Transgressive bodies in the work of Julie Doucet, Fabrice Neaud and Jean-Christophe Menu: towards a theory of the 'autobioBD'

As the comic book, and more precisely its exceptionally francophone doppelganger, la bande dessinée, begins to fulfil its potential as 'the Ninth Art', the range of styles, reading contexts, and genres which constitute the form as a signifying practice has consequently expanded. Consideration of 'what a comic is', such as is found in the works of Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters1 needs therefore to be complemented by a range of subsidiary questions addressing not only 'what kinds of comics there are', but, as an integral part of those inquiries, how different comic genres signify, and how the enunciative and representational functions deployed by each might be conceptualised. This paper considers the work of three Francophone comic artists, Fabrice Neaud and Jean-Christophe Menu, both French, and the Québecoise Julie Doucet, all of whom could be considered as proponents of the genre of BD we will call 'autobiocomics'. It will be argued that Neaud and Doucet, through their exploration of ontologies of presence and self-representation, work against the visual order of the phallocentric and heteronormative, an order which Menu appears to replicate but ultimately calls into question

Detectors and cryostat design for the SuMIRe Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS)

We describe the conceptual design of the camera cryostats, detectors, and detector readout electronics for the SuMIRe Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) being developed for the Subaru telescope. The SuMIRe PFS will consist of four identical spectrographs, each receiving 600 fibers from a 2400 fiber robotic positioner at the prime focus. Each spectrograph will have three channels covering wavelength ranges 3800 {\AA} - 6700 {\AA}, 6500 {\AA} - 10000 {\AA}, and 9700 {\AA} - 13000 {\AA}, with the dispersed light being imaged in each channel by a f/1.10 vacuum Schmidt camera. In the blue and red channels a pair of Hamamatsu 2K x 4K edge-buttable CCDs with 15 um pixels are used to form a 4K x 4K array. For the IR channel, the new Teledyne 4K x 4K, 15 um pixel, mercury-cadmium-telluride sensor with substrate removed for short-wavelength response and a 1.7 um cutoff will be used. Identical detector geometry and a nearly identical optical design allow for a common cryostat design with the only notable difference being the need for a cold radiation shield in the IR camera to mitigate thermal background. This paper describes the details of the cryostat design and cooling scheme, relevant thermal considerations and analysis, and discusses the detectors and detector readout electronics

In search of space: Fourier spectroscopy, 1950-1970

In the large grey area between science and technology, specialisms emerge with associated specialists. But some specialisms remain ‘peripheral sciences’, never attaining the status of ‘disciplines’ ensconced in universities, and their specialists do not become recognised professionals. A major social component of such side-lined sciences – one important grouping of technoscientific workers – is the ‘research-technology community’. An important question concerning research-technology is to explain how the grouping survives without specialised disciplinary and professional affiliations. The case discussed illustrates the dynamics of one such community

In search of space: Fourier spectroscopy, 1950-1970

In the large grey area between science and technology, specialisms emerge with associated specialists. But some specialisms remain ‘peripheral sciences’, never attaining the status of disciplines ensconced in universities, and their specialists do not become recognised professionals. A major social component of such side-lined sciences – one important grouping of techno-scientific workers – is the research-technology community. An important question concerning research-technology is to explain how the grouping survives without specialised disciplinary and professional affiliations. The case discussed illustrates the dynamics of one such community

Contested Ground: alcohol, attachment, and the hut habit at war

This talk is about the different ways and places in which attachment was expressed, managed, contained and denied at war. My focus is on alcohol, and on associated ideas about the articulation and performance of masculine identity, as demonstrated by church organizations and the military, as well as a range of men who fought. The concept of the ‘whole man’, fundamental to the wartime caregiving of the YMCA, for example, was, I will argue, a construct that conflicted with the military model. The experience of attachment, as explored in the literary record, exposes the extent of that conflict, as does the wartime debate over the use and effects of alcohol – a debate that had a politically and socially fraught history in the UK in the years before 1914. If, as one historian argues, ‘the British soldier was remarkably well looked after’, how was that looking after managed and manifested when alcohol was the matter at hand? This talk examines this and other questions in its exploration of the contested ground of alcohol at war

Structuring information through gesture and intonation

Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several “semiotic layers”, modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting

Piece by Piece Review of Digitize-and-Lend Projects Through the Lens of Copyright and Fair Use

Digitize-and-lend library projects can benefit societies in multiple ways, from providing information to people in remote areas, to reducing duplication of effort in digitization, to providing access to people with disabilities. Such projects contemplate not just digitizing library titles for regular patron use, but also allowing the digitized versions to be used for interlibrary loan (ILL), sharing within consortia, and replacing print copies at other libraries. Many of these functions are already supported within the analog world (e.g., ILL), and the digitize-and-lend concept is largely a logical outgrowth of technology, much like the transitioning from manual hand duplication of books to printing presses. The purpose of each function is to facilitate user access to information. Technology can amplify that access, but in doing so, libraries must also be careful not to upset the long established balance in copyright, where authors’ rights sit on the other side of the scale from public benefit. This article seeks to provide a primer on the various components in a digitize-and-lend project, explore the core copyright issues in each, and explain how these projects maintain the balance of copyright even as libraries take advantage of newer technologies