Representing parallelism in a control language designed for young children

Actor-lab was intended to make control problems comprehensible to young children experiencing programming for the first time, and to provide an interface around which they could have learning conversations. The design goal was to create an expressive high-level control language that could incorporate the WHEN DEMON metaphor within the intrinsically parallel actor programming paradigm. Information about the static relationship between the objects in the system, the external dynamic events and the internal message passing is provided by the visualisation. The learner-centered evolution of actor-lab is detailed in terms of how successfully it both reflects the curriculum model of control and also engenders a sense of agency within the system

Programming with agents new metaphors for thinking about computation

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-206).by Michael David Travers.M.S

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Performing translation : theatrical theory and its relevance to textual transfer

The fundamental similarity between translation and acting can be summarized by the words of translator Ralph Manheim: ‘translators are like actors: we speak lines by someone else’ (cited in Stavans 1998: 176). This common metaphor is a useful tool for translation practitioners and researchers. Although it cannot be fully exhausted, it can be further clarified, analysed and developed by looking into modern and pre-modern theories of theatrical performance, examining their compatibility and incompatibility with the world of translation practice and theory. The first chapter of this thesis deals with mimetic representation in translation and in performance. The issue of disguising oneself as someone else while performing or translating raises practical problems. They are discussed here in relation to the opposite approaches to acting suggested by Denis Diderot and Constantin Stanislavski. The following chapter deals with radical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses ethical and political strategies in relation to Bertolt Brecht and Lawrence Venuti. The next chapter deals with spiritual and metaphysical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses them in relation to Jerzi Grotowski and Walter Benjamin. The final chapter explores the common ground between theatrical space and norms of translation, and shows that in many ways, the use of theatrical space, confining performers yet channelling their communication with their spectators, functions in similar fashion to translation norms

The sounds of silence: how Chileans said no to General Augusto Pinochet

Art provides an image of reality from the creator's perspective which sparks interaction between the viewer and the piece. Throughout history, metaphor-infused art has inspired dialogue and social change as a means for oppressed people to speak out in a society where a violent, political oppressor has silenced their voices. Employing art, oppressed people can communicate safely with the outside world through individual cultural expression. Through creating and viewing political art viewers are invited into a national discourse which contributes to building cultural identity. This study examines how political movements, focusing on Chile's 1988 No campaign against their dictator, Pinochet, can be facilitated by nontraditional, traditional, and performance arts because they each contain similar political messages and discrete expressions of emotion, hopes, and desires. Therefore, political art embodies a form of rhetoric that can potentially provoke emotional responses in viewers through visual images and inspire people to join movements by promoting the recognition of violence and images of peace for the future

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

The design of collaborative projects : Language, metaphor, conversation and the systems approach

This thesis uses a systems approach to develop a model for Collaborative Project Design (CPD). Failure of the software process is the area of concern. The focus of the argument is, however, on the organizational environment of the software process. A central argument is that the analytic tools of standard software development methodologies are inappropriate for systems synthesis. They provide little assistance in coping with the loose complexity that is inherent in the organizational environment in which the software process is embedded. These analytic tools and the engineering language and metaphor which dominate the software process undermine collaboration and disempower business users. CPD was developed to enable viable collaboration that is necessary for the software process to succeed. The purpose of CPD is to provide a systemic model of causal influences and social process in order to guide a project designer when intervening in projects which call for acts of shared creation and/or discovery. CPD was developed through a combination of action research (in projects involving software development and organisational transformation) and theoretical readings focused on the philosophy of meaning, systems thinking, social process and the software process. CPD emphasises that a collaborative project requires careful design of its underlying languages, metaphors and conversations. It identifies three distinct types of conversation, namely communication, dialogue and collaboration. The thesis describes how these conversation types are utilised in transforming a project's network of commitments from loose complexity via shared meaning to cohesive simplicity. Associated with each conversation type is a set of project influences which are developed into a causal influence model in order to depict a collaborative project as a dynamic system of mutually interdependent influences. This causal influence model was used to synthesise the learning from action research and the theoretical readings. An appreciative systems framework was then derived in order to justify a collaborative project as a self-regulating social system and was overlaid onto the causal influence model in order to derive CPD in its final form. CPD proved beneficial when tested in practical projects as a framework to organise a project designer's mind when designing project interventions

God, Dog, and the Problem of the Immanent Frame

In this project I rethink a key analytical category borrowed from religious studies—ritual—through the joint intervention of postsecular critique and Indigenous literature. My work unfolds in two parts: first in a critique of Eurocentric historicism and then in a move towards an anti-historicist interpretive horizon that nevertheless relates back to history. Chapter 2 then analyzes the Cherokee-Canadian author Thomas King’s 1993 novel, Green Grass, Running Water. I demonstrate that postsecular interpretation readily builds connections across time and space, prompting the reformation of categories such as ritual so that they may exceed their Eurocentric roots. What emerges from Green Grass, Running Water as a result is a clarified Indigenous radicalism that simultaneously reaffirms and displaces human agency

A Software-based Knowledge Management System Using Narrative Texts

Technical and professional communicators have in recent research been challenged to make significant contributions to the field of knowledge management, and to learn or create the new technologies allowing them to do so. The purpose of this dissertation is to make such a combined theoretical and applied contribution from the context of the emerging discipline of Texts and Technology. This dissertation explores the field of knowledge management (KM), particularly its relationship to the related study of artificial intelligence (AI), and then recommends a KM software application based on the principles of narratology and narrative information exchange. The focus of knowledge is shifted from the reductive approach of data and information to a holistic approach of meaning and the way people make sense of complex events as experiences expressed in stories. Such an analysis requires a discussion of the evolution of intelligent systems and narrative theory as well as an examination of existing computerized and non-computerized storytelling systems. After a thorough discussion of these issues, an original software program that is used to collect, analyze, and distribute thematic stories within any hierarchical organization is modeled, exemplified, and explained in detail

The Leading Journal in the Field: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management

217 p. : il , 20 x 13 cm.Libro ElectrónicoI am often told, “Don’t waste your time reading books, you’d be better off reading the leading journals in your field.” Unfortunately, the authors of this book have closely read some of those articles: examining arguments, with simple principles and words, plus a touch of irony – and a shared belief in ideas and debates. The suspicions that we all have in a part of our head appears in its ugly nakedness: what is this social game that authors in leading management journals play? What grants them their truth effects? This is a book that one should read the day one enters the academic field; and then regularly thereafter so as not to forget.’ Professor Jean-Luc Moriceau, Telecom Business School (France)"A menudo me dijo:" No pierda su tiempo leyendo libros, que sería mejor que la lectura de las revistas líderes en su campo. "Desafortunadamente, los autores de este libro han leído muy de cerca algunos de esos artículos: el examen de los argumentos, con principios simples y palabras, además de un toque de ironía - y la creencia compartida de ideas y debates. Las sospechas de que todos tenemos en una parte de la cabeza aparece en su fea desnudez: ¿qué es este juego social que los autores de revistas líder en gestión de jugar? Lo que les dé efectos de verdad? Este es un libro que uno debe leer el día se entra en el campo académico, y luego periódicamente a partir de entonces, para no olvidar ". Profesor Jean-Luc Moriceau , Telecom Business School (Francia)Contributors vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Towards a Clinical Study of Finance: The DeAngelos and the Redwoods 9 3 Marientbal At Work 35 4 ‘Lessons for Managers and Consultants’: A Reading of Edgar H. Schein’s Process Consultation 61 5 Multiple Failures of Scholarship: Karl Weick and the Mann Gulch Disaster 85 6 The ‘Nature of Man’ and the Science of Organization 103 7 Performativity: From J.L. Austin to Judith Butler 119 8 Four Close Readings on Introducing the Literary in Organizational Research 143 9 From Bourgeois Sociology to Managerial Apologetics: A Tale of Existential Struggle 16