The Comic Book Film as Palimpsest

In this dissertation, I argue that the comic book film can be productively conceptualized along the same theoretical lines used by Gérard Genette in his literary study Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree: that is, as a genre whose individual works are constructed of multiple textual layers. In this case, these layers consist of different media—film and comics—both of which remain uniquely visible in the final product, and whose combination results in unique articulations of cinematic style. I argue that the full import of these stylistic interventions is lost or overlooked when using an adaptation studies approach to the genre; therefore I employ a version of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation filtered through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary dialogism and heteroglossia. Chapter One articulates the limitations of adaptation theory and presents remediation as a productive alternative. Chapter Two develops a Genette-inspired six-tiered schema that details the categories into which the various strategies of remediation fit. The following two chapters draw upon this framework to explore particular formal differences between comics and film and the stylistic means through which various film texts have addressed them: namely, the difference between the film frame and the comic book panel (Chapter Three) and cinematic movement versus comic book stasis (Chapter Four). In Chapter Five, I explode the established paradigm by considering two case studies that remediate comic books amongst a broader variety of media, which present comics as one medium in the vast contemporary digital media ecology. In the final chapter, I address the superhero film in particular, exploring the question of celluloid versus digital cinema at length and how Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy (Batman Begins; The Dark Knight; The Dark Knight Rises) uses its narrative to allegorically advocate for cinematic specificity, thus articulating a counter-example to the framework established in the previous chapters

BETWEEN RHETORIC AND PERFORMATIVITY: THE VERBAL AND VISUAL ART OF FOUR MODERNIST WOMEN

The early twentieth century witnessed a special intensity in the relationship among different forms of artistic expression. Cases of osmosis multiplied between writing and painting, entailing the negotiation of techniques, giving voice to a myriad of hybrid forms. Moving on this fruitful field of research, my thesis aims at investigating the cases of some female writers who were artists at the same time, as they occupy a position of their own in the already fascinating frame of writing-artistic partnership. Specifically, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy, and Zelda Fitzgerald appear to share artistic milieux and similar biographical experiences, so that they fit comparative settings. On the transnational chessboard of modernism, these four women moved among major centres \u2013 including London, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Italy and New York \u2013 to weave a complex network of \u2018upstream modernism\u2019. The texture entangling exchanges of expressive techniques and gender awareness appears to be particularly dense in their verbal and visual works, unmediated and spontaneous, original and dynamic. It is interesting to observe how these female artists\u2019 twin talents of writing and painting clearly influenced verbal and visual choices in terms of genres, forms and patterns. In addition, these women traced their own paths as divergent from that of men\u2019s, both of the past and of their time. In the already extensive criticism of (some of) these artists, there seems to be a still little trodden path of intermediality, upon which my thesis aims to expand

The Progress of Error: or, the Recursive Eighteenth Century

Digital archives of early modern printed materials—on Early English Books Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg, among others—are rife with scanning errors, incomplete metadata, typos, and other odd, frustrating artifacts of mediation. Each technological change in writing brings its own version of problems in preserving and mediating our print history—problems which may, paradoxically, proliferate errors as they seek to correct prior mistakes. “The Progress of Error” traces a history of these fractious, recursive, debates about error correction and mediation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when editors, printers, and critics squabbled over the best means of preserving classical texts, Shakespeare, Milton, and early English ballads. I argue that the literary past is literally made of mistakes and attempts to correct them which go out of control; these errant corrections are not to be fixed in future editions but rather are constitutive of Enlightenment concepts of mediation, criticism, sensory perception, historicity, and agency. Editor and satirist Alexander Pope played both sides of the error correction and creation game, translating and editing texts at the same time as he reveled in satire’s distorting lens and its potential for correcting others’ moral and intellectual failings. Classical editor Richard Bentley, a target of Pope’s scourge in the first edition of the Dunciad, practiced extraordinary editorial hubris in insisting that he could conjecturally correct not just typos in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, but entire lines that he felt were blots on the poem’s design and style. Lewis Theobald followed Bentley’s intellectually provocative but over-reaching, bombastic style when he turned his scrutiny onto Pope’s editorial methods: his Shakespeare Restor’d was a method composed of broken lines and phrases as he animadverted on his rival’s work. Less sharp-tongued but even more ambitious, Thomas Percy undertook a gigantic editorial vision of composing a world history of poetry in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and related editorial projects, many of which were left unfinished: a hodgepodge of misprisioned scale and poetic scope. Correction’s effects thus extended beyond fixing a particular error in a poem or play; the protocols engendered new technologies of social behavior in print and new forms of mediating agency. I am fascinated by those printer’s errors and scanning glitches, those moments when mediation goes awry. Following Marshall McLuhan, media historians Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have used the term “remediation” to consider how digital technology refashions media across forms and genres. With McLuhan’s background in early modern literary criticism in mind, I adapt the term for the study of print technology. I fold in related meanings of remediation—to remedy a mistake, to intervene in a situation, to renovate a landscape—to describe an emergence of literary effects generated by the iterative interventions of textual error correction. I pay attention to editors’ critical vocabularies of mediating conjectures, surveying prospects, and sifting through reams of information. The same debates about errors in perception and transmission of knowledge which engaged Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Bacon, George Berkeley and John Locke took place on the margins of pages as editors debated how to use these new tools of mediation. My dissertation historicizes and breaks down these protocols and interactions into their smallest radical units—errors—with the goal of theorizing how these procedures have come to constitute both objects of study and critical practices in the field of literary study. It is a meta-reflective experiment in mediating among fields of book history, media theory, experimental poetics and digital art, and disciplinary histories to ask questions about where we may go next

Technical Debt: An empirical investigation of its harmfulness and on management strategies in industry

Background: In order to survive in today\u27s fast-growing and ever fast-changing business environment, software companies need to continuously deliver customer value, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, the consequences of potential long-term and far-reaching negative effects of shortcuts and quick fixes made during the software development lifecycle, described as Technical Debt (TD), can impede the software development process.Objective: The overarching goal of this Ph.D. thesis is twofold. The first goal is to empirically study and understand in what way and to what extent, TD influences today’s software development work, specifically with the intention to provide more quantitative insight into the field. Second, to understand which different initiatives can reduce the negative effects of TD and also which factors are important to consider when implementing such initiatives.Method: To achieve the objectives, a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are used, including interviews, surveys, a systematic literature review, a longitudinal study, analysis of documents, correlation analysis, and statistical tests. In seven of the eleven studies included in this Ph.D. thesis, a combination of multiple research methods are used to achieve high validity.Results: We present results showing that software suffering from TD will cause various negative effects on both the software and the developing process. These negative effects are illustrated from a technical, financial, and a developer’s working situational perspective. These studies also identify several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD.Conclusion: The results show that software developers report that they waste 23% of their working time due to experiencing TD and that TD required them to perform additional time-consuming work activities. This study also shows that, compared to all types of TD, architectural TD has the greatest negative impact on daily software development work and that TD has negative effects on several different software quality attributes. Further, the results show that TD reduces developer morale. Moreover, the findings show that intentionally introducing TD in startup companies can allow the startups to cut development time, enabling faster feedback and increased revenue, preserve resources, and decrease risk and thereby contribute to beneficial\ua0effects. This study also identifies several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD, such as the introduction of a tracking process where the TD items are introduced in an official backlog. The finding also indicates that there is an unfulfilled potential regarding how managers can influence the manner in which software practitioners address TD

Beckett and media

Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation

Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan.

Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan is a critical reconsideration of the modes and meanings of the Pink Film; a form of soft-core, narrative, theatrical adult film produced in Japan from the 1960s to the present day. Focusing on the period between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, I combine fieldwork with historiographical and theoretical reassessments to explore this industry through the three main dimensions of its contemporary existence—the pro-filmic spaces of production at shooting locations and in studios, the imaginary and remediated realms of the pornographic image on movie and TV screens, and the physical environments of the adult specialty cinema network in Japan. In counterargument to a growing body of knowledge that has, since the rapid spread of adult video formats in Japan in the early 1980s, emphasized the material and contextual specificities of Pink Film and reified the format as an essentially filmic, distinctly theatrical, and particularly Japanese cinema, I examine the ways in which Pink Film has acted instead as a (re)productive point of translation between presumably disparate moving image technologies and audiences. I challenge the assumption that pornographic film, as a ‘body genre,’ has the unusual power to directly address or affect spectators’ bodies. I argue that while Pink Film does exhibit an intimate relationship with the bodies of producers and performers that create it, the films themselves focus as much on the spectacular coupling of media technologies as they do the simulated sexual contact of actors in the frame. I also show how adult cinema customers often have no interest in the movie at all, and instead utilize these spaces in ways that are directly disputed by theater management and disavowed by filmic narratives. Sex Every Afternoon recalibrates the ‘bodies’ of this body genre to align with the real people who create Pink Films. It issues a challenge to film and pornography studies by arguing that a close textual and contextual evaluation of this medium reveals that the romantic relationship between the moving image and the living spectator is, at best, uncertain.PHDIndependent Interdepartmental Degree ProgramUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116708/1/maiku_1.pd

Mitigating Emergent Safety and Security Incidents of CPS by a Protective Shell

In today's modern world, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have gained widespread prevalence, offering tremendous benefits while also increasing society's dependence on them. Given the direct interaction of CPS with the physical environment, their malfunction or compromise can pose significant risks to human life, property, and the environment. However, as the complexity of CPS rises due to heightened expectations and expanded functional requirements, ensuring their trustworthy operation solely during the development process becomes increasingly challenging. This thesis introduces and delves into the novel concept of the 'Protective Shell' – a real-time safeguard actively monitoring CPS during their operational phases. The protective shell serves as a last line of defence, designed to detect abnormal behaviour, conduct thorough analyses, and initiate countermeasures promptly, thereby mitigating unforeseen risks in real-time. The primary objective of this research is to enhance the overall safety and security of CPS by refining, partly implementing, and evaluating the innovative protective shell concept. To provide context for collaborative systems working towards higher objectives — common within CPS as system-of-systems (SoS) — the thesis introduces the 'Emergence Matrix'. This matrix categorises outcomes of such collaboration into four quadrants based on their anticipated nature and desirability. Particularly concerning are outcomes that are both unexpected and undesirable, which frequently serve as the root cause of safety accidents and security incidents in CPS scenarios. The protective shell plays a critical role in mitigating these unfavourable outcomes, as conventional vulnerability elimination procedures during the CPS design phase prove insufficient due to their inability to proactively anticipate and address these unforeseen situations. Employing the design science research methodology, the thesis is structured around its iterative cycles and the research questions imposed, offering a systematic exploration of the topic. A detailed analysis of various safety accidents and security incidents involving CPS was conducted to retrieve vulnerabilities that led to dangerous outcomes. By developing specific protective shells for each affected CPS and assessing their effectiveness during these hazardous scenarios, a generic core for the protective shell concept could be retrieved, indicating general characteristics and its overall applicability. Furthermore, the research presents a generic protective shell architecture, integrating advanced anomaly detection techniques rooted in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and human machine teaming. While the implementation of protective shells demonstrate substantial positive impacts in ensuring CPS safety and security, the thesis also articulates potential risks associated with their deployment that require careful consideration. In conclusion, this thesis makes a significant contribution towards the safer and more secure integration of complex CPS into daily routines, critical infrastructures and other sectors by leveraging the capabilities of the generic protective shell framework.:1 Introduction 1.1 Background and Context 1.2 Research Problem 1.3 Purpose and Objectives 1.3.1 Thesis Vision 1.3.2 Thesis Mission 1.4 Thesis Outline and Structure 2 Design Science Research Methodology 2.1 Relevance-, Rigor- and Design Cycle 2.2 Research Questions 3 Cyber-Physical Systems 3.1 Explanation 3.2 Safety- and Security-Critical Aspects 3.3 Risk 3.3.1 Quantitative Risk Assessment 3.3.2 Qualitative Risk Assessment 3.3.3 Risk Reduction Mechanisms 3.3.4 Acceptable Residual Risk 3.4 Engineering Principles 3.4.1 Safety Principles 3.4.2 Security Principles 3.5 Cyber-Physical System of Systems (CPSoS) 3.5.1 Emergence 4 Protective Shell 4.1 Explanation 4.2 System Architecture 4.3 Run-Time Monitoring 4.4 Definition 4.5 Expectations / Goals 5 Specific Protective Shells 5.1 Boeing 737 Max MCAS 5.1.1 Introduction 5.1.2 Vulnerabilities within CPS 5.1.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.1.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.2 Therac-25 5.2.1 Introduction 5.2.2 Vulnerabilities within CPS 5.2.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.2.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.3 Stuxnet 5.3.1 Introduction 5.3.2 Exploited Vulnerabilities 5.3.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.3.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.4 Toyota 'Unintended Acceleration' ETCS 5.4.1 Introduction 5.4.2 Vulnerabilities within CPS 5.4.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.4.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.5 Jeep Cherokee Hack 5.5.1 Introduction 5.5.2 Vulnerabilities within CPS 5.5.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.5.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.6 Ukrainian Power Grid Cyber-Attack 5.6.1 Introduction 5.6.2 Vulnerabilities in the critical Infrastructure 5.6.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.6.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.7 Airbus A400M FADEC 5.7.1 Introduction 5.7.2 Vulnerabilities within CPS 5.7.3 Specific Protective Shell Mitigation Mechanisms 5.7.4 Protective Shell Evaluation 5.8 Similarities between Specific Protective Shells 5.8.1 Mitigation Mechanisms Categories 5.8.2 Explanation 5.8.3 Conclusion 6 AI 6.1 Explainable AI (XAI) for Anomaly Detection 6.1.1 Anomaly Detection 6.1.2 Explainable Artificial Intelligence 6.2 Intrinsic Explainable ML Models 6.2.1 Linear Regression 6.2.2 Decision Trees 6.2.3 K-Nearest Neighbours 6.3 Example Use Case - Predictive Maintenance 7 Generic Protective Shell 7.1 Architecture 7.1.1 MAPE-K 7.1.2 Human Machine Teaming 7.1.3 Protective Shell Plugin Catalogue 7.1.4 Architecture and Design Principles 7.1.5 Conclusion Architecture 7.2 Implementation Details 7.3 Evaluation 7.3.1 Additional Vulnerabilities introduced by the Protective Shell 7.3.2 Summary 8 Conclusion 8.1 Summary 8.2 Research Questions Evaluation 8.3 Contribution 8.4 Future Work 8.5 Recommendatio

Digital material: tracing new media in everyday life and technology

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.Nieuwe media zijn vanaf hun opkomst begeleid door revolutionaire beloften en bedreigingen: hypertekst zou lezers veranderen in auteurs, digitale beelden zouden de waarheid en werkelijkheid ondermijnen, en online communicatie zou alle afstanden overbruggen. 'Cyberspace' werd gevierd dan wel gevreesd als immaterieel en autonoom, losgezongen van onze dagelijkse leefwereld. Na twee decennia 'cyberrevolutie' zijn nieuwe media vanzelfsprekend geworden en blijken zij allesbehalve immaterieel. Vanuit dat perspectief belicht de bundel Digital Material digitale culturen. De bijdragen onderzoeken onder meer computer games, mobiele communicatie, interfacemetaforen, weblogculturen, software ontwikkeling en digitale beeldproductie. Bij elkaar vormen zij een inspirerend theoretisch kader om de hedendaagse betekenis van nieuwe media te doorgronden

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

Fungi Media: A Post-Internet Performance of Bodily Mutations as an Enactment of Alternative Sexualities

This theory-practice PhD project investigates post-Internet performance art, i.e. art which is visually inspired by mutations of human bodies on the Internet, to stage a form of bodily decomposition in real-life spaces. As a framing device for my thesis, I propose the concept of ‘fungi media’. This concept builds on the vital role of fungi in the decomposition of individual organisms’ bodies to highlight the role of media, including the Internet, in breaking down and reassembling human and nonhuman bodies into complex ecologies. Body performance that engages with fungi on a visual and material level is used in this project to explore the possibility of enacting alternative sexualities and non-normative lifestyles within the present-day context of the decomposing world. Those alternative sexualities are described in the thesis as ‘fungosexual’. This formulation repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’, and which stands for a fungiinduced process of decomposition. With this, I explore the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such. Using the mutability of fungal life as a model, I also look at life’s mutation beyond sexual reproduction and beyond binary gender roles. In line with its theory-practice aspect, the PhD has a dual methodology. On the one hand, it uses a humanities framework (drawn from philosophies of posthumanism and new materialism, media theory, and theories of sexuality and the body) to engage, critically and creatively, with bioscience research into microbes and fungi. On the other, it mobilises the concept of ‘fungi media’ for my own performance art and curatorial work. The performance space used for my research, which is a London squat inhabited by both artists and fungi, serves as an important actor in these performances. My overall aim with this thesis is to position bodily mutation unfolding on and off the Internet as a performative form of dark vitalism. This philosophical-artistic approach offers strategies for urban dwelling, which transcend normative family and sexual life to embrace a hybrid fungosexuality