Recomposing the Archive: Remediating memories of Iraqi diaspora with personal archive photos, oral history, and Virtual Reality

This practice-based research builds on an aggregation of methods and themes from the artist’s personal practice. It adopts a critical visual-arts-based participatory methodology utilising qualitative methods to collect personal photographs from Iraqi diaspora, record oral history narratives surrounding those photographs, and explore the creative remediation of this memory material within simulated environments using Virtual Reality. The focus on Iraqi diaspora is informed by the artist’s dual Irish-Iraqi heritage. The research reviews and classifies the extent of photographic archives related to Iraq (both formal and informal), oral history and creative practice memory projects involving Iraqi diaspora, and the range of simulated representations of Iraq. Visual research into formal archival collections of photographs from Iraq led to an observation that historical collections are predominately filled with ethnographic images taken in a colonial context, and contemporary collections dominated by images related to war. Digital simulations of Iraq are almost exclusively associated with the country as a site of conflict, be it representations within military training simulations, backdrops for first-person shooter games and combat flight simulators, or digital heritage preservation and reconstruction of cultural heritage sites damaged or destroyed due to conflict. These observations motivated the use of a participatory methodology combined withcreative practice to create sites of representation and explore the impact of this process on participants and audiences. The Iraq Photo Archive website was created as an online repository for personal archive photographs, and oral history interviews using photo elicitation method were conducted with consenting participants about their memories of the photographic moments. The memory materials generated through this process were creatively remediated into the House of Memory Virtual Reality experience, using aspects of the neonarrative method for interviews, and 3D design to reconstruct the photographs in virtual environments. The experience expands the photographic moment into an immersive temporal environment where the digital materiality of the space is inhabited by the voices and narratives of the Iraqi diaspora participants. This methodological approach forefronts memories and narratives about Iraq from Iraqis themselves, facilitating representation through participation, and counters dominant representations of Iraq in simulated media such as video games. Following qualitative evaluation with participants and audiences, the research demonstrates how a participatory art-based project (informed by personal practice) can impact knowledge and desire for authentic representations of Iraqi narratives within and outside of the Iraqi diaspora community; communicate situated and relational knowledge on the experiences and memories of Iraqi diaspora using photography, oral history, and VR; present counter narratives to the representation of Iraq in simulations, and more generally by the media; and develop a technological and methodological approach for remediating vernacular images and narratives into VR as a means of contributing to the preservation and dissemination of individual (and collective) community histories for diasporic communities

Европейский и национальный контексты в научных исследованиях

В настоящем электронном сборнике «Европейский и национальный контексты в научных исследованиях. Технология» представлены работы молодых ученых по геодезии и картографии, химической технологии и машиностроению, информационным технологиям, строительству и радиотехнике. Предназначены для работников образования, науки и производства. Будут полезны студентам, магистрантам и аспирантам университетов.=In this Electronic collected materials “National and European dimension in research. Technology” works in the fields of geodesy, chemical technology, mechanical engineering, information technology, civil engineering, and radio-engineering are presented. It is intended for trainers, researchers and professionals. It can be useful for university graduate and post-graduate students

Framing digital image credibility: image manipulation problems, perceptions and solutions

Image manipulation is subverting the credibility of photographs as a whole. Currently there is no practical solution for asserting the authenticity of a photograph. People express their concern about this when asked but continue to operate in a ‘business as usual’ fashion. While a range of digital forensic technologies has been developed to address falsification of digital photographs, such technologies begin with ‘sourceless’ images and conclude with results in equivocal terms of probability, while not addressing the meaning and content contained within the image. It is interesting that there is extensive research into computer-based image forgery detection, but very little research into how we as humans perceive, or fail to perceive, these forgeries when we view them. The survey, eye-gaze tracking experiments and neural network analysis undertaken in this research contribute to this limited pool of knowledge. The research described in this thesis investigates human perceptions of images that are manipulated and, by comparison, images that are not manipulated. The data collected, and their analyses, demonstrate that humans are poor at identifying that an image has been manipulated. I consider some of the implications of digital image manipulation, explore current approaches to image credibility, and present a potential digital image authentication framework that uses technology and tools that exploit social factors such as reputation and trust to create a framework for technologically packaging/wrapping images with social assertions of authenticity, and surfaced metadata information. The thesis is organised into 6 chapters. Chapter 1: Introduction I briefly introduce the history of photography, highlighting its importance as reportage, and discuss how it has changed from its introduction in the early 19th century to today. I discuss photo manipulation and consider how it has changed along with photography. I describe the relevant literature on the subject of image authentication and the use of eye gaze tracking and neural nets in identifying the role of human vision in image manipulation detection, and I describe my area of research within this context. Chapter 2: Literature review I describe the various types of image manipulation, giving examples, and then canvas the literature to describe the landscape of image manipulation problems and extant solutions, namely: • the nature of image manipulation, • investigations of human perceptions of image manipulation, • eye gaze tracking and manipulated images, • known efforts to create solutions to the problem of preserving unadulterated photographic representations and the meanings they hold. Finally, I position my research activities within the context of the literature. Chapter 3: The research I describe the survey and experiments I undertook to investigate attitudes toward image manipulation, research human perceptions of manipulated and unmanipulated images, and to trial elements of a new wrapper-style file format that I call .msci (mobile self-contained image), designed to address image authenticity issues. Methods, results and discussion for each element are presented in both explanatory text and by presentation of papers resulting from the experiments. Chapter 4: Analysis of eye gaze data using classification neural networks I describe pattern classifying neural network analysis applied to selected data obtained from the experiments and the insights this analysis provided into the opaque realm of cognitive perception as seen through the lens of eye gaze. Chapter 5: Discussion I synthesise and discuss the outcomes of the survey and experiments. I discuss the outcomes of this research, and consider the need for a distinction between photographs and photo art. I offer a theoretical formula within which the overall authenticity of an image can be assessed. In addition I present a potential image authentication framework built around the .msci file format, designed in consideration of my investigation of the requirements of the image manipulation problem space and the experimental work undertaken in this research. Chapter 6: Conclusions and future work This thesis concludes with a summary of the outcomes of my research, and I consider the need for future experimentation to expand on the insights gained to date. I also note some ways forward to develop an image authentication framework to address the ongoing problem of image authenticity

BOBCATSSS 2016 : Information, Libraries, Democracy. Proceedings & Abstracts

Actes du congrès BOBCATSSS 2016 qui s\u27est déroulé à Lyon du 27 au 29 janvier 2016 sur le thème : Information, bibliothèques, démocratie

Living on the Edge: The Manuscript of Ocaña and the Production of an Islamic Space in Early Modern Spain

Before their expulsion from Spain in the early seventeenth century, Muslims would hide their books inside the walls of their houses to evade the castigation of the Christian Inquisition. The manuscript under study is an anonymous pocket-size Islamic compendium written in Arabic, excavated in Ocaña (Toledo) in 1969 from the wall of a house in restoration. More than five centuries old, this manuscript is a rare testimony of the survival of both Arabic and Islam until the early sixteenth century in Castile, despite the efforts of the Christian Crown to ban the language and eradicate the religion. The choice of this manuscript is driven by the recognition of its value as the epitome of the resistance of the Muslim minority in Spain at a transitional period of its history under Christian rule. It materialises their journey from the secluded Mudejar districts pushed to the outskirts of cities to the underground Morisco households lurking under surveillance. Examined as both an artefact and a text, this codex proves to be a multi-layered manuscript matrix, carefully designed to produce a space of interstice between the ideal Islamic construction of the universe, at the centre of which stands the Muslim community, and the reality of their marginalisation and persecution in early modern Spain. This thesis is an endeavour to offer a comprehensive multi-disciplinary study of an invaluable historical token that belongs to a private collection, nowadays inaccessible to the researcher. Its first part offers a thick description of the text-object in an attempt to reconstruct its life-cycle, relying on the available historical data about the crypto-Muslim community and their secret manuscript culture. The manuscript of Ocaña, the practical sermon-guide, once used to instruct the audience, turned into a sacred inscribed relic that survived the fire of biblioclasm and outlived its owners. The second part then turns to an analysis of the features of the space created in the compilation. The construction of the universe, fragile as it might seem, proves to be sustained by a strong ethical system based on the fear of God and His retribution. Most of the spaces represented in the manuscript are liminal, suspended between the Here and the Hereafter to dramatise the reverberations between the macrocosm and the microcosm and constantly remind the believers of death and the Last Judgement. Life and Afterlife are portrayed as permeable spaces that have a synchronised existence at a time when the End is looming ahead. The exploration of the spatial pattern that unfolds in the text and its ethical dimensions and rhetorical undertones is a lens to grasp the worldview of the marginalised community, the mechanisms of their momentary survival in a structured space-within-a space, and the reasons for their ultimate disappearance. It is argued that the denial of their right to publicly practise their religion in a space of their own led the crypto-Muslims who chose to remain in their land to gradually lose their language and religious rituals. When the ideal Islamic space of the manuscript could no longer be represented in everyday life, and the sense of a shared community vanished with the domestication of religion, the end of Islam in Spain was an inevitable consequence. Religion, unlike faith, is communal, public, performative, and material. It needs a physical space to survive or else will become, like this manuscript, a text that can no longer be read. In using a largely untapped primary source of documents written in Arabic, this project will contribute to the growing body of research on similar codices, to complicate the Inquisition records and other state archival documents in the recovery of the forgotten period in the history of Spanish Islam