The many levels of sports narration

'At its most a typical sports narrative records what happens in space and time. Alongside this traditional history of events there has emerged a research approach that might be called structural sports history. Its methods move in the world under the surface of facts, explored by researchers in ways that resemble archaeology. The aim is to uncover the changed human relationships and new forms of presence in sport-figurations of corporeality, space and time. Where the event-history approach recounts and recapitulates, the new approach works towards interpretation and understanding. These two are joined by yet a third element, the most intimate aspect of sports narratives: microhistory and the routes that it opens to the interfaces between the public and the private and the general and the particular, where the reader-oriented focus of the experiencing and narrating subject is necessarily foregrounded and at this point surface such elements of narrativity as the 'confessional', the 'meditative' and the 'fragmentary' (auto)biography. The article describes different levels of a sports narrative and their conventions in qualitative sports research.' (author's abstract

Специфіка хронотопу в романі-біографії М. Слабошпицького «Марія Башкирцева (Життя за гороскопом)»

На матеріалі роману-біографії М. Слабошпицького «Марія Башкирцева (Життя за гороскопом)» виявлено хронотопні особливості твору: лінійність, послідовність викладу подій, специфіку моделювання соціально-історичного часу, що виступає як тло для сюжетної канви, точне датування як провідний чинник формування художнього часу. У статті закцентовано на художніх прийомах зміщення та заміщення часових площин, кадруванні, забіганні наперед, ретроспекції. There is no scientific solid research of biographic prose of М. Slaboshpytskyi what makes actuality of the chosen theme. In the article there is an attempt to evaluate chronotype features of M. Slaboshpytskyi’s novel-biography “Maria Bashkyrtseva”, namely linearness, sequence of exposition of events, specific of design of socialhistorical time that comes forward as a background for a plot canvas, exact dating as leading factor of forming of artistic time. In the article it is marked on the artistic receptions of moving and substituting of temporal planes, stream of shots method, retrospective views. Formign of artistic space in relation to a heroine in a novel «Maria Bashkyrtseva» passes due to comparison of Native and Stranger space, that helps to expresse the inner world of Maria Bashkyrtseva, and show how the reason of own search, process of self-definition is realized

"Mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation" : writing Nabokov's life in the age of the author's death

textIn her introduction to a special issue of the South Central Review on literary biography published in 2006, Linda Leavell writes, "Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of the word “literary”—back through Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” to the New Critics’ division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality. Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author’s life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text" (1). Leavell’s explanation of how critical theory of the twentieth century came to shape the current scholarly attitude towards literary biography establishes the genre’s status in an era of literary theory that is commonly characterized by the diminishment of the author as the source of meaning in a text, an era in which we remain. This characterization, however, overlooks the different ways that the theorists of the era displaced the author as the dominant figure in literary studies. This paper demonstrates how these different ways, despite whatever damage they might have done to the status of literary biography, actually benefit the study of the genre. Additionally, this paper argues that they not only comprise one side of Vladimir Nabokov’s contradictory views on his own authorship, which makes him an ideal subject for the study of authority over biographical representation, but also gave rise to new methodologies of literary biography, which are the methodologies of Nabokov’s biographers themselves. As a result, this paper concludes, “an author’s life, personality, and intentions” in turn have assumed new relevancy in literary studies.Englis

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase, and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm

Cultural Creativity and Local Development: The Experience of the Socio-Cultural District of Selinunte

The pivotal idea of the Socio-Cultural District of Selinunte was inspired by a concept we found as a gift in that inexhaustible source of ideas that Borges’ texts (1995) still are. It might seem absurd to think of the biography of Michelangelo without any of his works… Yet, if we carefully think about it, we will realise that the endless series of acts composing the mosaic of a whole life is wide enough to allow us connecting a limited number of events among them. In addition, if we put those events in a diachronic sequence, they will take on the characteristics of a biography! That is Borges, up to here. If we select a different subject though, a territory for example, a consistent physiognomy could emerge in this case too, even if we leave aside the Temple ‘C’ of Selinunte or even the whole monument area of one of the largest and most complex archaeological parks in the Mediterranean area. We live in an era of cultures and territories, with emerging subjects who want to gain the place and role in history that have been long denied to them. This is also an era of decline of absolute values and grand theories. All that given, regaining (rebuilding or even making up) one’s identity is an inescapable strategic shift. Who will be in charge with the task of outlining the borders and contents of a community space? Who will be held responsible for drawing a face that is marked by the passing of time and made lively by our fresh contemporary energies? How can we avoid heritage becoming a burden rather than a challenge to think about the future

Book Review: Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography - Representing Canadian History through Graphic Art

This paper explores how graphic art, specifically in the comic-strip form, can represent events of the past and engage readers in historical narratives. Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography tells history in a unique way by depicting heightened moments of drama in Riel’s life during the Red River Rebellion. Through vivid illustrations, Brown involves readers in the imaginative process and helps readers uncover Riel’s character and the choices he made during the series of events before his hanging for high treason in 1885. This paper contains original interpretations of Brown’s comic-strip biography, coupled with scholars’ opinions and critical analysis of Brown’s work. Brown’s comic-strip biography reveals how images in graphic novels can uniquely represent historical events and engage readers in historical narratives. The potential of graphic art at successfully representing the imagined communities of Canada should not be underestimated

Time machines.

The chapter is concerned with the use of computers to represent historical time visually, typically as ‘timelines’. Research into the sophisticated practice and theory of early modern paper timelines in the eighteenth century reveals the weakness of current practice, especially on the Web. Behind the work of the early pioneers lay a vision of mechanising knowledge. At that time, this proved a productive metaphor, but in our own time the mechanistic properties of computers have tended to encourage an approach to visualising history that excludes all but the crudest aspects. Solutions are needed which use computing in ways that do justice to the demands of historiography

Following people through time : an analysis of individual residential mobility biographies

Maarten van Ham’s contribution to this research was partly made possible through the financial support of the EU Marie Curie programme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).The life course framework guides us towards investigating how dynamic life course careers affect residential mobility decision-making and behaviour throughout long periods of individual lifetimes. However, most longitudinal studies linking mobility decision-making to subsequent moving behaviour focus only on year-to-year transitions. This study moves beyond this snapshot approach by analysing the long-term sequencing of moving desires and mobility behaviour within individual lives. Using novel techniques to visualise the desire–mobility sequences of British Household Panel Survey respondents, the study demonstrates that revealing the meanings and significance of particular transitions in moving desires and mobility behaviour requires these transitions to be arranged into mobility biographies. The results highlight the oft-neglected importance of residential stability over the life course, uncovering groups of individuals persistently unable to act in accordance with their moving desires.PostprintPeer reviewe

Biography and Social History: An Intimate Relationship

Biography has been considered as outside the discipline of history by many historians. Since the chronological framework of the study is pre-deter-mined, given the subject\u27s life, it has been argued, it does not meet the fundamental historical test of analyzing historical change across time. Others, particularly literary critics, have suggested that the biographical emphasis on the personal is itself, at root, invalid. This comment instead suggests that the recent turn to biography in labor and social history is most welcome, for it creates the possibility of a broader understanding of the interplay between an individual and social forces beyond one\u27s ability to control. But to write a social biography demands a disciplinary rigor and thorough research effort that treats equally seriously both the subject and the context that shapes that life

Just In Time: defining historical chronographics

The paper is historical in two respects, both concerned with visual representations of past time. Its first purpose is to enquire how visual representations of historical time can be used to bring out patterns in a museum collection. A case study is presented of the visualisation of data with sufficient subtlety to be useful to historians and curators. Such a visual analytics approach raises questions about the proper representation of time and of objects and events within it. It is argued that such chronographics can support both an externalised, objectivising point of view from ‘outside’ time and one which is immersive and gives a sense of the historic moment. These modes are set in their own historical context through original historical research, highlighting the shift to an Enlightenment view of time as a uniform container for events. This in turn prompts new ways of thinking about chronological visualisation, in particular the separation of the ‘ideal’ image of time from contingent, temporary rendered views