9 research outputs found

    Dwelling on ontology - semantic reasoning over topographic maps

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    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 ‘residential area’ in the ontology editor ProtĂ©gĂ©. 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

    Gatherings in biosemiotics

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    http://www.ester.ee/record=b2860486*es

    Social movements related to alter-globalisation in Portugal:identities, praxes and mobilisations

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    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 – the how of social movements), the sense of militant action (activists’ motives and reasons – the why of social movements), and the ontology of social movements (collective and individual identities, otherness, and their co-relativity – the what and who of social movements). For this purpose, I have followed what is habitually called “qualitative sociology”, 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 “emic” writings, to engage in “participant observation”. 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

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    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

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    This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s 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 decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis. In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s 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 “culture of narcissism”. 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 concept’s 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, wasn’t 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 “the real”. A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s 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 “attacks on reality”, 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 “return of the real” 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. Mailer’s 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 Mailer’s 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 Mailer’s fiction sought to confront postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The thesis also traces Mailer’s 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 Mailer’s 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 Mailer’s 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

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    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 Neuchñtel 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 Neuchñtel 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 ‘East Indies’). 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

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    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

    The Adaptive City

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