4,625 research outputs found

    The Adirondack Chronology

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    The Adirondack Chronology is intended to be a useful resource for researchers and others interested in the Adirondacks and Adirondack history.https://digitalworks.union.edu/arlpublications/1000/thumbnail.jp

    Practices of cultural democracy : the Cultura Viva program in Brazil

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    Despite the socio-economic crisis Brazil has experienced since 2014 and that has been considerably deepened by political instability in a polarized scenario, in 2022 the cultural area resists. The sector has confronted a deliberate dismantlement in the last two governments, Michel Temer's (2016-2018) and, since 2019, Jair Bolsonaro’s. On the other hand, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s mandates (2003-2010) represented in Brazilian contemporary history a radical paradigmatic shift to the approach to culture from a political and ideological perspective, as culture was a crucial aspect for fostering social equality and economic development, besides its role for overcoming social exclusion. In other words, culture was transformed into one of the main pillars of Brazilian identity's construction and preservation (Lula da Silva 2003). Twelve years after the end of Lula's government, this research examines practices of cultural democracy during his two mandates through the analysis of the National Plan of Culture and of the National System of Culture. Special attention is given to the Cultura Viva program and its pontos de cultura, understood as the most significant governmental initiative to expand and democratize the access to culture, especially in terms of its production. Bearing in mind the political disruption and the dismantlement of the cultural-artistic sector in the last two governments, this dissertation aims at evaluating Lula’s practices of cultural democracy and the legacy of Cultura Viva.Apesar da crise socioeconômica que o Brasil vive desde 2014 e que foi consideravelmente aprofundada pela instabilidade política em um cenário polarizado, em 2022 a área cultural no resiste. O setor enfrentou um desmonte deliberado nos dois últimos governos, no de Michel Temer (2016-2018) e, desde 2019, no de Jair Bolsonaro. Por outro lado, os mandatos de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) representaram na história contemporânea brasileira uma mudança radical de paradigma na abordagem da cultura sob uma perspectiva política e ideológica, pois a cultura foi um aspecto crucial para a promoção da igualdade social e do desenvolvimento econômico, além do seu papel para a superação da exclusão social. Em outras palavras, a cultura se transformou em um dos principais pilares da construção e preservação da identidade brasileira (Lula da Silva 2003). Doze anos após o fim do governo Lula, esta pesquisa examina as práticas de democracia cultural durante seus dois mandatos por meio da análise do Plano Nacional de Cultura e do Sistema Nacional de Cultura. O foco principal é o programa Cultura Viva e seus pontos de cultura, entendidos como a mais significativa iniciativa governamental em ampliar e democratizar o acesso à cultura, especialmente no que se refere à sua produção. Tendo em vista a ruptura política e o desmonte do setor artístico-cultural nos dois últimos governos, esta dissertação tem como objetivo avaliar as práticas de democracia cultural dos governos Lula e o legado do Cultura Viva

    Freelance subtitlers in a subtitle production network in the OTT industry in Thailand: a longitudinal study

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    The present study sets out to investigate a subtitle production network in the over-the-top (OTT) industry in Thailand through the perspective of freelance subtitlers. A qualitative longitudinal research design was adopted to gain insights into (1) the way the work practices of freelance subtitlers are influenced by both human and non-human actors in the network, (2) the evolution of the network, and (3) how the freelance subtitlers’ perception of quality is influenced by changes occurring in the network. Eleven subtitlers were interviewed every six months over a period of two years, contributing to over 60 hours of interview data. The data analysis was informed by selected concepts from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Law 1992, 2009; Latour 1996, 2005; Mol 2010), and complemented by the three-dimensional quality model proposed by Abdallah (2016, 2017). Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019a, 2020b) was used to generate themes and sub-themes which address the research questions and tell compelling stories about the actor-network. It was found that from July 2017 to September 2019, the subtitle production network, which was sustained by complex interrelationships between actors, underwent a number of changes. The changes affected the work practices of freelance subtitlers in a more negative than positive way, demonstrating their precarious position in an industry that has widely adopted the vendor model (Moorkens 2017). Moreover, as perceived by the research participants, under increasingly undesirable working conditions, it became more challenging to maintain a quality process and to produce quality subtitles. Finally, translation technology and tools, including machine translation, were found to be key non-human actors that catalyse the changes in the network under study

    Songs without borders: complex interpretative song worlds and the audiences that inhabit them

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    The genre of music commonly referred to as art song often elicits emotionally charged responses in accounts of audience experiences. However, scholarship has largely neglected the object of inquiry where these responses and experiences materialise: the live art song event. The principal research task in this study is to investigate audience experience of live art song events in the UK. The audiences and events at the centre of this inquiry coalesce around the work of the art song promoter Oxford Lieder. Using a mixed method approach (questionnaire, diary methods and guided interviews), statistical and thematic analysis, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, is applied to a dataset that utilises 82 individual participants’ experiences of live art song events, including regular attendees and those experiencing live art song for the first time. To frame the findings of this inquiry, this study establishes the concept of complex interpretative song worlds: defined as a collection of interactions that audience members draw upon to construct their experience of live art song events, through a dynamic and multi-faceted interplay with the system of possibilities afforded by live art song environments. In this study, complex interpretative song world theorising takes place across three levels of audiencing: (1) Interactions with the live art song domain (the norms, behaviours, and conventions of live art song environments) are gathered under three themes. Collecting activity sees a desire for participants to scrutinise song objects, embrace familiar artists and repertoire, and adopt a connoisseur-like approach to knowledge acquisition. Connecting activity reveals a prized sense of close psycho-social resonance, which takes place between songs, performers, spaces and everyday experiences. Venerating activity foregrounds a view of songs as inviolable objects, where perceived changes to songs are deemed heretical by some, examined through the (re)introduction of sung English translations into the live art song corpus. (2) Interactions with live art song objects (the lexical and musical features that make up songs) reveal the ways audience members process words and music, and prioritise either, or both features during live art song events. The presentation of these materials in ways that blur senses (sights and sounds), and time (before, during, and after performances), are shown to be as additive to audience member conceptualisations of the nature of lexical-musical relationships as they are disruptive. (3) Interactions with live art song actors (performers, producers, and audiences) reveal processes of role formation at work, where vocal acts, non-vocal acts, and fixed and non-fixed traits complicate the way audience members derive impressions of performers. Art song’s hybridity as a genre, which is not a dramatic form, yet ‘not not’ a dramatic form, reveals the imbricated way audience members construct identities of performers: as professional musicians; as human beings; and as inhabitants of roles defined textually through a song’s poetic content. This interdisciplinary study draws predominantly on three overlapping areas of scholarship, and makes new contributions to knowledge in all three. For musicology, this inquiry develops deeper understandings of live art song objects to complement the hegemony of hermeneutic, musico-analytical and historiographical research that typifies much of the existing art song literature. For audience studies, these findings provide new audiencing insights, by examining an art form not yet analysed by empirical audience research methods, and one that simultaneously combines both words and music as a mode of expression. For translation theory, this inquiry responds to calls within the existing literature for more research to understand the reception of translation in music. This study also generates dividends outside of the academy, providing new insights for performers and promoters of art song to inform approaches to programming, presentation, production, marketing and audience development

    Playing no solo imagination: synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and writing

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    This practice-based PhD explores musical imagination by examining the relationships of embodied musical performance and writing. The submission comprises audio recordings of original musical material and accompanying literary output, which are contextualised through a written commentary. Through creative practice-led research based on the author’s experience as a performing musician, the thesis explores and details the generative relationship between imagination and intersubjectivity. In demonstrating musical performance as an ecologically-grounded activity animated by polyvalent real and imaginary elements, the thesis ultimately challenges the notion of an autonomous, solo subject in musical performance practice. The research context draws on music, creative writing and a range of artistic and theoretical scholarship on the subjective experience: of emotion and feeling; intersubjectivity and embodiment; semiotics and the musical imagination; histories of time and rhythm. By engaging performance and writing as situated, ecological activities, creative practice is used productively as a research methodology through the following devices: (1) The drum kit—the author’s primary performance vehicle—is treated to a broadly historical and theoretical examination of material practice. A ‘hybrid drum kit’—combining acoustic drums, cymbals, and synthetic sounds—is proposed, and used by the author as the basis for this project’s practical explorations; (2) Rhythm is conceptualised and deployed as a systematic and recursive method for musical play, in order to investigate the interrelationship of sonic, semantic and physical elements; (3) Creative writing, based on theories of embodied cognition, is used to explore and inscribe the imagination of musical play. This creative practice methodology is used to articulate and respond to the following questions: (a) What is the felt relationship between listening and inscription? (b) How do particular words, diagrams, real and imagined materials effect the sound of drum performance? (c) How do movements of the body relate to semantic and timbral conventions? The methodology is productive generating emergent structures which express embodied cognition, demonstrating the function of musical imagination. The approach serves simultaneously to expose the bias of perceptual filtering, and to challenge conventions of movement and quantification that condition musical subjectivity. The research is formally presented in a way that reflects the synthesis of real, imagined, poetic and analytic elements under scrutiny in this thesis, through a series of interconnected units: thesis, audio recordings, and attendant written outputs. Exercises generate scores, in turn performed and recorded live. Sonic and written outcomes are combined, resulting in two publications, and a speculative performance. Narrated by a number of fictional characters, through various imaginary spaces, these outputs constitute three ‘Rhythmic Figure’ studies—‘Ductus,’ ‘Nsular’ and ‘Gyri’—produced as independent documents, and presented in the central ‘Garden’ section of the thesis. ‘Anteroom’ and ‘Exits’ sections, framing the ‘Garden,’ introduce, and conclude the thesis, respectively. In its original, creative demonstration of the interconnected contribution of non-verbal, sensory, and intersubjective imagination to musical play, this creative practice research project contributes argument and evidence for the manifold ways of knowing music—listen, feel, move, write—which sit beyond discursive norms.This practice-based PhD explores musical imagination by examining the relationships of embodied musical performance and writing. The submission comprises audio recordings of original musical material and accompanying literary output, which are contextualised through a written commentary. Through creative practice-led research based on the author’s experience as a performing musician, the thesis explores and details the generative relationship between imagination and intersubjectivity. In demonstrating musical performance as an ecologically-grounded activity animated by polyvalent real and imaginary elements, the thesis ultimately challenges the notion of an autonomous, solo subject in musical performance practice. The research context draws on music, creative writing and a range of artistic and theoretical scholarship on the subjective experience: of emotion and feeling; intersubjectivity and embodiment; semiotics and the musical imagination; histories of time and rhythm. By engaging performance and writing as situated, ecological activities, creative practice is used productively as a research methodology through the following devices: (1) The drum kit—the author’s primary performance vehicle—is treated to a broadly historical and theoretical examination of material practice. A ‘hybrid drum kit’—combining acoustic drums, cymbals, and synthetic sounds—is proposed, and used by the author as the basis for this project’s practical explorations; (2) Rhythm is conceptualised and deployed as a systematic and recursive method for musical play, in order to investigate the interrelationship of sonic, semantic and physical elements; (3) Creative writing, based on theories of embodied cognition, is used to explore and inscribe the imagination of musical play. This creative practice methodology is used to articulate and respond to the following questions: (a) What is the felt relationship between listening and inscription? (b) How do particular words, diagrams, real and imagined materials effect the sound of drum performance? (c) How do movements of the body relate to semantic and timbral conventions? The methodology is productive generating emergent structures which express embodied cognition, demonstrating the function of musical imagination. The approach serves simultaneously to expose the bias of perceptual filtering, and to challenge conventions of movement and quantification that condition musical subjectivity. The research is formally presented in a way that reflects the synthesis of real, imagined, poetic and analytic elements under scrutiny in this thesis, through a series of interconnected units: thesis, audio recordings, and attendant written outputs. Exercises generate scores, in turn performed and recorded live. Sonic and written outcomes are combined, resulting in two publications, and a speculative performance. Narrated by a number of fictional characters, through various imaginary spaces, these outputs constitute three ‘Rhythmic Figure’ studies—‘Ductus,’ ‘Nsular’ and ‘Gyri’—produced as independent documents, and presented in the central ‘Garden’ section of the thesis. ‘Anteroom’ and ‘Exits’ sections, framing the ‘Garden,’ introduce, and conclude the thesis, respectively. In its original, creative demonstration of the interconnected contribution of non-verbal, sensory, and intersubjective imagination to musical play, this creative practice research project contributes argument and evidence for the manifold ways of knowing music—listen, feel, move, write—which sit beyond discursive norms

    Emotion Recognition for Affective Computing: Computer Vision and Machine Learning Approach

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    The purpose of affective computing is to develop reliable and intelligent models that computers can use to interact more naturally with humans. The critical requirements for such models are that they enable computers to recognise, understand and interpret the emotional states expressed by humans. The emotion recognition has been a research topic of interest for decades, not only in relation to developments in the affective computing field but also due to its other potential applications. A particularly challenging problem that has emerged from this body of work, however, is the task of recognising facial expressions and emotions from still images or videos in real-time. This thesis aimed to solve this challenging problem by developing new techniques involving computer vision, machine learning and different levels of information fusion. Firstly, an efficient and effective algorithm was developed to improve the performance of the Viola-Jones algorithm. The proposed method achieved significantly higher detection accuracy (95%) than the standard Viola-Jones method (90%) in face detection from thermal images, while also doubling the detection speed. Secondly, an automatic subsystem for detecting eyeglasses, Shallow-GlassNet, was proposed to address the facial occlusion problem by designing a shallow convolutional neural network capable of detecting eyeglasses rapidly and accurately. Thirdly, a novel neural network model for decision fusion was proposed in order to make use of multiple classifier systems, which can increase the classification accuracy by up to 10%. Finally, a high-speed approach to emotion recognition from videos, called One-Shot Only (OSO), was developed based on a novel spatio-temporal data fusion method for representing video frames. The OSO method tackled video classification as a single image classification problem, which not only made it extremely fast but also reduced the overfitting problem

    Internationalisation dynamics in contemporary South American life sciences: the case of zebrafish

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    We tend to assume that science is inherently international. Geographical boundaries are not a matter of concern in science, and when they do – e.g. due to the rise of nationalist or populist movements – they are thought to constitute a threat to the essence of the scientific enterprise; namely, the global mobility of ideas, knowledge and researchers. Quite recently, we also started to consider that research could become ‘more international’ under the assumption that in doing so it becomes better, i.e. more collaborative, innovative, dynamic, and of greater quality. Such a positive conceptualisation of internationalisation, however, rests on interpretations coming almost exclusively from the Global North that systematically ignore power dynamics in scientific practice and that regard scientific internationalisation as an unproblematic transformative process and as a desired outcome. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), social research on model organisms is perhaps the clearest example of the influence of the dominant vision of internationalisation. This body of literature tends to describe model organism science and their research communities as uniform and harmonious international ecosystems governed by a strong collaborative ethos of sharing specimens, knowledge and resources. But beyond these unproblematic descriptions, how does internationalisation actually transform research on life? To what extent do the power dynamics of internationalisation intervene in contemporary practices of knowledge production and diffusion in this field of research? This thesis revisits the dynamics and practices of scientific internationalisation in contemporary science from the perspective of South American life sciences. It takes the zebrafish (Danio rerio), a small tropic freshwater fish, originally from the Ganges region in India and quite popular in pet shops, as a case study of how complex dynamics of internationalisation intervene in science. While zebrafish research has experienced a remarkable growth in recent years at the global scale, in South America its growth has been unprecedented, allowing average laboratories, which often operate with small budgets and with less well-developed science infrastructures, to conduct world-class research. My approach is based on a consideration of internationalisation as a conceptual model of change. I consider internationalisation to be a process essentially marked by tensions in the spatial, cognitive and evaluative dimensions of scientific practice. These tensions, I claim, are not just a key feature of internationalisation, but also aspects of a conceptual opposition that is geared towards explaining how change comes about in science. By studying the dynamics of internationalisation, I seek to understand various transformations of zebrafish research: from its construction as a research artefact to its diffusion across geographical boundaries. My focus on South America, on the other hand, helps me to understand the complexity of such dynamics beyond the lenses of the dominant discourse of internationalisation that prevails in the STS literature on model organisms. I use mixed-methods (i.e. semi-structured interviews, document analysis, bibliometrics and social network analysis) to observe and interpret transformations of internationalisation at different scales and levels. My analysis suggests first, that internationalisation played an important role in the construction of the zebrafish as a model organism and that, in the infrastructures and practices of resource exchange that sustain the scientific value of the organism internationally, dynamics of asymmetry and empowerment problematise the collaborative ethos of this community. Second, I found that collaborative networks – measured through co-authorships – also played an important role in the diffusion of zebrafish as a model organism in South America. However, I did not find a clear indication of international dependency in the diffusion of zebrafish, explained by a geographical concentration of scientific expertise in the zebrafish collaboration network. Rather than exposing peripheral researchers to novel ideas, networks of international collaboration seem to be more related to access to privileged material infrastructures resulting from the social organisation of scientific labour worldwide. Lastly, by examining practices of biological data curation and researchers’ international mobility trajectories, I describe how dynamics of internationalisation shape the notion of research excellence in model organism science. In this case, I found mobility trajectories to play a key role in boosting researchers’ contributions to the community’s database, especially among researchers from peripheral communities like South America. Overall, while these findings show the value of considering internationalisation as a conceptual model of change in science, more research is needed on the intervention of complex dynamics of internationalisation in other cases and fields of research

    WaveCat Wave Energy Converter: Performance and Wave Field Interaction

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    Wave Energy Converters (WECs) have been shown to offer a promising option for power generation. The WaveCat is a moored WEC design which uses wave overtopping discharge into a variable v-shaped hull, to generate electricity through low head turbines. Physical model tests of the WaveCat WEC were carried out at the University of Plymouth COAST Laboratory to determine the device reflection, transmission and absorption coefficients. 60° and 30° wedge angles were tested, where wedge angle is the angle between the two hulls. Motion response of the WaveCat model was also quantified. The device heave and pitch motions were simulated using the CFD package STAR-CCM+. The results show the WaveCat absorption coefficient and expected power generation is highest during the largest Hs and smallest Tp conditions tested for both wedge angle cases. During the wave conditions that exhibit highest amount of power captured, the device has the lowest motion responses. When at a 60° wedge angle the device generated the highest power (0.4 W) during tests of Hs = 0.12 m and Tp = 1.09 s. When at a 30° wedge angle the device generated the highest power (1.8 W) during tests of Hs = 0.15 m and Tp = 1.46 s which would be normal operating conditions. The 60° and 30° configurations showed the highest surge Response Amplitude Operator (RAO) (0.68 and 0.79 respectively), pitch RAO (1.9 and 2.2 respectively) and heave RAO (0.97 and 0.92 respectively) values during tests where the wavelength is larger than the model length. Experimental responses were shown to be well predicted by the numerical model. The 60° configuration Capture Width Ratio (CWR) peaked at 1.5% during tests indicating greatest efficiency. This occurred at Hs of 0.08 m and Tp of 1.09 s. The 30° configuration CWR peaked at 5.4% during tests indicating greatest efficiency. This occurred at tests with Hs of 0.15 m and Tp of 1.46 s. At full scale the 60° configuration produced the equivalent of 64.6 kW in conditions of Hs = 3.5 m and Tp = 6 s. At full scale the 30° configuration produced the equivalent of 269.2 kW in conditions of Hs = 4.5 m and Tp = 8 s. These values show the device successfully captures and generates power and is suitable for further development. The findings presented in this thesis have increased understanding of behaviour of the WaveCat in a wide range of wave conditions and across two wedge angles.FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CI
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