Bringing troubled water: quality of experience in a mobile media context

The ICT environment went through notable changes, which have had an irreversible and strong influence on both ICT innovation processes and the role of end-users. In this context, technology developers are increasingly expected to take users’ experiences with technology into account during the process of developing applications or frameworks. As technology is more and more embedded in users’ daily lives, they seek out those personalized values to satisfy their own, situational needs. As a result, a thorough insight in users’ expectations and experiences at various levels (both explicit and more latent) and in different contexts (eg. mobile) has become a crucial determinant for the successful development, introduction and adoption of new ICTs. To this end, our paper focuses on the increased importance of Quality of Experience (QoE). It provides a conceptual model for QoE and furthermore discusses the prevalent gap that still exists between QoE and Quality of Service (QoS). Our main objective is to present a new methodology for correlating user experience to QoS parameters. This methodology was tested in the context of an exploratory interdisciplinary study on QoE-measurement. This new approach goes beyond QoS-parameters and aims to also grasp the social and contextual dimensions of users’ experiences

HOW EUROPEAN HISTORIANS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES TOLD THE HISTORY OF HUMAN MASS MIGRATIONS OR VÖLKERWANDERUNGEN

Historians’ interest in the history of human migrations is not limited to recent years. Migrations had already figured as explanatory factors in connection with cultural and historical change in the work of classical and ancient studies scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the writings of these scholars, migrations acted as historical landmarks or epochal thresholds and played a key role in the construction of geo‐historical areas. This model has been called “migrationism” and cannot be explained simply on the basis of the history of individual disciplines, but must be seen in its complex interaction with scientific and historical contexts. However, “migrationism” does not relate to fixed political and scientific positions or movements. For this reason, it cannot be explained adequately by using a historically or ideologically based approach. Relying on narratological approaches, this article examines migration narratives that historians of this period used to explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Referring to contemporary historiographical representations of the ancient Near East, it distinguishes three main narratives that are still common today: narratives of foundation, narratives of destruction, and narratives of mixtures. In this sense, analyzing older migration narratives helps us to sharpen the critical view on the genealogy of our own views on the history—and present—of human migrations

Limitations of Civic Service: Critical Perspectives

Limitations of Civic Service: Critical Perspective

Rounsevelle Wildman: The Lone Ethnographer

Rounsevelle Wildman (1864 – 1901), the United States Consul at Singapore, published a series of magazine articles documenting his experiences in the Malay Archipelago from 1893 to 1897. These articles, published in several travel-related magazines, feature Wildman’s observations of the Malay Archipelago and its varied peoples. The ethnographic perspective in these writings may be analyzed using Renato Rosaldo’s Lone Ethnographer concept, as presented in Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. This tripartite model concerns the ethnographic process, the role of ethnography in imperialism, and the relationship between the ethnographer and natives. Evaluating Wildman’s articles with this model, one may conclude that he provided an informal ethnographic perspective as an American diplomat in a European colony, one which supported imperialism and the subjugation of natives

Hypercanonical Joyce : Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, creative disaffiliation, and the global afterlives of Ulysses

Roughly two-thirds of the way through Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), there is a section highly redolent of the ‘Penelope’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Commonly referred to as ‘Summer’, the section’s similarity to ‘Penelope’ has not gone unnoticed among either Joyce or Selvon scholars; to date, however, only J. Dillon Brown (2013) has offered a substantive reading of the connection. This article seizes on the relative absence of critical discussion of Selvon in Joyce studies to consider what might be the particular responsibilities that Joyce studies bears when reading Joyce’s global afterlives. Drawing on critical debates around the concept of global modernism, I discuss the terms of Joyce’s canonisation and his use in ‘diffusionist’ models of literary history. Building on Kandice Chuh’s (2019) analysis of the combined effects of liberal representational politics and hypercanonicity in literary studies, I contend that future studies of Joyce’s global reception and influence should seek to establish mutually transformative intercultural dialogue, which in turn requires opening the field to unsettling Joyce’s position in literary studies – and, to that I end, I propose that Selvon’s novel provides an exemplary model of engagement with Joyce through ‘creative disaffiliation’.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe