3,747 research outputs found

    Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading: Essays by Lisa Jardine and others

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    Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal ‘Studied for Action’ (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds. Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting ‘Studied for Action’ with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading

    Documenting Knowledge Graph Embedding and Link Prediction using Knowledge Graphs

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    In recent years, sub-symbolic learning, i.e., Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) incorporated with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has gained significant attention in various downstream tasks (e.g., Link Prediction (LP)). These techniques learn a latent vector representation of KG's semantical structure to infer missing links. Nonetheless, the KGE models remain a black box, and the decision-making process behind them is not clear. Thus, the trustability and reliability of the model's outcomes have been challenged. While many state-of-the-art approaches provide data-driven frameworks to address these issues, they do not always provide a complete understanding, and the interpretations are not machine-readable. That is why, in this work, we extend a hybrid interpretable framework, InterpretME, in the field of the KGE models, especially for translation distance models, which include TransE, TransH, TransR, and TransD. The experimental evaluation on various benchmark KGs supports the validity of this approach, which we term Trace KGE. Trace KGE, in particular, contributes to increased interpretability and understanding of the perplexing KGE model's behavior

    From Aspiration to Actuality under Xi Jinping: Reinterpreting the Outcome-driven Debate towards the Role of Historical Materialism in China’s Rise, 1949–2021

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    DOES THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY of socialist rising powers influence their rise to power? If so, how, when, and why? The literature on rising powers works on a set of historical assumptions which, when applied to China’s rise, predict an inevitable rise to power. In this literature, a new world order is imagined with China as a new kind of leading great power. For some, this development represents the correction of imperial China’s historical position in the world. This thesis disagrees with this outcome-based analytical approach to China’s rise. It instead posits another argument: in understanding the dynamics of a socialist rising power, the role of ideology matters more than the rising power literature suggests. In the Chinese context, this means bringing the Communist Party of China back into the story of its rise. This Party- state builds on a genuine belief in historical materialism and a teleology of success which it, presumably, represents. Treating the Xi Jinping era (2012 to the present) as a pivotal moment, this thesis understands the Chinese Dream of Great Rejuvenation as promethean. While it fits within the Chinese tradition of organising China in its own image, as a political actor it is entirely new. China’s rise, then, becomes much more than simply ensuring the Party’s self- perpetuation of its political rule. It is a grand historical narrative which may only be understood, and problema

    Self-supervised learning for transferable representations

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    Machine learning has undeniably achieved remarkable advances thanks to large labelled datasets and supervised learning. However, this progress is constrained by the labour-intensive annotation process. It is not feasible to generate extensive labelled datasets for every problem we aim to address. Consequently, there has been a notable shift in recent times toward approaches that solely leverage raw data. Among these, self-supervised learning has emerged as a particularly powerful approach, offering scalability to massive datasets and showcasing considerable potential for effective knowledge transfer. This thesis investigates self-supervised representation learning with a strong focus on computer vision applications. We provide a comprehensive survey of self-supervised methods across various modalities, introducing a taxonomy that categorises them into four distinct families while also highlighting practical considerations for real-world implementation. Our focus thenceforth is on the computer vision modality, where we perform a comprehensive benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art self supervised models against many diverse downstream transfer tasks. Our findings reveal that self-supervised models often outperform supervised learning across a spectrum of tasks, albeit with correlations weakening as tasks transition beyond classification, particularly for datasets with distribution shifts. Digging deeper, we investigate the influence of data augmentation on the transferability of contrastive learners, uncovering a trade-off between spatial and appearance-based invariances that generalise to real-world transformations. This begins to explain the differing empirical performances achieved by self-supervised learners on different downstream tasks, and it showcases the advantages of specialised representations produced with tailored augmentation. Finally, we introduce a novel self-supervised pre-training algorithm for object detection, aligning pre-training with downstream architecture and objectives, leading to reduced localisation errors and improved label efficiency. In conclusion, this thesis contributes a comprehensive understanding of self-supervised representation learning and its role in enabling effective transfer across computer vision tasks

    Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

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    In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Sociotechnical Imaginaries, the Future and the Third Offset Strategy

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    Lived experiences of gay men in their achievement of leadership in South African organisations

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    There is a noticeable absence of the voices of gay men in leadership in South African government and corporate organisations. This absence of visible gay male leadership in organisations in South Africa, coupled with the limited research in a South African context, gave rise to the research topic. This qualitative study investigated the lived experiences of gay men in their achievement of leadership with a focus on the possible barriers or obstacles they may have encountered and overcome to realise their leadership positions. The study was conducted through interviews with South Africa citizens working in mainstream South African organisations; some participants also had personal experiences working in multinational organisations allowing for a comparison between the multinational workspace and the South African workspace. By utilising snowball sampling methods, eleven participants were purposefully selected from a sample of self-identified cisgender gay men. The selected participants had all openly revealed their same-sex sexual orientation to the organisations where they worked and were all working in senior leader roles. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with the participants and later transcribed, and rigorously analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis methods. The findings of the study identified that gay cisgender males in mainstream South African organisations do indeed encounter barriers relating to prejudice based on their same-sex sexual orientation. These barriers may impede their professional development and growth into senior leadership positions. It was found that some gay men possess internal resources or enablers that allow them to overcome existing barriers and advance into successful leaders in their careers. Similarly, progress has been made in some South African organisations, allowing them to provide a culture and environment of safety and support for gay men, enabling these men to realise their aspirations of senior leadership. By combining senior leadership who are supportive and involved in LGBTI+ affirmative practices and implementing workplace processes like LGBTI+ forums and inclusivity, and awareness training programmes, organisations may create cultures where LGBTI+ people may flourish and advance to senior leadership roles in South African organisations.PsychologyPh.D. (Consulting Psychology

    Minoritized Knowledges: Agency, Literature, Temporalities

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    Abstract “I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules.” Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, xiii “Minoritized Knowledges: Agency, Literature, Temporalities,” queries an agency exercised by literature in excess of authorial intention as well as the text itself, which is transforming in its unoriginality, as a convergence of exploited, minoritized knowledges. The six chapters engage multiple fields as discourses rather than territories. “Nonidentity and Vectors of History,” brings Critical Theory’s notion of nonidentity into dialogue with key literary work by authors including Claudia Rankine and Elfriede Jelinek. The historical principle of nonidentity illuminates a convergence in their writing, which facilitates understanding history as vectors of trauma rather than modes of domination. Chapter 2. “Literary Agency and Minoritized Grammar'' addresses the political work of contemporary poets, including Fred Moten, contesting the sequestering of alternative minoritized grammars in poetic terms. Limiting alternative grammar to poetic experimentation perpetuates melancholy and epistemic hegemony. Chapter 3. “Economies of Sacrifice,” situates the work historically, where sacrifice emerges as central to western hegemonic logic. Recent feminist and queer mobilizations of the figure of Antigone highlight how sacrifice undergirds western tradition/s of exploitation and increasingly generates economies of violence that mobilize current knowledge markets. Chapter 4. “Unfinished Knowledge,” sets the stage by underscoring the convergence of partial, situated and unfinished knowledges in the works of Black, feminist and queer theorists for which literature is key. Such incomplete epistemologies continue to be underestimated and ambivalently received. Chapter 5. “The Folly of Narrative,” engages with current critical re-readings of literary realism, to draw out alternative epistemological figures and temporalities that contest the logic of sacrifice. Chapter 6. “Literary Agency and Minoritized Knowledges” revisits the history of western ideas decentering eurocentrism’s deployment of certainty qua mastery and completion under the guise of knowledge. Pivoting from the convergence of decolonial queer feminist critique, I elaborate alternative epistemological figures, including counter-grammar, nonidentity and folly. By undermining dominant dichotomous epistemologies and inviting diasporic study, these figures challenge epistemic injustice. The contrast between epistemologies of exploitation versus decolonization is not dichotomous but performative. Hence, it is situated, situational, contextual, temporal, historical and (dis)located

    Provincialising whiteness: Òyìnbó and the politics of race in Lagos, Nigeria

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    Much academic work on racialisation processes to date has focused on a geographically restricted range of racial regimes characterised by white supremacy. This study broadens the geographical scope of analyses by looking at race-making practices in Lagos, Nigeria. I explore the geographical specificity of race-making in Lagos through interrogation of the concept of òyìnbó – a Yorùbá word most often translated into English as ‘white person.’ By highlighting the particular meanings attached to òyìnbó, and the political work that racialisation does in this understudied context, I argue for the need to provincialise understandings of whiteness in studies of global race-making processes. The project is based upon eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork with Lagosians of different generations and social demographics at three different research sites: a senior secondary school, the University of Lagos, and at a church. My findings suggest that divergent meanings are attached to òyìnbós in these contexts, which do not universally celebrate whiteness. Rather, the practice of race-making in Lagos predominantly addresses local political concerns, and common attributes associated with òyìnbós are primarily evaluated according to local people’s own moral economy. This results in highly ambivalent attitudes to òyìnbós as individuals and to òyìnbó as trope. I suggest that these attitudes can best be explained by situating constructions of òyìnbós within their wider social context in Lagos. By centring local understandings in this way, I argue that the political practice of race-making in Lagos is not purely a reflection of a singular, global racial hierarchy, but a means of actively engaging with global and local power structures. I propose that seeking to understand the emic nature of divergent global race-making processes in this way has the potential to broaden academic understanding of these and related social phenomena
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