Yavaa: supporting data workflows from discovery to visualization

Recent years have witness an increasing number of data silos being opened up both within organizations and to the general public: Scientists publish their raw data as supplements to articles or even standalone artifacts to enable others to verify and extend their work. Governments pass laws to open up formerly protected data treasures to improve accountability and transparency as well as to enable new business ideas based on this public good. Even companies share structured information about their products and services to advertise their use and thus increase revenue. Exploiting this wealth of information holds many challenges for users, though. Oftentimes data is provided as tables whose sheer endless rows of daunting numbers are barely accessible. InfoVis can mitigate this gap. However, offered visualization options are generally very limited and next to no support is given in applying any of them. The same holds true for data wrangling. Only very few options to adjust the data to the current needs and barely any protection are in place to prevent even the most obvious mistakes. When it comes to data from multiple providers, the situation gets even bleaker. Only recently tools emerged to search for datasets across institutional borders reasonably. Easy-to-use ways to combine these datasets are still missing, though. Finally, results generally lack proper documentation of their provenance. So even the most compelling visualizations can be called into question when their coming about remains unclear. The foundations for a vivid exchange and exploitation of open data are set, but the barrier of entry remains relatively high, especially for non-expert users. This thesis aims to lower that barrier by providing tools and assistance, reducing the amount of prior experience and skills required. It covers the whole workflow ranging from identifying proper datasets, over possible transformations, up until the export of the result in the form of suitable visualizations

Across Anthropology

"How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland – and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition-making. This collection considers where and how anthropology is troubled, mobilised, and rendered meaningful. Across Anthropology charts new ground by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe’s reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies.

Information technology and military performance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 519-544).Militaries have long been eager to adopt the latest technology (IT) in a quest to improve knowledge of and control over the battlefield. At the same time, uncertainty and confusion have remained prominent in actual experience of war. IT usage sometimes improves knowledge, but it sometimes contributes to tactical blunders and misplaced hubris. As militaries invest intensively in IT, they also tend to develop larger headquarters staffs, depend more heavily on planning and intelligence, and employ a larger percentage of personnel in knowledge work rather than physical combat. Both optimists and pessimists about the so-called "revolution in military affairs" have tended to overlook the ways in which IT is profoundly and ambiguously embedded in everyday organizational life. Technocrats embrace IT to "lift the fog of war," but IT often becomes a source of breakdowns, misperception, and politicization. To describe the conditions under which IT usage improves or degrades organizational performance, this dissertation develops the notion of information friction, an aggregate measure of the intensity of organizational struggle to coordinate IT with the operational environment. It articulates hypotheses about how the structure of the external battlefield, internal bureaucratic politics, and patterns of human-computer interaction can either exacerbate or relieve friction, which thus degrades or improves performance. Technological determinism alone cannot account for the increasing complexity and variable performances of information phenomena. Information friction theory is empirically grounded in a participant-observation study of U.S. special operations in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. To test the external validity of insights gained through fieldwork in Iraq, an historical study of the 1940 Battle of Britain examines IT usage in a totally different structural, organizational, and technological context.(cont.) These paired cases show that high information friction, and thus degraded performance, can arise with sophisticated IT, while lower friction and impressive performance can occur with far less sophisticated networks. The social context, not just the quality of technology, makes all the difference. Many shorter examples from recent military history are included to illustrate concepts. This project should be of broad interest to students of organizational knowledge, IT, and military effectiveness.by Jon Randall Lindsay.Ph.D

Buck-horned snakes and possum women: Non-white folkore, antebellum *Southern literature, and interracial cultural exchange

The antebellum American South was a site of continual human mobility and social fluidity. This cultivated a pattern of cultural exchange between black, indigenous, and white Southerners, especially in the Old Southwest, making the region a cultural borderland as well as a geographical one. This environment resulted in the creolization of many aspects of life in the region. to date, the literature of the Old South has yet to be studied in this context. This project traces the diffusion of African-American and Native American culture in white-authored Southern texts.;For instance, textual evidence in Old Southwestern Humor reveals a pattern of adaptations of folklore belonging to African-Americans. Johnson Jones Hooper\u27s Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845) in particular reflects the presence of plots and motifs that originated in African trickster tales. Not all white Southern authors were menable to creolization, though. Novelists like William Gilmore Simms drew from but resisted the complete integration of non-white folklore in his historical romances. Native Americans and their culture frequently appear in his The Yemassee (1835), for instance, but always in a separate sphere.;The differences associated with the creolization of Old Southwestern Humor and the lack thereof in Southern historical romances reflect a distinction in Southern attitudes toward westward expansion and its social implications. In particular, the degree to which these authors did or did not resist creolization reflects their opinion about patterns of antebellum emigration and the backwoods social fluidity that contributed to the phenomenon of cultural exchange. Older conservatives like Simms, for instance, perceived the Old Southwest as a threat due to its rowdiness, materialism, and permeable social class. Novels by these authors displaced this milieu into the colonial past at an historical moment at which it became stabilized. The consequent elimination of Native Americans by whites in these texts marked a symbolic victory for order and stasis.;The texts of younger emigres to the South like Hooper reflect an alternate perspective. their embrace of the creative opportunities made possible by the social instability of the Old Southwest corresponds to their enthusiasm for the economic and social promise afforded by this recently settled region. In other words, the authors\u27 openness to creolization mirrors a tolerance of the chaos born of mobility and a lack of structure. Suggs\u27s antisocial exploits are adapted from African-American trickster tales whose characteristic disdain for authority and subversiveness contribute to Hooper\u27s satire of traditional attitudes, including paternalism, which sought to limit this social flux.;These texts\u27 competing viewpoints of the frontier allow scholars to get a sense of the diversity of social and political thought in the region---there was no monolithic Mind of the Old South. Additionally, acknowledging that these texts are a product of the multicultural environment reveals the contributions of Africans and Native Americans to Southern literature at its formative stage

Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy

Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the “making” of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861-1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy’s most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D’Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 silent film Cabiria--produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911-12) and celebrating ancient Roman imperialism

Digital curation in UK performing arts contemporary professional practice

Practitioners of the performing arts working outside the higher education institutional context regularly produce work on limited project funding, to tight deadlines and with too little time or resource to consider the curation of their digital assets. Without specialist expertise, digital objects created and used by performance practitioners are vulnerable to damage and disappearance, limiting the prospects of a coherent record of contemporary performance practice. This study begins to ascertain the nature of digital curation practice in the professional performing arts by examining the digital curation awareness and practice of a sample of the UK performing arts community. This enquiry is set into the broader context of digital curation and preservation, which offers some useful models of sustainable management of digital objects against which practice can be compared. Twelve performing arts practitioners from across the UK are interviewed to establish understanding of whether, why and how they create and manage digital objects in the course of their creative work. The resulting detailed qualitative data establishes what they understand about sustainable management of digital objects, and which digital curation activities they execute in their working processes. It also identifies the presence of possible skills and knowledge gaps, and explores the types of digital resources that performing arts practitioners seek and use, in order to understand whether there is a comparable appetite for the creation and reuse of digital objects in this field. Additionally, the research examines the sources used by practitioners when attempting to access digital objects created by others as part of research for their own creative work. This provides a ‘performer’s-eye view’ of performance collections - that is to say, the resources used as collections for research, irrespective of the formal designation or intended purpose of such resources. Responses indicated that practitioners highly value the digital objects they create themselves as well as those created by others and have expectations of sustained access to these objects. In contrast, however, reported awareness and practice of the principles of sustainable management of digital objects, as promulgated by digital curation, is very low. Although further research is required to test whether the results of the present study are indicative of practice in the larger performance arts sector, they indicate that many digital objects produced by performing arts practitioners are probably subject to damage or loss. Concluding remarks indicate the implications of these findings for the representation of performing arts practice for current and future generations, and suggest useful future areas of enquiry

Origins, Genealogies, and the Politics of Mythmaking: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Myth

This thesis develops and advocates a feminist philosophy of myth in order to reformulate influential understandings of the roles and functions of myths in recent mythological scholarship. The initial hypothesis which the thesis establishes in Chapter 1 is that the designation of myth qua myth is neither innocent nor organic; highly consequential interests are at stake when myths are narrated, and, moreover, the categorisation of some types of narrative as ‘myth’ and others as ‘science’, or ‘philosophy’, for example, indicates powerful assertions about their relative level of validity and authority. I argue that these assertions are implicated in discursive strategies of containment and exclusion and allied to forms of identity construction characterised by an assertion of singularity. They further rely on the location of a non-transcendable point of origin as a means of securing the stability and legitimacy of these constructions. I develop this argument, in Chapters 2–7, through an extended case study of the German search for origins from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and demonstrate its relationship to the German romantic attempt to construct a noble German identity. I critique these forms of identity and origin construction, arguing that the German case is but one example of the western metaphysical theories of ontology which are indebted to inflected patrilinearity, the main feature of which is a preoccupation with monogenetic singularity. I consequently develop an alternative feminist model of origins and identity in Chapters 8–10 based on poststructural and psychoanalytical feminist theories of maternality as a site of splitting, doubling, and process. I acknowledge that while the identification of origins is an ontological convention, the assertion of patrilineal provenance creates forms of subjectivity that are exclusionary, dialectical, and monolithic, and are, therefore, inadequate frameworks for constructing ethically oriented models of identity in a post-feminist context. In contrast, I suggest that metaphors of maternal origin offer a considerably more promising, if transitional, discursive frame for articulating identities that stress multiplicity, connectedness, immanence, and dialogue

Perceptual fail: Female power, mobile technologies and images of self

Like a biological species, images of self have descended and modified throughout their journey down the ages, interweaving and recharging their viability with the necessary interjections from culture, tools and technology. Part of this journey has seen images of self also become an intrinsic function within the narratives about female power; consider Helen of Troy “a face that launched a thousand ships” (Marlowe, 1604) or Kim Kardashian (KUWTK) who heralded in the mass mediated ‘selfie’ as a social practice. The interweaving process itself sees the image oscillate between naturalized ‘icon’ and idealized ‘symbol’ of what the person looked like and/or aspired to become. These public images can confirm or constitute beauty ideals as well as influence (via imitation) behaviour and mannerisms, and as such the viewers belief in the veracity of the representative image also becomes intrinsically political manipulating the associated narratives and fostering prejudice (Dobson 2015, Korsmeyer 2004, Pollock 2003). The selfie is arguably ‘a sui generis,’ whilst it is a mediated photographic image of self, it contains its own codes of communication and decorum that fostered the formation of numerous new digital communities and influenced new media aesthetics . For example the selfie is both of nature (it is still a time based piece of documentation) and known to be perceptually untrue (filtered, modified and full of artifice). The paper will seek to demonstrate how selfie culture is infused both by considerable levels of perceptual failings that are now central to contemporary celebrity culture and its’ notion of glamour which in turn is intrinsically linked (but not solely defined) by the province of feminine desire for reinvention, transformation or “self-sexualisation” (Hall, West and McIntyre, 2012). The subject, like the Kardashians or selfies, is divisive. In conclusion this paper will explore the paradox of the perceptual failings at play within selfie culture more broadly, like ‘Reality TV’ selfies are infamously fake yet seem to provide Debord’s (1967) illusory cultural opiate whilst fulfilling a cultural longing. Questions then emerge when considering the narrative impact of these trends on engendered power structures and the traditional status of illusion and narrative fiction