Riveter: Measuring Power and Social Dynamics Between Entities

Riveter provides a complete easy-to-use pipeline for analyzing verb connotations associated with entities in text corpora. We prepopulate the package with connotation frames of sentiment, power, and agency, which have demonstrated usefulness for capturing social phenomena, such as gender bias, in a broad range of corpora. For decades, lexical frameworks have been foundational tools in computational social science, digital humanities, and natural language processing, facilitating multifaceted analysis of text corpora. But working with verb-centric lexica specifically requires natural language processing skills, reducing their accessibility to other researchers. By organizing the language processing pipeline, providing complete lexicon scores and visualizations for all entities in a corpus, and providing functionality for users to target specific research questions, Riveter greatly improves the accessibility of verb lexica and can facilitate a broad range of future research

Fabric-Rendered Identity: A Study of Dalit Representation in Pa. Ranjith’s Attakathi, Madras and Kabali

Cinema has played a role in caste politics in India. Its role ranges from special arrangement to consume the film to working in films based on caste based demarcated jobs. Films have always been in a constant struggle to eradicate eas well as to maintain the boundaries between the dominant and the dominated. Clothing is one such element which acts to represent the formation of a community’s image in people’s minds. The representation politics with the fabric worn in films becomes the clash between dress codes. These are symbolic conflicts played on the screen between social and cultural norms that possess the potential to alter identity and its structures of reality. This paper will be dealing with the analysis of three films by Pa. Ranjith: Attakathi (Cardboard Knife)(2012), Madras(2014) and Kabali(2016); to understand the representational politics involving the Dalit community with the help of costumes that the characters adorn in the films. Semiotics as an approach has been applied to understand the representation of Dalit identity reflected through clothing practices

Pausing dramatic tension within contemporary action cinema: the relationship between time slicing/slow motion and suspenseful situations in action feature films through praxis lead research

Thesis (M.A. (Digital Animation))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2016Time slicing is a film-based visual effect that refers to an enhanced simulation of time at variable speeds by creating the illusion of frozen or slowly progressing motion in time; it is most commonly digitally manipulated. This report will research and analyse how it can be utilized to amplify dramatic tension, or suspenseful situations in contemporary action films through theories, technology and various filming techniques. The theoretical methodology in this report is a historical account of the technology and process in the evolution of time manipulation within photography and film leading up to time slicing. Some Film theory is included in this report in a more conceptual manner as to why time slicing or slow motion is used in suspenseful situations, particularly in the action film genre. The report also demonstrates how the high standards of time slicing in feature films can be similarly achieved on a budget which will be demonstrated through a practical component that will compare a real time versus a time sliced scenario. While it would be preferable to use a full 360-degree array of cameras, the technology involved in time slicing has not yet reached a point where it is economically accessible to a student film maker and most local industries, which is why the focus of the research paper analyses a shorter array of cameras that is just enough to capture a time slice effect. The results will then be assessed based on dramatic tension/suspense to see if they equate to the theories of montage and mise en scène discussed in the research report. As a case study, the report will then compare a scene from The Matrix to that of a scene produced as part of the practical component in order to draw conclusions on quality and the possibilities of a lower budget set-up.MT201

Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a process are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically