A semantic-based platform for the digital analysis of architectural heritage

This essay focuses on the fields of architectural documentation and digital representation. We present a research paper concerning the development of an information system at the scale of architecture, taking into account the relationships that can be established between the representation of buildings (shape, dimension, state of conservation, hypothetical restitution) and heterogeneous information about various fields (such as the technical, the documentary or still the historical one). The proposed approach aims to organize multiple representations (and associated information) around a semantic description model with the goal of defining a system for the multi-field analysis of buildings

Ending the silence : a documentary theatre response to the impact of German war guilt on intergenerational, bi-cultural identity in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

This exegesis forms the written accompaniment to the documentary theatre production Ending the Silence. Together, these creative and critical components form the basis for a Performance as Research (PAR) project undertaken as part of a Masters in English at Massey University. This research aims to explore and utilise the potentials of the ‘documentary theatre’ form to better understand how issues of heritage and inheritance have informed intergenerational Kiwi/German bicultural identity. The research also aims to analyse how engaging with a creative process enables a closer investigation into topics which may be regarded as taboo. The PAR project also aimed to give a voice to those who have been silenced due to the pressures of social constructs regarding German War Guilt. This term is defined as a response shared by Germans for Germany’s involvement in the Second World War. This project explores the themes of identity, guilt, history and fiction, and authenticity and the representation of trauma. The thesis begins by describing the ethnographic methodology utilised for devising the documentary theatre script Ending the Silence, highlighting how the creative process enabled a closer investigation of the key research themes. The research highlights how history and fiction can work symbiotically to explore taboo topics in greater depth. It concludes that documentary theatre is a useful tool for exploring taboo topics in history, arguing that there is a need to encourage intergenerational, inter-cultural communication around these topics in order to talk responsibly about past injustices

Artefacts and Errors: Acknowledging Issues of Representation in the Digital: Imaging of Ancient Texts

It is assumed, in palaeography, papyrology and epigraphy, that a certain amount of uncertainty is inherent in the reading of damaged and abraded texts. Yet we have not really grappled with the fact that, nowadays, as many scholars tend to deal with digital images of texts, rather than handling the texts themselves, the procedures for creating digital images of texts can insert further uncertainty into the representation of the text created. Technical distortions can lead to the unintentional introduction of ‘artefacts’ into images, which can have an effect on the resulting representation. If we cannot trust our digital surrogates of texts, can we trust the readings from them? How do scholars acknowledge the quality of digitised images of texts? Furthermore, this leads us to the type of discussions of representation that have been present in Classical texts since Plato: digitisation can be considered as an alternative form of representation, bringing to the modern debate of the use of digital technology in Classics the familiar theories of mimesis (imitation) and ekphrasis (description): the conversion of visual evidence into explicit descriptions of that information, stored in computer files in distinct linguistic terms, with all the difficulties of conversion understood in the ekphratic process. The community has not yet considered what becoming dependent on digital texts means for the field, both in practical and theoretical terms. Issues of quality, copying, representation, and substance should be part of our dialogue when we consult digital surrogates of documentary material, yet we are just constructing understandings of what it means to rely on virtual representations of artefacts. It is necessary to relate our understandings of uncertainty in palaeography and epigraphy to our understanding of the mechanics of visualization employed by digital imaging techniques, if we are to fully understand the impact that these will have

Listen to Nice

In describing Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary propaganda film, 'Listen to Britain' (1942), a film with an overtly poetic sensibility and dominantly musical soundtrack, John Corner asserts that ‘through listening to Britain, we are enabled to properly look at it'. This idea of sound leading our attention to the images has underpinned much of the collaborative work between composer and sound designer, Geoffrey Cox, and documentary filmmaker, Keith Marley. It is in this context that the article will analyse an extract of A Film About Nice (Marley and Cox 2010), a contemporary re-imagining of Jean Vigo’s silent documentary, 'A propos de Nice' (1930). Reference will be made throughout to the historical context, and the filmic and theoretical influences that have informed the way music and creative sound design have been used to place emphasis on hearing a place, as much as seeing it

Documentários e ficções: discurso e ideologia em Justiça e Ônibus 174

Analyzing two films this article deals with the relation betweenevent and documentary cinematographic discourse. Assuming that documentary cinema is characterized by the concern of proximity with te reality, this article discusses how such representation is constructed using the analysis of the discourse, in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Patrick Charaudeau, and the questions of ideology and social space

The search for the Jew's gene : science, spectacle, and the ethnic other

This paper considers the collision of spectacle, science, and racial-ethnic identifications in the contemporary scientific search for a "Jewish gene." It aims not so much to distinguish the "line between ‘real’ and ‘fabled’ aspects of the Jew" (as cited in the passage by Gilman above), but to consider the inextricability of both as composite elements, mutually constituting "difference" as racial-ethnic identification. Thus I am concerned with the specular economies of science as well as the knowledge capital of its mediatisation as they come together, troubled, over the Jew’s body. The essay takes as its case study the National Geographic (NOVA/PBS) television documentary, The Sons of Abraham, a film that follows the progress of anthropologist Tudor Parfitt through the Lemba communities of South Africa in a quest to obtain genetic evidence in order to authenticate (or falsify) their claims to Jewish identity

Recreating Reality: Waltz With Bashir, Persepolis, and the Documentary Genre

This paper examines Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) to elucidate how artists, distributors, and audiences shape and define the porous boundaries of the documentary genre, and how such perceptions are shaped within a digital context. By analyzing how each film represents reality; that is, how documentaries attempt to represent the real world, this paper explores the elements of performativity within animated documentary as a reflection of both the growing fluidity of the documentary genre and the instability of the indexical in a digital age. In a digital context, where the “real” can be manufactured at an increasing rate, stronger skepticism and cynicism push the documentary genre towards more subjective explorations, with animated documentaries serving as a key example of how genre distinctions have fluctuated in response

The Indian family on UK reality television: Convivial culture in salient contexts

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2012 @ the author.This article demonstrates how The Family (2009), a fly-on-the wall UK reality series about a British Indian family, facilitates both current public service broadcasting requirements and mass audience appeal. From a critical cultural studies perspective, the author examines the journalistic and viewer responses to the series where authenticity, universality, and comedy emerge as major themes. Textual analysis of the racialized screen representations also helps locate the series within the contexts of contested multiculturalism, genre developments in reality television and public service broadcasting. Paul Gilroy’s concept of convivial culture is used as a frame in understanding how meanings of the series are produced within a South Asian popular representational space. The author suggests that the social comedy taxonomy is a prerequisite for the making of this particular observational documentary. Further, the popular (comedic) mode of conviviality on which the series depends is both expedient and necessary within the various sociopolitical contexts outlined

Optimized Adaptive Streaming Representations based on System Dynamics

Adaptive streaming addresses the increasing and heterogenous demand of multimedia content over the Internet by offering several encoded versions for each video sequence. Each version (or representation) has a different resolution and bit rate, aimed at a specific set of users, like TV or mobile phone clients. While most existing works on adaptive streaming deal with effective playout-control strategies at the client side, we take in this paper a providers' perspective and propose solutions to improve user satisfaction by optimizing the encoding rates of the video sequences. We formulate an integer linear program that maximizes users' average satisfaction, taking into account the network dynamics, the video content information, and the user population characteristics. The solution of the optimization is a set of encoding parameters that permit to create different streams to robustly satisfy users' requests over time. We simulate multiple adaptive streaming sessions characterized by realistic network connections models, where the proposed solution outperforms commonly used vendor recommendations, in terms of user satisfaction but also in terms of fairness and outage probability. The simulation results further show that video content information as well as network constraints and users' statistics play a crucial role in selecting proper encoding parameters to provide fairness a mong users and to reduce network resource usage. We finally propose a few practical guidelines that can be used to choose the encoding parameters based on the user base characteristics, the network capacity and the type of video content