Making Social Dynamics and Content Evolution Transparent in Collaboratively Written Text

This dissertation presents models and algorithms for accurately and efficiently extracting data from revisioned content in Collaborative Writing Systems about (i) the provenance and history of specific sequences of text, as well as (ii) interactions between editors via the content changes they perform, especially disagreement. Visualization tools are presented to gain further insights into the extracted data. Collaboration mechanisms to be researched with these new data and tools are discussed

Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean

Acord transformatiu CRUE-CSICUnidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MIn thinking about alternatives to growth-based development, we draw attention to Mediterranean islands and the way they animate imaginaries and practices of a simple life. We follow Franco Cassano's thesis of 'Southern thought' - a critique of Western developmentalism, prioritizing instead values of slowness, moderation and conviviality. These values are central to what Serge Latouche and others call 'degrowth'. Drawing on fieldwork and ethnography from Ikaria and Gavdos, two remote islands in the Greek archipelago, we show how Southern thought, and forms of real-existing degrowth develop in relation to 'islandness' - a physical and cultural condition specific to small islands. Geography, historical contingency, and processes of myth-making combine to re-valorise what otherwise would be seen as 'undeveloped' places, thereby generating space for real-existing degrowth

Wallace Stegner\u27s Wolf Willow and 1960s Critical Essays: Renarrativizing Western American Literature for the West and for America

As writer, essayist, environmentalist, and westerner, Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-1993) confronted what he understood to be an imagined and literal American West constructed by myths of frontier conquest, pioneer settlement in and transformation of the western landscape, and cowboy exceptionalism that erased an historical legacy of hardship, failure, and destruction of land and people, and also a West constructed by Eastern publishers and literary critics who diminished western American literature to local color writing. In Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962), Stegner uses fiction, history, and memoir to engage the mythic West\u27s silencing of his family\u27s failed homesteading experiences in a specific western place and the relationship of his childhood and adult selves to this place, to its history, to experiences there, and to the cultural myths that characterize his western past and present and position the West as a symbolic container of hope, opportunity, and reward for the individual and America. In an historicized western place and from childhood experiences, Stegner locates an Other western narrative and an authentic western voice that disrupts the monomythic voice and values that are out of touch not only with a modern, multicultural, urban West but also with a rural West. Coming after Wolf Willow, a series of essays-- Born a Square (1964), On the Writing of History (1965), and History, Myth, and the Western Writer (1967), reprinted in the popular The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)-- present Stegner\u27s new theory of western American literature that re-visions the West\u27s literary heritage and reclaims the western story, what he called another kind of western story-telling that engages both the present and the past Wests, acknowledges past crimes against racial others and against western lands, promotes a sense of hope for a native western art, and raises America\u27s consciousness of the personal, environmental, and cultural costs of adhering to the metanarratives of the culturally dominant mythic West of formula fiction, Hollywood films, and television series of the 1940s through 1960s. While Stegner scholars have examined the essays independently and deem them important to Stegner\u27s works and to the trajectory of western American literature in the 1970s forward, no study has undertaken an extended analysis of these three essays in relation to Wolf Willow to argue, as this dissertation does, that Wolf Willow contains in germinal form the foundation of Stegner\u27s realist, place-based, and historicist theoretical construct for western American literature he advocated for in the 1960\u27s essays

Triune God and the hermeneutics of community: church, gender and mission in Stanley J. Grenz with reference to Paul Ricoeur

The aim of this dissertation is to undertake a study of the trinitarian ecclesiology of the North American evangelical theologian Stanley J. Grenz (d.2005), along with his imago Dei theology, revisioned social trinitarianism, narrative theology, incorporation of theosis, and theology of triune participation. This dissertation also utilizes the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, in conjunction with Grenz’s trinitarian ecclesiology, to propose a missional and hermeneutical ecclesiology. Chapter one begins with an overview of Grenz’s theology and a discussion of the current state of Grenz scholarship. It then introduces Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self and theory of narrative identity. The chapter concludes with an overview of chapters two, three, and four. Chapter two traces the manner in which Grenz’s social trinitarianism and imago Dei theology yield a social imago. The first section overviews Grenz’s The Social God and the Relational Self, the social imago, the ecclesial self, his notion of ecclesial eschatological prolepsis, and his theology of triune participation. The second section responds to key criticisms of social trinitarianism, discusses Grenz and Ricoeur on the relational self, and outlines the manner in which Grenz’s theology of theosis and triune participation “in Christ” and through the Spirit yields an ecclesially oriented communal theo-anthropology. The final section takes up Grenz’s social imago and triune participation in relation to female/male mutuality in ecclesial participation and community. Chapter three discusses Grenz’s narrative theology and the development of a narrative imago. The first section overviews Grenz’s The Named God and the Question of Being and his development of the narrative of the divine name as the saga of the triune God, his further use of theosis, and the narrative imago arising within storied participation “in Christ” through the Spirit. The second section examines the continuity of Named God with Social God and argues that Grenz presents a revisioned social trinitarianism. The second section also considers Grenz and Ricoeur on the narrative self and proposes that Grenz’s ecclesial theo-anthropology now becomes a cruciform Christo-anthropology. The third section takes up the narrative imago and female/male mutuality and cruciformity as it arises from the ecclesial relation of storied and communal theotic triune participation. Chapter four treats the development of a Grenzian ecclesial imago and proposes a missional and hermeneutical ecclesiology. The first section presents Grenz’s ecclesiology as it is oriented towards mission and the connection of theosis, triune participation, and ecclesia. This section then proposes a missional grammar for the church as God’s ecclesial hermeneutics of community. The second section discusses potential charges of ecclesiological foundationalism, considers Grenz and Ricoeur on the summoned self, and extends Grenz’s theo-anthropology and Christo-anthropology into a missio-anthropology. The third section considers the mutuality and cruciformity of ecclesial “male and female” relation “in Christ” and through the Spirit, manifest in ecclesial friendship and hospitality, as the coming-to-representation and hermeneutics of community of the triune God. The conclusion offers a summary and possible avenues for further investigation

Sisters to Scheherazade: Revisioned Histories of Gender and Nation in Postcolonial African and Asian Women's Literature

PhDTraversing geographical boundaries and cultural locations, and using a comparative, crosscultural framework, this thesis examines and critiques a selected range of women's writings from postcolonial Africa and Asia. It foregrounds the works of Assia Djebar, Mariama Ba, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nayantara Sahgal and Attia Hosain and outlines the processes through which women writers decentre imperialist, patriarchal underpinnings of the grand recit, defy conventions of autobiographical practice, make sense of a feminized past and revision a different collective personal history that has emancipatory potential for women and other oppressed groups. Referring to Eurocentric "male-stream" histories that have systematically thrust women to the margins, the study illustrates through a variety of literary texts and genres the complex ways in which past histories have obliterated women's presence and voiceconsciousness. While appraising diverse textual strategies of narratives, it discusses the "fictional" nature of historical work and the underlying ideologies framing supposedly "truthful" archival records; the ambivalent role of the historian; the gaps and fissures in historical memory; and the significance of history as a palimpsest. By excavating subsumed histories and "spectres" of the past, the study assesses the way specific texts reconstruct totalizing masculinist chronicles and counterpoise them with alternative feminine inscriptions that are multi-layered and polyphonic, and sometimes also fragmented, "silent" and inconclusive. Additionally, the thesis demonstrates how the process of overwriting the palimpsest has situated women in pivotal positions to articulate issues relevant to a dialogue between gender and nation/atism. The strategic role women have undertaken in decolonization processes worldwide, the ambivalent attitude of male nationalists to women's concerns after independence, and the multiple dilemmas confronting women in a globalized neoimperial world scenario are central to this discussion. Here, the thesis also probes the implications of veiling for Muslim women of contemporary times, sex-segregation based on an antiquated ideology of purdah, women's (limited) access to public space, and the question of agency and women's voice-consciousness. The study highlights current global conditions (such as modern migrations and economic transnationalism) and multiple categories of race, class, gender and ethnicity that intersect in complex ways to represent the Otherized identities of women

Revisioning Baptist missional identity: Edgar Young Mullins\u27 theology of soul competency and contemporary Christian mission

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1674/thumbnail.jp