3,320 research outputs found
Humour in fifteenth-century France: a study of visual evidence
Humour in Fifteenth-Century France: A Study of Visual Evidence is an investigation of the development of humour in late medieval France, as expressed in the visual arts. The research identifies and examines comic themes in Valois visual culture through analysis of three case studies. TheâŻfirst is the new iconography for the comedies of Terence, created in the early fifteenth century for the Duke of Berry and the Valois Princes (BnF Lat. 7907A and Arsenal Ms-664 rĂ©serve). The second is the manuscript of RenĂ© dâAnjouâs Livre du Coeur dâAmour Ăpris (ĂNB Cod. Vind. 2597). The third is the only extant fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (GUL Ms Hunter 252 [U.4.10]).
The special emphasis on the arts of the book allows for a discussion of the illuminations in relation to the text they intend to illustrate. Each of these works offers a distinct contribution to the topic by presenting a rich variety of material and different shades, types and forms of humour expressed pictorially. Their nature as manuscripts involves a personal dimension, which narrows their intended audience to specific and well researched historic personalities, facilitating the reconstruction of their tastes, pleasures and sense of humour. Thus, these works permit insights into how humour was expressed, understood and appreciated, and they allow for a nuanced discussion on the comedic and the nature of visuality in late medieval France.
Each of the investigated manuscripts has been studied previously, yet their visual humour has not been addressed as an independent and intentional artistic creation with the specific function of provoking amusement and laughter. This thesis is the first such investigation of humour in visual culture for this period, addressing the lacuna in scholarship and showing that there is a rich diversity of visual material that merits analysis. It argues that pictorial expressions of humour became an important focus for leading creative artists in France through the course of the fifteenth century, and it contextualises this art historical phenomenon within the intellectual, social and political history that surrounded it. The reconstruction of the circumstances in which works of art were made, displayed and understood highlights the changes in the prospective audiences for these works, and the ways different viewers engaged and appreciated humour expressed visually. As well as providing new insights into the patrons, this thesis discusses the artistsâ approach towards their text of reference, their inventions, innovations and creative impulses. In doing so, the investigation highlights a close connection with theatre and performance, and it identifies the printing industry as a contributing factor for the diffusion of comic iconography.
Studying humour is important because it determines social boundaries and functions as a barometer of social, political, sexual and ethical sensibilities. Humour in Fifteenth-Century France: A Study of Visual Evidence addresses a variety of media and permits a closer reading of the role of humour and its functions in Valois France and in Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, expanding our understanding of late medieval concepts of visuality and appreciation of the image
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
Recommended from our members
Cancer Care in Pandemic Times: Building Inclusive Local Health Security in Africa and India
This is a book about improving cancer care in Africa and India that is a child of its pandemic times. It has been collaboratively researched and written by colleagues in Kenya, Tanzania, India and the UK, working within a cross-country, multidisciplinary research project, Innovation for Cancer Care in Africa (ICCA). Since this was a health-focused research project, ICCA researchers during the pandemic not only continued to work on the cancer research project but were also called upon by their governments to respond to immediate pandemic needs. In combining these two concerns, for improving cancer care and responding to pandemic needs, our original project aims have been challenged, deepened and reworked. ICCAâs initial collaborative research focus includedâagainst the grain of most global health literatureâthe potential role of enhanced local production of essential healthcare supplies for improving cancer care in African countries. The pandemic experience has strikingly validated these earlier findings on the importance of industrial development for health care. The pandemic crystallised for researchers and policymakers an often overlooked phenomenon: global health security is built on the foundations of strong local health security. We argue in this book that new analytical thinking from social scientists and others is required on how to build local health security. We use the âlensâ of original research on cancer care in East Africa and India to build up an understanding of the scope for the development of stronger synergies between local health industries and health care, in order to strengthen local health security and develop tools for policy making. The rethinking and reimagining presented here is required for different African countries, for India and the wider world, and this research on cancer care has taught us that this imperative goes much wider than infectious diseases
Software Design Change Artifacts Generation through Software Architectural Change Detection and Categorisation
Software is solely designed, implemented, tested, and inspected by expert people, unlike other engineering projects where they are mostly implemented by workers (non-experts) after designing by engineers. Researchers and practitioners have linked software bugs, security holes, problematic integration of changes, complex-to-understand codebase, unwarranted mental pressure, and so on in software development and maintenance to inconsistent and complex design and a lack of ways to easily understand what is going on and what to plan in a software system. The unavailability of proper information and insights needed by the development teams to make good decisions makes these challenges worse. Therefore, software design documents and other insightful information extraction are essential to reduce the above mentioned anomalies. Moreover, architectural design artifacts extraction is required to create the developerâs profile to be available to the market for many crucial scenarios. To that end, architectural change detection, categorization, and change description generation are crucial because they are the primary artifacts to trace other software artifacts.
However, it is not feasible for humans to analyze all the changes for a single release for detecting change and impact because it is time-consuming, laborious, costly, and inconsistent. In this thesis, we conduct six studies considering the mentioned challenges to automate the architectural change information extraction and document generation that could potentially assist the development and maintenance teams. In particular, (1) we detect architectural changes using lightweight techniques leveraging textual and codebase properties, (2) categorize them considering intelligent perspectives, and (3) generate design change documents by exploiting precise contexts of componentsâ relations and change purposes which were previously unexplored. Our experiment using 4000+ architectural change samples and 200+ design change documents suggests that our proposed approaches are promising in accuracy and scalability to deploy frequently. Our proposed change detection approach can detect up to 100% of the architectural change instances (and is very scalable). On the other hand, our proposed change classifierâs F1 score is 70%, which is promising given the challenges. Finally, our proposed system can produce descriptive design change artifacts with 75% significance. Since most of our studies are foundational, our approaches and prepared datasets can be used as baselines for advancing research in design change information extraction and documentation
Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication
This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of âpost-Internetâ communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories âsomewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fictionâ (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the âcreative paranoiaâ engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology
Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies across Europe: Understanding Sharing and Caring
"Sharing economy" and "collaborative economy" refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the common lens of ethnographic methods, this book presents in-depth examinations of collaborative economy phenomena. The book combines qualitative research and ethnographic methodology with a range of different collaborative economy case studies and topics across Europe. It uniquely offers a truly interdisciplinary approach. It emerges from a unique, long-term, multinational, cross-European collaboration between researchers from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, business studies, law, computing, information systems), career stages, and epistemological backgrounds, brought together by a shared research interest in the collaborative economy. This book is a further contribution to the in-depth qualitative understanding of the complexities of the collaborative economy phenomenon. These rich accounts contribute to the painting of a complex landscape that spans several countries and regions, and diverse political, cultural, and organisational backdrops. This book also offers important reflections on the role of ethnographic researchers, and on their stance and outlook, that are of paramount interest across the disciplines involved in collaborative economy research
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Meets Deep Learning
This reprint focuses on the application of the combination of synthetic aperture radars and depth learning technology. It aims to further promote the development of SAR image intelligent interpretation technology. A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an important active microwave imaging sensor, whose all-day and all-weather working capacity give it an important place in the remote sensing community. Since the United States launched the first SAR satellite, SAR has received much attention in the remote sensing community, e.g., in geological exploration, topographic mapping, disaster forecast, and traffic monitoring. It is valuable and meaningful, therefore, to study SAR-based remote sensing applications. In recent years, deep learning represented by convolution neural networks has promoted significant progress in the computer vision community, e.g., in face recognition, the driverless field and Internet of things (IoT). Deep learning can enable computational models with multiple processing layers to learn data representations with multiple-level abstractions. This can greatly improve the performance of various applications. This reprint provides a platform for researchers to handle the above significant challenges and present their innovative and cutting-edge research results when applying deep learning to SAR in various manuscript types, e.g., articles, letters, reviews and technical reports
A review of technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth Observation imagery
Semantic segmentation (classification) of Earth Observation imagery is a
crucial task in remote sensing. This paper presents a comprehensive review of
technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for this purpose.
The review focuses on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and transformer
models, discussing prominent design patterns for these ANN families and their
implications for semantic segmentation. Common pre-processing techniques for
ensuring optimal data preparation are also covered. These include methods for
image normalization and chipping, as well as strategies for addressing data
imbalance in training samples, and techniques for overcoming limited data,
including augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and domain adaptation. By
encompassing both the technical aspects of neural network design and the
data-related considerations, this review provides researchers and practitioners
with a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the factors involved in
designing effective neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth
Observation imagery.Comment: 145 pages with 32 figure
Transition 2.0: Re-establishing Constitutional Democracy in EU Member States
The central question of Transition 2.0 is this: what (and how) may a new government do to re-establish constitutional democracy, as well as repair membership within the European Union, without breaching the European rule of law? This volume demonstrates that EU law and international commitments impose constraints but also offer tools and assistance for facilitating the way back after rule of law and democratic backsliding. The various contributions explore the constitutional, legal, and social framework of 'Transition 2.0'.Dieser Band zeigt, dass das EU-Recht und die internationalen Verpflichtungen zwar ZwĂ€nge auferlegen, aber auch Instrumente und Hilfestellungen bieten, um den Weg zurĂŒck in die EuropĂ€ische Union nach Rechtsstaatlichkeitsdefiziten und demokratischen RĂŒckschritten zu erleichtern. Die verschiedenen BeitrĂ€ge untersuchen den verfassungsrechtlichen, rechtlichen und sozialen Rahmen des "Ăbergangs 2.0"
TwinTex: Geometry-aware Texture Generation for Abstracted 3D Architectural Models
Coarse architectural models are often generated at scales ranging from
individual buildings to scenes for downstream applications such as Digital Twin
City, Metaverse, LODs, etc. Such piece-wise planar models can be abstracted as
twins from 3D dense reconstructions. However, these models typically lack
realistic texture relative to the real building or scene, making them
unsuitable for vivid display or direct reference. In this paper, we present
TwinTex, the first automatic texture mapping framework to generate a
photo-realistic texture for a piece-wise planar proxy. Our method addresses
most challenges occurring in such twin texture generation. Specifically, for
each primitive plane, we first select a small set of photos with greedy
heuristics considering photometric quality, perspective quality and facade
texture completeness. Then, different levels of line features (LoLs) are
extracted from the set of selected photos to generate guidance for later steps.
With LoLs, we employ optimization algorithms to align texture with geometry
from local to global. Finally, we fine-tune a diffusion model with a multi-mask
initialization component and a new dataset to inpaint the missing region.
Experimental results on many buildings, indoor scenes and man-made objects of
varying complexity demonstrate the generalization ability of our algorithm. Our
approach surpasses state-of-the-art texture mapping methods in terms of
high-fidelity quality and reaches a human-expert production level with much
less effort. Project page: https://vcc.tech/research/2023/TwinTex.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH ASIA 202
- âŠ