Reassembling documentary: from actuality to virtuality

At a period of intense technological change, which has led to an increasing degree of modularity in documentary media, Reassembling Documentary: From Actuality to Virtuality takes up episodic documentaries and non-fiction films broken into distinctly conceptualized parts, in order to examine how the evolution of technologies transform documentary film and media\u27s relationship to the audiovisual archive across different historical periods. More specifically, the dissertation challenges the assumption that documentary film is essentially holistic in its discursive orientation and audiovisual aesthetics, by studying the fragmented works of a highly unique and international group of filmmakers, such as Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog, Péter Forgács, Aleksandr Sokurov, and James Longley in relation to the large number of modular, episodic, and mix-media films belonging to the documentary canon. To map the technological and theoretical transformations suggested in these films especially in the digital era, I propose the deployment of what I call assemblistic reading, a type of textual analysis that moves from the distinct parts of a film to the whole, shifting the attention from the hierarchy between the micro and macro elements to their mutual reconfiguration. The project is organized into four chapters, each of which examines a different form of assembly (with individual parts conceptualized as fragments, lessons, installments, and compilations respectively) in documentary media

Glasses and Glass-Ceramic Components from Inorganic Waste and Novel Processing

Thanks to European environmental rules and regulations establishment, waste recycling has become a more and more relevant problematic. For manufacturing plants, especially those producing hazardous wastes, expenses linked to waste production have drastically increased over the last decades. In the proposed work, various hazardous and non-hazardous wastes, among: soda-lime and borosilicate glass cullet, cathode ray tubes glass, exhausted lime from fume abatement systems residues, sludge and slags from ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, and pre-stabilized municipal solid waste incinerators ashes are used to elaborate several compositions of glass-ceramics. High-temperature treatment (minimum 800 °C) associated to a Direct Sintering process (30 min) was an efficient way to stabilize chemically the final products. The impact of each waste on the final product’s mechanical properties was studied, but also their synergies between each other, when mixed together. Statistic mixture designs enabled to develop interesting products for modern building applications, such as porous tiles and lightweight panels destined to insulation, with a purpose of fulfilling multifunctional properties

Eleven teaching units for fifth grade United States geography.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit