A collaborative artefact reconstruction environment

A novel collaborative artefact reconstruction environment design is presented that is informed by experimental task observation and participatory design. The motivation for the design was to enable collaborative human and computer effort in the reconstruction of fragmented cuneiform tablets: millennia-old clay tablets used for written communication in early human civilisation. Thousands of joining cuneiform tablet fragments are distributed within and between worldwide collections. The reconstruction of the tablets poses a complex 3D jigsaw puzzle with no physically tractable solution. In reconstruction experiments, participants collaborated synchronously and asynchronously on virtual and physical reconstruction tasks. Results are presented that demonstrate the difficulties experienced by human reconstructors in virtual tasks compared to physical tasks. Unlike computer counterparts, humans have difficulty identifying joins in virtual environments but, unlike computers, humans are averse to making incorrect joins. A successful reconstruction environment would marry the opposing strengths and weaknesses of humans and computers, and provide tools to support the communications and interactions of successful physical performance, in the virtual setting. The paper presents a taxonomy of the communications and interactions observed in successful physical and synchronous collaborative reconstruction tasks. Tools for the support of these communications and interactions were successfully incorporated in the “i3D” virtual environment design presented

Courses of mobilisation: writing systematic micro-histories on legal discourse

Inside the offices, paper-workers produce and combine documents. Their desks are covered with paper: with files, bundles and briefs. And the production goes on. Solicitors dictate notes, secretaries type letters, and the legal clerks compile sets of evidence. It is exactly through these paper-trails that things are set into motion for the day in court. The analysis of courses of mobilisation provides some potentials for a cross comparative perspective. Crucial here is the hypothesis generating inventiveness of the researcher. Beyond case-related story-telling, there is the need to create analytical devices that open up the micro-perspective. The data logs suggested above are just a starting point on the way to formalisation and generalisation. It remains the most challenging task to change from the single-case perspective to a cross-case or even cross-cultural perspective. Tracing mobilisation is by no means a new approach in social science or discourse analysis. Many of the ideas presented here stem from the empirical work done in interactionist ethnography, ethno methodology and Actor Network Theory. Here, I would like to finish with some observations on the significance of this research methodology for socio-legal studies. How can it profit from this perspective? The proposed research design, first of all, implies a critical reflection on socio-legal studies and its dominant research foci. How is it that either talk or text, either the drama in court or the rules of the books occupied sociolegal attention? Does one, in the text-book manner, need to declare the primacy of either oral or written language in legal discourse? The analysis of mobilisation allows one to transcend these debates. Despite the affinities with workplace studies, ethno methodology, and Actor Network Theory, the analysis of mobilisation is not identical to these fields of research. Tracing mobilisation does not directly aim to grasp the social organisation of the law firm, the solicitor’s workplace, or the legal apparatus. It, moreover, focuses neither solely on local events, nor on the institutional talk. But what then does it offer? As I understand it, tracing mobilisation makes accessible representational projects in their socio-material course. The course includes various sites and layers of social praxis such as accumulative file-work, extended correspondence, or relatively self-driven events. This multi-sitedness directs the formation of legal discourse, and the involvement of subjects and objects. As a micro-sociologist, I was firstly interested in how court hearings are interactively accomplished. (text extract

From intangibility to materiality and back again: preserving Portuguese performance artworks from the 1970s

Performance art has seen growing incorporation in museum collections in the last decade, and yet Conservation is still struggling to find methods to conserve these artworks, which resist acts of containement. In the context of the present research, three problems hampering progress in the conservation of performance art were identified: (1) Conservation’s scope is often seen in opposition to the nature of performance artworks, (2) there is a lack of an epistemological analysis of Conservation’s documentation methodologies, and (3) there are difficulties in managing the artwork’s networks in institutional contexts. The third problem is beyond the scope of this thesis, as this project was undertaken outside an institutional setting. This thesis therefore sheds light on the first two issues by drawing on agential realism (Karen Barad 2007), an epistemological lens which considers that every act of knowing implies material and discursive entanglements within every agent involved. To answer the first problem, a relational ontology of Conservation, which considers that Conservation practice, instead of being associated only with tangible objects, constitutes and is coconstituted by material-discursive practices, is proposed. Following this reasoning the act of conservation is then presented as a set of decisions, which vary in scale and produce materialisations of artistic manifestations. This thesis argues that cultural heritage works, including performance art, are thus always intangible until being materialised by heritage practices, which are characterised by specific ways of seeing, or measurements. In this sense it will be demonstrated that performance art, instead of existing only in the present, exists in various material ways, which are recursively disseminated over time through practices of memorialisation. To understand the second problem, two performance artworks created in the 1970s by Portuguese artists have been documented for the first time in this thesis. The case study analyses demonstrate how current methodologies are focused on perfomance-based art’s materials instead of its materiality and how that process increases the number of exclusions in the documentation process. Exclusions are then explained as acts of affirmation of the dominant cultural and political discourse and, in that sense, contribute to the invisibility of counter-narratives which not only co-constitute but are an intentional part of the fabric of performance artworks. Aside from implying a constant delimitation in the materialisation of these works, exclusions also immortalise social injustices in the form of, for example, community misrecognition. Participation, understood in the broad sense as an act of yielding authority, is proposed as a way to materialise performance artworks while reducing the exclusions that occur in every documentation process. This thesis argues that a dislocation of authority to peripheral stakeholders is not a loss of authorial power, but a way to multiply the instances of the work in multiple body-archives. An outcome of this dissertation, is a proposal and detailed outline for an innovative methodology for documenting performance art works

Designing the Multilingual: Summer Olympic Sports Pictograms and Universal Design in Cross-cultural Context

This Major Research Paper explores Summer Olympic sports pictograms design in historical and cross-cultural context. The distinctive characteristic and significance of Olympic sports pictogram design lies in its capacity to negotiate specific cultural expression alongside universal legibility, ideally communicating without supplementary text. On the other hand, they are also sutured to the mission of expressing the national identity of the host city/country and charged with conveying the specific cultural legacy unique to the host. Through an in-depth case study of the design process for the pictograms of the 2008 Beijing Olympiad, it further attempts to counter the Western-centered perspective of Olympic design scholarship. Drawing on the role and meaning of Chinese script (direct inspiration for the 2008 pictograms), as well as interventions by domestic and international stakeholders, this paper demonstrates how these images negotiate a synthesis between specific cultural interests and universal communication

Towards a Digital Land of Song: A Digital Approach to the Archival Record of Welsh Traditional Music, its Performance and its Reception

Divided between a prototype digital resource and a written companion, this research implements and examines some of the possibilities and prospects offered to the study of Welsh traditional music by digital humanities methods and approaches. Built on a relational database, the digital prototype functions as a server-based annotated index of a sample of sources from the collections of the National Library of Wales. The user interface of the prototype uses hyperlinks and geographical mapping to express connections between sources of, figures involved with, and reception information relating to Welsh traditional music. Its written companion serves as a contextual review and exposition of some of the research interests that have informed the creation of the prototype. Philosophically, these interests include the concepts of cultural geography, national identity, collective memory, archive, and their intersections with music. Musicologically, the research centres around twin axes: the traces of Welsh traditional music in the theoretical and literal archive constituted by the National Library of Wales, and the integration and inter-referencing of these traces in a virtual space in order to consider Welsh traditional music and its material record as a situated cultural activity

Implementation plan of health and safety processes

An auditor was asked to review an organisation’s Health and Safety procedures to assess compliance with the new legislation imposed by The Health and Safety Act 2015. Then the organisation approached an internal source to conduct a strategic plan in order to target issues of health and safety risk. An implementation plan will be designed to achieve the auditors recommendations and improve the organisation’s Health and Safety practices. Research and audit of the current policies and procedures used at the organisation must be conducted in order to gain a better understanding of the current issues and from there develop action plans and a strategy on how to reach those action plans. Current documentation of policies and an interview with management will be analysed to detail the potential action plans.Once the research has been conducted, results will be used to determine conclusions