268 research outputs found

    Narratives Crossing Boundaries: Storytelling in a Transmedial and Transdisciplinary Context

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    As the dominant narrative forms in the age of media convergence, films and games call for a transmedial perspective in narratology. Games allow a participatory reception of the story, bringing the transgression of the ontological boundary between the narrated world and the world of the recipient into focus. These diverse transgressions - medial and ontological - are the subject of this transdisciplinary compendium, which covers the subject in an interdisciplinary way from various perspectives: game studies and media studies, but also sociology and psychology, to take into account the great influence of storytelling on social discourses and human behavior

    Measuring knowledge sharing processes through social network analysis within construction organisations

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    The construction industry is a knowledge intensive and information dependent industry. Organisations risk losing valuable knowledge, when the employees leave them. Therefore, construction organisations need to nurture opportunities to disseminate knowledge through strengthening knowledge-sharing networks. This study aimed at evaluating the formal and informal knowledge sharing methods in social networks within Australian construction organisations and identifying how knowledge sharing could be improved. Data were collected from two estimating teams in two case studies. The collected data through semi-structured interviews were analysed using UCINET, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool, and SNA measures. The findings revealed that one case study consisted of influencers, while the other demonstrated an optimal knowledge sharing structure in both formal and informal knowledge sharing methods. Social networks could vary based on the organisation as well as the individuals’ behaviour. Identifying networks with specific issues and taking steps to strengthen networks will enable to achieve optimum knowledge sharing processes. This research offers knowledge sharing good practices for construction organisations to optimise their knowledge sharing processes

    Applying the Free-Energy Principle to Complex Adaptive Systems

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    The free energy principle is a mathematical theory of the behaviour of self-organising systems that originally gained prominence as a unified model of the brain. Since then, the theory has been applied to a plethora of biological phenomena, extending from single-celled and multicellular organisms through to niche construction and human culture, and even the emergence of life itself. The free energy principle tells us that perception and action operate synergistically to minimize an organism’s exposure to surprising biological states, which are more likely to lead to decay. A key corollary of this hypothesis is active inference—the idea that all behavior involves the selective sampling of sensory data so that we experience what we expect to (in order to avoid surprises). Simply put, we act upon the world to fulfill our expectations. It is now widely recognized that the implications of the free energy principle for our understanding of the human mind and behavior are far-reaching and profound. To date, however, its capacity to extend beyond our brain—to more generally explain living and other complex adaptive systems—has only just begun to be explored. The aim of this collection is to showcase the breadth of the free energy principle as a unified theory of complex adaptive systems—conscious, social, living, or not

    The Creighton Century, 1907-2007

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    The Creighton Century, 1907–2007 offers a selection of ten lectures from the first 100 years of the University of London’s prestigious Creighton Lecture series. Each of the chosen lectures, delivered between 1913 and 2004, is introduced and set in context by a historian of the modern-day University. The collection also includes, and is introduced by, Robert Evans’s 2007 centenary lecture, ‘The Creighton century: British historians and Europe, 1907–2007’. This volume provides a fascinating insight into the development of the discipline of history over the twentieth and early twenty-first century, revealing some significant changes in approach and emphasis as well as some surprising continuities. The Creighton Century is an invaluable guide to students of historiography, and a chance to revisit some of the great lectures from the series, including those by R. H. Tawney, Lucy Sutherland, Donald Coleman, Eric Hobsbawm and Keith Thomas, published here with commentaries by Virginia Berridge, Justin Champion, Julian Hoppit and Jinty Nelson among others. First published in 2009, The Creighton Century is now reissued as an open access edition by the University of London Press. This edition includes a new joint foreword by the volume’s editor, David Bates, and the current director of the Institute of Historical Research, Jo Fox

    Dancing Media: The Contagious Movement of Posthuman Bodies (or Towards A Posthuman Theory of Dance)

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    My dissertation seeks to define a posthuman theory of dance through a historical study of the dancer as an instrument or technology for exploring emergent visual media, and by positioning screendance as an experimental technique for animating posthuman relation and thought. Commonly understood as ephemeral, dance is produced by assemblages that include bodies but are not limited to them. In this way, dance exceeds the human body. There is a central tension in the practice of dance, between the persistent presumption of the dancing body as a channel for human expression, and dance as a technicity of the body—a discipline and a practice of repeated gesture—that calls into question categories of the human. A posthuman theory of dance invites examination of such tensions and interrogates traditional notions of authenticity, ownership and commodification, as well as the bounded, individual subject who can assess the surrounding world with precise clarity, certain of where the human begins and ends. The guiding historical question for my dissertation is: if it is possible to describe both a modern form of posthuman dance (turn of the 19th-20th century), and a more recent form of posthuman dance (turn of the 20th-21st century), are they part of the same assemblage or are they constituted differently, and if so, how? Throughout my four chapters, I explore an array of case studies from early modernism to advanced capitalism, including Loie Fuller’s otherworldly stage dances; the scientific motion studies of Muybridge and Marey; Fritz Lang’s dancing maschinenmensch (or the first on-screen dancing machine) in the 1927 film Metropolis; the performances of singer-dancer hologram pop star, Hatsune Miku; and American engineering firm Boston Dynamics’ dancing military robots. The figure of the “dancing machine” (McCarren) is central to my project, especially given that dance has historically been used as a means of testing machines—from automata to robots to CGI images animated with MoCap—in their capacity to be lively or human-like. In each case, I am interested in how dance continues to be productive of some kind of subjectivity (or interiority, or “soul”), even in the absence of the human body, and how technique and gesture passes between bodies, both virtual and organic, dispersing agency often attributed to the human alone. I propose that a posthuman theory of dance is a necessary intervention to the broad and contradictory field of posthumanism because dance returns us to questions about bodies that are often suspiciously ignored in theories of posthumanism, especially regarding race (and historically racist categories of non/inhumanity), thereby exposing many of posthumanism’s biases, appropriations, dispossessions and erasures. Throughout my dissertation, I look to dance as both a concrete example and as a method of thinking through the potentials and limitations of posthumanism

    Proceedings of the 11th Toulon-Verona International Conference on Quality in Services

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    The Toulon-Verona Conference was founded in 1998 by prof. Claudio Baccarani of the University of Verona, Italy, and prof. Michel Weill of the University of Toulon, France. It has been organized each year in a different place in Europe in cooperation with a host university (Toulon 1998, Verona 1999, Derby 2000, Mons 2001, Lisbon 2002, Oviedo 2003, Toulon 2004, Palermo 2005, Paisley 2006, Thessaloniki 2007, Florence, 2008). Originally focusing on higher education institutions, the research themes have over the years been extended to the health sector, local government, tourism, logistics, banking services. Around a hundred delegates from about twenty different countries participate each year and nearly one thousand research papers have been published over the last ten years, making of the conference one of the major events in the field of quality in services

    From Perfectibility to Progress: The Search for a Science of Society in France, 1750-1850

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    The early nineteenth century was a defining moment in the emergence of new, future-oriented visions of human progress. This thesis analyses this development of modern thought through a particular case study: the search for a science of society in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through a contextual study of ideas and knowledge production, the chapters examine the successive models of reform and regeneration that defined this search, tracking a shift in the way these models were conceptualised. This shift involved a transition from individual to collective models of improvement, or, more discursively, from perfectibility to progress. This thesis documents this shift by tracing the origins and development of early French social science in the works of Sieyes, Condorcet and the Ideologues, before turning to the reconfiguration of this science effected by Saint-Simon and his followers in the nineteenth century. In doing so, this study provides new insights into the search for a science of society during and after the French Revolution, a revised interpretation of the history of the concept of perfectibility and a fresh perspective on the ongoing contest between science, religion and politics in this period of intense upheaval. It also advances scholarly understanding of the range of moral, philosophical and natural scientific ideas behind early French positivism and socialism. The nineteenth-century fascination, if not obsession, with progress is shown, in this thesis, to have been shaped by the works of theorists with visionary but idiosyncratic imaginations

    The 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association Conference: Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment, Conference Proceedings, 23 - 25 November 2022, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, Sydney, Australia

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    This is the proceedings of the 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association (AUBEA) conference which will be hosted by Western Sydney University in November 2022. The conference is organised by the School of Engineering, Design, and Built Environment in collaboration with the Centre for Smart Modern Construction, Western Sydney University. This year’s conference theme is “Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment”, and expects to publish over a hundred double-blind peer review papers under the proceedings

    Human-Robot Collaborations in Industrial Automation

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    Technology is changing the manufacturing world. For example, sensors are being used to track inventories from the manufacturing floor up to a retail shelf or a customer’s door. These types of interconnected systems have been called the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, and are projected to lower manufacturing costs. As industry moves toward these integrated technologies and lower costs, engineers will need to connect these systems via the Internet of Things (IoT). These engineers will also need to design how these connected systems interact with humans. The focus of this Special Issue is the smart sensors used in these human–robot collaborations
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