A holistic model of emergency evacuations in large, complex, public occupancy buildings

Evacuations are crucial for ensuring the safety of building occupants in the event of an emergency. In large, complex, public occupancy buildings (LCPOBs) these procedures are significantly more complex than the simple withdrawal of people from a building. This thesis has developed a novel, holistic, theoretical model of emergency evacuations in LCPOBs inspired by systems safety theory. LCPOBs are integral components of complex socio-technical systems, and therefore the model describes emergency evacuations as control actions initiated in order to return the building from an unsafe state to a safe state where occupants are not at risk of harm. The emergency evacuation process itself is comprised of four aspects - the movement (of building occupants), planning and management, environmental features, and evacuee behaviour. To demonstrate its utility and applicability, the model has been employed to examine various aspects of evacuation procedures in two example LCPOBs - airport terminals, and sports stadiums. The types of emergency events initiating evacuations in these buildings were identified through a novel hazard analysis procedure, which utilised online news articles to create events databases of previous evacuations. Security and terrorism events, false alarms, and fires were found to be the most common cause of evacuations in these buildings. The management of evacuations was explored through model-based systems engineering techniques, which identified the communication methods and responsibilities of staff members managing these events. Social media posts for an active shooting event were analysed using qualitative and machine learning methods to determine their utility for situational awareness. This data source is likely not informative for this purpose, as few posts detail occupant behaviours. Finally, an experimental study on pedestrian dynamics with movement devices was conducted, which determined that walking speeds during evacuations were unaffected by evacuees dragging luggage, but those pushing pushchairs and wheelchairs will walk significantly slower.Open Acces

The art of getting lost: reeling through Benjamin

This project asks why Walter Benjamin regarded film as a revolutionary technology. Through Picture House and Hansel & Gretel, two `digital objects' I have composed, and my text, the art of getting lost, I trace the obscure connections among memory, mimesis, embodied experience, communication, translation, forgotten futures, allegory, and the (neo)baroque, which Benjamin weaves together in his theory of film. In film's mimetic nature Benjamin saw a means to (re)educate our abilities to make connections, to stray from our usual ways of perceiving and to enter into an astonishment that can lead to new awareness. I argue that in his concept of innervation -an exchange between screen and skin- Benjamin sees film as producing a semblance of an oral society, one which privileges memory and embodied communication. Film, I posit, is a site which Benjamin understood as permitting a recuperation of the sensual; for him it is a time and place which sutured experience and representation, body and memory. Further, I argue that the aura Benjamin claimed was stripped away in technological reproduction is in film actually reproduced as an `afterlife' which is able to touch us in ways that are more than metaphorical. My own practice picks up on Benjamin's notion that within film there lies buried what paradoxically he called forgotten futures. My pieces play along one of these possible tangents, engaging in a baroque cinema of attractions which celebrates artifice and openendedness. Benjamin, I am arguing, saw the technology of film as performing a remembrance service, reminding us of the cost of uncritically accepting representations and misusing technologies. His theories prove as relevant to today, if not more so, as to the time he wrote them

Heteropticks: Spectatorship and Theatricality on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage and Beyond

PhDThe central research question of this project asks how to account for the relationship between spectator and spectacle across a variety of texts which construct theatrical and performance spaces in eighteenth-century London. This study begins with an exploration of The Spectator, (1710-11) and asks what is at stake in the visual encounter between spectator and spectacle, and how this is structured. It uses The Spectator as a key text that resonates throughout eighteenthcentury discourse on vision and spectacle. Not only does The Spectator explore the theatre and specifically theatrical practices, but it is more broadly invested in ways of looking and visual practices in the eighteenth-century city. Critics have traditionally dealt with The Spectator as advancing a particular disciplinary mode of vision, however I suggest ways in which The Spectator may be understood more broadly to advance a different and more pluralistic model of eighteenth-century spectatorship. After having established the imaginative framework of what is happening in the spectatorial economy in Chapter One, subsequent chapters are organised thematically by space, taking into account first the theatre and then the pleasure garden. These chapters are concerned with exploring the cultural construction of these performance sites across a range of literature and visual sources including novels, plays, poems, prints and ephemera. Chapter Two maps out the imaginative spaces of the theatre auditorium, the stage, and backstage space, taking into account the female spectator specifically, and how women participate in spectatorial practices in the theatre space. Chapter Three maps out the pleasure garden as a theatrical space. Using the concept of sympotic space as a way to begin thinking about the pleasure garden theatrically, I argue for a holistic appraisal of the pleasure garden suited to its variety of spectacle and performance

One in a Million Girl: a fictocritical screenplay for a feminist musical

Through its small acts of resistance, this PhD highlights an experimental, feminist and personal approach to writing screen stories about women. As the latest statistics indicate at the time of this project's completion, only a third of the major characters and female protagonists in mainstream feature films are women (Lauzen 2019; Smith et al 2016). Being a feminist filmmaker, researcher and spectator, I am interested in changing these practices at the earliest stages of a screen work. This practice-led research project is presented as a new form that I call 'a fictocritical screenplay'. As a document that represents the individual and process-driven script development stage of a screen story, it privileges the writer-director's subjectivity on the page. This project asks, how can a fictocritical screenplay perform a feminist aesthetic and language? How is agency given to the female characters and the author within the construction of a screen story? The fictocritical screenplay tells two stories: fiction and process. The fictional story features the scenes for a proposed feminist musical called One in a Million Girl. In this story two actresses navigate their changing positions in an industry that favours youth and beauty. The second story focuses on the process and practice of writing in an alternative way. I write myself into the picture by showing a woman's history of cinema and give agency to the multiple female voices in the texts. By giving the screenplay another identity, where it becomes 'a subject in process' (Brewster 2005, 400), I produce an alternative form that is more than the proposed film

Show and Tell: Photography, Film and Literary Naturalism in Late Nineteenth Century America.

This dissertation traces the vexing complexity of the relationship between naturalist literature of the American 1890s and emerging technologies of visual representation: although photographic representation was frequently invoked as naturalism’s ideal model, the novels I consider are better characterized as skeptical interrogators, rather than as eager imitators, of photographic accuracy. In Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, narrative shifts between intimacy and distance mirror the promise and threat epitomized by the practice of documentary photographers like Jacob Riis. Riis’s photography represented an ideal of accuracy, but McTeague’s narrator ultimately rejects it: the threat of becoming complicit in reprehensible acts or of becoming indistinguishable from their perpetrators, proves too great a risk for the reward of producing a photographically accurate representation. Stephen Crane’s The Monster offers a similarly skeptical assessment of the potential of narrative mediation, one that I read through a comparative consideration of Crane’s novella and the practice of the moving picture lecturers of the 1890s. I argue that these lecturers—poised between a didactic culture of genteel entertainments and an emerging culture of film that was more interested in thrilling than in edifying its audience—embodied the kind of paradoxical mediation that complicates any moral or ethical interpretation of The Monster. In Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, photography and film model representational modes that seem better suited to the hapless characters of these novels than to their knowledgeable narrators. What Maisie Knew articulates the possibility of a naturalist brute mastering her own story. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier represents the unique accuracy of the embodied, subjective experience of individual subjects, an experience figured by the novel’s soundscape of music and noise. This soundscape functions much like those of early films, in which the sounds of so-called “silent” films often indexed a reality that exceeded the limits of the images playing on the screen. My dissertation urges us to take naturalism seriously, as an insightful commentator on a social world in which everything, it seems, can be made readily available for our viewing pleasure.Ph.D.English Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91445/1/berkleya_1.pd