Adapting the Theatrical Frame in Online Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous disruptions to the world. As places of social gatherings, theatre venues worldwide were closed for a significant period of time. Deprived of physical proximity with the audience, theatre makers resorted to the Internet and presented numerous online works. The pandemic, inducing an existential crisis for theatre, prompted an urgent need and an opportunity to re-examine theatre and its relationship with digital media. This thesis seeks to contribute to this re-examination and evaluate the pandemic’s impact on theatre through the lens of the theatrical frame, which concerns how an event is constructed and perceived as a theatrical performance. By examining pandemic theatre from the angle of framing, this thesis also foregrounds the theatrical frame as an umbrella term; this research aims to synthesise various discussions in theatre studies regarding framing devices and mechanisms, and to investigate the correlation between theatrical approaches and mediatisation strategies in mediatised performances. It investigates how artists adapted theatrical conventions and mechanisms to digital media in the pandemic through three representative case studies, Telephone (2020) by Coney, The Tempest (2020) by Creation Theatre and Big Telly, and To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (2020) by Dead Centre. The thesis comprises seven chapters. The introduction traces the journey of the adaptation of my research in response to the pandemic, and outlines the research questions, methodology and thesis structure. The second chapter elaborates the theoretical frameworks, i.e. the theatrical frame, online theatre and adaptation, to set the ground for analyses in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 presents the context of the pandemic and theatre-related restrictions, and provides an overview of online performance from March 2020 to the summer of 2021, with a focus on the UK. Chapter 4 analyses how framing conventions are adapted in Telephone to digital media under restricting conditions during the pandemic. Chapter 5 examines the correlation between theatrical framing mechanisms and mediatisation strategies by comparing The Tempest and To Be a Machine. Chapter 6 further explores the different approaches in these two productions in relation to COVID theatre conventions, revealing divergent stances towards digital media and live theatre during the pandemic. By assessing COVID online theatre’s status as a qualified medium, this chapter examines its disruption of the theatrical frame, and evaluates the pandemic’s impact on performance-making and reception, as well as the legacy of COVID theatre. The conclusion presents the findings concerning the theatrical frame, pandemic theatre, and the digital adaptation of the frame in the case studies; it also summarises this research’s contribution to knowledge

Are foreign students in Australian universities disadvantaged when learning Japanese through the medium of English?

There is concern that international students studying Japanese in Australia are seriously disadvantaged by having to learn a foreign language through the medium of another, imperfectly-mastered, foreign language. This paper tests the validity of these concerns through comparative evaluation of the frequency and type of errors made in written texts by Australian and international students

Are foreign students in Australian universities disadvantaged when learning Japanese through the medium of English?

There is concern that international students studying Japanese in Australia are seriously disadvantaged by having to learn a foreign language through the medium of another, imperfectly-mastered, foreign language. This paper tests the validity of these concerns through comparative evaluation of the frequency and type of errors made in written texts by Australian and international students.</p

Similarity Calculation via Passage-Level Event Connection Graph

Recently, many information processing applications appear on the web on the demand of user requirement. Since text is one of the most popular data formats across the web, how to measure text similarity becomes the key challenge to many web applications. Web text is often used to record events, especially for news. One text often mentions multiple events, while only the core event decides its main topic. This core event should take the important position when measuring text similarity. For this reason, this paper constructs a passage-level event connection graph to model the relations among events mentioned in one text. This graph is composed of many subgraphs formed by triggers and arguments extracted sentence by sentence. The subgraphs are connected via the overlapping arguments. In term of centrality measurement, the core event can be revealed from the graph and utilized to measure text similarity. Moreover, two improvements based on vector tunning are provided to better model the relations among events. One is to find the triggers which are semantically similar. By linking them in the event connection graph, the graph can cover the relations among events more comprehensively. The other is to apply graph embedding to integrate the global information carried by the entire event connection graph into the core event to let text similarity be partially guided by the full-text content. As shown by experimental results, after measuring text similarity from a passage-level event representation perspective, our calculation acquires superior results than unsupervised methods and even comparable results with some supervised neuron-based methods. In addition, our calculation is unsupervised and can be applied in many domains free from the preparation of training data

How do emerging multinationals configure political connections across institutional contexts?

Forming informal ties with political agents is viewed as a viable strategy for multinational enterprises seeking to enter emerging countries. Less is known about the conditions under which political connection is most helpful for firms dealing with cross-border institutional distance. We discuss the distinctive mechanisms through which emerging multinationals may benefit from both home and host political connections. Based on the strategy tripod perspective, we postulate that the importance of different types of connections depends on the overall configurations of a firm’s resources and industry characteristics, and these may change with institutional distance. Our analysis of a sample of Chinese high-tech manufacturing firms yields new insights into political connections, institutional distance and the strategy tripod perspective

A comparison study of human and machine generated creativity

Creativity is a fundamental feature of human intelligence. However, achieving creativity is often considered a challenging task, particularly in design. In recent years, using computational machines to support people in creative activities in design, such as idea generation and evaluation, has become a popular research topic. Although there exist many creativity support tools, few of them could produce creative solutions in a direct manner, but produce stimuli instead. DALL·E is currently the most advanced computational model that could generate creative ideas in pictorial formats based on textual descriptions. This study conducts a Turing test, a computational test and an expert test to evaluate DALL·E’s capability in achieving combinational creativity comparing with human designers. The results reveal that DALL·E could achieve combinational creativity at a similar level to novice designers and indicate the differences between computer and human creativity

Integrated sensor FTC using integral sliding mode control

In this paper, a sliding mode sensor fault tolerant control scheme which involves a first order sliding mode observer, fault compensation logic and an integral sliding mode controller, is proposed for a class of uncertain linear parameter-varying systems. The proposed scheme has the capability to retain near nominal fault-free performance in the face of a class of sensor faults/failures. In particular, the closed-loop stability of the sensor fault tolerant scheme involving the sliding mode observer and the sliding mode controller in the presence of faults and uncertainty, is rigorously analysed. Furthermore, the paper proposes an algorithm to simultaneously synthesise the design freedom associated with the observer gains and control law despite the lack of a separation principle in the closed loop system overall caused by the uncertainty. The proposed scheme is validated using a commercial aircraft model. Good simulation results show the efficacy of the scheme

Winter Arctic Amplification at the synoptic timescale, 1979-2018, its regional variation and response to tropical and extratropical variability

We investigate winter Arctic Amplification (AA) on synoptic timescales and at regional scales using a daily version of the Arctic Amplification Index (AAI) and examine causes on a synoptic scale. The persistence, frequency and intensity of high AAI events show significant increases over the Arctic. Similarly, low AAI events are decreasing in frequency, persistence and intensity. In both cases, there are regional variations in these trends, in terms of significance and timing. Significant trends in increasing persistence, frequency and intensity of high AAI events in winter are concentrated in the period 2000-2009, with few significant trends before and after this. There are some decreases in sea-ice concentration in response to synoptic-scale AA events and these AA events can contribute to the decadal trends in AA found in other studies. A sectoral analysis of the Arctic indicates that in the Beaufort-Chukchi and East Siberian-Laptev Seas, synoptic scale high AAI events can be driven by tropical teleconnections while in other Arctic sectors, it is the intrusion of moisture-transporting synoptic cyclones into the Arctic that is most important in synoptic-scale AA. The presence of Rossby wave breaking during high AAI events is indicative of forcing from lower latitudes, modulated by variations in the jet stream. An important conclusion is that the increased persistence, frequency and intensity of synoptic-scale high AAI events make significant contributions to the interannual trend in AA.</p

Proton transport in crystalline, porous covalent organic frameworks: a NMR study

Proton transport in crystalline, porous covalent organic frameworks: a NMR stud