Sources of Computer Metaphors for Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction

This chapter is devoted to finding sources for metaphors of computer visualization and human-computer interaction. Computer metaphor is considered the basic idea for the development of interfaces, visualization views, and scenarios of visualization and interaction. Global metaphors map the main design idea. These ideas depend on global events and changes in society, art, and science. In the “pre-computer” era, such ideas formed the basics of cartography, engineering drawings, and drawing function graphs on the Cartesian plane. When designing visualization and interactive systems, computer metaphors use “magic features” beside analogies with daily life. Nowadays ideas of visualization are often based on “gamification.” This approach presupposes creating tools that provide software engineers with an interface similar to that of computer games. In this chapter, ideas drawn upon fairy tales, science fiction books, fantasy films, and other similar spheres are considered as sources of computer metaphors. Such metaphors are very interesting when designing visualization systems based on virtual reality

Textiles in Texts: Literary Representations of Women's Textile Crafts

Textiles in Text

The Big Disease with the Little Name: Retelling the Story of HIV & AIDS in an Evolving New Media Landscape

Stories shape our social reality. This research explores new ways of storytelling around the topic of HIV and AIDS by using augmented reality (AR) and electronic literature to experiment with the meaning, structure, and form that a story can take. Employing a mixed methodological approach that combines Research through Design, Transmedia Storytelling and Critical Design methodologies, this thesis unpacks the potential of digital technologies in retelling and revisioning the story of HIV and AIDS as a way to give voice to stories that are often left unheard. AR Disclosures is an interactive documentary installation that tells stories about HIV in the form of augmented reality latrinalia. Once Upon A Virus is an interactive dystopian fantasy that subverts fairy-tale motifs in order to explore themes of inequality in relation to the AIDS epidemic. These two exploratory prototypes aim to propose new ways in which storytellers might leverage evolving new media technologies and experimental storytelling techniques to tell the story of HIV and AIDS to a new audience, while contributing to a developing definition of what the practice of storytelling is and looks like today

Many are the deceivers

This thesis examines the adaptations and disseminations of ancient and modern dominant Western Parables. It investigates both Biblical myths and fairy tales, as they are used as socializing tools, which set standards in Western culture, and prescribe conventions to our children. Within the thesis, themes from Little Red Riding Hood will be extrapolated, and compared to those found in Old Testament tales such as, The Expulsion from Eden, the Deluge, The Ten Plagues, and Exodus. Throughout the thesis, the history and function of the myth and fairy tale will be defined, and questions will be raised regarding the role of the story and storyteller. An analysis will be made of the Western obsession with using stories as allegorical representations of a culture, and societies need to relate to mythical characters. Specific mythical characters will also be studied for their ubiquitous qualities, their fundamental representations of the human condition, and their incarnations of an iconic individual. Explanations will be given to the artist’s relationship to multiple medias, and her additional role as author and narrator of a new story. The title of the thesis (Many are the Deceivers) will also be explained, as it is a reference to Anne Sexton’s 1971 poem “Red Riding Hood”. The thesis will describe the artist’s artwork as a visual comparison to Sexton’s literary work, and will reinforce the idea that everyone holds the potential to deceive

Eoin Colfer\u27s Artemis Fowl novels: Contemporary subversive tales

Drawing especially on Donna Haraway\u27s notion of the cyborg, this thesis argues that Eoin Colfer\u27s Artemis Fowl novels, through their depiction of the cyborg and their use of metafiction, intertextuality, and irony, subvert binaries and hierarchies that cause social injustice. Chapter one argues that Colfer\u27s characters disrupt the oppressive binary opposition between innocence and experience that characterizes children\u27s literature. Chapter two argues that Colfer\u27s fairy hierarchy satirizes the human hierarchy. Chapter three argues that Colfer\u27s cyborg, by disrupting the boundary between machine and organism, breaches the wall around the pervasive garden hierarchy of childhood innocence. Chapter four argues against the traditional textual hierarchies which classify children\u27s literature as inferior, and which give adult writers power over child readers

Metaphor in comparative studies, or, the folklore of anthropology: Frazer, Malinowski, Trobriand, and us

This article looks at the nineteenth-century preconception that ‘primitives’ ignore fatherhood—how it crept into ethnographic reports, made its way into anthropological theory, and sparked debates for the best part of a century. The discussion looks at the influential work of James Frazer and Sidney Hartland—at how these authors relied on folk metaphors to reason about the ignorance of ‘primitives’—and exposes Bronislaw Malinowski’s place in that tradition. Beyond revisiting Trobriand ethnography, this article argues that knowledge in anthropology and folkloristics is inherently metaphorical. The article makes a case for heeding metaphors across cultures, including in scholarly models, as a tool for understanding the varieties of human thinking.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Figuring “Sleeping Beauty”: Metamorphosis of a Literary and Cultural Trope in European Fairy Tales and Medicine, c. 1350-1700

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women—paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection—who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods. In this unnatural state, these female bodies remain intact: materially incorrupt, aesthetically unblemished. Thus can the body of the sleeping beauty be defined as an enigma and a paradox: a nexus of competing and unanswered questions, uniquely worthy of investigation. This thesis examines the metamorphoses of the figure of the sleeping beauty in literature and medicine between c.1350 and 1700 in order to interrogate the enduring aesthetic and epistemological fascination that she exercises in different contexts: her potency to entrance, her capacity to charm, in both literary and philosophical realms. The widespread presence of the sleeping beauty in literature and art, as well as in the broader social sphere, over the centuries, indicates the figure’s important and ongoing cultural role. Central to this role is the figure’s dual nature and functionality. On the one hand, conceptualized as allegories, sleeping beauties act as receptacles for a complex matrix of patriarchal fears, desires and beliefs about the female body in general, and the virgin and maternal bodies in particular. On the other hand, understood as material or bodily entities, sleeping beauties make these same ideological questions incarnate. Sleeping beauties are, therefore, signs, treated as material bodies, a tension which this thesis explores. As such, they are prime subjects for cross-disciplinary correlational study and historicist analysis: vehicles for comparison and dialogue between literature, medicine, and religion on the issues of power and passivity, sexuality and gender difference, mortality and beauty, nature and the unnatural or supernatural. Sleeping beauties negotiate the boundaries of human desire for, and capacity for belief in, miracles and wonders