9 research outputs found
Dwelling on ontology - semantic reasoning over topographic maps
The thesis builds upon the hypothesis that the spatial arrangement of topographic
features, such as buildings, roads and other land cover parcels, indicates how land is
used. The aim is to make this kind of high-level semantic information explicit within
topographic data. There is an increasing need to share and use data for a wider range of
purposes, and to make data more definitive, intelligent and accessible. Unfortunately,
we still encounter a gap between low-level data representations and high-level concepts
that typify human qualitative spatial reasoning. The thesis adopts an ontological
approach to bridge this gap and to derive functional information by using standard
reasoning mechanisms offered by logic-based knowledge representation formalisms. It
formulates a framework for the processes involved in interpreting land use information
from topographic maps. Land use is a high-level abstract concept, but it is also an
observable fact intimately tied to geography. By decomposing this relationship, the
thesis correlates a one-to-one mapping between high-level conceptualisations
established from human knowledge and real world entities represented in the data.
Based on a middle-out approach, it develops a conceptual model that incrementally
links different levels of detail, and thereby derives coarser, more meaningful
descriptions from more detailed ones. The thesis verifies its proposed ideas by
implementing an ontology describing the land use âresidential areaâ in the ontology
editor Protégé. By asserting knowledge about high-level concepts such as types of
dwellings, urban blocks and residential districts as well as individuals that link directly
to topographic features stored in the database, the reasoner successfully infers instances
of the defined classes. Despite current technological limitations, ontologies are a
promising way forward in the manner we handle and integrate geographic data,
especially with respect to how humans conceptualise geographic space
Social movements related to alter-globalisation in Portugal:identities, praxes and mobilisations
Tese de doutoramento, Sociologia (Sociologia das Desigualdades, das Minorias e dos Movimentos Sociais), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de CiĂȘncias Sociais, 2013This sociological research deals with the problematic of the genesis and formation of
social movements. The latter is approached through the study of Portuguese alterglobalisation
social movements, and more precisely via an emphasis on their mobilisations,
praxes and identities.
I explore the conditions or possibilities of social movements (their socio-cultural and
historical context and their structures â the how of social movements), the sense of militant
action (activistsâ motives and reasons â the why of social movements), and the ontology of
social movements (collective and individual identities, otherness, and their co-relativity â the
what and who of social movements).
For this purpose, I have followed what is habitually called âqualitative sociologyâ, that
is, I have opted for an ethnography carried out among three Portuguese movements, in
Lisbon, between 2010 and 2012. This methodology led me to conduct interviews with
activists, to consider their diverse practices, oral discourses and âemicâ writings, to engage in
âparticipant observationâ. Thus, I have followed a certain idiographic approach by focusing
upon the people who compose social movements. This idiography is irreducible to
subjectivity. On the contrary, it allows one to observe collective or trans-subjective features of
militant actions and representations, that is, their objective dimension.
This empirical work has been necessarily complemented by a theoretical study, which
have conduced to an analysis of the social phenomenon in question. The chosen theoretical
perspective comprehends and goes beyond the main traditional theories in the sociology of
social movements. Whilst these latter theories offer significant insights, they remain limited in
their explanatory potential. Consequently, they have to be completed by a larger paradigm,
notably to tackle the problems posed by current militant collective action. It therefore seems
necessary to consider the contributions of the sociology of action and of identity in more
depth.Fundação para a CiĂȘncia e a Tecnologia (FCT, SFRH/BD/63298/2009
The poetry of C.T. Msimang : a deconstructive critique
This study attempts to offer a reading of Msimang's poetry from the perspective of
deconstruction. In this course it is necessary to introduce and elaborate on certain
deconstruction strategies. This is mainly effected in the second chapter, where
consideration is given to diachronic and synchronic perspectives on deconstruction.
However, not all the ramifications of the various radical insights offered by
deconstructive approaches into the various fields are explored, only the significant
texts by mainly French theorists and their American disciples are investigated.
Secondly, this study seeks to show that the Zulu poems under consideration are
highly amenable to a deconstruction reading. This thesis examines the various
practices to absorb, transform, and integrate deconstruction and to make the theory
applicable as a critical method within the African languages critical environment. In
the third chapter, I am chiefly concerned with the claim that a text never has a single
meaning, but is a crossroads of multiple ambiguous meanings. Explaining the
historical context, the interdisciplinary scope, and the philosophical significance of
Derrida' s project are explored in the fourth chapter. Language has no determinate
centre nor any retrievable origin or truth. Belief in such is no more than nostalgia,
says Derrida. What actually exists is a complex network of differences between
signifiers, each in some sense carrying the traces of all others. With psychoanalysis
in the fourth chapter, the focus is not on the differences between the deconstructive
and psychoanalytic critics, but on their shared assumption that works ofliterature are
in some sense indeterminate. These properties lead to the sixth chapter, which deals
with intertextuality according to Derrida, Barthes and Bloom. The seventh and last
chapter is the general conclusion in which main observations are summarized and
important aspects highlighted. Finally, this thesis attempts to illustrate why the
deconstructive procedure of analysing texts in such a way as to explicate their partial
complicity with the theory, makes this deconstructive reading of Msimang' s poetry
possible.African LanguagesD.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages
Narcissus revisited: Norman Mailer and the twentieth century avant-garde
This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailerâs relationship to
the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new
documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the
decadeâs themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailerâs aesthetics in general to
other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis.
In doing so, it argues that Mailerâs work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and
political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical
opposition to postmodern aesthetics.
Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer
was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the âculture of narcissismâ. The self-advertising
non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in
the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist
aesthetics. Starting with the conceptâs early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis,
this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the
20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the
atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasnât just concerned with the aesthetics
of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost
every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity,
criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism
was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition.
The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of âthe realâ.
A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailerâs initially radical work was
excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the
question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist
standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic
âattacks on realityâ, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of
postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism
in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the âreturn of the
realâ in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical
views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later
postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailerâs view was
that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity.
While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailerâs first novel
The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on
a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailerâs fiction sought to confront
postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The
thesis also traces Mailerâs relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture,
including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema.
This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory
to explore Mailerâs often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality.
The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that
while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to
account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis
also discusses Mailerâs much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the
context of postcolonial politics
Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin
Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A NeuchĂątel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to NeuchĂątel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics.
During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the âEast Indiesâ). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin
Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education
International audienceThis volume contains the Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME), which took place 9-13 February 2011, at Rzeszñw in Poland