Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationTongues of Men and of Angels is a collection of short works exploring E.L. Doctorow's claim that, "There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative." Though the individual pieces in Tongues might be conventionally categorized as short memoirs and personal essays (and thus thought of as works generated by a singular author about the life of that author as a singular person), the book as a whole seeks to problematize popular notions of writing about the self. By subverting formal elements held to be the foundations of personal nonfiction narrative, these pieces, each in their own way, question the prevalent opinion that a given narrative is capable of posing as strictly fiction or nonfiction. Written as present-tense memoirs, my collection's opening pieces, "Mother Moves Us, Father" and "College, Art, Et al: An Evolution," highlight the slippery ground between the self recounted and the self in the act of recounting. The narrator of "Mother Moves Us, Father" attempts to investigate the meaning behind a memory of his adolescence and, in the process of elucidating this memory, loses track of his original intent in a spin of florid language, strange characterizations, and interpolated stories. Conversely, the narrator of "College, Art, Et al: An Evolution" holds tight to his narrative trajectory but, in doing so, exposes the artifice and absurdity of trapping one's personal history in the guise of linear recollection. The pieces "What's He Got?" "Thriftstore," "Paralyzed by the Immediate," and "Cut but not Dried," interrogate the convention of first-person POV as crucial to nonfiction or realistic narrators. On the other hand, works such as "Pornography," "Loop," and "Tongues of Men and of Angels," perform an overwrought first-person narrative. These greedy, interruptive, lyrical, and tangential voices blur the tentative lines meant to distinguish story and storyteller, experience and authority, and the subject and its traces. Freud famously said, "Writing is the record of an absent person," and, years later, Leonard Michaels expounded upon this idea in "Writing About Myself," arguing that author-personalized narratives bring subjective notions of presence and absence into extreme tension. Just the basic awareness of this tension, Michaels continued, allows the writer, when writing about himself, to place more interest on "the expressive value of form and its relation to the personal more than [an interest in] particular revelations of [one's] individual life." Hoping to expose this writerly tension for the reader while also seeking a sense of ineffable (in)completion, Tongues of Men and of Angels assembles a multivalent, polyphonic narrator who, through gaps, tangents, liminal spaces, and "fictional" elements, is more human and more real than any conventional subject of nonfictional writing might hope to be: a narrator who lets the reader listen, as Barry Hannah puts it, "to the orchestra of living.

Landscapes of ephemeral embrace : a painter's exploration of immersive virtual space as a medium for transforming perception

The following text has been written to illuminate the research embodied In Ephemere, a fullyimmersive virtual environment which integrates stereoscopic 3D computer-generated images and spatialized 3D sound, with a user interface based on breathing, balance, and gaze. This artwork was begun when I entered the doctoral program at CAiNA (Centre of Advanced Inquiry Into the Interactive Arts) in 1997, and was completed in 1998. The work Ephemere is grounded in a very personal vision, developed over more than 25 years of artistic practice, including, most significantly, painting. Ephemere follows on its predecessor Osmose, and as such, Is a continuation of my efforts to: (I) explore and communicate my sensibility of what it means to be embodied, here now, in the living Rowing world; and (ii) use the medium of immersive virtual space to do so, necessarily subverting its culturally-biased conventions to achieve this goal. The contents of this text are most clearly indicated by its title: Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter's Exploration of the Medium of Immersive Virtual Space for Transforming Perception. And further, by its chapter headings: (I) Context: Rethinking Technology in the "Reign of King Logos ; (II) Defining Terms: Key Concepts and Concerns in the Work; (III) Origins of the Work in Prior Artistic Practice: Emergence of Key Concerns and Strategies; (IV) First Explorations in Immersive Virtual Space: Osmose; (V) Continuing Explorations In Immersive Virtual Space: Ephemere; and (VI) Strategies and Their Implications In the Immersive Experience. In this text, I have focused my discussion on artistic Intent, rather than on whether I have been successful, for this can only be evaluated with the passing of time

Development, Value, and Education in India\u27s Digital Age

This ethnography is an attempt to show the particular relationships between globalization, development, digitality, and urban-rural change as they are re-articulated in the actions and interactions between several groups – NGO personnel, teachers, students – living, working, and studying within educational spaces in South Karnataka, in regions in and around Bangalore city. My intervention, to put it simply, is to show how the condition of development in India, and specifically education-as-development, has changed in the contemporary global digital moment, and I identify the new concerns of each of these groups – how they sought to develop themselves and Others – in the wake of technologically-enabled globality and social reform-oriented connection. My own set of ethnographic stories begins at the heart of these education-as-development concerns, but relies on the specificity of my interactions with a single NGO, Adhyaapaka, based in Bangalore, but that worked with school communities outside of it. I have placed these NGO narratives in relation to another set of narratives from one school site in which Adhyaapaka works, Adavisandra school. What I discovered, inadvertently, was an alternative shape that global development takes when seen through the stories of teachers and students, equally tied to the idea of a changing India, but inflected with aspirations and commitments that reflected the unique lived experiences of those who were participating in schooling in the village. This is also to say that, at least in India, any global-digital future is always a “global-urban-rural future” and throughout this study I mark instances of urban-rural linkage and boundary, always as a means to understand how individuals perceive development-based change. To this end, I further the concept of value migrations, a set of mediated imaginings and aspirations that reflect the circulation of values and the concomitant changes wrought in villages. In unpacking the concept of “value” I foreground the inextricable link between global economic structures, human development, and village change. Further, I connect value to affect, showing how structures of economic power work on a psychosocial register, manifesting as dreams, hopes, desires, nostalgias, anxieties, and sufferings and together are what I term the “affects of development”

Effects of Complementary use of Organic and Inorganic fertilizers on the growth and yield of Cucumber (Cucumu sativus. L.) on an ultisol

A field study was conducted in 2008 and 2009 early cropping seasons to assess the response of cucumber (Cucumus sativus L.) to complementary use of organic and inorganic fertilizers in Uyo agro-ecology. The fertilizer treatments were: NPK (15:15:15) at 100 and 200 kgha-1, poultry manure (PM) at 5 and 10 tha-1 , and complementary application of 100 kgha-1 of NPK + 5 tha-1 of PM, 100 kgha-1 of NPK + 10 tha-1 of PM, 200 kgha1 of NPK +5 tha-1 of PM ,200 kgha-1 of NPK +10 tha-1 of PM and control (no fertilizer). Results showed significant differences (P<0.05) in all the growth and yield parameters considered in both cropping seasons. The combined application of 200 kgha-1 of NPK and 10 tha-1 of PM performed better than sole application of either organic or inorganic fertilizer, with fresh fruit yield of 14.63 and 14.92 tha-1 in 2008 and 2009, respectively and exceeded other treatments by 1 -76% and 1-73% in 2009 and 2010, respectively. This indicates strongly the synergistic benefits of using both organic and inorganic fertilizers even at lower rates

Perception and Discovery: An Introduction to Scientific Inquiry

Norwood Russell Hanson was one of the most important philosophers of science of the post-war period. Hanson brought Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy to bear on the concepts of science, and his treatments of observation, discovery, and the theory-ladenness of scientific facts remain central to the philosophy of science. Additionally, Hanson was one of philosophy’s great personalities, and his sense of humor and charm come through fully in the pages of Perception and Discovery. Perception and Discovery, originally published in 1969, is Hanson’s posthumous textbook in philosophy of science. The book focuses on the indispensable role philosophy plays in scientific thinking. Perception and Discovery features Hanson’s most complete and mature account of theory-laden observation, a discussion of conceptual and logical boundaries, and a detailed treatment of the epistemological features of scientific research and scientific reasoning. This book is of interest to scholars of philosophy of science, particularly those concerned with Hanson’s thought and the development of the discipline in the middle of the 20th century. However, even fifty years after Hanson’s early death, Perception and Discovery still has a great deal to offer all readers interested in science

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed