9 research outputs found
Glitch Poetics
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis. Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language. Glitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time. Charles Bernstein, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. So, body-machinic posthuman reader, consider the shock to your system(s) when a glitch-error interrupts the coding-decoding mechanisms that govern your operations. Disruption to the textual condition occurs as voice misrecognition and cycles of translation malform and corrupt the poetics of authorial production. The desire for ideological resistance may or may not be short-circuited by the predictive algorithm manifest in remediating performance and its disruption of literary habits. The old attachment to tactical intervention remains, an aspiration still making its way through the charged circuits of culture, looking for a way to break down the rule-governed barriers between aspiration and effective agency. The pathetic subroutines, often destined to crash, derive from provisional looping of interference patterns that constantly reorder our codified reality. In Glitch Poetics Jones selects vivid examples of the ways the glitch can be used deliberately to produce an uncomfortable intervention in the current conditions of posthuman capitalist culture. Or can it? Read and decide, based on your own bodily-machinic receptivity to ‘technological timings’ and ‘leaky intrusions’ across the ‘creepy porousness’ of your boundaries. Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies, UCLA. Glitch Poetics figures glitch radically as a key aesthetic condition of the contemporary moment. A powerful exploration of how glitch works across writing, art and bodies, it reconfigures our understanding of technology as an aesthetic force that structures our world. Olga Goriunova, Professor of Media, Royal Holloway University of London
Harnessing social media data to explore urban tourist patterns and the implications for retail location modelling
The tourism landscape in urban destinations has been spatially expanded in recent years due to the increasing prevalence of sharing economy accommodation and other tourism trends. Tourists now mix with locals to form increasingly intricate population geographies within urban neighbourhoods, bringing new demand into areas which are beyond the conventional tourist locations. How these dispersed tourist demands impact local communities has become an emerging issue in both urban and tourism studies. However, progress has been hampered by the lack of fine granular travel data which can be used for understanding urban tourist patterns at the small-area level.
Paying special attention to tourist grocery demand in urban destinations, the thesis takes London as the example to present the various sources of LBSN datasets that can be used as valuable supplements to conventional surveys and statistics to produce novel tourist population estimates and new tourist grocery demand layers at the small area level. First, the work examines the potential of Weibo check-in data in London for offering greater insights into the spatial travel patterns of urban tourists from China. Then, AirDNA and Twitter datasets are used in conjunction with tourism surveys and statistics in London to model the small area tourist population maps of different tourist types and generate tourist demand estimates. Finally, Foursquare datasets are utilised to inform tourist grocery travel behaviour and help to calibrate the retail location model.
The tourist travel patterns extracted from various LBSN data, at both individual and collective levels, offer tremendous value to assist the construction and calibration of spatial modelling techniques. In this case, the emphasis is on improving retail location spatial Interaction Models (SIMs) within grocery retailing. These models have seen much recent work to add non-residential demand, but demand from urban tourism has yet to be included. The additional tourist demand layer generated in this thesis is incorporated into a new custom-built SIM to assess the impacts of urban tourism on the local grocery sector and support current store operations and trading potential evaluations of future investments
Welcome back listeners: locating nostalgia, domesticity and shared listening practices in contemporary horror podcasting
[No abstract given
SMARTGIRLS.TV: DISCOURSES OF ACHIEVING GIRLHOOD IN SCHOOLS, ON SCREEN AND ONLINE
This thesis explores the nature and circulation of achieving girl discourses within and across school and television contexts. It examines the alignment of such discourses with those of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, and investigates the persistence of some historical models of gendered intelligence and feminised achievement within contemporary accounts.
The study draws on Foucault’s (1969) Archaeology of Knowledge to examine the nature and production of discourses in specific contexts. This enables an intertextual approach in which television narratives, participant accounts in school and online forum responses can be examined as instances of a wider discourse of achieving girlhood. The design thus recognizes contemporary conditions of media convergence and also enables a consideration of the importance of context in producing objects of knowledge.
I argue that common tropes circulate between popular, policy and local contexts to create endorsed identities and structured life narratives for achieving girls. These identities and narratives are not equally available, but normalise middle class values and practices at the same time as promoting a model of the self-creating successful subject. I find that girls, with varying degrees of knowingness, draw on these tropes to frame stories of intelligible selfhood and to present themselves as deserving winners within educational meritocracies. I demonstrate that the ‘smart girl’ is not wholly constructed in the vanguard of success, but is restrained in some traditionally gendered ways by discourses which set limits on feminised ambition and endorse hyperfeminised performances and subordinated roles
Characterisation of web spambots using self organising maps
The growth of spam in Web 2.0 environments not only reduces the quality and trust of the content but it also degrades the quality of search engine results. By means of web spambots, spammers are able to distribute spam content more efficiently to more targeted websites. Current anti-spam filtering solutions have not studied web spambots thoroughly and the characterisation of spambots remains an open area of research. In order to fill this research gap, this paper utilises Kohonen’s Self-Organising Map (SOM) to characterise web spambots. We analyse web usage data to profile web spambots based on three novel set of features i.e. action set, action frequency and action time. Our experimental results uncovered important characteristics of web spambots that 1) they focus on specific and limited actions compared with humans 2) they use multiple user accounts to spread spam content, hide their identity and bypass restrictions, 3) they bypass filling in submission forms and directly submit the content to the Web server in order to efficiently spread spam, 4) they can be categorise into 4 different categories based on their actions – content submitters, profile editors, content viewers and mixed behaviour, 5) they change their IP address based on different action to hide their tracks. Our results are promising and they suggest that our technique is capable of identifying spam in Web 2.0 applications
Addressing the new generation of spam (Spam 2.0) through Web usage models
New Internet collaborative media introduce new ways of communicating that are not immune to abuse. A fake eye-catching profile in social networking websites, a promotional review, a response to a thread in online forums with unsolicited content or a manipulated Wiki page, are examples of new the generation of spam on the web, referred to as Web 2.0 Spam or Spam 2.0. Spam 2.0 is defined as the propagation of unsolicited, anonymous, mass content to infiltrate legitimate Web 2.0 applications.The current literature does not address Spam 2.0 in depth and the outcome of efforts to date are inadequate. The aim of this research is to formalise a definition for Spam 2.0 and provide Spam 2.0 filtering solutions. Early-detection, extendibility, robustness and adaptability are key factors in the design of the proposed method.This dissertation provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art web spam and Spam 2.0 filtering methods to highlight the unresolved issues and open problems, while at the same time effectively capturing the knowledge in the domain of spam filtering.This dissertation proposes three solutions in the area of Spam 2.0 filtering including: (1) characterising and profiling Spam 2.0, (2) Early-Detection based Spam 2.0 Filtering (EDSF) approach, and (3) On-the-Fly Spam 2.0 Filtering (OFSF) approach. All the proposed solutions are tested against real-world datasets and their performance is compared with that of existing Spam 2.0 filtering methods.This work has coined the term ‘Spam 2.0’, provided insight into the nature of Spam 2.0, and proposed filtering mechanisms to address this new and rapidly evolving problem