Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

Existing research on the extensive Chinese censorship organization uses observational methods with well-known limitations. We conducted the first large-scale experimental study of censorship by creating accounts on numerous social media sites, randomly submitting different texts, and observing from a worldwide network of computers which texts were censored and which were not. We also supplemented interviews with confidential sources by creating our own social media site, contracting with Chinese firms to install the same censoring technologies as existing sites, and—with their software, documentation, and even customer support—reverse-engineering how it all works. Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real-world events with collective action potential are censored.Governmen

Zunun Kadir's Ambiguity: The dilemma of a Uyghur writer under Chinese rule

This thesis considers the work of the influential Uyghur writer Zunun Kadir (1912-1989), and through it charts some aspects of Uyghur identity and aspiration, while explaining the background of his work in relation to the culture and history of the Uyghur people of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). Growing up in a poor and conservative family under Chinese rule, Zunun developed a commitment to nationalism and socialism in the belief that these would serve as the best basis for the advancement of the Uyghur people. In middle age he witnessed the absorption of the East Turkistan Republic into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established by the Chinese Communist Party, and he adapted himself to work under that government. This involved accepting a political agenda that called upon him to support a unified greater China to the detriment of Uyghur national interests. This situation presented Zunun Kadir with an enduring dilemma: how to resist the cultural domination of the Han Chinese and maintain the distinct cultural identity of the Uyghur people, while ensuring his freedom to write and publish in an environment controlled by the CCP. In the volatile political environment of the PRC, this balance could not be maintained indefinitely and Zunun was eventually subjected to official criticism and sent to the Tarim desert to undergo labour reform. After 17 years of exile he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era, and he returned to Urumqi to resume his career as a Uyghur writer. His later work indicates a degree of disillusionment and caution, but also shows how he reconciled his choices by balancing his idealism with the reality of his environment. The use of ambiguous language and imagery allowed Zunun Kadir to pass the political scrutiny required of a publishing author in the PRC, and at the same time to offer different layers of meaning to his Uyghur-reading audience through cultural and historical references to Uyghur life

Ranking and Retrieval under Semantic Relevance

This thesis presents a series of conceptual and empirical developments on the ranking and retrieval of candidates under semantic relevance. Part I of the thesis introduces the concept of uncertainty in various semantic tasks (such as recognizing textual entailment) in natural language processing, and the machine learning techniques commonly employed to model these semantic phenomena. A unified view of ranking and retrieval will be presented, and the trade-off between model expressiveness, performance, and scalability in model design will be discussed. Part II of the thesis focuses on applying these ranking and retrieval techniques to text: Chapter 3 examines the feasibility of ranking hypotheses given a premise with respect to a human's subjective probability of the hypothesis happening, effectively extending the traditional categorical task of natural language inference. Chapter 4 focuses on detecting situation frames for documents using ranking methods. Then we extend the ranking notion to retrieval, and develop both sparse (Chapter 5) and dense (Chapter 6) vector-based methods to facilitate scalable retrieval for potential answer paragraphs in question answering. Part III turns the focus to mentions and entities in text, while continuing the theme on ranking and retrieval: Chapter 7 discusses the ranking of fine-grained types that an entity mention could belong to, leading to state-of-the-art performance on hierarchical multi-label fine-grained entity typing. Chapter 8 extends the semantic relation of coreference to a cross-document setting, enabling models to retrieve from a large corpus, instead of in a single document, when resolving coreferent entity mentions

Transnational Modern Languages

In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series

Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. This 'editorial' is for a special issue of AI & Society, which includes contributions from: María Jesús Schultz Abarca, Peter Bell, Tobias Blanke, Benjamin Bratton, Claudio Celis Bueno, Kate Crawford, Iain Emsley, Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Daniel Chávez Heras, Vladan Joler, Nicolas Malevé, Lev Manovich, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Perle Møhl, Bruno Moreschi, Fabian Offert, Trevor Paglan, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Gabriel Pereira, Carloalberto Treccani, Rebecca Uliasz, and Manuel van der Veen

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licens

Holding Stories

The Afterlife Creative Memory Retreat by The Other Way Works (research and development) invited audience participants to an online retreat via Zoom. Inspired by the 1998 film After Life by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the work invites participants to focus on what they value in life through an in-depth creative exploration of their own important memories facilitating hope, togetherness and a deeper connection to one’s sense of self. The scenographer was part of the team of artists who devised exercises that were then given to the online audience to help them revisit some of their memories. A playful exercise featuring a red thread was introduced and the participants were encouraged to use it for connecting with each other’s screen spaces. Through the medium of touch and the playful scenographic illusion of the thread extending to other participants’ rooms, this tool was used as a way to create a sense of togetherness among the group. I will unpack the above scenographic action through the lens of 4Es cognition: enactive, ecological, embodied, embedded ‘and some cases extended and affective’ (Ward and Stapleton, 2012), suggesting that human cognition is an on-going collaboration between brain, body and environment. If places are shaped by significant historic moments (Hannah, 2011: 56), they are also shaped by the memories we choose to attach to those moments and a certain materiality related to those moments. By understanding thinking not as an individualistic activity but one that is happening within socio-cultural and material knowledge and inextricably integrated with perception and action I will argue that in the Afterlife Creative Memory Retreat, the tactile scenographic element of the thread enhanced the sense of memory as storytelling between the screens

Reviving musical indigeneity : institutionalization, transmission, and revival of Taiwan’s aboriginal music

This dissertation studies the revival of Taiwan’s Aboriginal music motivated by the emergence of a strong Aboriginal consciousness during the last three decades. This revivalism has been stimulated in part by government initiatives to foster diversity in the national arts, by the changing economies of Aboriginal musical performance, and by the Aboriginal communities’ emerging commitment to musical-cultural preservation. Instead of framing revival as a mere counterhegemonic move of returning to an “authentic tradition” with a long history, this research argues that Aboriginal music revival is a contemporary phenomenon of constructing or reimagining the musical past enacted in discursive, performative, and institutional efforts. By emphasizing the articulation of musical indigeneity, this dissertation teases out the processes and multiple ways practitioners respond to the state and engage in the specific aspects of revived music in relation to their adaptations, interpretations, and cultural choices. My dissertation links the study of Aboriginal music revival to recent literature related to affect, critical organology, and language revitalization, focusing on several essential phenomena of Aboriginal music revival: (1) the institutionalization and the state’s heritage projects of Paiwan nose flutes (lalingedan) and mouth flutes (pakulalu) that have reinforced a particular thoughtful sorrow as a core aesthetic symbol of the Paiwan; (2) the craftsmanship of Paiwan flute making and playing that are central to the transformation of the Paiwan soundscape and changing state’s heritage projects, and; (3) the emerging movement of Aboriginal mother-tongue songwriting that participated in a wider revalorization of the “local” in Taiwan’s music industry, with a particular focus on Paiwan songwriters. Through a close examination of affective, material, and vocal dimensions of Aboriginal Paiwan music, this study aims to provide an alternative mode to reexamine the naturalized connections to the ancient past and bounded reification of identities occurring in music revival. I argue that the examination of these dimensions of music contributes to the understanding of diverse manifestations of Aboriginal music and how certain aspects of local musical practices attain new importance as core values for revival.Musi