Academic literature on the topic 'Sketches appris'

Abstract This special issue responds to an increasing interest in decolonial and Southern thinking in applied linguistics. In this Introduction, we first discuss some basic historical facts about colonization, and we highlight some key concepts. We then present the six contributions in the special issue. Three contributions compellingly expose the pervasiveness of coloniality and give reason to doubt that it can ever be overcome; the other three contributions open spaces for the decolonial possibilities of healing, hope, and futurity. We then discuss some key issues in decolonial and Southern scholarship, including the role of non-conventional writing in decolonial research, the differences between decolonial and social justice projects, the difficulties of decolonizing Eurocentric knowledge through Euro-Anglo-Northern tools, and deep inequities in the geopolitics of knowledge. We hope that the special issue will enable readers to re-see long-standing applied linguistics questions through decolonial and Southern lenses. We also hope to make the case why decolonial projects are worth the trouble.

The article examines creative techniques of the outstanding film director Serhiy Eisenstein in the context of Japanese visual and performative practices. In particular, a range of sources that formed Eisenstein’s idea of the Japanese artistic experience is identified. They include works of Japanese art, hieroglyphics, scientific literature, kabuki theatrical performances and communication with the bearers of Japanese theatrical tradition. A variety of borrowings of creative techniques of Japanese artists and their creative interpretation is revealed on the basis of a comparative analysis of Japanese visual and performative practices with the materials of theoretical and creative heritage of the artist and memoirs. Pre-drawn compositions of frames (so called “sketches”) reveal the techniques of Japanese engraving, samples of which were stored in the directorʹs own collection: close up compositions, sharp camera angles and perspective cuts, expressive silhouettes, shadow play, forming a second meaningful plan. Close ups in the film Ivan the Terrible contain many parallels with such techniques of Kabuki Theater as grotesque facial expressions, mimic facial wrinkles, apples of the eyes extremely slanted to the side, or brought to the bridge of the nose. The models of expression of various emotional states honed in the theatrical practice of Japan corresponded to Eisenstein’s idea of cinema “types”. The principles of using sound as one of the means of expression in the performance of kabuki prompted the director to develop the concept of editing as the main means of developing an audiovisual work. It is established that Eisensteinʹs research of various branches of Japanese art, his experience in the study of hieroglyphic writing directed the masterʹs creative experiments in search of metaphorical language, the principles of developing a clear, easy to read visual component.

Pavelchuk I. The search for Cezannism in the practice of Adalbert Erdeli of 1930–1940. The paper explores the trends of Cezannism in the artwork of the prominent Transcarpathian painter Adalbert Erdeli (1891–1955), who was memorized in the history of the Ukrainian art as one of the founders of artistic education in Transcarpathia. Chronological systematization of the visual tendencies in the artwork of A. Erdeli: Impressionism (1915–1926), Cezannism (1930–1940), Fauvism (1943–1955) – was never performed in the Ukrainian art studies before. The process of mastering the principles of Cezannism has become the subject of a dedicated scientifi c study for the fi rst time. Systematized material is considered in various genres of Adalbert Erdeli’ work: landscapes, still-life and thematic compositions. The art review is performed by comparison of the iconography of the Cezanne’s scenes and the artistic interpretations of Adalbert Erdeli. Objectives. The author’s task was to reveal refl ections of Cezannism in the different genres of A. Erdeli’ work. On the basis of results obtained, to systematize the patterns of the fi ne-art process that took place in 1930–1940’. The main focus was the analysis of the iconography of the Cezanne’s scenes of 1859–1890’, which were the object of A. Erdeli’ artistic interpretations up to 1950’. Methods. The study is performed by the art analysis using the method of iconographic comparison. Biographical and comparative research methods proved to be important. The application of the interdisciplinary approach made it possible to ascertain the similarity and make a distinction between the iconography of the Cezanne’s scenes in the artwork of A. Erdeli. The study was carried out in 2010–2018 based on the analysis of paintings from holdings of the Transcarpathian Regional Art Museum named after Joseph Bokshay (TRAM) and private collections, which exhibited paintings of A. Erdeli twice in the Kyiv gallery “NU ART Gallery” (25.05–25.06. 2011, 20.09–27.10. 2018). Since A. Erdeli got a higher education in Hungary, it has actualized the issue of studying the leading tendencies of Hungarian painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which were studied at the Hungarian National Gallery in October-December 2014. The main attention was paid to the study of the work of Hungarian colorists: Revesz Imre, Bela Ivanyi-Grünwald, Ferenczy Karoly, Simon Hollosy, Jozsef Rippl-Ronai. Results. In the early 1930’, after A. Erdeli returned from France, he became interested in the tendency of Cezannism, which spread to all genres of his work. The productive trend was realized in the landscapes of the 1930–1940’: “The Uzh River”, “Over the Uzh River”, “The Water Landscape”, “Trees over Water”, “The River Landscape”, “The Pond Landscape”. Although the above-mentioned sketches were created on the plain air, the creative tasks went beyond the bounds of naturalism. Images created by A. Erdeli render his associative impressions of nature. The scenes with reservoirs symbolically symbolize the idea of the illusory nature of life. The scenic iconography is similar to numerous Ce- ВІСНИК Історія мистецтва zanne’s motifs, “The Banks of Marne” (1888). A completely different adaptation of Cezannism revealed in the genre of still life. The plots of 1930–1950’ demonstrate the gradual mastering of experience: from a limited palette in the 1930s to a bright chromatic scale in the 1940s. In the still-life composition, there were shifts towards decorative and plane generalization of forms. Similar processes are observed in still-life pieces of Cezanne in 1880–1890: “Three Pears” (1879) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington; “Still Life with Pomegranate and Pears” (1890) from the d’Orsay Museum; Still Life with the Apples (1890) from the State Hermitage Museum. The artwork of A. Erdeli during the late Cezannism period of the 1940’ had much in common with the work of P. Konchalovsky in 1920’. Interpretations of Cezanne’s “The Bathers” held a remarkable place in the work of A. Erdeli in 1930–1946: “The Bather”, “Nude”, “Nude Sitting” (1930s); “Landscape with a fi gure” (1935), “Nude among the Trees”, “The Bathers” (1937), “A model. Awakening” (1946). The “Nude Among the Trees” (1937) is a unique one, which can rightly be credited to the masterpieces of late A. Erdeli. In this painting, the artistic synthesis of A. Erdeli reached its highest apogee. This artwork combined all the potencies of Cezannism: Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Symbolism, manifested in a single impulse of professional instinct. Conclusions. Features, which were just outlined in the work of A. Erdeli at the beginning of the third decade of the XX century, already in the middle of 1930s developed with complete convincingness: monumentality, simplicity, schematism, frontal, static, decorative planes – all the signs of painting A. Erdeli strengthened. The Ukrainian painter established the artistic myths on the new formal stage of the art synthesis. When absorbing P. Cezanne’ experience, his formal traditions became a productive foundation for the birth of a new and qualitatively different Ukrainian art of the 20th century. Absorption of the Art Nouveau experience in the practice of A. Erdeli, in particular, mastering the fundamental basics of Cezannism, confi rms the organic affi liation of the contemporary Ukrainian art to the European culture. That gave a historic chance to bring the artistic tradition of Transcarpathia from the provincial corner to the path of wide international recognition. Keywords: trend, color, symbol, post-impressionism, style, formalism, Cezannism, synthesis of arts

Abstract Sighted children drawing an apple with a pin through it show the hidden parts of the pin. That is, not only is the pin shown running towards the apple and out the other side, it is also shown inside the apple, without a single break, and so the sketch depicts the occluded parts of the pin. Several investigators have offered theories of the observation. We report here on tangible raised-line drawings by young blind people who are novices at drawing. They also include occluded segments of the pin. To explain the drawings we use the John Willats region theory. In this account, enclosed regions represent the volumes of 3D objects. According to region theory, what is in the interior of an object should be shown in the drawing even if it cannot be seen or touched. As a result, since occluded parts of the pin are inside the apple, blind children, like sighted children, include them in their drawings. In region theory, for both the blind and the sighted, long lines on a 2D pictorial surface represent elongated objects in the scene and regions on the surface represent 3D objects and their contents. The basis of region theory may be that sensory information for pins and lines has high-frequency components, and for apples and regions has lower-frequency components.

Mesurer l'activité d'un réseau de télécommunications est essentiel à son opération et sa gestion. Ces mesures sont primordiales pour analyser la performance du réseau et établir son diagnostic. En particulier, effectuer des mesures détaillées sur les flux consiste à calculer des métriques caractérisant les flots de données individuels qui traversent le réseau. Afin de développer des représentations pertinentes de leur trafic, les opérateurs réseau doivent en sélectionner les caractéristiques appropriées et doivent attentivement relier leur coût d'extraction à leur expressivité pour les tâches considérées. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons de nouvelles méthodologies pour extraire des représentations pertinentes du trafic. Particulièrement, nous postulons que l'apprentissage automatique (Machine Learning) peut améliorer les systèmes de mesures, grâce à sa capacité à apprendre des motifs adéquats issus des données, ce afin de fournir des prédictions sur des caractéristiques du trafic.La première contribution de cette thèse est un cadre de développement permettant aux systèmes de mesures basés sur des sketches d'exploiter la nature biaisée du trafic réseau. Spécifiquement, nous proposons une nouvelle représentation de ces structures de données, qui tire profit de de la sous-utilisation des sketches, réduisant ainsi l'empreinte mémoire des mesures par flux en n'enregistrant que les compteurs utiles. La deuxième contribution est un système de surveillance réseau assisté par un modèle d'apprentissage automatique, en intégrant un classificateur de trafic. En particulier, nous isolons les flux les plus larges dans le plan de données (data plane), avant de les traiter séparément avec des structures de données dédiées pour différents cas d'usage. Les dernières contributions de cette thèse abordent la conception d'un pipeline d'apprentissage profond (Deep Learning) pour les mesures de réseau, afin d'extraire de riches représentations des données de trafic permettant l'analyse du réseau. Nous puisons dans les récentes avancées en modélisation de séquences afin d'apprendre ces représentations depuis des données de trafic catégorielles et numériques. Ces représentations alimentent la résolution de tâches complexes telles que la réconciliation de données issues d'un flux de clics enregistré par un fournisseur d'accès à internet, ou la prédiction du mouvement d'un terminal dans un réseau Wi-Fi. Enfin, nous présentons une étude empirique des affinités entre tâches candidates à l'apprentissage multitâches, afin d'évaluer lorsque deux tâches bénéficieraient d'un apprentissage conjoint
Measurements are essential to operate and manage computer networks, as they are critical to analyze performance and establish diagnosis. In particular, per-flow monitoring consists in computing metrics that characterize the individual data streams traversing the network. To develop relevant traffic representations, operators need to select suitable flow characteristics and carefully relate their cost of extraction with their expressiveness for the downstream tasks considered. In this thesis, we propose novel methodologies to extract appropriate traffic representations. In particular, we posit that Machine Learning can enhance measurement systems, thanks to its ability to learn patterns from data, in order to provide predictions of pertinent traffic characteristics.The first contribution of this thesis is a framework for sketch-based measurements systems to exploit the skewed nature of network traffic. Specifically, we propose a novel data structure representation that leverages sketches' under-utilization, reducing per-flow measurements memory footprint by storing only relevant counters. The second contribution is a Machine Learning-assisted monitoring system that integrates a lightweight traffic classifier. In particular, we segregate large and small flows in the data plane, before processing them separately with dedicated data structures for various use cases. The last contributions address the design of a unified Deep Learning measurement pipeline that extracts rich representations from traffic data for network analysis. We first draw from recent advances in sequence modeling to learn representations from both numerical and categorical traffic data. These representations serve as input to solve complex networking tasks such as clickstream identification and mobile terminal movement prediction in WLAN. Finally, we present an empirical study of task affinity to assess when two tasks would benefit from being learned together

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter sketches the history of the EU and its institutions in order to set the competition rules in context. It then discusses the competition provisions themselves, and explains the way in which those rules are applied and enforced. The EU competition rules are primarily contained in Title VII, Chapter 1 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The two main competition articles are Article 101 TFEU, which applies to agreements between undertakings, and Article 102, which applies to the conduct of undertakings in a ‘dominant position’. Articles 101 and 102 are supplemented by Article 106 (public undertakings and undertakings with special or exclusive rights), and by articles concerned with powers and procedures.

Virtue ethics provides a congenial framework for the conceptualization and practice of business and can offer the resources for a new theory of the firm in efforts to understand the nature and purpose of business organizations. Business ethics is then primarily about character rather than actions: the values that are used to appraise business conduct and success must be somehow related to actualizing human nature in the context of the production and exchange of goods and services. A character-based theory of business entails a shift of research focus in academic business ethics, from political philosophy to moral psychology and managerial ethics. This chapter examines the components of a full character-based theory of business practice, considers three of the most serious objections against the theory, and sketches a reply to the objections.

The introduction explains the need for a book on moral psychology and animals. It outlines the psychological account described in more detail in chapters 2–5, which focus on the implications of the psychology of dehumanization for attitudes toward animals. It also briefly explains the approach to ethics and moral psychology provided in chapters 6–8, which discuss how we should think about ethical issues concerning animals, given the psychological details provided in chapters 2–5. Short case studies are used to illustrate the importance of dehumanization and explain how dehumanization applies to animals. Different approaches are sketched for using psychology to inform ethics.

This chapter summarizes the key takeaways from the book and the utility of the political communication cycle (PCC) overall. Technological changes and political contexts matter a great deal in the process of political communication change, but nothing is as consequential as the political choices that political actors and organizations make. These behavioral motivations explain much of the difference in innovativeness over time between different types of organizations, like the campaigns, social movements, and interest groups detailed in chapters 5 through 7. The conclusion applies these historical lessons to the current status of political communication, clarifying where we now are in the recurring cycle, and explaining why our position within the stabilization phase matters for political actors and consumers of political communication alike. Finally, this chapter sketches three possible paths forward and highlights related areas that could become subjects of future studies.

Buddhism is flourishing on the Internet and digital media. However, the form and usage patterns of Buddhist media technologies have varied considerably from the earliest oral texts to the latest online versions of the Buddhist canon. Do such media transformations merely transmit the old dharma in a new bottle, or do they change Buddhism’s message? Are these changes to be welcomed or shunned? This chapter explores how various media technologies tend to promote particular aspects of Buddhism, and also how different Buddhist worldviews shape how these media are used. First, it sketches a short genealogy of Buddhist media technologies. Second, it concentrates on contemporary digital media, briefly describing Buddhist bulletin boards, email lists, websites, computer apps, virtual worlds, and video games. Third, the chapter explains digital media’s procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial affordances. Finally, it illuminates how digital media affordances are shaped by the technological worldview of convert Buddhism.

Whether consciousness involves an ego is a thorny and complicated question in phenomenology. This chapter defines pure phenomenology and the peculiar way in which the problem of the ego is framed in this approach, then discusses three different approaches to the issue. First, Husserl’s egological account of consciousness is sketched in connection with his analysis of attention. Second, Sartre’s non-egological arguments are examined in detail. There is reason to ask whether his critique successfully applies to the Husserlian conception. Third, Gurwitsch’s non-egological view is considered. It is not clear that Gurwitsch’s non-egological theory of attention can account for the distinction between activity and passivity in consciousness. The chapter then shifts to contemporary debates about the self. The notion of the minimal embodied prereflective self is presented and opposed to alternative views. The chapter highlights several rich and complex questions concerning the ego and the self raised in the phenomenological literature.

AbstractDisregard of frames in a statement, or mixing up its frame and sphere, have become a daily affair. Cases discussed here comprise, among others, idyllic alpine communities voting extremely, an internal conflict in a university, stock exchange crazes, international boycotts, cultural essentialism normalizing structural inequality, the shootings by incels and a documentary about Britney Spears. Frames distend or spheres contract. The recent anthropological theories of ontology and intersectionality cannot account for the dynamic characterizing the epoch.The chapter sketches the impasse of the Anthropocene in terms of the macro-context of global information networks. Is a massive shift of lifeway conceivable today? The chapter illustrates and applies the six obstructions proper to simplex communication: unidimensional, unmediated, disconnected, frameless, fragmented, viral. Together these prevent the shifting of frames, cause spheres to fragment into bubbles, and counter an important intuitive energy, that of belonging to the human species. The process has a history gradually involving wider scales of society. Lifeways determine how the affects of trust, sense of impact and connection are transformed.

Abstract Chapter 4: ‘Apples and Kitchens: The Aesthetics and Politics of Modern Dining in Virginia Woolf’ returns the focus to Britain, contending that Woolf explored the gendered role of food in everyday life in order to reshape the aesthetics that were part of her ‘civilized’ Victorian heritage. Examining Bloomsbury definitions of civilization and barbarism, Woolf’s extra-national view of women’s social position aids her in thinking through civilization in her fiction like Jacob’s Room, and her more polemical works, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. In a section on institutional food, archival research shows that the cost of Cambridge food in 1928 reveals that Woolf’s representation of the quality of the Cambridge food for women was most likely understated in A Room of One’s Own. The second part of the chapter focuses on representations of the pressures on unmarried or poor women dining in urban settings. Finally, reading Between the Acts and ‘Sketch of the Past’ in light of Woolf’s exploring of women’s societal positions, this chapter concludes that Woolf’s vision of civilization, while still rooted in a classist framework, aims to provide women with a sense of access to an equal intellectual and culinary community.

Based on the generative adversarial network, this paper proposes a method of colorizing gray images without supervision and applies it to the field of the automatic coloring of gray comic sketches to solve the problem of the high production cost of color comics and the large consumption of human resources. The method proposed in this paper mainly improves the classical generative adversarial network model in the following aspects: first, the idea of the residual network is added to the builder model and the discriminator model to ensure that the training of the model can develop in the right direction; secondly, add a gradient penalty term to the loss function of the discriminator to accelerate the convergence of the model and speed up the iteration; at the same time, the activation function in the original model is changed to the Mish activation function, so that the information flowing through the network model has higher accuracy and better generalization. This paper trained the model of the Anime Sketch Colorization Pair dataset [1] from Kaggle, and the final experimental results show that the method is practical and feasible.

This chapter examines the Latine protest tradition as it applies to movements for migrant justice in the U. S., acknowledging twentieth-century roots in the United Farm Workers movement and sixteenth-century roots in la Virgen de Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego. The chapter sketches a philosophical framework for treating transitoriness and contingency within theological aesthetics (an alternative to aesthetics based on transcendentals of being) to serve a social ethics of rootedness (an alternative to virtue ethics). It highlights distinctive Latine religious contributions, coming from devotions and liturgy, to democratic conversations and work toward justice for immigrants.

Abstract The life’s work of the Swiss stage designer and theorist Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) paralleled that of the other great theatrical innovator, Gordon Craig. Both Appia and Craig undermined the supremacy of the scenic theatre which had dominated Euro-pean staging methods since the Renaissance; their new thinking inevitably questioned conventional notions of drama as well. Like Craig, whom he knew but with whom he never collaborated, Appia called for the unifying artistic control of a director-designer. Like him, he felt that the illusionistic theatre-no matter whether romantic or naturalistic-had arrived at an artistic dead end. Like Craig, Appia sketched out a revolutionary approach to production but he, too-whether by reason of personality or unfavourable external circumstances-rarely had a chance to put his ideas into practice.

Samuel Kerstein points out that although respect is a commonly deployed concept in bioethics, requirements of respect usually amount to respect for autonomy, or for giving proper weight to the choices made by competent persons. Kerstein argues that increased emphasis on another sense of respect, respect for the worth of persons, will greatly enrich discussions in several areas of bioethics. He sketches a Kantian account of respect for persons’ worth, one that incorporates a prohibition on using them merely as means as well as a prescription to treat them as having unconditional, preeminent value. He then applies the account to questions regarding the morality of physician-assisted dying, the ethical distribution of scarce, life-saving medical resources, and morally appropriate reasons for having children.

Abstract This epilogue addresses the question, what are the meaning grounds of sentences ascribing meaning grounds? It sketches a pragmatist answer to this question: what makes meaning-ground ascriptions have the meaning they have is the procedure that regulates their acceptance. It is argued that the procedure that regulates our acceptance of meaning-ground specifications is our general procedure for regulating acceptance of interpretations—the combination of projection, familiarity, and non-verbal evidence for belief attribution presented in Chapter 7. The approach applies in particular to the specification of the meaning grounds of interpretations in terms of our interpretative procedures. What makes this meaning-ground specification, like any other, have the meaning it has, is the fact that its acceptance is regulated by our interpretative procedures.

Abstract This first chapter provides a short introduction to the book. First, it sketches a brief history of the study of ignorance. There is a lack of serious investigation into ignorance: apart from the apophatic tradition in the ancient world and the Middle Ages and the more recent fields of agnotology, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy, ignorance itself has received little philosophical attention. It is then laid out how the field that one would expect to have studied ignorance in detail, namely, epistemology, has failed to do so. The chapter also explores why this could be the case. Subsequently, it is explained what is new about this book and how this fills the important gap in the study of ignorance: it develops and applies an epistemology of ignorance. Finally, it gives a brief overview of the chapters ahead.

Abstract When corporate executives act in morally unacceptable ways, is it a matter of a few “bad apples” or is there some other, or some additional, explanation? It is plausible to suggest that collective values are important components of corporate life and must be considered in examining morally unacceptable behavior within corporations. This chapter argues for a particular interpretation of collective values, understood as collective value judgments, and against an account that might at first seem appropriate. It is then argued that collective values as understood here are apt to induce people to abstain from speaking out in an active effort to counter them. Some practical consequences for corporations and those concerned with them are sketched.

This paper reports on a web-based groupware tool intended to support large distributed teams of engineers in modern engineering design practice. The Advanced Design Coordination Tool (ADCT) presents itself to members of a design team as a shared on-line set of engineers’ notebooks with flexible editing, filing, viewing, browsing, and searching capabilities. Additionally, its use of product, process, and decision representations referencing an explicit domain ontology, and tied together by dependency links, introduces artificial intelligence technology that enables capabilities beyond simple unstructured design history capture. The resulting repository can capture a rich and structured design rationale, which, with the system’s state management and versioning capability, enables recording active as well as rejected alternatives. The system currently exploits the captured data to improve team coordination: it applies dependency processing algorithms to automatically generate notifications to appropriate team members, based on changes to design notes or the detection of design conflicts. Over time, the accumulation of structured design histories with rationales should provide the basis for a knowledge repository that can proactively offer advice on new design challenges. This paper first sketches the context that makes this tool desirable, and then describes the system’s design and key capabilities. We finish with a discussion of limitations and future enhancements.

The obtaining of the overall transfer equation of a linear controlled multibody system is one of the key problems when the transfer matrix method for multibody systems (MSTMM) is applied to study controlled multibody dynamics. This paper applies the theory of matrix signal flow graphs (MSFG) to MSTMM. The transfer matrix signal flow graphs (TMSFG) of a mechanical element and a control subsystem can be drawn according to their transfer equations. By merging the nodes corresponding to the same state vector, the TMSFG of the entire system can be obtained. Eventually, the overall transfer equation of the linear controlled system can be systematically obtained according to the reduction rules of MSFG. An example is taken to sketch the idea and the simulation results are compared with other ordinary dynamics methods to validate the proposed method. This paper lays a foundation for automatic deduction of overall transfer equations of linear controlled multibody systems.

This paper presents the results of initial fieldwork on Online dating (netto-jô konkatsu, koikatsu) and other types of internet-based partner matching options in Japan, focusing on the possibilities for textual and interactional self-representation on different sites and apps available to single Japanese. This includes widespread international apps like Tinder and Grindr, along with local apps like 9 Monsters, a popular gay app that also incorporates light gaming functions, or Zexy En-Musubi, a revolutionarily egalitarian site aimed at heterosexual singles specifically seeking marriage. I approach this question by looking at the different technological affordances for profile creation using these services, and the ways users engage with those affordances to create profiles and to search for partners, based on examinations of websites, apps, and public profiles; interviews with website producers; and ethnographic interviews with past and current users of Online dating services. I primarily argue that self-presentation in Japanese Online dating hinges on the use of polite speech forms towards unknown readers, which have the power to flatten out gendered speech differences that are characteristic of language ideologies in Japan (Nakamura 2007). However, dominant cultural ideas about gender, sexuality, and marriage—such as patriarchal marriage structures—may still be “baked into” the structure of apps (Dalton and Dales 2016). Studying Online dating in Japan is critical because of its growing social acceptance. While in 2008 the only “respectable” site was a Japanese version of Match.com, in 2018 there are numerous sites and apps created by local companies for local sensibilities. Where Online dating was already established, in the West, there was little sociological study of it while it was becoming popular, in part because research on the internet also lacked respectability. By looking at Japan, where acceptance is growing but Online dating has not yet been normalized, we can gain a deeper understanding of its gender, sexuality, romance, and marriage practices. Japan’s experiences can also potentially provide a model for understanding how Online dating practices might develop elsewhere. In the US, Online dating faced many of the stigmas that it continues to face in Japan—such as that it was “sleazy,” “sketchy,” or desperate. In spite of these stigmas, however, Online dating grew slowly until it suddenly exploded (Orr 2004). Will it explode in Japan? By looking at how people use these sites, this paper also hopes to shed light on the uptake of Online partner matching practices.