Facing the Wreck: Death, Optimism, and the Fragmented Form

Walter Benjamin described history as a winged angel who faces backwards, staring perpetually into the past as the violent winds of destiny carry him into the future (Illuminations). Despite a western, post-enlightenment myth of eternal progress, the wreckage of human contributions to history is clearly evident in our 21st-century understanding of anthropogenic impact on global ecology. In the context of these ecological crises (and the resulting political and economic questions), postmodern novels reveal a powerful ability to imagine different ways of living and interacting with the world. This thesis traces the relationship between fragmentation, death, and liminal experiences through Frederick Buechner\u27s Godric, Marilynn Robinson\u27s Gilead, and Paul Harding\u27s Tinkers. By imagining death as a khôral space, both of total openness and total otherness, our connectivity to the seemingly taut autre is revealed. Things thus take center stage, serving as fragmented but viable symbolons which reveal inherent connection and demand sustainable reciprocity. Fragmented narrative structures become symbolons of their own with potential ecological, ethical, and political consequences. Both the detonated forms and each novel\u27s intimacy with impending death require readers to shift their lines of sight and consider the texts from the periphery. The shift to the margins has ethical potential as it encourages the reader to metadiscursively react to their own viewing, ordering, and objectifying practices. These novels begin to suggest new ways that we might, as William Carlos Williams wrote, reconcile / the people and the stones

Embodying Artistic Reflexive Praxis: An Early Career Academic's Reflections on Pain, Anxiety, and Eating Disorder Recovery Research

Wenn wir als Forscher_innen über unsere Körper schreiben, werden wir diesem vielbewegten Gegenstand mit all seinen Verwobenheiten in die Prozesse und "Produkte" unseres Forschungshandelns nicht immer gerecht. In diesem Beitrag beschreibe ich meine reflexive Auseinandersetzung mit künstlerischer Praxis zu Beginn meiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn. Die Beschäftigung mit verkörpert-reflexiver Praxis durch Tanz, Film und Schreiben ermöglichte es mir, Forschung nicht nur zu "produzieren", sondern auch zu fühlen und noch ungeordnete, schmerzhafte Erfahrungen zu verarbeiten. Der Reflexivitätszugang hat dabei nicht nur meine Zugehörigkeitsräume zu den Forschungsteilnehmer_innen sichtbar werden lassen, sondern auch dazu geführt, meine Beziehung zu Schmerz, Behinderung, Genesung von Essproblemen und zu Forschung selbst (neu) zu untersuchen.Writing about our bodies, as researchers, does not always do justice to their ebbs and flows—their entanglements with the processes and "products" of our research journeys. In this piece, I share my reflexive engagement with artistic praxis over the course of my early career. Engaging with embodied reflexive praxis through dance, film, and writing enabled me to not only produce but also to feel research and to work through messy and painful experiences. Beyond simply unearthing my spaces of belonging in relationship to participants, reflexivity has meant examining and re-examining my relationship to pain, disability, recovery from eating distress, and research itself

Clock drawing test digit recognition using static and dynamic features

The clock drawing test (CDT) is a standard neurological test for detection of cognitive impairment. A computerised version of the test promises to improve the accessibility of the test in addition to obtaining more detailed data about the subject's performance. Automatic handwriting recognition is one of the first stages in the analysis of the computerised test, which produces a set of recognized digits and symbols together with their positions on the clock face. Subsequently, these are used in the test scoring. This is a challenging problem because the average CDT taker has a high likelihood of cognitive impairment, and writing is one of the first functional activities to be affected. Current handwritten digit recognition system perform less well on this kind of data due to its unintelligibility. In this paper, a new system for numeral handwriting recognition in the CDT is proposed. The system is based on two complementary sources of data, namely static and dynamic features extracted from handwritten data. The main novelty of this paper is the new handwriting digit recognition system, which combines two classifiers—fuzzy k-nearest neighbour for dynamic stroke-based features and convolutional neural network for static image- based features, which can take advantage of both static and dynamic data. The proposed digit recognition system is tested on two sets of data: first, Pendigits online handwriting digits; and second, digits from the actual CDTs. The latter data set came from 65 drawings made by healthy people and 100 drawings reproduced from the drawings by dementia patients. The test on both data sets shows that the proposed combination system can outperform each classifier individually in terms of recognition accuracy, especially when assessing the handwriting of people with dementi

Flesh Without Blood: (Re)locating Embodiment in Technology

The social/technology divide has eclipsed our understanding of the many ways in which the two are interconnected. In this thesis I examine the interplay of the social and technological through the lens of embodiment. In particular, I focus on the ways in which bodies become located, relocated and even dislocated, in interaction with technologies. My approach is an analytical synthesis informed by three examinations: The art of Mariko Mori; the ‘robot’ social media influencer @lilmiquela; and applications of artificial intelligence on the human body. These examinations can be thought of as thought experiments, case studies or musings to help explore the possibilities for bodies rendered through technologies. Through the complex interaction with technologies, embodiment is affected and the question of where bodies begin and end becomes a productive way to think about sociological processes of identity and power

Counter-mapping the material world of the bone clocks: A critical analysis through digital cartography

This project develops a reading strategy through mapping, using David Mitchell\u27s 2014 novel The Bone Clocks as a primary text. Through the methods of critical cartography and counter-mapping, this research insists that by making maps that counter the dominant narrative, readers can disrupt the author’s perspective and craft new interpretations that highlight their own experiences. Critical cartography, the reflexive how and why maps are made and used, is all about the awareness of the power dynamics and colonial influences involved in traditional map-making. Choosing to map against dominant power structures is called counter-mapping. To apply these theories to literature, then, is to interrogate existing worldviews provided by the author. Counter-mapping empowers readers to create new meanings within a text and to work with other readers to share ideas and experiences that de-center the author’s single perspective. The activity of mapping events, characters, locations and material conditions found in novels encourages self-reflection, challenges perspectives of power, and develops new ways of using existing digital platforms. This research offers a new approach to navigate literary criticism in a changing world and offers a way for readers to locate themselves on the map, better understand their own personal narrative, and practice critical cartography