting maxims of quality (8%); and 2 flouting maxims of manner (8%). Hence the total number of flouting maxims is 24. These results suggest that the use of flouts has to do with their different personalities and communities.Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Grice’s Maxim, Flouting MaximHow to Cite: Ulfah-1, R.A.A.N.U.-1., Afrilia, R-2. (2018). An Analysis of Fluting Maxim in BFG Movie. Project, X (X), XX-XX. INTRODUCTIONCommunication is a medium to convey meaning from one to another. As stated by Yule (2006) that communication involves word recognition and meaning recognition. There could be hidden intention in some utterances. Failing to recognize those intentions may lead to misunderstanding and even a dispute. Nevertheless, listener is not always to be in guilt. Sometimes in communication, the speaker may provide incomplete or unclear utterance hence the listener found difficulties to comprehend. Thus it is claimed that language as a tool for communication serves as an instrument to maintain a good relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Dealing with language and communication, cooperative principle proposed by Grice serves as means to achieve effective communication. It is described that speakers and listeners must give contribution as required by each other so that both of them may come to the same understanding of the meaning they are trying to convey. Grice elaborates four conversational maxims: maxim of relevance, maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, and maxim of manner. During conversation, speakers may break the rule of the maxims. The flouting of the maxims may occur in daily life or in movies. Movies as one of literary works mostly functions to entertain the audience. The flouting maxims in movies may be intentionally created to achieve the purpose of entertaining. The BFG is one fantasy adventure film released in 2016 by Walt Disney. It tells about the journey of two different species, a human (Sophie) and a giant (that Sophie called Big Friendly Giant). Since they are from different group of communities, their communication may run ineffective. This study aims at analyzing the flouting maxims occurred in The BFG movie.The Cooperative Principle Cooperative Principle is the basic principle in pragmatics. The Cooperative Principle is principle of conversation that was proposed by Grice. He called The Cooperative Principle as when we try to talk to be cooperative by elevating. He says, “make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of talk exchange in which you are engaged.” Within this principle, he intended four maxims.(Grundy, 1998) (in Ginarsih, 2014)Grice’s MaximMaxim of RelevanceMaxim of relation: This maxim may seem clear in the first look but as Grice himself mentioned it is very difficult to define it exactly: "Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately changed, and so on. I find the treatment of such questions exceedingly difficult, and I hope to revert to them in later work." Grice ( in Kheirabadi, 2012).Maxim of Quantity Maxim of quantity requires that participants of a conversation give their contribution as is required in terms of the quantity of information. To say beyond the quantity of information needed in the conversation is to break the maxim. In making their contribution to the conventional talk, participants should gauge the amount information that is really sought for and give it as much as is necessary. They should not make their contribution either more informative or less informative. (Seken, n.d.2015)Maxim of QualityMaxim of quality requires conventional participants to say things that are true or things that they believe to be true. That is, they do not say anything than they believe to be false or anything of which they do not have any evidence. In other words, to comply with this maxim, a speaker in a conventional exchange must speak on the basis of facts, or he/she must have factual evidence by which to sufficiently support what he/she says as truth. (Seken, n.d.2015)Maxim of Manner Utterances may conform to the maxims or may disobey them by infringing, opting out, and flouting or violating. The infringement of the maxims is because of the speaker‟s imperfect knowledge of linguistic. When speakers decided to be uncooperative, they opt out of observing the maxims. ( Thomas 1995 in Jafari, 2013) Maxim Flouting Flouting a maxim is the case when a speaker purposefully disobeys a maxim at the level of what is said with the deliberate intention of generating an implicature. In this case, the speaker’s choice not to observe the maxim by the words he/she utters may be related to the some motive (such as politeness, style of speaking, etc.) (Seken, n.d.2015).According to Thomas (1995:64 in Mohammed & Alduais, 2012) flouting a maxim occurs where a participant in a conversation chooses to ignore one or more of the maxims by using a conversational implicature. Ignoring maxims by using conversational implicatures means that the participant adds meaning to the literal meaning of the utterance. He further explains the conversational implicature that is added when flouting is not intended to deceive the recipient of the conversation, but the purpose is to make the recipient look for other meaning. Moreover Black (2006:25 in Mohammed & Alduais, 2012) explains that a speaker who flouts maxims is actually aware of the Cooperative Principles and the maxims. In other words, it is not only about the maxims that are broken down but that the speaker chooses an indirect way to achieve the cooperation of the communication.Types of Flouting Maxim In ( Grice’s theory in Nur & Fatmawati, 2015) there are four types of maxim flouting. They are quantity maxim flouting, quality maxim flouting, relevance maxim flouting, and manner maxim flouting. Quantity Maxim FloutingWhen a speaker flouts the maxims under the category of Quantity, she/he blatantly gives either more or less information than the situation demands.For example: A : The other giants. Are they nice, like you a nice?B : No, I regret to say that the guys would eat you alive bite. My twenty four foot, but not in Giant country, and that's where you are. In Giants country now.In the example above, it is not appropriate, because when A asks the B about another giant, B does not answer according to the question. He give more information that not needed by A.Quality Maxim Flouting Thomas (in Fami 2015:15) said that flout maxim of quality occur when the speaker say something which is blatantly untrue or for which he/she lack adequate evidence.For example:A : Not as it happens to me, it is most terrible speakB : Well, I think you speak beautifullyIn the example above, B say untrue or lie. She do this, because she doesn’t want B sad with his speaking.Relevance Maxim FloutingFlouting of maxim relevance, (Ginarsih 2014, n.d.) said that by changing the subject or by failing the address the topic directly is encountered very frequently. For example:A : You mean of my life. For the rest of my life?B : Hey, do not you cold?In this case B did not answer according to the question, B changes the topic of conversation. Manner Maxim FloutingAccording to (Ginarsih 2014, n.d.) The maxim under the category of manner is exploited by giving ambiguity and obscure expressions, failure to be brief and orderly. It is often trying to exclude a third party, as in this sort of exchange between husband and wife.A : Where are you off to?B : I was thinking of going out to get some of that funny white stuff for somebody.A : OK, but don’t be long – dinner is nearly readyB speaks in an ambiguous way, saying “that funny white stuff” and“somebody”, because he is avoiding saying “ice cream” and “her/his Daugther”, so that his little daughter does not become excited and ask for the ice cream before her meal. Sometimes the speakers play with words to heighten the ambiguity, in order to make a point.Movie(Chandra Yuliasman 2014) Movie is happen based on script, but it reflect to our daily life activity mostly. That is why the researcher interested to use movie as media to increase the researcher understanding about flouting maxim. Movie also affect masses in childhood and youth. Movie is also called a film or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. Based on the theories above, the researcher chose “The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)” as the object of the research.The B.F.GThe B.F.G is a 2016 American fantasy adventure film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Melissa Mathison and based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Roald Dahl. In the film, an orphan human girl be friends a benevolent giant, dubbed the "Big Friendly Giant", who takes her to Giant Country, where they attempt to stop the man-eating giants that are invading the human world. The writers chose The B.F.G, because in the film contain about friendship and courage, in that movie also have morality and ethics quotes. Steven Spielberg is known for his quality films, such as Jurrasic Park. He has also received three Oscars, and received a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute (AFI). Steven hooked some Hollywood actresses to play in the movie B.F.G, such as: Mark Rylance (B.F.G), Ruby Barnhill (Sophie), Penelope Wilton, Jemani Clement, Rebecca Hall, Rafe Spall, and Bill Hader. Steven Spielberg films this In the premiere of premiere The BFG managed to triumph in the Top 10 Box Office by collecting revenues of USD 31 million. Although not a chance to taste the top of the Box Office but The BFG still loved by his fans, especially for lovers of fantasy and adventure movies.METHODThis research uses a descriptive qualitative method to analyse the flouting maxim in The B.F.G movie directed by Steven Spielberg. According to Holloway (in Nur & Fatmawati, n.d.) qualitative research is a form of social inquiry focusing on the interpretation of experience and the world by people.” Therefore, this research is conducted systematically through the technique of data collecting and data analysis. The data are taken from the script, the writers analysed of flouting maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation, and maxim of manner based on Grice’s theories, being used to choose the most frequently method among them, the writer used percentage category based on Multihajz’s formula, in Selvia (2014) as follows: P = Percentage F = Frequency n = Number of Maxims RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONResultsThere are 24 conversations from 100 conversations that found in The B.F.G Movie between the main characters, Sophie and B.F.G that flouted the Grice’s cooperative principle. They flouted the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation, and the maxim of manner. In the calculation the writers employed percentage technique as described below:Table 1The Classification of Maxim:NoTypes of MaximQuantityPercentage1.The Maxim of Quantity1042 %2. The Maxim of Quality28 %3The Maxim of Relevance1042 %4The Maxim of Manner28 %Total24100 %From the classification above, it could be seen clearly that among four types of maxim in conversation between the main characters, Sophie and B.F.G in “The B.F.G” Movie, the maxim of Quantity and Relevance were the most identifiable types. First is Quantity. There are 10 conversations or cover 42 %. The second was the maxim of Relevance; there are 10 conversations or cover 42 %. The third was maxim of Quality; there are 2 conversations or cover 8 %. The fourth was the maxim of Manner; there are 2 conversations or cover 8 %. Based on the table above, here are the explanations of each maxim that the main character, Sophie and B.F.G flouted in The B.F.G Movie. The maxim of quantitySophie : The other giants. Are they nice, like you a nice?B.F.G : No, I regret to say that the guys would eat you alive bite. My twenty four foot, but not in Giant country, and that's where you are. In Giants country now.Analysis: It is not appropriate, because when Sophie asks the BFG about another giant, the BFG does not answer according to the question. He give more information that not needed by Sophie.Sophie : We can’t have secrets. I'll tell you mine. I sneak around at night too, and that still sometimes theft and lying. So I’m alone at the time. I've never had a best friend, I told you all thatB.F.G : We got over.Analysis: The BFG did not give the right reasons to reply to a statement from Sophie.Sophie : You should not let them treat you like that. You should notB.F.G : Live with nine giant eats beans. They take so I return. Murmur good dreams. It's what I can do, I do something. I do something.Analysis: The BFG ignored Sophie’s suggestion of another giant treating the BFG badly and he changed the subject.Sophie : No I’m not.B.F.G : Yes you here. If you are a human being and human being is a strawberry cream for giants. They are the prey of those giants out there, so you stay in a nice safe place right here. Analysis: BFG answer does not fit with the context of the conversation at that time.B.F.G : Someone called me a big, friendly giant. How should I call you? Sophie : My name is SophieAnalysis: Sophie does not understand about a nickname, so she just answers with her name only "Sophie".B.F.G: So you're an orphan?Sophie: Yes. You took me to an orphanage. You did not know?Analysis: Sophie did not give the right reasons to reply to a statement from B.F.G.B.F.G: I did not know that. Are you happy there?Sophie: No! I hate that. The lady who runs it is incompetent and she’s crazy rules and you get punish a lot.Analysis: In this conversation, Sophie should answer yes or no , because the question is are you happy there ?.Sophie : Being is not be ing .What is that green thing ?B.F.G : Frobscuttel. All giant drink frobscottel.Analysis: BFG answer does not fit with the context of the conversation at that time.Sophie : Where are you going now ?B.F.G : A dreams blow .It's what I do next.Analysis: BFG answer does not fit with the context of the conversation at that time. In this conversation Sophie asks where, it means that ask about place.Sophie : But why did you bring me here? Why did you take me?B.F.G : I had did to take you, because the first thing you, you would do spread the news you actually saw a giant and then there would be a big fuss and all human beans would be looking for the giant dresses all excited, and then I would be locked up in a cage to look at me with all the noisy hypo-fat and crocodiles and giraffes. And then there would be a huge hunt for all the boy giantsAnalysis: The BFG gives too much give reason to Sophie, should the BFG give Sophie a simple and precise reason for the question.The maxim of RelevanceSophie : Then, who are you? What kind of monster are you?B.F.G : You as me wrongAnalysis: BFG does not honestly reply to Shopie that he is a giant kind.Sophie : You mean of my life. For the rest of my life. B.F.G : Hey, do not you cold?Analysis: BFG did not answer according to the questionSophie : What did you work? B.F.G : And now she asks me to tell you very big secrets.Analysis: BFG did not answer according to the questionSophie : Flesh head ,he comes to eat me, my blood will be on your hands. B.F.G : Everything about you going against my better judgment.Analysis: BFG tries to make Shopie calm by diverting the conversationSophie : Look at all the stars! B.F.G : Often when it is clear I hear distant music living of the stars in the skyAnalysis: When Shopie wants to show something, BFG answer it with things that are not appropriate.Sophie: Really? B.F.G : You think I'm kidding, right? Analysis: BFG should simply answer "yes" or "no".Sophie : Are there bad dreams here too? B.F.G : It will a TrogglehumperAnalysis: BFG did not answer the question correctly.Sophie : Make them all happy. BFG, your father and your mother taught you about dreams? B.F.G : The Giants do not have mothers or fathers. Analysis: BFG should simply answer “has” or “has not”.Sophie : What is the Sophie’s dream? B.F.G : A golden Phizzwizard. I had not seen in a while. Analysis: BFG does not explain what dreams Sophie will experience.Sophie : You snapped me.B..F.G : Well, you are right. After all, you're just a little thing. I can’t help thinking what your poor mother and father must be …Analysis: BFG should simply answer "yes" and "no", and not discuss the unnecessaryThe maxim of QualityB.F.G : You do, you really do?Sophie : Simply beautifully.Analysis: In this situation of conversation, Sophie gives untrue respond to B.F.G or she lies, because she didn’t want make B.F.G sad with B.F.G’s sentence.B.F.G : Not as it happens to me, it is most terrible speak.Sophie : Well, I think you speak beautifully.Analysis: In this conversation, Sophie say untrue or lie. She did it, because she didn’t want B.F.G sad with his statement.The maxim of mannerSophie : Blood bottler ? B.F.G : Yes and butcherSophie : The butcher. Please don’t eat me.Analysis: BFG does not explain in detail about Bottler.Sophie : But then I wake up.B.F.G : And you wake up.Sophie : But not here.Analysis: There is no alignment in the conversationDiscussionThe writer found total numbers of flouting maxim that produce by main character in “The B.F.G” movie those were 24 utterances. Then divided into four types of flouting, they were quality which had 10 data or 42%, quantity had 2 data or 8%, relevance had 10 data or 42% and manner had 2 data or 8%. Thus the most frequent category of flouting maxim produce is the main character was maxim of quality and maxim of relevance. It means that in this movie, The BFG tended to conduct his flouted utterance for move the conversations. CONCLUSIONThe aim of this research is to find out the flouting maxim by the main characters in “The B.F.G” movie. The result show the most frequent category of flouting maxim by the main character was quality and relevance. It indicates that based on the maxim of quantity, there are some conversations that giving more or less information. Based on the semantics theory it is wrong, because giving more information than the need is flouting the maxim of quantity. For the maxim of relevance, there are some conversations that are not relevance, it is related with Ginarsih statement relevance maxim flouting by changing the subject or by failing the address the topic directly is encountered very frequently. There are only two flouting maxims of quality and manner was less frequent. It indicates mostly the conversation in The B.F.G movie is cooperative. It is different with the previous study, from Iniyanti, A et.al (2014) they found two flouting maxims, there are: maxim of relation and maxim of manner. And from Al-Qaderi (2015) he found that the maxim of quantity was most frequently flouted.After the research, the researcher took a conclusion that even the famous movie, the flouting maxims are can’t be avoid. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSPlace Acknowledgments, including information on the source of any financial support received for the work being published. Place Acknowledgments, including information on the source of any financial support received for the work being published.
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Wang, Yao, and YiJing Yan. "Quantum mechanics of open systems: Dissipaton theories." Journal of Chemical Physics, October 12, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0123999.

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This Perspective presents a comprehensive account of the dissipaton theories developed in our group since 2014, including the physical picture of dissipatons and the phase-space dissipaton algebra. The dissipaton- equation-of-motion-space (DEOM-space) formulations cover the Schrödinger picture, the Heisenberg picture, and further the imaginary-time DEOM. Recently developed are also the dissipaton theories for studying equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermodynamic mixing processes. The Jarzynski equality and Crooks relation are accurately reproduced numerically. It is anticipated that dissipaton theories would remain essential towards a maturation of quantum mechanics of open systems.
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25

Wild, Rachel. "I'll Give You the Sun by J. Nelson." Deakin Review of Children's Literature 5, no. 1 (July 16, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.20361/g2d60f.

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Nelson, Jandy. I'll Give You the Sun. New York: Dial Books, 2014. Print.At thirteen, twins Noah and Jude seem to share an unbreakable bond that goes beyond a typical sibling relationship. Three years later, at sixteen, they are barely speaking to each other; each holding on to secrets that could completely destroy or heal their fractured relationship.A winner of the 2015 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and a 2015 YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, I’ll Give You the Sun, is an absorbing, coming-of-age tale told from the alternating perspectives of Jude and her brother Noah. Nelson skillfully pieces together a picture of the lives of the two protagonists as they struggle to come to terms with love, loss and alienation.Nelson blends poetic phrases and description with believable dialogue creating two distinct characters that readers will quickly identify with. The voices of Noah and Jude are so finely crafted that readers will find themselves drawn to the struggles and triumphs of these two characters. The use of non-linear plot progression will keep readers absorbed until the last page.I’ll Give You the Sun is an excellent choice for the high school reader, particularly those ready to transition to adult contemporary fiction. Nelson sensitively and frankly deals with issues such as sexual abuse, sexual orientation, bullying and infidelity. Due to the themes and topics of the book, it should be considered a mature read.Readers who enjoy authors such as John Green or A.S. King will be drawn to the writing of Jandy Nelson and I’ll Follow The Sun.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Rachel WildRachel Wild is an English teacher at Parkland Composite High School in Edson, Alberta. She is currently enrolled the Teacher Librarianship Masters degree program through distance education. Reading and reviewing a plethora of young adult novels has renewed her interest in and passion for this genre.
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26

Betancourt, Michael. "The calligram and the title card." Semiotica 2015, no. 204 (January 1, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/sem-2014-0080.

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AbstractThe design of motion picture title sequences in 1930s Hollywood employs one of two approaches: (1) superimposed text where the background is independent of the typography, (2) the integration of the type and background imagery to produce a single, composite effect. The title design for the 1936 film
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27

Henderson, Neil James. "Online Persona as Hybrid-Object: Tracing the Problems and Possibilities of Persona in the Short Film Noah." M/C Journal 17, no. 3 (June 10, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.819.

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Introduction The short film Noah (2013) depicts the contemporary story of an adolescent relationship breakdown and its aftermath. The film tells the story by showing events entirely as they unfold on the computer screen of Noah, the film’s teenaged protagonist. All of the characters, including Noah, appear on film solely via technological mediation.Although it is a fictional representation, Noah has garnered a lot of acclaim within an online public for the authenticity and realism of its portrayal of computer-mediated life (Berkowitz; Hornyak; Knibbs; Warren). Judging by the tenor of a lot of this commentary, the film has keyed in to a larger cultural anxiety around issues of communication and relationships online. Many reviewers and interested commentators have expressed concern at how closely Noah’s distracted, frenetic and problematic multitasking resembles their own computer usage (Beggs; Berkowitz; Trumbore). They frequently express the belief that it was this kind of behaviour that led to the relationship breakdown depicted in the film, as Noah proves to be “a lot better at opening tabs than at honest communication” (Knibbs para. 2).I believe that the cultural resonance of the film stems from the way in which the film is an implicit attempt to assess the nature of contemporary online persona. By understanding online persona as a particular kind of “hybrid object” or “quasi-object”—a combination of both human and technological creation (Latour We Have)—the sense of the overall problems, as well as the potential, of online persona as it currently exists, is traceable through the interactions depicted within the film. By understanding social relationships as constituted through dynamic interaction (Schutz), I understand the drama of Noah to stem principally from a tension in the operation of online persona between a) the technological automation of presentation that forms a core part of the nature of contemporary online persona, and b) the need for interaction in effective relationship development. However, any attempt to blame this tension on an inherent tendency in technology is itself problematised by the film’s presentation of an alternative type of online persona, in a Chatroulette conversation depicted in the film’s second half.Persona and Performance, Mediation and DelegationMarshall (“Persona Studies” 163) describes persona as “a new social construction of identity and public display.” This new type of social construction has become increasingly common due to a combination of “changes in work, transformation of our forms of social connection and networking via new technologies, and consequent new affective clusters and micropublics” (Marshall “Persona Studies” 166). New forms of “presentational” media play a key role in the construction of persona by providing the resources through which identity is “performed, produced and exhibited by the individual or other collectives” (Marshall “Persona Studies” 160).In this formulation of persona, it is not clear how performance and presentation interlink with the related concepts of production and exhibition. Marshall’s concept of “intercommunication” suggests a classificatory scheme for these multiple registers of media and communication that are possible in the contemporary media environment. However, Marshall’s primary focus has so far been on the relationship between existing mediated communication forms, and their historical transformation (Marshall “Intercommunication”). Marshall has not as yet made clear the theoretical link between performance, presentation, production and exhibition. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can provide this theoretical link, and a way of understanding persona as it operates in an online context: as online persona.In ANT, everything that exists is an object. Objects are performative actors—the associations between objects produce the identity of objects and the way they perform. The performative actions of objects, equally, produce the nature of the associations between them (Latour Reassembling). Neither objects nor associations have a prior existence outside of their relationship to each other (Law).For Latour, the semiotic distinction between “human” and “non-human” is itself an outcome of the performances of objects and their associations. There are also objects, which Latour calls “quasi-objects” or “hybrids,” that do not fit neatly on one side of the human/non-human divide or the other (Latour We Have). Online persona is an example of such a hybrid or quasi-object: it is a combination of both human creation and technological mediation.Two concepts formulated by Latour provide some qualitative detail about the nature of the operation of Actor-Networks. Firstly, Latour emphasises that actors are also “mediators.” This name emphasises that when an actor acts to create a connection between two or more other objects, it actively transforms the way that objects encounter the performance of other objects (Latour Reassembling). This notion of mediation resembles Hassan’s definition of “media” as an active agent of transferral (Hassan). But Latour emphasises that all objects, not just communication technologies, act as mediators. Secondly, Latour describes how an actor can take on the actions originally performed by another actor. He refers to this process as “delegation.” Delegation, especially delegation of human action to a technological delegate, can render action more efficient in two ways. It can reduce the effort needed for action, causing “the transformation of a major effort into a minor one.” It can also reduce the time needed to exert effort in performing an action: the effort need not be ongoing, but can be “concentrated at the time of installation” (Latour “Masses” 229-31).Online persona, in the terminology of ANT, is a constructed, performative presentation of identity. It is constituted through a combination of human action, ongoing mediation of present human action, and the automation, through technological delegation, of previous actions. The action of the film Noah is driven by the changes in expected and actual interaction that these various aspects of persona encourage.The Problems and Potential of Online PersonaBy relaying the action entirely via a computer screen, the film Noah is itself a testament to how encounters with others solely via technological mediation can be genuinely meaningful. Relaying the action in this way is in fact creatively productive, providing new ways of communicating details about characters and relationships through the layout of the screen. For instance, the film introduces the character of Amy, Noah’s girlfriend, and establishes her importance to Noah through her visual presence as part of a photo on his desktop background at the start of the film. The film later communicates the end of the relationship when the computer boots up again, but this time with Amy’s photo notably absent from the background.However, the film deviates from a “pure” representation of a computer screen in a number of ways. Most notably, the camera frame is not static, and moves around the screen in order to give the viewer the sense that the camera is simulating Noah’s eye focus. According to the directors, the camera needed to show viewers where the focus of the action was as the story progressed. Without this indication of where to focus, it was hard to keep viewers engaged and interested in the story (Paulas).Within the story of the film itself, the sense of drama surrounding Noah’s actions similarly stem from the exploration of the various aspects of what it is and is not possible to achieve in the performance of persona – both the positive and the negative consequences. At the start of the film, Noah engages in a Skype conversation with his girlfriend Amy. While Noah is indeed “approximating being present” (Berkowitz para. 3) for the initial part of this conversation, once Noah hears an implication that Amy may want to break up with him, the audience sees his eye movements darting between Amy’s visible face in Skype and Amy’s Facebook profile, and nowhere else.It would be a mistake to think that this double focus means Noah is not fully engaging with Amy. Rather, he is engaging with two dimensions of Amy’s available persona: her Facebook profile, and her Skype presence. Noah is fully focusing on Amy at this point of the film, but the unitary persona he experiences as “Amy” is constructed from multiple media channels—one dynamic and real-time, the other comparatively stable and static. Noah’s experience of Amy is multiplexed, a unitary experience constructed from multiple channels of communication. This may actually enhance Noah’s affective involvement with Amy.It is true that at the very start of the Skype call, Noah is focusing on several unrelated activities, not just on Amy. The available technological mediators enable this division of attention. But more than that, the available technological mediators also assume in their functioning that the user’s attention can be and should be divided. Thus some of the distractions Noah experiences at this time are of his own making (e.g. the simple game he plays in a browser window), while others are to some degree configured by the available opportunity to divide one’s attention, and the assumption of others that the user will do so. One of the distractions faced by Noah comes in the form of repeated requests from his friend “Kanye East” to play the game Call of Duty. How socially obligated is Noah to respond to these requests as promptly as possible, regardless of what other important things (that his friend doesn’t know about) he may be doing?Unfortunately, and for reasons which the audience never learns, the Skype call terminates abruptly before Noah can fully articulate his concerns to Amy. With a keen eye, the audience can see that the image of Amy froze not long after Noah started talking to her in earnest. She did indeed appear to be having problems with her Skype, as her later text message suggested. But there’s no indication why Amy decided, as described in the same text message, to postpone the conversation after the Skype call failed.This is a fairly obvious example of the relatively common situation in which one actor unexpectedly refuses to co-operate with the purposes of another (Callon). Noah’s uncertainty at how to address this non-cooperation leads to the penultimate act of the film when he logs in to Amy’s Facebook account. In order to fully consider the ethical issues involved, a performative understanding of the self and of relationships is insufficient. Phenomenological understandings of the self and social relationships are more suited to ethical considerations.Online Persona and Social RelationshipsIn the “phenomenological sociology” of Alfred Schutz, consciousness is inescapably temporal, constantly undergoing slight modification by the very process of progressing through time. The constitution of a social relationship, for Schutz, occurs when two (and only two) individuals share a community of space and time, simultaneously experiencing the same external phenomena. More importantly, it also requires that these two individuals have an ongoing, mutual and simultaneous awareness of each other’s progress and development through time. Finally, it requires that the individuals be mutually aware of the very fact that they are aware of each other in this ongoing, mutual and simultaneous way (Schutz).Schutz refers to this ideal-typical relationship state as the “We-relationship,” and the communal experience that constitutes it as “growing older together.” The ongoing awareness of constantly generated new information about the other is what constitutes a social relationship, according to Schutz. Accordingly, a lack of such information exchange will lead to a weaker social bond. In situations where direct interaction does not occur, Schutz claimed that individuals would construct their knowledge of the other through “typification”: pre-learned schemas of identity of greater or lesser generality, affixed to the other based on whatever limited information may be available.In the film, when Amy is no longer available via Skype, an aspect of her persona is still available for interrogation. After the failed Skype call, Noah repeatedly refreshes Amy’s Facebook profile, almost obsessively checking her relationship status to see if it has changed from reading “in a relationship.” In the process he discovers that, not long after their aborted Skype conversation, Amy has changed her profile picture—from one that had an image of the two of them together, to one that contains an image of Amy only. He also in the process discovers that someone he does not know named “Dylan Ramshaw” has commented on all of Amy’s current and previous profile pictures. Dylan’s Facebook profile proves resistant to interrogation—Noah’s repeated, frustrated attempts to click on Dylan’s profile picture to bring up more detail yields no results. In the absence of an aspect of persona that undergoes constant temporal change, any new information attained—a profile picture changed, a not-previously noticed regular commenter discovered—seems to gain heightened significance in defining not just the current relationship status with another, but the trajectory which that relationship is taking. The “typification” that Noah constructs of Amy is that of a guilty, cheating girlfriend.The penultimate act of the film occurs when Noah chooses to log in to Amy’s Facebook account using her password (which he knows), “just to check for sketchy shit,” or so he initially claims to Kanye East. His suspicions appear to be confirmed when he discovers that private exchanges between Amy and Dylan which indicate that they had been meeting together without Noah’s knowledge. The suggestion to covertly read Amy’s private Facebook messages comes originally from Kanye East, when he asks Noah “have you lurked [covertly read] her texts or anything?” Noah’s response strongly suggests the normative uncertainty that the teenaged protagonist feels at the idea; his initial response to Kanye East reads “is that the thing to do now?” The operation of Facebook in this instance has two, somewhat contradictory, delegated tasks: let others feel connected to Amy and what she’s doing, but also protect Amy’s privacy. The success of the second goal interferes with Noah’s desire to achieve the first. And so he violates her privacy.The times that Noah’s mouse hovers and circles around a button that would send a message from Amy’s account or update Amy’s Facebook profile are probably the film’s most cringe-inducing moments. Ultimately Noah decides to update Amy’s relationship status to single. The feedback he receives to Amy’s account immediately afterwards seems to confirm his suspicions that this was what was going to happen anyway: one friend of Amy’s says “finally” in a private message, and the suspicious “Dylan” offers up a shoulder to cry on. Apparently believing that this reflects the reality of their relationship, Noah leaves the status on Amy’s Facebook profile as “single.”The tragedy of the film is that Noah’s assumptions were quite incorrect. Rather than reflecting their updated relationship status, the change revealed to Amy that he had violated her privacy. Dylan’s supposedly over-familiar messages were perfectly acceptable on the basis that Dylan was not actually heterosexual (and therefore a threat to Noah’s role as boyfriend), but gay.The Role of Technology: “It’s Complicated”One way to interpret the film would be to blame Noah’s issues on technology per se. This is far too easy. Rather, the film suggests that Facebook was to some degree responsible for Noah’s relationship issues and the problematic way in which he tried to address them. In the second half of the film, Noah engages in a very different form of online interaction via the communication service known as Chatroulette. This interaction stands in sharp contrast to the interactions that occurred via Facebook.Chatroulette is a video service that pairs strangers around the globe for a chat session. In the film, Noah experiences a fairly meaningful moment on Chatroulette with an unnamed girl on the service, who dismisses Facebook as “weird and creepy”. The sheer normative power of Facebook comes across when Noah initially refuses to believe the unnamed Chatroulette girl when she says she does not have a Facebook profile. She suggests, somewhat ironically, that the only way to have a real, honest conversation with someone is “with a stranger, in the middle of the night”, as just occurred on Chatroulette.Besides the explicit comparison between Facebook and Chatroulette in the dialogue, this scene also provides an implicit comparison between online persona as it is found on Facebook and as it is found on Chatroulette. The style of interaction on each service is starkly different. On Facebook, users largely present themselves and perform to a “micro-public” of their “friends.” They largely engage in static self-presentations, often “interacting” only through interrogating the largely static self-presentations of others. On Chatroulette, users interact with strangers chosen randomly by an algorithm. Users predominantly engage in dialogue one-on-one, and interaction tends to be a mutual, dynamic affair, much like “real life” conversation.Yet while the “real-time” dialogue possible on Chatroulette may seem more conducive to facilitating Schutz’ idea of “growing older together,” the service also has its issues. The randomness of connection with others is problematic, as the film frankly acknowledges in the uncensored shots of frontal male nudity that Noah experiences in his search for a chat partner. Also, the problematic lack of a permanent means of staying in contact with each other is illustrated by a further tragic moment in the film when the session with the unnamed girl ends, with Noah having no means of ever being able to find her again.ConclusionIt is tempting to dismiss the problems that Noah encounters while interacting via mediated communication with the exhortation to “just go out and live [… ] life in the real world” (Trumbore para. 4), but this is also over-simplistic. Rather, what we can take away from the film is that there are trade-offs to be had in the technological mediation of self-presentation and communication. The questions that we need to address are: what prompts the choice of one form of technological mediation over another? And what are the consequences of this choice? Contemporary persona, as conceived by David Marshall, is motivated by the commodification of the self, and by increased importance of affect in relationships (Marshall “Persona Studies”). In the realm of Facebook, the commodification of the self has to some degree flattened the available interactivity of the online self, in favour of what the unnamed Chatroulette girl derogatorily refers to as “a popularity contest.”The short film Noah is to some degree a cultural critique of dominant trends in contemporary online persona, notably of the “commodification of the self” instantiated on Facebook. By conceiving of online persona in the terms of ANT outlined here, it becomes possible to envision alternatives to this dominant form of persona, including a concept of persona as commodification. Further, it is possible to do this in a way that avoids the trap of blaming technology for all problems, and that recognises both the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of constructing online persona. The analysis of Noah presented here can therefore provide a guide for more sophisticated and systematic examinations of the hybrid-object “online persona.”References Beggs, Scott. “Short Film: The Very Cool ‘Noah’ Plays Out Madly on a Teenager’s Computer Screen.” Film School Rejects 11 Sep. 2013. 3 Mar. 2014. Callon, M. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Ed. John Law. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 196–223. Berkowitz, Joe. “You Need to See This 17-Minute Film Set Entirely on a Teen’s Computer Screen.” Fast Company 10 Sep. 2013. 1 Mar. 2014. Hassan, Robert. Media, Politics and the Network Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004. Hornyak, Tim. “Short Film ‘Noah’ Will Make You Think Twice about Facebook—CNET.” CNET 19 Sep. 2013. 2 Mar. 2014. Knibbs, Kate. “‘Have You Lurked Her Texts?’: How the Directors of ‘Noah’ Captured the Pain of Facebook-Era Dating.” Digital Trends 14 Sep. 2013. 9 Feb. 2014. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 225–58. Law, John. “After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology.” Actor-Network Theory and After. Ed. John Law and John Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 1–14. Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153–170. Marshall, P. David. “The Intercommunication Challenge: Developing a New Lexicon of Concepts for a Transformed Era of Communication.” ICA 2011: Proceedings of the 61st Annual ICA Conference. Boston, MA: Intrenational Communication Association, 2011. 1–25. Paulas, Rick. “Step inside the Computer Screen of ‘Noah.’” VICE 18 Jan. 2014. 8 Feb. 2014. Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. London, UK: Heinemann, 1972. Trumbore, Dave. “Indie Spotlight: NOAH - A 17-Minute Short Film from Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman.” Collider 2013. 2 Apr. 2014. Warren, Christina. “The Short Film That Takes Place Entirely inside a Computer.” Mashable 13 Sep.2013. 9 Feb. 2014. Woodman, Walter, and Patrick Cederberg. Noah. 2013.
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Mulyawan, I. Wayan. "CHARACTER’S LANGUAGE FEATURES IN ‘ILE’ BY EUGENNE O’NEIL." Lingual: Journal of Language and Culture 2, no. 1 (May 1, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.24843/ljlc.2014.v02.i01.p09.

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This study focuses on analyzing of the language features used by the main character in “Ile” drama. Drama is a literary composition involving conflict, action crisis and atmosphere designed to be acted by players on a stage before an audience. This definition may be applied to motion picture drama as well as to the traditional stage. The main questions to be answered namely what the language features of the main character are. The analysis showed that every character uses certain language features as a manifestation of their role, atitude or status
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"Avatar and Nature Spirituality." International Dialogue 4, no. 1 (November 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.id.4.1.1091.

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“To put it mildly, the world is a mess.” Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, 27 July 2014 James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) was the first film to combine stereoscopic imagining and motion-capture animation for a flawless 3-D presentation. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture, and won three, for Cinematography, Art Direction, and Visual Effects. It was also the first box-office hit to gross more than $2 billion, and it remains the highest-grossing film to date. It made cinematic history. But it was more than an aesthetic triumph. Avatar is also a cultural critique and an intellectual provocation. It’s a science-fiction about Earthlings fighting with extraterrestrials—tall, blue humanoids called the Na’vi—on a forest world called Pandora. The conflict is the old battle of good against evil, but with a twist: in Avatar, it is the aliens that are good. The human hero, the soldier Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), deserts his unit and switches sides to fight with the Na’vi against his own colony and ultimately against his own civilization.
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Guiralt Gomar, Carmen. "El Two-Color Kodachrome y su inserción en The Llight in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922): primera y única exhibición pública del proceso experimental de color en un largometraje comercial." Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía, no. 9 (September 24, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.24310/fotocinema.2014.v0i9.5963.

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El Two-Color Kodachrome fue un proceso experimental de color de la Eastman Kodak Company, inventado por John G. Capstaff (en 1913 para fotografía fija y desde finales de 1914 adaptado al celuloide), y el primer método fotoquímico de color sustractivo que se aplicó a la cinematografía. Se introdujo en un único largometraje comercial, que supuso a la vez la primera exhibición pública del sistema: The Light in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922). Pese a las buenas críticas, después quedó restringido a la experimentación dentro de la compañía y a cortometrajes. Este artículo examina el sistema de color en sí mismo, así como el modo en que se insertó en la película, de la que no han sobrevivido ni su negativo original ni la única copia que existió de ella en Kodachrome. Esto último se realiza a través de la confrontación de material de archivo inédito y de testimonios de pruebas en Kodachrome simultáneas al rodaje del film. Conocemos así cómo fueron las imágenes en color de la película y el estado de desarrollo exacto del sistema en 1922. Se examina también la evolución posterior del Kodachrome y su ausencia de éxito para su adopción por parte de los estudios de Hollywood. Abstract: Two-Color Kodachrome was a color experimental process from the Eastman Kodak Company, invented by John G. Capstaff (in 1913 for still photography and since the end of 1914 adapted to motion pictures), and it was the first photochemical method in a subtractive color system applied to cinematography. It was introduced in an only one commercial feature, which meant at the same time the first public exhibition of the system: The Light in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922). Despite obtaining good reviews, later the system was restricted to the experimentation within the company and shorts. This article examines the color system by itself, as well as the way in which the color was inserted into the film, of which neither the original negative nor the only print of it that included the Kodachrome have survived. Principio del formularioThe latter is carried out through the confrontation of unpublished archival material and examples of existing tests that were filmed in Kodachrome simultaneously to the shooting of the picture. This way we can know how the color images of the film were, as well as the exact state of development on the system in 1922. It is also examined the subsequent evolution of Kodachrome and its lack of success in being used by the Hollywood studios.Palabras clave: Two-Color Kodachrome; Kodak; John G. Capstaff; George Eastman; Jules Brulatour; The Light in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922). Keywords: Two-Color Kodachrome; Kodak; John G. Capstaff; George Eastman; Jules Brulatour; The Light in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922).
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Bespalova, Anna, Tatiana Bondarenko, and Natalya Kozlovskaya. "P0327SUCCESSFUL ACHIEVMENT OF LONG-TERM COMPLETE REMISSION OF LUPUS NEPHRITIS IN A PATIENT WITH SEVERE SYSTEMIC LUPUS ERYTHEMATOSUS AND SECONDARY INFECTIOUS COMPLICATOINS." Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 35, Supplement_3 (June 1, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfaa142.p0327.

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Abstract Background and Aims A significant contribution to the structure of mortality in SLE is made by infectious complications, which complicate the course of SLE and complicate the management of patients due to the impossibility of prescribing immunosuppressive therapy in full. Method A clinical case of successful achievement of LN remission in a patient with severe SLE and secondary APS is described, despite the development of secondary infectious complications and the inability to fully immunosuppressive therapy. Results A 42-year-old woman has been observed at the clinic from autumn 2013 to the present. Since the end of Aug.2013 she got a severe dyspnea, generalized edema, ulcers of the legs, blood pressure persistently increased to 180/110 mm Hg, diuresis decreased. Laboratory examination at admission in Oct.2013: (table 1), polyserositis, non-inclusive thrombosis of the posterior tibial vein on the left. An immunological examination: anti-dsDNA 101.6 U/L, ANA 5.2, C3 complement fragment 0.29 g/L, antibodies to beta-2-glycoprotein-1 55.7 U/ml, positive lupus anticoagulant. Intravenous methylprednisolone at a dosе of 1000 mg/day for 3 days plus high dose CYC at a dosе of 800 mg/day for 1 days was started, followed by prednisone 60 mg/day. This intravenous pulsewas repeated after 3 weeks. Renal biopsy in Nov.2013: diffuse proliferative glomerulonephritis with 7% cellular crescents, ISN/RPS class IV LN. Positive dynamics in Dec.2013 (table 1). By mid-Dec.2013, the patient had complaints of pain and limited range of motion in the right shoulder joint, the appearance of edema in this region. According to the puncture of the joint cavity, MRI, purulent arthritis of the right shoulder joint was diagnosed with the formation of intermuscular phlegmon of this area. Sepsis was diagnosed. The patient underwent emergency surgical drainage of phlegmon, followed by repeated revisions of this area. Prescribed meropenem at a dose of 3 g/day. Implementation of the complete immunosuppressive therapy protocol was impossible; a gradual decrease in the dose of prednisone per os was started. Due to the continued activity of SLE, in January 2014, a repeated intravenous pulse methylprednisolone without СYС was performed. Since Dec.2013, the patient has not received cystostatics. But despite it positive dynamics in Feb.2014 (table 1) . In Mar.2014 current treatment was hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/day, prednisone 15 mg/day, azathioprine 100 mg/twid. After 2 years of complete remission of LN in April 2016: prednisone 10 mg/day, hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/day, azathioprine 50 mg/twid. After another 2 years of complete remission of LN in 2018: prednisone 5 mg/day, hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/day. During the observation, a complete clinical and laboratory remission of SLE was noted. Laboratory examination at admission in Oct.2019: complete remission of SLE (table 1). The patient takes prednisone 5 mg/day, hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/day. The patient has limited mobility of the right shoulder joint, but complete loss of function did not occur. According to the control MRI there are the formation of aseptic necrosis of the head of the right humerus. Conclusion Infectious complications remain one of the leading causes of mortality in patients with SLE. The uniqueness of this clinical case in the successful achievement of long-term complete remission of SLE, despite the secondary infectious complications. The success of achieving long-term remission of SLE is associated with the onset of immunosuppressive therapy as soon as possible from the debut of the disease, with the conduct in the maximum allowable volumes. The morphological picture with a small % cellular crescents was also a favorable factor.
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Kuyama, N., Y. Hamatani, A. Okada, Y. Yanagi, Y. Jo, M. Amano, H. Takahama, et al. "P915Clinical characteristics, natural history and predictors of disease progression in patients with degenerative mitral stenosis." European Heart Journal 40, Supplement_1 (October 1, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehz747.0511.

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Abstract Background Mitral annular calcification (MAC) is a common echocardiographic finding and an increasingly recognized cause of degenerative mitral stenosis (DMS). However, little is known about the natural history and predictors of disease progression of DMS, especially compared with rheumatic mitral stenosis (RMS). Purpose To compare the clinical characteristics and disease progression among patients with DMS and those with RMS, and to investigate the determinants of disease progression in DMS patients. Methods We retrospectively reviewed consecutive MS patients with a trans-mitral mean gradient ≥2 mmHg who underwent echocardiography at our institution between January 2014 and December 2017. We selected patients who had an initial and follow-up echocardiography with a ≥3-month interval and without prior and interim mitral valve intervention. DMS was defined as MS with MAC with normal or minimally reduced leaflet motion without tips restriction. RMS was defined as MS with tip restriction, thickening and restriction of leaflet mainly. We defined MAC severity as mild (focal), moderate (marked density >1/3 but <1/2 of the mitral annulus) and severe (marked density involving >1/2 of the mitral annulus) based on previous reports. We calculated disease progression from the annual increase rate of trans-mitral mean gradient. First, we compared the backgrounds and disease progression between DMS group and RMS group. Second, we investigated the predictors of disease progression in DMS group. Results We enrolled 111 patients (64 in DMS group and 47 in RMS group) with a mean follow-up period of 2.1 years. Patients in DMS group were significantly older (79±9 vs. 70±10 years; P<0.01), had higher prevalence of hypertension (P<0.01) and coronary artery disease (P=0.02), and had higher plasma BNP level (P<0.01) than those in RMS group. Baseline trans-mitral mean gradient was slightly lower in DMS group than in RMS group (3.9±1.9 vs. 4.7±1.8 mmHg; P=0.02). There were wide variations among individuals in progression rate (range: 0 to 3.5 mmHg/year in DMS group and 0 to 5.8 mmHg/year in RMS group, respectively), and the progression rate was comparable between DMS group and RMS group (0.49±0.79 vs. 0.61±1.37 mmHg/year; P=0.59). In DMS group, higher prevalence of dyslipidemia (P=0.01) and lower baseline trans-mitral mean gradient (P<0.01) were significantly associated with disease progression even after adjustment for age and sex. Unexpectedly, there was no significant difference in the disease progression regardless of the MAC severity among DMS group (Picture). MAC severity and disease progression Conclusions Progression in DMS group is highly variable, but generally slow as that in RMS group. Initial mean gradient was inversely associated with disease progression in DMS group. Furthermore, baseline MAC severity did not correlate with the progression, suggesting the importance of follow-up echocardiography in spite of the MAC severity and initial mean gradient.
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Miletic, Sasa. "‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of Snowden and The Fifth Estate." M/C Journal 23, no. 4 (August 12, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1668.

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In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Wildwood Enterprises. 1976.Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. “Oliver Stone- Satire and Controversy.” 23 Mar. 2013. 30 Juy 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2gBKApxyk>.Bauman, Zygmunt. Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.Born on the 4th of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Ixtian, 1989.The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, Legendary Entertainment. 2008.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.The Fifth Estate. Dir. Bill Condon. Dreamworks, Anonymous Content (a.o.). 2013.Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. Guilford, Lyons P, 2011.Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2011.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.Moretti, Anthony. “Whistleblower or Traitor: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Power of Media Celebrity.” Moscow Readings Conference, 14-15 Nov. 2013, Moscow, Russia.North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Warner Bros., Industry Entertainment (a.o.). 2005.On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures. 1954.Oushakine, Sergei A. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 191-214.Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.
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Champion, Katherine M. "A Risky Business? The Role of Incentives and Runaway Production in Securing a Screen Industries Production Base in Scotland." M/C Journal 19, no. 3 (June 22, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1101.

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IntroductionDespite claims that the importance of distance has been reduced due to technological and communications improvements (Cairncross; Friedman; O’Brien), the ‘power of place’ still resonates, often intensifying the role of geography (Christopherson et al.; Morgan; Pratt; Scott and Storper). Within the film industry, there has been a decentralisation of production from Hollywood, but there remains a spatial logic which has preferenced particular centres, such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague often led by a combination of incentives (Christopherson and Storper; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Goldsmith et al.; Miller et al.; Mould). The emergence of high end television, television programming for which the production budget is more than £1 million per television hour, has presented new opportunities for screen hubs sharing a very similar value chain to the film industry (OlsbergSPI with Nordicity).In recent years, interventions have proliferated with the aim of capitalising on the decentralisation of certain activities in order to attract international screen industries production and embed it within local hubs. Tools for building capacity and expertise have proliferated, including support for studio complex facilities, infrastructural investments, tax breaks and other economic incentives (Cucco; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Jensen; Goldsmith et al.; McDonald; Miller et al.; Mould). Yet experience tells us that these will not succeed everywhere. There is a need for a better understanding of both the capacity for places to build a distinctive and competitive advantage within a highly globalised landscape and the relative merits of alternative interventions designed to generate a sustainable production base.This article first sets out the rationale for the appetite identified in the screen industries for co-location, or clustering and concentration in a tightly drawn physical area, in global hubs of production. It goes on to explore the latest trends of decentralisation and examines the upturn in interventions aimed at attracting mobile screen industries capital and labour. Finally it introduces the Scottish screen industries and explores some of the ways in which Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity. The paper identifies some key gaps in infrastructure, most notably a studio, and calls for closer examination of the essential ingredients of, and possible interventions needed for, a vibrant and sustainable industry.A Compulsion for ProximityIt has been argued that particular spatial and place-based factors are central to the development and organisation of the screen industries. The film and television sector, the particular focus of this article, exhibit an extraordinarily high degree of spatial agglomeration, especially favouring centres with global status. It is worth noting that the computer games sector, not explored in this article, slightly diverges from this trend displaying more spatial patterns of decentralisation (Vallance), although key physical hubs of activity have been identified (Champion). Creative products often possess a cachet that is directly associated with their point of origin, for example fashion from Paris, films from Hollywood and country music from Nashville – although it can also be acknowledged that these are often strategic commercial constructions (Pecknold). The place of production represents a unique component of the final product as well as an authentication of substantive and symbolic quality (Scott, “Creative cities”). Place can act as part of a brand or image for creative industries, often reinforcing the advantage of being based in particular centres of production.Very localised historical, cultural, social and physical factors may also influence the success of creative production in particular places. Place-based factors relating to the built environment, including cheap space, public-sector support framework, connectivity, local identity, institutional environment and availability of amenities, are seen as possible influences in the locational choices of creative industry firms (see, for example, Drake; Helbrecht; Hutton; Leadbeater and Oakley; Markusen).Employment trends are notoriously difficult to measure in the screen industries (Christopherson, “Hollywood in decline?”), but the sector does contain large numbers of very small firms and freelancers. This allows them to be flexible but poses certain problems that can be somewhat offset by co-location. The findings of Antcliff et al.’s study of workers in the audiovisual industry in the UK suggested that individuals sought to reconstruct stable employment relations through their involvement in and use of networks. The trust and reciprocity engendered by stable networks, built up over time, were used to offset the risk associated with the erosion of stable employment. These findings are echoed by a study of TV content production in two media regions in Germany by Sydow and Staber who found that, although firms come together to work on particular projects, typically their business relations extend for a much longer period than this. Commonly, firms and individuals who have worked together previously will reassemble for further project work aided by their past experiences and expectations.Co-location allows the development of shared structures: language, technical attitudes, interpretative schemes and ‘communities of practice’ (Bathelt, et al.). Grabher describes this process as ‘hanging out’. Deep local pools of creative and skilled labour are advantageous both to firms and employees (Reimer et al.) by allowing flexibility, developing networks and offsetting risk (Banks et al.; Scott, “Global City Regions”). For example in Cook and Pandit’s study comparing the broadcasting industry in three city-regions, London was found to be hugely advantaged by its unrivalled talent pool, high financial rewards and prestigious projects. As Barnes and Hutton assert in relation to the wider creative industries, “if place matters, it matters most to them” (1251). This is certainly true for the screen industries and their spatial logic points towards a compulsion for proximity in large global hubs.Decentralisation and ‘Sticky’ PlacesDespite the attraction of global production hubs, there has been a decentralisation of screen industries from key centres, starting with the film industry and the vertical disintegration of Hollywood studios (Christopherson and Storper). There are instances of ‘runaway production’ from the 1920s onwards with around 40 per cent of all features being accounted for by offshore production in 1960 (Miller et al., 133). This trend has been increasing significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the genesis of new hubs of screen activity such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague (Christopherson, “Project work in context”; Goldsmith et al.; Mould; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). This development has been prompted by a multiplicity of reasons including favourable currency value differentials and economic incentives. Subsidies and tax breaks have been offered to secure international productions with most countries demanding that, in order to qualify for tax relief, productions have to spend a certain amount of their budget within the local economy, employ local crew and use domestic creative talent (Hill). Extensive infrastructure has been developed including studio complexes to attempt to lure productions with the advantage of a full service offering (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Internationally, Canada has been the greatest beneficiary of ‘runaway production’ with a state-led enactment of generous film incentives since the late 1990s (McDonald). Vancouver and Toronto are the busiest locations for North American Screen production after Los Angeles and New York, due to exchange rates and tax rebates on labour costs (Miller et al., 141). 80% of Vancouver’s production is attributable to runaway production (Jensen, 27) and the city is considered by some to have crossed a threshold as:It now possesses sufficient depth and breadth of talent to undertake the full array of pre-production, production and post-production services for the delivery of major motion pictures and TV programmes. (Barnes and Coe, 19)Similarly, Toronto is considered to have established a “comprehensive set of horizontal and vertical media capabilities” to ensure its status as a “full function media centre” (Davis, 98). These cities have successfully engaged in entrepreneurial activity to attract production (Christopherson, “Project Work in Context”) and in Vancouver the proactive role of provincial government and labour unions are, in part, credited with its success (Barnes and Coe). Studio-complex infrastructure has also been used to lure global productions, with Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney all being seen as key examples of where such developments have been used as a strategic priority to take local production capacity to the next level (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Studies which provide a historiography of the development of screen-industry hubs emphasise a complex interplay of social, cultural and physical conditions. In the complex and global flows of the screen industries, ‘sticky’ hubs have emerged with the ability to attract and retain capital and skilled labour. Despite being principally organised to attract international production, most studio complexes, especially those outside of global centres need to have a strong relationship to local or national film and television production to ensure the sustainability and depth of the labour pool (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003). Many have a broadcaster on site as well as a range of companies with a media orientation and training facilities (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003; Picard, 2008). The emergence of film studio complexes in the Australian Gold Coast and Vancouver was accompanied by an increasing role for television production and this multi-purpose nature was important for the continuity of production.Fostering a strong community of below the line workers, such as set designers, locations managers, make-up artists and props manufacturers, can also be a clear advantage in attracting international productions. For example at Cinecitta in Italy, the expertise of set designers and experienced crews in the Barrandov Studios of Prague are regarded as major selling points of the studio complexes there (Goldsmith and O’Regan; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). Natural and built environments are also considered very important for film and television firms and it is a useful advantage for capturing international production when cities can double for other locations as in the cases of Toronto, Vancouver, Prague for example (Evans; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Szczepanik). Toronto, for instance, has doubled for New York in over 100 films and with regard to television Due South’s (1994-1998) use of Toronto as Chicago was estimated to have saved 40 per cent in costs (Miller et al., 141).The Scottish Screen Industries Within mobile flows of capital and labour, Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity through multiple interventions, including investment in institutional frameworks, direct and indirect economic subsidies and the development of physical infrastructure. Traditionally creative industry activity in the UK has been concentrated in London and the South East which together account for 43% of the creative economy workforce (Bakhshi et al.). In order, in part to redress this imbalance and more generally to encourage the attraction and retention of international production a range of policies have been introduced focused on the screen industries. A revised Film Tax Relief was introduced in 2007 to encourage inward investment and prevent offshoring of indigenous production, and this has since been extended to high-end television, animation and children’s programming. Broadcasting has also experienced a push for decentralisation led by public funding with a responsibility to be regionally representative. The BBC (“BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15”) is currently exceeding its target of 50% network spend outside London by 2016, with 17% spent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Channel 4 has similarly committed to commission at least 9% of its original spend from the nations by 2020. Studios have been also developed across the UK including at Roath Lock (Cardiff), Titanic Studios (Belfast), MedicaCity (Salford) and The Sharp Project (Manchester).The creative industries have been identified as one of seven growth sectors for Scotland by the government (Scottish Government). In 2010, the film and video sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £120 million GVA and £120 million adjusted GVA to the economy and the radio and TV sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £50 million GVA and £400 million adjusted GVA (The Scottish Parliament). Beyond the direct economic benefits of sectors, the on-screen representation of Scotland has been claimed to boost visitor numbers to the country (EKOS) and high profile international film productions have been attracted including Skyfall (2012) and WWZ (2013).Scotland has historically attracted international film and TV productions due to its natural locations (VisitScotland) and on average, between 2009-2014, six big budget films a year used Scottish locations both urban and rural (BOP Consulting, 2014). In all, a total of £20 million was generated by film-making in Glasgow during 2011 (Balkind) with WWZ (2013) and Cloud Atlas (2013), representing Philadelphia and San Francisco respectively, as well as doubling for Edinburgh for the recent acclaimed Scottish films Filth (2013) and Sunshine on Leith (2013). Sanson (80) asserts that the use of the city as a site for international productions not only brings in direct revenue from production money but also promotes the city as a “fashionable place to live, work and visit. Creativity makes the city both profitable and ‘cool’”.Nonetheless, issues persist and it has been suggested that Scotland lacks a stable and sustainable film industry, with low indigenous production levels and variable success from year to year in attracting inward investment (BOP Consulting). With regard to crew, problems with an insufficient production base have been identified as an issue in maintaining a pipeline of skills (BOP Consulting). Developing ‘talent’ is a central aspect of the Scottish Government’s Strategy for the Creative Industries, yet there remains the core challenge of retaining skills and encouraging new talent into the industry (BOP Consulting).With regard to film, a lack of substantial funding incentives and the absence of a studio have been identified as a key concern for the sector. For example, within the film industry the majority of inward investment filming in Scotland is location work as it lacks the studio facilities that would enable it to sustain a big-budget production in its entirety (BOP Consulting). The absence of such infrastructure has been seen as contributing to a drain of Scottish talent from these industries to other areas and countries where there is a more vibrant sector (BOP Consulting). The loss of Scottish talent to Northern Ireland was attributed to the longevity of the work being provided by Games of Thrones (2011-) now having completed its six series at the Titanic Studios in Belfast (EKOS) although this may have been stemmed somewhat recently with the attraction of US high-end TV series Outlander (2014-) which has been based at Wardpark in Cumbernauld since 2013.Television, both high-end production and local broadcasting, appears crucial to the sustainability of screen production in Scotland. Outlander has been estimated to contribute to Scotland’s production spend figures reaching a historic high of £45.8 million in 2014 (Creative Scotland ”Creative Scotland Screen Strategy Update”). The arrival of the program has almost doubled production spend in Scotland, offering the chance for increased stability for screen industries workers. Qualifying for UK High-End Television Tax Relief, Outlander has engaged a crew of approximately 300 across props, filming and set build, and cast over 2,000 supporting artist roles from within Scotland and the UK.Long running drama, in particular, offers key opportunities for both those cutting their teeth in the screen industries and also by providing more consistent and longer-term employment to existing workers. BBC television soap River City (2002-) has been identified as a key example of such an opportunity and the programme has been credited with providing a springboard for developing the skills of local actors, writers and production crew (Hibberd). This kind of pipeline of production is critical given the work patterns of the sector. According to Creative Skillset, of the 4,000 people in Scotland are employed in the film and television industries, 40% of television workers are freelance and 90% of film production work in freelance (EKOS).In an attempt to address skills gaps, the Outlander Trainee Placement Scheme has been devised in collaboration with Creative Scotland and Creative Skillset. During filming of Season One, thirty-eight trainees were supported across a range of production and craft roles, followed by a further twenty-five in Season Two. Encouragingly Outlander, and the books it is based on, is set in Scotland so the authenticity of place has played a strong component in the decision to locate production there. Producer David Brown began his career on Bill Forsyth films Gregory’s Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984) and has a strong existing relationship to Scotland. He has been very vocal in his support for the trainee program, contending that “training is the future of our industry and we at Outlander see the growth of talent and opportunities as part of our mission here in Scotland” (“Outlander fast tracks next generation of skilled screen talent”).ConclusionsThis article has aimed to explore the relationship between place and the screen industries and, taking Scotland as its focus, has outlined a need to more closely examine the ways in which the sector can be supported. Despite the possible gains in terms of building a sustainable industry, the state-led funding of the global screen industries is contested. The use of tax breaks and incentives has been problematised and critiques range from use of public funding to attract footloose media industries to the increasingly zero sum game of competition between competing places (Morawetz; McDonald). In relation to broadcasting, there have been critiques of a ‘lift and shift’ approach to policy in the UK, with TV production companies moving to the nations and regions temporarily to meet the quota and leaving once a production has finished (House of Commons). Further to this, issues have been raised regarding how far such interventions can seed and develop a rich production ecology that offers opportunities for indigenous talent (Christopherson and Rightor).Nonetheless recent success for the screen industries in Scotland can, at least in part, be attributed to interventions including increased decentralisation of broadcasting and the high-end television tax incentives. This article has identified gaps in infrastructure which continue to stymie growth and have led to production drain to other centres. 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35

Droumeva, Milena. "Curating Everyday Life: Approaches to Documenting Everyday Soundscapes." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (August 10, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1009.

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In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi-modal, computational “smart” media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement, and the ubiquity of technological mediation into the everyday settings of urban life. With it, a new kind of media literacy has become necessary for participation in the networked social publics (Ito; Jenkins et al.). Increasingly, the way we experience our physical environments, make sense of immediate events, and form impressions is through the lens of the camera and through the ear of the microphone, framed by the mediating possibilities of smartphones. Adopting these practices as a kind of new media “grammar” (Burn 29)—a multi-modal language for public and interpersonal communication—offers new perspectives for thinking about the way in which mobile computing technologies allow us to explore our environments and produce new types of cultural knowledge. Living in the Social Multiverse Many of us are concerned about new cultural practices that communication technologies bring about. In her now classic TED talk “Connected but alone?” Sherry Turkle talks about the world of instant communication as having the illusion of control through which we micromanage our immersion in mobile media and split virtual-physical presence. According to Turkle, what we fear is, on the one hand, being caught unprepared in a spontaneous event and, on the other hand, missing out or not documenting or recording events—a phenomenon that Abha Dawesar calls living in the “digital now.” There is, at the same time, a growing number of ways in which mobile computing devices connect us to new dimensions of everyday life and everyday experience: geo-locative services and augmented reality, convergent media and instantaneous participation in the social web. These technological capabilities arguably shift the nature of presence and set the stage for mobile users to communicate the flow of their everyday life through digital storytelling and media production. According to a Digital Insights survey on social media trends (Bennett), more than 500 million tweets are sent per day and 5 Vines tweeted every second; 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 20 billion photos have been shared on Instagram to date; and close to 7 million people actively produce and publish content using social blogging platforms. There are more than 1 billion smartphones in the US alone, and most social media platforms are primarily accessed using mobile devices. The question is: how do we understand the enormity of these statistics as a coherent new media phenomenon and as a predominant form of media production and cultural participation? More importantly, how do mobile technologies re-mediate the way we see, hear, and perceive our surrounding evironment as part of the cultural circuit of capturing, sharing, and communicating with and through media artefacts? Such questions have furnished communication theory even before McLuhan’s famous tagline “the medium is the message”. Much of the discourse around communication technology and the senses has been marked by distinctions between “orality” and “literacy” understood as forms of collective consciousness engendered by technological shifts. Leveraging Jonathan Sterne’s critique of this “audio-visual litany”, an exploration of convergent multi-modal technologies allows us to focus instead on practices and techniques of use, considered as both perceptual and cultural constructs that reflect and inform social life. Here in particular, a focus on sound—or aurality—can help provide a fresh new entry point into studying technology and culture. The phenomenon of everyday photography is already well conceptualised as a cultural expression and a practice connected with identity construction and interpersonal communication (Pink, Visual). Much more rarely do we study the act of capturing information using mobile media devices as a multi-sensory practice that entails perceptual techniques as well as aesthetic considerations, and as something that in turn informs our unmediated sensory experience. Daisuke and Ito argue that—in contrast to hobbyist high-quality photographers—users of camera phones redefine the materiality of urban surroundings as “picture-worthy” (or not) and elevate the “mundane into a photographic object.” Indeed, whereas traditionally recordings and photographs hold institutional legitimacy as reliable archival references, the proliferation of portable smart technologies has transformed user-generated content into the gold standard for authentically representing the everyday. Given that visual approaches to studying these phenomena are well underway, this project takes a sound studies perspective, focusing on mediated aural practices in order to explore the way people make sense of their everyday acoustic environments using mobile media. Curation, in this sense, is a metaphor for everyday media production, illuminated by the practice of listening with mobile technology. Everyday Listening with Technology: A Case Study The present conceptualisation of curation emerged out of a participant-driven qualitative case study focused on using mobile media to make sense of urban everyday life. The study comprised 10 participants using iPod Touches (a device equivalent to an iPhone, without the phone part) to produce daily “aural postcards” of their everyday soundscapes and sonic experiences, over the course of two to four weeks. This work was further informed by, and updates, sonic ethnography approaches nascent in the World Soundscape Project, and the field of soundscape studies more broadly. Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their media and technology use, in order to establish their participation in new media culture and correlate that to the documentary styles used in their aural postcards. With regard to capturing sonic material, participants were given open-ended instructions as to content and location, and encouraged to use the full capabilities of the device—that is, to record audio, video, and images, and to use any applications on the device. Specifically, I drew their attention to a recording app (Recorder) and a decibel measurement app (dB), which combines a photo with a static readout of ambient sound levels. One way most participants described the experience of capturing sound in a collection of recordings for a period of time was as making a “digital scrapbook” or a “media diary.” Even though they had recorded individual (often unrelated) soundscapes, almost everyone felt that the final product came together as a stand-alone collection—a kind of gallery of personalised everyday experiences that participants, if anything, wished to further organise, annotate, and flesh out. Examples of aural postcard formats used by participants: decibel photographs of everyday environments and a comparison audio recording of rain on a car roof with and without wipers (in the middle). Working with 139 aural postcards comprising more than 250 audio files and 150 photos and videos, the first step in the analysis was to articulate approaches to media documentation in terms of format, modality, and duration as deliberate choices in conversation with dominant media forms that participants regularly consume and are familiar with. Ambient sonic recordings (audio-only) comprised a large chunk of the data, and within this category there were two approaches: the sonic highlight, a short vignette of a given soundscape with minimal or no introduction or voice-over; and the process recording, featuring the entire duration of an unfolding soundscape or event. Live commentaries, similar to the conventions set forth by radio documentaries, represented voice-over entries at the location of the sound event, sometimes stationary and often in motion as the event unfolded. Voice memos described verbal reflections, pre- or post- sound event, with no discernable ambience—that is, participants intended them to serve as reflective devices rather than as part of the event. Finally, a number of participants also used the sound level meter app, which allowed them to generate visual records of the sonic levels of a given environment or location in the form of sound level photographs. Recording as a Way of Listening In their community soundwalking practice, Förnstrom and Taylor refer to recording sound in everyday settings as taking world experience, mediating it through one’s body and one’s memories and translating it into approximate experience. The media artefacts generated by participants as part of this study constitute precisely such ‘approximations’ of everyday life accessed through aural experience and mediated by the technological capabilities of the iPod. Thinking of aural postcards along this technological axis, the act of documenting everyday soundscapes involves participants acting as media producers, ‘framing’ urban everyday life through a mobile documentary rubric. In the process of curating these documentaries, they have to make decisions about the significance and stylistic framing of each entry and the message they wish to communicate. In order to bring the scope of these curatorial decisions into dialogue with established media forms, in this work’s analysis I combine Bill Nichols’s classification of documentary modes in cinema with Karin Bijsterveld’s concept of soundscape ‘staging’ to characterise the various approaches participants took to the multi-modal curation of their everyday (sonic) experience. In her recent book on the staging of urban soundscapes in both creative and documentary/archival media, Bijsterveld describes the representation of sound as particular ‘dramatisations’ that construct different kinds of meanings about urban space and engender different kinds of listening positions. Nichols’s articulation of cinematic documentary modes helps detail ways in which the author’s intentionality is reflected in the styling, design, and presentation of filmic narratives. Michel Chion’s discussion of cinematic listening modes further contextualises the cultural construction of listening that is a central part of both design and experience of media artefacts. The conceptual lens is especially relevant to understanding mobile curation of mediated sonic experience as a kind of mobile digital storytelling. Working across all postcards, settings, and formats, the following four themes capture some of the dominant stylistic dimensions of mobile media documentation. The exploratory approach describes a methodology for representing everyday life as a flow, predominantly through ambient recordings of unfolding processes that participants referred to in the final discussion as a ‘turn it on and forget it’ approach to recording. As a stylistic method, the exploratory approach aligns most closely with Nichols’s poetic and observational documentary modes, combining a ‘window to the world’ aesthetic with minimal narration, striving to convey the ‘inner truth’ of phenomenal experience. In terms of listening modes reflected in this approach, exploratory aural postcards most strongly engage causal listening, to use Chion’s framework of cinematic listening modes. By and large, the exploratory approach describes incidental documentaries of routine events: soundscapes that are featured as a result of greater attentiveness and investment in the sonic aspects of everyday life. The entries created using this approach reflect a process of discovering (seeing and hearing) the ordinary as extra-ordinary; re-experiencing sometimes mundane and routine places and activities with a fresh perspective; and actively exploring hidden characteristics, nuances of meaning, and significance. For instance, in the following example, one participant explores a new neighborhood while on a work errand:The narrative approach to creating aural postcards stages sound as a springboard for recollecting memories and storytelling through reflecting on associations with other soundscapes, environments, and interactions. Rather than highlighting place, routine, or sound itself, this methodology constructs sound as a window into the identity and inner life of the recordist, mobilising most strongly a semantic listening mode through association and narrative around sound’s meaning in context (Chion 28). This approach combines a subjective narrative development with a participatory aesthetic that draws the listener into the unfolding story. This approach is also performative, in that it stages sound as a deeply subjective experience and approaches the narrative from a personally significant perspective. Most often this type of sound staging was curated using voice memo narratives about a particular sonic experience in conjunction with an ambient sonic highlight, or as a live commentary. Recollections typically emerged from incidental encounters, or in the midst of other observations about sound. In the following example a participant reminisces about the sound of wind, which, interestingly, she did not record: Today I have been listening to the wind. It’s really rainy and windy outside today and it was reminding me how much I like the sound of wind. And you know when I was growing up on the wide prairies, we sure had a lot of wind and sometimes I kind of miss the sound of it… (Participant 1) The aesthetic approach describes instances where the creation of aural postcards was motivated by a reduced listening position (Chion 29)—driven primarily by the qualities and features of the soundscape itself. This curatorial practice for staging mediated aural experience combines a largely subjective approach to documenting with an absence of traditional narrative development and an affective and evocative aesthetic. Where the exploratory documentary approach seeks to represent place, routine, environment, and context through sonic characteristics, the aesthetic approach features sound first and foremost, aiming to represent and comment on sound qualities and characteristics in a more ‘authentic’ manner. The media formats most often used in conjunction with this approach were the incidental ambient sonic highlight and the live commentary. In the following example we have the sound of coffee being made as an important domestic ritual where important auditory qualities are foregrounded: That’s the sound of a stovetop percolator which I’ve been using for many years and I pretty much know exactly how long it takes to make a pot of coffee by the sound that it makes. As soon as it starts gurgling I know I have about a minute before it burns. It’s like the coffee calls and I come. (Participant 6) The analytical approach characterises entries that stage mediated aural experience as a way of systematically and inductively investigating everyday phenomena. It is a conceptual and analytical experimental methodology employed to move towards confirming or disproving a ‘hypothesis’ or forming a theory about sonic relations developed in the course of the study. As such, this approach most strongly aligns with Chion’s semantic listening mode, with the addition of the interactive element of analytical inquiry. In this context, sound is treated as a variable to be measured, compared, researched, and theorised about in an explicit attempt to form conclusions about social relationships, personal significance, place, or function. This analytical methodology combines an explicit and critical focus to the process of documenting itself (whether it be measuring decibels or systematically attending to sonic qualities) with a distinctive analytical synthesis that presents as ‘formal discovery’ or even ‘truth.’ In using this approach, participants most often mobilised the format of short sonic highlights and follow-up voice memos. While these aural postcards typically contained sound level photographs (decibel measurement values), in some cases the inquiry and subsequent conclusions were made inductively through sustained observation of a series of soundscapes. The following example is by a participant who exclusively recorded and compared various domestic spaces in terms of sound levels, comparing and contrasting them using voice memos. This is a sound level photograph of his home computer system: So I decided to record sitting next to my computer today just because my computer is loud, so I wanted to see exactly how loud it really was. But I kept the door closed just to be sort of fair, see how quiet it could possibly get. I think it peaked at 75 decibels, and that’s like, I looked up a decibel scale, and apparently a lawn mower is like 90 decibels. (Participant 2) Mediated Curation as a New Media Cultural Practice? One aspect of adopting the metaphor of ‘curation’ towards everyday media production is that it shifts the critical discourse on aesthetic expression from the realm of specialised expertise to general practice (“Everyone’s a photographer”). The act of curation is filtered through the aesthetic and technological capabilities of the smartphone, a device that has become co-constitutive of our routine sensorial encounters with the world. Revisiting McLuhan-inspired discourses on communication technologies stages the iPhone not as a device that itself shifts consciousness but as an agent in a media ecology co-constructed by the forces of use and design—a “crystallization of cultural practices” (Sterne). As such, mobile technology is continuously re-crystalised as design ‘constraints’ meet both normative and transgressive user approaches to interacting with everyday life. The concept of ‘social curation’ already exists in commercial discourse for social web marketing (O’Connell; Allton). High-traffic, wide-integration web services such as Digg and Pinterest, as well as older portals such as Reddit, all work on the principles of arranging user-generated, web-aggregated, and re-purposed content around custom themes. From a business perspective, the notion of ‘social curation’ captures, unsurprisingly, only the surface level of consumer behaviour rather than the kinds of values and meaning that this process holds for people. In the more traditional sense, art curation involves aesthetic, pragmatic, epistemological, and communication choices about the subject of (re)presentation, including considerations such as manner of display, intended audience, and affective and phenomenal impact. In his 2012 book tracing the discourse and culture of curating, Paul O’Neill proposes that over the last few decades the role of the curator has shifted from one of arts administrator to important agent in the production of cultural experiences, an influential cultural figure in her own right, independent of artistic content (88). Such discursive shifts in the formulation of ‘curatorship’ can easily be transposed from a specialised to a generalised context of cultural production, in which everyone with the technological means to capture, share, and frame the material and sensory content of everyday life is a curator of sorts. Each of us is an agent with a unique aesthetic and epistemological perspective, regardless of the content we curate. The entire communicative exchange is necessarily located within a nexus of new media practices as an activity that simultaneously frames a cultural construction of sensory experience and serves as a cultural production of the self. To return to the question of listening and a sound studies perspective into mediated cultural practices, technology has not single-handedly changed the way we listen and attend to everyday experience, but it has certainly influenced the range and manner in which we make sense of the sensory ‘everyday’. Unlike acoustic listening, mobile digital technologies prompt us to frame sonic experience in a multi-modal and multi-medial fashion—through the microphone, through the camera, and through the interactive, analytical capabilities of the device itself. Each decision for sensory capture as a curatorial act is both epistemological and aesthetic; it implies value of personal significance and an intention to communicate meaning. The occurrences that are captured constitute impressions, highlights, significant moments, emotions, reflections, experiments, and creative efforts—very different knowledge artefacts from those produced through textual means. Framing phenomenal experience—in this case, listening—in this way is, I argue, a core characteristic of a more general type of new media literacy and sensibility: that of multi-modal documenting of sensory materialities, or the curation of everyday life. References Allton, Mike. “5 Cool Content Curation Tools for Social Marketers.” Social Media Today. 15 Apr. 2013. 10 June 2015 ‹http://socialmediatoday.com/mike-allton/1378881/5-cool-content-curation-tools-social-marketers›. Bennett, Shea. “Social Media Stats 2014.” Mediabistro. 9 June 2014. 20 June 2015 ‹http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-statistics-2014_b57746›. Bijsterveld, Karin, ed. Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013. Burn, Andrew. Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Daisuke, Okabe, and Mizuko Ito. “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy.” Japan Media Review. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.dourish.com/classes/ics234cw04/ito3.pdf›. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994. Förnstrom, Mikael, and Sean Taylor. “Creative Soundwalks.” Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship Symposium. Limerick, Ireland. 27–29 March 2014. Ito, Mizuko, ed. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. Jenkins, Henry, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. White Paper prepared for the McArthur Foundation, 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Nichols, Brian. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2001. Nielsen. “State of the Media – The Social Media Report.” Nielsen 4 Dec. 2012. 12 May 2015 ‹http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2012/state-of-the-media-the-social-media-report-2012.html›. O’Connel, Judy. “Social Content Curation – A Shift from the Traditional.” 8 Aug. 2011. 11 May 2015 ‹http://judyoconnell.com/2011/08/08/social-content-curation-a-shift-from-the-traditional/›. O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London, UK: Sage, 2007. ———. Situating Everyday Life. London, UK: Sage, 2012. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Schafer, R. Murray, ed. World Soundscape Project. European Sound Diary (reprinted). Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1977. Turkle, Sherry. “Connected But Alone?” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together?language=en›.
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Burford, James. "“Dear Obese PhD Applicants”: Twitter, Tumblr and the Contested Affective Politics of Fat Doctoral Embodiment." M/C Journal 18, no. 3 (June 10, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.969.

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It all started with a tweet. On the afternoon of 2 June 2013, Professor Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and visiting instructor at New York University (NYU), tweeted out a message that would go on to generate a significant social media controversy. Addressing aspiring doctoral program applicants, Miller wrote:Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truthThe response to Miller’s tweet was swift and fiery. Social media users began engaging with him on Twitter, and in the early hours of the controversy Miller defended the tweet. When one critic described his message as “judgmental,” Miller replied that doing a dissertation is “about willpower/conscientiousness, not just smarts” (Trotter). The tweet above, now screen captured, was shared widely and debated by journalists, Fat Acceptance activists, and academic social media users. Within hours Miller had deleted the tweet and replaced it with two new ones:My sincere apologies to all for that idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged tweet. It does not reflect my true views, values, or standards andObviously my previous tweet does not represent the selection policies of any university, or my own selection criteriaHe then made his Twitter account private. The captured image, however, continued to spread. Across social media, users began to circulate a campaign that called for Miller to be formally disciplined (Trotter). There was also widespread talk about potential lawsuits from prospective students who were not selected for admission at UNM (Kirby). Indeed, the Fat Chick Sings blogger Jeanette DePatie offered her own advice to Miller: #findagoodlawyer.Soon after the controversy emerged a response appeared on UNM’s website in the form of a video statement by Professor Jane Ellen Smith, the Chair of the UNM Psychology Department. Smith reiterated that Miller’s statements did not reflect the “policies and admissions standards of UNM”. She also stated that Miller had defended his actions by claiming the tweet was part of a “research project” where he would deliberately send out provocative messages in order to measure the public response to them. This claim was met with incredulity by a number of bloggers and columnists, and was later determined to be incorrect in an Institutional Review Board inquiry at UNM, which concluded Miller’s tweets were “self-promotional” in nature. Following a formal investigation, the UNM committee found no evidence that Miller had discriminated against overweight students. It did however pass a motion of censure that included a number of restrictions, including prohibiting Miller from sitting on any graduate admission committee at UNM.The #truth about Fat PhDs?Readers may be wondering why Miller’s tweet continues to matter as I write this article in 2015. It is my belief that the tweet is important insofar as it affords an insight into the cultural scene that surrounds the fat body in higher education. The vigorous debate generated by Miller’s tweet offers researchers a diverse array of media texts that are available to help build a more comprehensive picture of fat embodiment within higher education.Looking at the tweet in the cold light of day it is difficult to imagine any logical links one might infer between a person’s carbohydrate consumption and their ability to excel in doctoral education. And there’s the rub. Of course Miller’s tweet does not represent a careful evaluation of the properties of doctoral willpower. In order to make sense of the tweet we need to understand the ways cultural assumptions about fatness operate. For decades now, researchers have documented the existence of anti-fat attitudes (Crandall & Martinez). Increasingly, scholars and Fat Acceptance activists have described a “thinness norm” that is reproduced across contemporary Western cultures, which discerns normatively slender bodies as “both healthy and beautiful” (Eller 220) and those whose bodies depart from this norm, as “socially acceptable targets for shaming and hate speech” (Eller 220). In order to be intelligible Miller’s tweet relies on a number of deeply entrenched cultural meanings attributed to fatness and fat people.The first is that body-size is primarily a matter of self-control. Although Critical Fat Studies researchers have argued for some time that body weight is determined by complex interactions between the biological and environmental, the belief that a large body size is caused by limited self-control remains prevalent. This in turn supports a host of cultural connotations, which tend to constitute fat people as “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly and lacking in willpower” (Farrell 4).In light of the above, Miller’s message ought to be read as a moral one. I have paraphrased its logic as such: if you [the fat doctoral student] lack the willpower to discipline your body into normatively desired slimness, you will also likely lack the strength of character required to discipline your body-mind into producing a doctoral dissertation. The sad irony here is that, if anything, the attitudes that might hamper fat students from pursuing a doctoral education would be those espoused in Miller’s own tweet. As Critical Fat Studies researchers have illuminated, the anti-fat attitudes the tweet reproduces generate challenging higher education climates for fat people to navigate (Pausé, Express Yourself 6).Indeed, while Miller’s tweet is one case that arose to media prominence, there is evidence that it sits inside a wider pattern of weight discrimination within higher education. For example, Caning and Mayer (“Obesity: Its Possible”, “Obesity: An Influence”) found that despite similar high school performances, ‘obese’ students were less likely to be accepted to elite universities, than their non-obese peers. In a more recent US-based study, Burmeister and colleagues found evidence of weight bias in graduate school admissions. In particular, they found that higher body mass index (BMI) applicants received fewer post-interview offers into psychology graduate programs than other students (920), and this relationship appeared to be stronger for female applicants (920). This picture is supported by a study by Swami and Monk, who examined weight bias against women in a hypothetical scenario about university acceptance. In this study, 198 volunteers in the UK were asked to identify the women they were most and least likely to select for a place at university. Swami and Monk found that participants were biased against fat women, a finding which the authors interpreted as evidence of broader public beliefs about body size and access to higher education.In my examination of the media scene surrounding the Miller case I observed that most commentators associated the tweet with a particular affective formation – shame. Miller’s actions were widely described as “fat-shaming” (Bennet-Smith; Ingeno; Martin; Trotter; Walsh) with Miller himself often referred to simply as the “fat-shaming professor” (King; ThinkTank). In this article I wish to consider the affective-political dimensions of Miller’s tweet, by focusing on one digital community’s response to it: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. In following this path I am building on the work of other researchers who have considered fat activisms and Web 2.0 (Pausé, Express Yourself); fat visual activism (Gurrieri); and the emotional politics of fat acceptance blogging (Kargbo; Bronstein).Imaging Alternatives: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDsBy 3 June 2013 – just one day after Miller’s tweet was published – New Zealand-based academic Cat Pausé had created the Tumblr Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. This was billed as a photo-blog about “being fatlicious in academia”. Writing on her Friend of Marilyn blog, Pausé explained the rationale behind the Tumblr:I decided that what I wanted to do was to highlight all the amazing fat individuals who are in graduate school, or have completed graduate school – to provide a visual repository … and to celebrate the amazing work being done by these rad fatties!Pausé sent out calls for participants on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and emailed a Fat Studies listserv. She asked submitters to send “a photo, along with their name, degree, and awarding institution” (Pausé Express Yourself, 6). Images were submitted thick and fast. Twenty-three were published in the first day of the project, and twenty in the second. At the time of writing, just over 150 images had been submitted, the most recent being November 2013.The Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs project ought to be understood as part the turn away from the textual toward the digital in fat activist movements (Kargbo). This has seen a growth in online communities that are interested in developing “counter-images in response to the fat body’s position as the abject, excluded Other of the socially acceptable body” (Kargbo 162). Examples include a multitude of Fatshion photo-blogs, Tumblrs like Exciting Fat People or the Stocky Bodies image library, which responds to the limited diversity of visual representations of fat people in the mainstream media (Gurrieri).For this article, I have read the images on the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr in order to gain an impression about the affective-political work accomplished by this collective of self-identified fat academic bodies. As I indicated earlier, much of the commentary following Miller’s tweet characterised it as an attempt to ‘shame’ fat doctoral students. As Elspeth Probyn has identified, shame frequently manifests itself on the body “most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away and to cover yourself” (Probyn 329). I suggest that the core work of the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr is to address the spectre of shame Miller’s tweet projects with visibility, rather than it’s opposite. This visibility also enables the project to proliferate a host of different ways of (feeling about) being fat and doctoral.The first image posted on the Tumblr is Pausé’s own. She is pictured smiling at the 2007 graduation ceremony where she received her own PhD, surrounded by fellow graduates in academic regalia. Her image is followed by many others, mostly white women, who attest to the academic attainments of fat individuals. My first impression as I scrolled through the Tumblr was to note that many of the images (51) referenced scenes of graduation, where subjects wore robes, caps or posed with higher degree certificates. Many more were the kinds of photographs that one might expect to be taken at an academic event. Together, these images attest to the viability of the living, breathing doctoral body - a particularly relevant response given Miller’s tweet. This work to legitimate the fat doctoral body was also accomplished through the submission of two historical photographs of Albert Einstein, a figure who is neither living nor breathing, but highly unlikely to be described as lacking academic ability or willpower.As I read through the Tumblr subsequent times, I noticed that many of the submitters offered images that challenge stereotypical representations of the fat body. As a number of writers have noted, fat people tend to be visually represented as “solitary, lonely figures whose expressions are downcast and dejected” (Gurrieri 202). That is if they aren’t already decapitated in the visual convention of the “headless fatty” used across news media (Kargbo 160). Like the Stocky Bodies project, the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr facilitated a more diverse and less pathologising representation of fat (doctoral) embodiment.Across the images there is little evidence of the downcast eyes of shame and dejection that Miller’s tweet seems to invite of aspiring fat doctoral candidates. Scrolling through the Tumblr one encounters images of fat people singing, swimming, creating art, playing sport, smoking, smiling, dressing up, and making music. A number of images (12) emphasise the social nature of fat doctoral life, by picturing multiple subjects at once, some holding hands, others posing with colleagues, loved ones, and a puppy. Another category of submissions took a playful stance vis-à-vis some representational conventions of imaging fatness. Where portrayals of the fat body from side or rear angles, or images of fat people eating and drinking typically code an affective scene of disgust (Gurrieri), a number of images on the Tumblr appear to reinscribe these scenes with new meaning. Viewers are offered pictures of smiling and contented fat graduates unashamed to eat and drink, or be represented from ‘unflattering’ angles.Furthermore, a number of images offered alternatives to the conventional representation of the fat subject as ugly and sexually unattractive by posing in glamorous shots bubbling with allure and desire. In one memorable picture, blogger and educator Virgie Tovar is snapped wearing a “sex instructor” badge and laughs while holding two sex toys.Reading across the images it becomes clear that the Tumblr offers a powerful response to the visual convention of representing the solitary, lonely fat person. Rather than presenting isolated fat doctoral students the act of holding the images together generates a sense of fat higher education community, as Kargbo notes:A single image posted online amidst vast Internet ephemera is just a fleeting document of a moment in a stranger’s life. But in the plural, as one scrolls through hundreds of images eager to hit the ‘next’ button for what will be a repetition of the same, the image takes on a new function: it becomes an insistent testament to the liveness of fat embodiment in the present. (164)Obesity Timebomb blogger Charlotte Cooper (2013) commented on the significance of the project: “It is pretty amazing to see the names and faces as I scroll through Fuck yeah! Fat PhDs. Many of us are friends and collaborators and the site represents a new community of power.”Concluding Thoughts: Fat Embodiment and Higher Education CulturesThis article has examined a cultural event that that saw the figure of the fat doctoral student rise to international media prominence in 2013. I have argued that while Miller’s tweet can be read as illustrative of the affective scene of shame that surrounds the fat body in higher education, the images offered by the Fuck Yeah! photo submitters work to re-negotiate implication in social discourses of abjection. Indeed, the images assert that alternative ways of feeling about being fat and doctoral remain viable. Fat students can be contented, ambivalent, sultry, pissed off, passionate and proud – and Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs provides submitters with a platform to perform a wide array of these affects. This is not to say that shame is shut out of the project, or the lives of submitters’ altogether. Instead, I am suggesting that the Tumblr generates a more open field of possibilities, providing “a space for re-imagining new forms of attachments and identifications.” (Kargbo 171). Critics might argue that this Tumblr is not particularly novel when set in the context of a range of fat photo-blogs that have sprung up across the Internet in recent years. I would argue, however, that when we consider the kinds of questions Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs might ask of university cultures, and the prompts it offers to higher education researchers, the Tumblr can be seen to make an important contribution. I am in agreement with Kargbo (2013) when she argues that fat photo-blogs “have the potential to alter the conditions of visual reception and perception”. That is, through their “codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person” (Singer 602). When read together, the Fuck Yeah! images insist that a different kind of relationship to fat PhDs is possible, one that exceeds the shaming visible in Miller’s tweet. Ultimately then, the Tumblr is a call to take fat doctoral students seriously, not as problems in need of fixing, but as a diverse group of scholars who make important contributions to the academy and beyond.I would like to use the occasion of concluding this article to call for further conversations about fat embodiment and higher education cultures. The area is significantly under-researched, with higher education scholars largely failing to engage with the material and affective experiences of fat embodiment. Indeed, I would argue that if nothing else, this paper has demonstrated that public scenes of knowledge creation have done a much more comprehensive job of analysing the intersection of ‘fat + university’ than academic books and articles to date. While not offering an exhaustive sketch, I would like to gesture toward some areas that might contribute to a future research agenda. For example, researchers might begin to approach the experience of living, working and studying as a fat person in the contemporary university. Such research might examine whose body the university is imagined and designed for, as well as the campus climate experienced by fat individuals. Researchers might consider how body size could become a part of broader conversations about embodiment and privilege in higher education, alongside race, ability, gender identity, and other categories of social difference.Thinking about the intersection of ‘fat + university’ would also involve tracing possibilities. For example, what role do university campuses play as spaces of fat activism and solidarity? And, what is the contribution made by Critical Fat Studies as a newly established interdisciplinary field of inquiry?Taken together, I hope the questions I have raised in this article demonstrate that the intersection of ‘fat’ and higher education cultures represents a rich and valuable area that warrants further inquiry.ReferencesBennet-Smith, Meredith. “Geoffrey Miller, Visiting NYU Professor, Slammed for Fat-Shaming Obese PhD Candidates.” 6 Apr. 2013. The Huffington Post. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/geoffrey-miller-fat-shaming-nyu-phd_n_3385641.html›.Bronstein, Carolyn. “Fat Acceptance Blogging, Female Bodies and the Politics of Emotion.” Feral Feminisms 3 (2015): 106-118. Burmeister, Jacob, Allison Kiefner, Robert Carels, and Dara Mushner-Eizenman. “Weight Bias in Graduate School Admissions.” Obesity 21 (2013): 918-920.Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: Its Possible Effect on College Acceptance.” The New England Journal of Medicine 275 (1966): 1172-1174. Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: An Influence on High School Performance.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20 (1967): 352-354. Cooper, Charlotte. “The Curious Case of Dr. Miller and His Tweet.” Obesity Timebomb 4 June 2013. ‹http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-curious-case-of-dr-miller-and-his.html›.Crandall, Christian, and Rebecca Martinez. “Culture, Ideology, and Antifat Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 1165-1176.DePatie, Jeanette. “Dear Dr. Terrible Your Bigotry Is Showing...” The Fat Chick Sings 2 June 2013. ‹http://fatchicksings.com/2013/06/02/dear-dr-terrible-your-bigotry-is-showing/›.Eller, G.M. “On Fat Oppression.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (2014): 219-245. Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Gurrieri, Lauren. “Stocky Bodies: Fat Visual Activism.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 197-209. Ingeno, Lauren. “Fat-Shaming in Academe.” Inside Higher Ed 4 June 2013. Kargbo, Majida. “Toward a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 160-172.King, Barbara. “The Fat-Shaming Professor: A Twitter-Fueled Firestorm.” Cosmos & Culture 13.7 (2013) Kirby, Marianne. “How Not to Twitter: Dr. Geoffrey Miller's 140 Fat-Hating Characters of Infamy.” XoJane 5 June 2013. ‹http://www.xojane.com/issues/professor-geoffrey-miller›.Martin, Adam. “NYU Professor Immediately Regrets Fat-Shaming Potential Students.” New York Magazine June 2013. ‹http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nyu-professor-immediately-regrets-fat-shaming.html›.Pausé, Cat. “On That Tweet – Fat Discrimination in the Education Sector.” Friend of Marilyn 5 June 2013. ‹http://friendofmarilyn.com/2013/06/05/on-that-tweet-fat-discrimination-in-the-education-sector/›.Pausé, Cat. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. New York: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 1-8. Probyn, Elspeth. “Everyday Shame.” Cultural Studies 18.2-3 (2004): 328-349. Singer, T. Benjamin. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)viewing Non-Normative Body Images.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2013. 601-620. Swami, Viren, and Rachael Monk. “Weight Bias against Women in a University Acceptance Scenario.” Journal of General Psychology 140.1 (2013): 45-56.Sword, Helen. “The Writer’s Diet.” ‹http://writersdiet.com/WT.php?home›.ThinkTank. “'Fat Shaming Professor' Gives RIDICULOUS Excuse – Check This Out (Update).” ThinkTank 8 July 2013. ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ey9TkG18-o›.Trotter, J.K. “How Twitter Schooled an NYU Professor about Fat-Shaming.” The Atlantic Wire 2013. ‹http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/06/how-twitter-schooled-nyu-professor-about-fat-shaming/65833/›.Walsh, Michael. “NYU Visiting Professor Insults the Obese Ph.D.s with ‘Impulsive’ Tweet.” New York Daily News 2013.
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Lawrence, Robert. "Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art." M/C Journal 21, no. 1 (March 14, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1374.

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Abstract:
We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.
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38

Trofimova, Evija, and Sophie Nicholls. "On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page." M/C Journal 21, no. 4 (October 15, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1450.

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IntroductionTwo writers, stuck in our university offices, decide to take our thoughts “for a walk” across the page. Writing from Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, and Auckland, New Zealand, we are separated by 18,000 kilometres and 11 hours, and yet here, on the page, our paths meet. How does walking, imaginary or real, affect our thinking? How do the environments through which we move, and the things we see along the way, influence our writing? What role do rhythm and pace play in the process? We invite you to join us on two short walks that reflect on our shared challenges as writers from two different strands of writing studies. Perhaps our paths will intersect, or even overlap, with yours somewhere? Ultimately, we aim to find out what happens when we leave our academic baggage behind, side-stepping dense theoretical arguments and comprehensive literature reviews for a creative-critical exploration. Evija: Let’s admit it, Sophie—I’m stuck. I’ve spent half a day in front of this computer but have hardly typed a line. It’s not just writing. It’s my thinking. I feel like my mind is weighed down by the clutter of thoughts that lead nowhere.Look at my surroundings. My office is crammed with stuff. So many thoughts buried under piles of paper, insisting on their place in the work in which they so obviously do not belong. I also can’t help but feel the magnetic pull of others’ ideas from all the books around me. Each thought, each reference, fights for its place in my work. What an unbearable intertextual mess...Sophie: I think that everyone who has ever tried to write knows exactly what these moments feel like. We can feel so lost, so stuck and blocked. Have you ever noticed that the words that we use about these feelings are intensely visceral? Perhaps that’s why, when the words won’t come, so many of us find it helpful to get up and move our bodies. Evija, shall we leave our desks behind for a while and go for a walk? Would you like to join me?E: Most certainly! Apparently, Friedrich Nietzsche loved to take his mind for a walk (Gros). Ideas, born among books, says Frédéric Gros, “exude the stuffy odour of libraries” (18). Gros describes such books as “grey”: “overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations” (19). They fail to say anything new and are “crammed”, “stuffed”, and “weighed down”; they are “born of a compilation of the other books” (Gros 19) so also bear their weight. Essentially, we are told, we should think of the books we are writing as “expression[s] of [our] physiology” (Gros 19). If we are shrivelled, stuck, stooped, tense, and tired, so also are our thoughts. Therefore, in order to make your thoughts breathe, walk, and even “dance”, says Nietzsche, you should go outdoors, go up in the mountains.S: As I read what you’ve written here, Evija, I feel as if I’m walking amongst your thoughts, both here on the screen and in my imagination. Sometimes, I’m in perfect step with you. At other times, I want to interrupt, tug on your sleeve and point, and say “Look! Have you seen this, just up ahead?”E: That’s the value of companionship on the road. A shared conversation on the move can lead to a transformation of thought, a conversion, as in the Biblical stories of the roads to Emmaus and Damascus. In fact, we tested the power of walking and talking in rural settings in a series of experimental events organised for academics in Auckland, New Zealand, throughout 2017 (see our blog post on Writing, Writing Everywhere website). It appeared to work very well for writers who had either been “stuck” or in the early stages of drafting. Those who were looking to structure existing thoughts were better off staying put. But walking and talking is an entire other topic (see Anderson) that we should discuss in more depth some other time.Anyway, you’ve brought us to what looks like a forest. Is this where you want us to go?A Walk “into the Woods,” or Getting in the Thick of Free-Writing S: Yes, just follow me. I often walk in the woods close to where I live. Of course, going “into the woods” is itself a metaphor, rich with fairy-tale connotations about creativity. The woods are full of darkness and danger, grandmother’s cottage, wild beasts, witches, poisonous fruits. The woods are where traps are laid, where children wander and get lost, where enchantments befall us. But humans have always been seduced by the woods and what lies in wait there (Maitland). In Jungian terms, losing oneself in darkness is a rite of initiation. By stepping into the woods, we surrender to not knowing, to walking off the path and into the depths of our imagination. I dare you to do that, right now! E: Letting go is not always easy. I keep wanting to respond to your claim by adding scholarly references to important work on the topic. I want to mention the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, for whom this form of writing was but “an attempt” (from Old French, “essai”) to place himself in this world, a philosophical and literary adventure that stood very far from the rigidly structured academic essay of the present day (Sturm). We’ve forgotten that writing is a risky undertaking, an exploration of uncharted terrains (Sturm). S: Yes, and in academic thinking, we’re always afraid to ramble. But perhaps rambling is exactly what we need to do. Perhaps we need to start walking without knowing where we’re going ... and see where it takes us. E: Indeed. Instead of going on writing retreats, academics should be sent “into the woods”, where their main task would be to get lost before they even start to think.S: Into the Woods, a reality TV show for academics? But seriously, maybe there is something about walking into the woods—or a landscape different from our habitual one—that symbolises a shift in feeling-state. When I walk into the woods, I purposely place myself in a different world. My senses are heightened. I become acutely aware of each tiny sound—the ticking of the leaves, the wind, the birdsong, the crunch of my feet, the pounding of the blood in my ears. I become less aware of all the difficult parts of myself, my troubles, my stuckness, what weighs on me so heavily. It seems to me that there is a parallel here with a state of consciousness or awareness famously described by the psychologist of optimal experience, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, as “flow”. In flow, “the loss of a sense of self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment” (Csikszentmihalyi 63), together with pleasure in movement and in the sensory experience of seeing the world. So flow might be one way of thinking about my lived experience of walking in the woods. But this shift has also been described by the psychotherapist Marion Milner as a shift from “narrow thinking” into a “wider” way of looking, listening, feeling, and moving—a feeling state that Milner called the “fat feeling”. She identified this “fat feeling” as characteristic of moments when she experienced intense delight (Milner 15) and she began to experiment with ways in which she could practice it more purposefully.In this sense, walking is a kind of “trick” that I can play upon myself. The shift from office to woods, from sitting at my desk to moving through the world, triggers a shift from preoccupation with the “head stuff” of academic work and into a more felt, bodily way of experiencing. Walking helps me to “get out of my head.”E: So wandering through this thicket becomes a kind of free writing?S: Yes, free writing is like “taking a line for a walk” on the page, words that the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee famously attributed to drawing (Klee 105; see also Raymond). It’s what we’re doing here, wouldn’t you say?Two Lines of Walking: A drawing by Evija. E: Yes—and we don’t know where this walk will lead us. I’m thinking of the many times I have propelled myself into meaningful writing by simply letting the hand do its work and produce written characters on the screen or page. Initially, it looks like nonsense. Then, meaning and order start to emerge.S: Yes, my suggestion is that walking—like writing—frees us up, connects us with the bodily, felt, and pleasurable aspects of the writing process. We need this opportunity to meander, go off at tangents...E: So what qualities do free writing and walking have in common? What is helpful about each of these activities?S: A first guess might be that free writing and walking make use of rhythm. Linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls the sound, rhythm, and texture of language the “semiotic”. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” (the realm of bodily drives and affects, rhythms, pre-verbal babble) and the “symbolic” (the realm of prescribed language, linguistic structure, grammar, and judgment) do not exist in rigid opposition to one another. Instead, they form a continuum which she calls “signifiance” or signification (Kristeva 22), a “dialectic” (24) of making meaning. According to Kristeva, even the smallest element of symbolic meaning, the phoneme, is involved in “rhythmic, intonational repetitions” (103) so that, as we order phonemes into words and words into sentences, our language pulses with the operations of our bodily, instinctual drives. Kristeva thinks in terms of an “explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic” (69). E: An explosion. I like that!S: Me too.My theory is that, by letting go into that rhythm a little, we’re enabling ourselves to access some of the pre-verbal force that Kristeva talks about. E: So the rhythm of walking helps us to connect with the rhythmic qualities of the semiotic?S: Exactly. We might say that a lot of academic writing tends to privilege the symbolic—both in terms of the style we choose and the way that we structure our arguments. E: And academic convention requires that we make more references here. For example, as we’re discussing “free writing”, we could cite Ken Macrorie or Peter Elbow, the two grandfathers of the method. Or we might scaffold our talks about collaborative writing as a means of scholarly inquiry, with the work of Laurel Richardson or another authority in the field.S: Yes, and all of this is an important part of academic practice, of course. But perhaps when we give ourselves permission to ramble and meander, to loosen up the relationships between what we feel and what we say, we move along the continuum of meaning-making towards the more felt and bodily, and away from the received and prescribed. …S: And I’ve put an ellipsis there to mark that we are moving into another kind of space now. We’re coming to a clearing in the woods. Because at some point in our rambling, we might want to pause and make a few suggestions. Perhaps we come to a clearing, like this one here. We sit down for a while and collect our thoughts.E: Yes. Let’s sit down. And, while you’re resting, let me tell you what this “collecting of thoughts” reminds me of.I’m thinking that we don’t necessarily need to go anywhere to get away from our particular state of mind. A shared cup of coffee or a conversation can have the same effect. Much has already been said about the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs on writing; all rather harmful ways of going “on a trip” (Laing; Klein). In our case, it’s the blank pages of a shared Google Doc that has brought us together, collecting our thoughts on walking and moving us into a different realm, a new world of exciting and strange ideas to be explored. And the idea of mapping out this space by gradually filling its pages with words sets our minds on a journey.S: That’s interesting. The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about the power of ritual in creating this shift for us into a creative or flow state. It could be lighting a candle or drinking a glass of water. There is a moment when something “clicks”, and we enter the world of creativity.E: Yes, a thing can act as a portal or gateway. And, as I want to show you, the things in the landscape that we walk through can help us to enter imaginary realms.So can I take you for a little walk now? See that winding country road leading through open fields and rolling hills? That’s where we’re going to start.A publicity image, drawn by Evija, for Walking Talking Writing events for academics, organised at the University of Auckland in 2017.A Walk “through the Countryside”, or Traversing the Landscape of ThoughtsE: Sophie, you spoke earlier about the way that experiencing yourself in relation to the environment is important for opening up your imagination. For example, just allowing yourself to be in the woods and noticing how the space pulsates around you is enough to awaken your bodily awareness.But let’s take a stroll along this road and let me explain to you what’s happening for me. You see, I find the woods too distracting and stimulating. When I’m stuck, I crave openness and space like this landscape that we’re walking through right now. S: Too much detail, too many things, overwhelm you?E: Exactly. Here, where the landscape is simple and spacious, my thoughts can breathe. Ideas quietly graze as I move through them. The country road is under my feet and I know exactly where I’m heading – beyond that horizon line in the distance… I need to be able to look far into that hazy distance to get my sense of seeing things “in depth.” All this makes me think of a study by Mia Keinänen in which she surveyed nine Norwegian academics who habitually walk to think (Keinänen). Based on their personal observations, the resulting article provides interesting material about the importance of walking—its rhythm, environment, and so on—on one’s thinking. For one of the academics, being able to see landmarks and thoughts in perspective was the key to being able to see ideas in new ways. There is a “landscape of thinking”, in which thinking becomes a place and environment is a process.For another participant in the study, thoughts become objects populating the landscape. The thinker walks through these object-thoughts, mapping out their connections, pulling some ideas closer, pushing others further away, as if moving through a 3D computer game.S: Hmm. I too think that we tend to project not only thoughts but also the emotions that we ourselves might be experiencing onto the objects around us. The literary critic Suzanne Nalbantian describes this as the creation of “aesthetic objects”, a “mythopoetic” process by which material objects in the external world “change their status from real to ‘aesthetic’ objects” and begin to function as “anchors or receptacles for subjectivity” (Nalbantien 54).Nalbantian uses examples such as Proust’s madeleine or Woolf’s lighthouse to illustrate the ways in which authors of autobiographical fiction invest the objects around them with a particular psychic value or feeling-tone.For me, this might be a tree, or a fallen leaf on the path. For you, Evija, it could be the horizon, or an open field or a vague object, half-perceived in the distance. E: So there’s a kind of equivalence between what we’re feeling and what we’re noticing? S: Yes. And it works the other way around too. What we’re noticing affects our feelings and thoughts. And perhaps it’s really about finding and knowing what works best for us—the landscape that is the best fit for how we want to feel… E: Or how we want to think. Or write. S: That’s it. Of course, metaphor is another way of describing this process. When we create a metaphor, we bring together a feeling or memory inside us with an object in the outside world. The feeling that we carry within us right now finds perfect form in the shape of this particular hillside. A thought is this pebble. A memory is that cloud…E: That’s the method of loci, which Mia Keinänen also refers to (600) in her article about the walking-thinking Norwegian academics. By projecting one’s learnt knowledge onto a physical landscape, one is able to better navigate ideas.S: Although I can’t help thinking that’s all a little cerebral. For me, the process is more immediate and felt. But I’m sure we’re talking about something very similar...E: Well, the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who has written a great deal on walking, in his article “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting” urges us to rethink what imagination might be and the ways that it might relate to the physical environment, our movement through it, and our vision. He quotes James Elkins’s suggestion (in Ingold 15-16) that true “seeing” involves workings of both the eye and the mind in bringing forth images. But Ingold questions the very notion of imagination as a place inhabited by images. From derelict houses, barren fields and crossroads, to trees, stray dogs, and other people, the images we see around us do not represent “the forms of things in the world” (Ingold 16). Instead, they are gateways and “place-holders” for the truer essence of things they seem to represent (16). S: There’s that idea of the thing acting as a gateway or portal again… E: Yes, images—like the ruins of that windmill over there—do not “stand for things” but help us experientially “find” those things (Ingold16). This is one of the purposes of art, which, instead of giving us representations of things in the world, offers us something which is like the things in the world (16)—i.e., experiences.But as we walk, and notice the objects around us, are there specific qualities about the objects themselves that make this process—what you call “projection”—more or less difficult for us?A drawing by Latvian artist Māris Subačs (2016). The text on the image says: “Clouds slowly moving.” Publicity image for Subačs’s exhibition “Baltā Istaba” (The White Room), taken from Latvijas Sabiedriskie Mediji, https://www.lsm.lv/. S: Well, let’s circle back now—on the road and on the page. We’ve talked about the way that you need wide, open spaces, whereas I find myself responding to a range of different environments in different ways. How do you feel now, as we pause here and begin to retrace our steps? E: How do I feel? I’m not sure. Right now, I’m thinking about the way that I respond to art. For example, I would say that life-like images of physical objects in this world (e.g., a realistic painting of a vase with flowers) are harder to perceive with my mind's eye than, let’s say, of an abstract painting. I don’t want to be too tied to the surface details and physicality of the world. What I see in a picture is not the representation of the vase and flowers; what I see are forms that the “inner life force”, to use Ingold’s term, has taken to express itself through (vaseness, flowerness). The more abstract the image, the more of the symbolic or the imaginary it can contain. (Consider the traditional Aboriginal art, as Ingold invites, or the line drawings of Latvian artist Māris Subačs, as I suggest, depicted above.) Things we can observe in this world, says Ingold, are but “outward, sensible forms” that “give shape to the inner generative impulse that is life itself” (17). (This comes from the underlying belief that the phenomenal world itself is all “figmented” (Ingold 17, referring to literary scholar Mary Carruthers).)S: And, interestingly, I don’t recognise this at all! My experiencing of the objects around me feels very different. That tree, this pine cone in my hand, the solidity of this physical form is very helpful in crystallising something that I’m feeling. I enjoy looking at abstract paintings too. I can imagine myself into them. But the thing-ness of things is also deeply satisfying, especially if I can also touch, taste, smell, hold the thing itself. The poet Selima Hill goes for a walk in order to gather objects in a Tupperware box: “a dead butterfly, a yellow pebble, a scrap of blue paper, an empty condom packet.” Later she places an object from these “Tupperware treasures” on her writing desk and uses it “to focus on the kernel of the poem”, concentrating on it “to select the fragments and images she needs” (Taylor). This resonates with me.E: So, to summarise, walking seems to have something to do with seeing, for both of us. S: Yes, and not just seeing but also feeling and experiencing, with all of our senses. E: OK. And walking like appreciating art or writing or reading, has the capacity to take us beyond what shows at surface level, and so a step closer to the “truer” expression of life, to paraphrase Ingold. S: Yes, and the expression that Ingold calls more “true” is what Kristeva would say is the semiotic, the other-than-meaning, the felt and bodily, always bubbling beneath the surface. E: True, true. And although Ingold here doesn’t say how walking facilitates this kind of seeing and experiencing, perhaps we can make some suggestions here.You focused on the rhythm of walking and thinking/writing earlier. But I’m equally intrigued by the effects of speed. S: That resonates for me too. I need to be able to slow down and really experience the world around me. E: Well, did you know that there are scientific studies that suggest a correlation between the speed of walking and the speed of thinking (Jabr; Oppezzo and Schwartz)? The pace of walking, as the movement of our bodies through space, sets a particular temporal relationship with the objects we move past. In turn, this affects our “thinking time”, and our thinking about abstract ideas (Cuelenaere 127, referring to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas).S: That makes sense to me. I noticed that when we were walking through the woods, we had slowed right down and then, as we reached the open road, you seemed to want to go much faster than me…E: Yes, at a steady pace. That’s perhaps not surprising. Because it seems that the speed of our walking is intimately connected with our vision. So if I’m moving through a landscape in which I’m fully immersed, I’m unable to take in everything around me. I choose to rest my eyes on a few select points of interest. S: Or on the horizon…E: Yes. The path that leads through an open field allows me to rest my eyes on the distant horizon. I register the patterns of fields and houses; and perhaps I catch sight of the trees in my peripheral vision. The detailed imagery, if any, gets reduced to geometrical figures and lines.The challenge is to find the right balance between the stimuli provided by the external world and the speed of movement through it.S: So the pace of walking can enable us to see things in a certain way. For you, this is moving quickly, seeing things vaguely, fragmentally and selectively. For me, it’s an opportunity to take my time, find my own rhythm, to slow down and weigh a thought or a thing. I think I’m probably the kind of walker who stops to pick up sticks and shells, and curious stones. I love the rhythm of moving but it isn’t necessarily fast movement. Perhaps you’re a speed walker and I’m a rambler? E: I think both the pace and the rhythm are of equal importance. The movement can be so monotonous that it becomes a meditative process, in which I lose myself. Then, what matters is no longer the destination but the journey itself. It’s like...S: Evija! Stop for a moment! Over here! Look at this! E: You know, that actually broke my train of thought. S: I’m sorry… I couldn’t resist. But Evija, we’ve arrived at the entrance to the woods again. E: And the light’s fading… I should get back to the office.S: Yes, but this time, we can choose which way to go: through the trees and into the half-dark of my creative subconscious or across the wide, open spaces of your imagination. E: And will we walk slowly—or at speed? There’s still so much to say. There are other landscapes and pathways—and pages—that we haven’t even explored yet.S: But I don’t want to stop. I want to keep walking with you.E: Indeed, Sophie, writing is a walk that never ends. ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Talking whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge.” Area 36.3 (2004): 254-261. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1997.Cuelenaere, Laurence. “Aymara Forms of Walking: A Linguistic Anthropological Reflection on the Relation between Language and Motion.” Language Sciences 33.1 (2011):126-137. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Gros, Frédéric. The Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014.Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.———. “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet.” Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004): 315-340.———. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.———. “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting.” Visual Studies 25.1 (2010):15-23.Ingold, Tim, and J.L. Vergunst, eds. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. London: Ashgate, 2008.Jabr, Ferris. “Why Walking Helps Us Think.” The New Yorker, 3 Sep. 2014. 10 Aug. 2018 <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/walking-helps-us-think>.Keinänen, Mia. “Taking Your Mind for a Walk: A Qualitative Investigation of Walking and Thinking among Nine Norwegian Academics.” Higher Education 71.4 (2016): 593-605. Klee, Paul. Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye. Ed. J. Spiller. Trans. R. Manheim. London: Lund Humphries, 1961. Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. London: Picador, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink. Edinburgh: Canongate 2013.Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Book Company, 1976.Maitland, Sarah. Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy-Tales. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012. Milner, Marion (as Joanna Field). A Life of One’s Own. 1934. London: Virago, 1986.Nalbantien, Suzanne. Aesthetic Autobiography. London: Macmillan, 1994.Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40.4 (2014): 1142-1152.Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Ed. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007. 923-948. Sturm, Sean. “Terra (In)cognita: Mapping Academic Writing.” TEXT 16.2 (2012).Taylor, Debbie. “The Selima Hill Method.” Mslexia 6 (Summer/Autumn 2000). Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. New York: Simon Schuster, 2003.Trofimova, Evija. “Academics Go Walking, Talking, Writing*.” Writing, Writing Everywhere, 8 Dec. 2017. 1 Oct. 2018 <http://www.writing.auckland.ac.nz/2017/12/08/academics-go-walking-talking-writing>.
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Juckes, Daniel. "Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey Can Intersect." M/C Journal 21, no. 4 (October 15, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1455.

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Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.
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