6,316 research outputs found
Impressions: Understanding Visual Semiotics and Aesthetic Impact
Is aesthetic impact different from beauty? Is visual salience a reflection of
its capacity for effective communication? We present Impressions, a novel
dataset through which to investigate the semiotics of images, and how specific
visual features and design choices can elicit specific emotions, thoughts and
beliefs. We posit that the impactfulness of an image extends beyond formal
definitions of aesthetics, to its success as a communicative act, where style
contributes as much to meaning formation as the subject matter. However, prior
image captioning datasets are not designed to empower state-of-the-art
architectures to model potential human impressions or interpretations of
images. To fill this gap, we design an annotation task heavily inspired by
image analysis techniques in the Visual Arts to collect 1,440 image-caption
pairs and 4,320 unique annotations exploring impact, pragmatic image
description, impressions, and aesthetic design choices. We show that existing
multimodal image captioning and conditional generation models struggle to
simulate plausible human responses to images. However, this dataset
significantly improves their ability to model impressions and aesthetic
evaluations of images through fine-tuning and few-shot adaptation.Comment: To be published in EMNLP 202
The Rhetoric of the Comment Box: Editorial Queries as Arguments and Relationships in Engineering Proposals
In today\u27s academic engineering environments, securing funding has become a volatile process, requiring the hard work of and collaboration between many different people. Technical editors are one of these important forces in the proposal writing process, as they help engineer writers to develop their proposals and persuade reviewers of the value of their research. However, to date, there have been very few studies on how editors convince engineer writers to accept their proposed revisions. To fill this gap in the literature, this thesis offers an in-depth style analysis of six proposals in order to determine what technical editors do when they edit engineering proposals and how they create working relationships with engineers. In particular, I will concentrate on how two editors in Clemson University\u27s College of Engineering and Science argue for changes and create stylistic relationships--and the interrelationship between argument and style--by querying writers through the Comment function in Microsoft Word. The two analyses that I will complete are based on the theories of Stephen Toulmin et al. on argumentation and Walker Gibson on style. Toulmin et al.\u27s theory will enable me to analyze how the editors argue for revisionary changes in each of the technical proposals, whereas Gibson\u27s theory will enable me to determine how editors create relationships with authors through the language they use in the comment box. The findings revealed from this thesis provide practical knowledge to technical editing students and to working technical editors
Connected Information Management
Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management
a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several
levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands,
small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different
for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online,
but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information
management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of
CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization
such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering
specialized editors.
The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally
grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository.
The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data,
similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported
by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain
structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the
CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with
meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data.
Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application
HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be
synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the
CoIM ideas
Representing and Redefining Specialised Knowledge: Medical Discourse
This volume brings together five selected papers on medical discourse which show how specialised medical corpora provide a framework that helps those engaging with medical discourse to determine how the everyday and the specialised combine to shape the discourse of medical professionals and non-medical communities in relation to both long and short-term factors. The papers contribute, in an exemplary way, to illustrating the shifting boundaries in today’s society between the two major poles making up the medical discourse cline: healthcare discourse at the one end, which records the demand for personalised therapies and individual medical services; and clinical discourse the other, which documents research into society’s collective medical needs
Rhetorics of identity from Shakespeare to Milton
This thesis deals primarily with Renaissance tragedy and with Milton's Paradise Lost. It is structured around three main Sections each of which identifies a dominant theme in the drama/poetry of the period 1580-1670 and considers the way in which it is utilised in order to express or represent what was arguably the most pressing concern of the age - the concept of individual identity, or 'selfhood'.
Section One takes as its theme 'death', or more specifically 'death scenes'. It considers the way in which the battle for what I have chosen to term 'directional control' in the death scenes of both playhouse and scaffold shapes the symbiotic relationship between the two, and can be viewed as a vital component in the rhetoric of identity which emerges from plays such as Shakespeare's Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and scaffold texts of the period.
Section Two deals with the remaining Shakespearean mature tragedies - Hamlet and King Lear - as well as with Marlowe's Dr Faustus. It takes as its focal point the viability - or otherwise - of the 'interiorised contexts' which such plays construct. This Section contends that these (relative) microcosmic interiors are, in fact, limited by the 'absolute' of death. The third and final Section of the thesis consequently addresses the implications, for the contextualised self, of removing this limiting factor. The text which lends itself most naturally to this is Paradise Lost, and Section Three concludes by placing Milton's epic alongside a small selection of contemporaneous poetry by Traherne
One Map, Multiple Legends:Exposing Military Spatial Narratives in the Israeli Desert
This paper investigates the blurred borders between civilian and military ways of envisioning, experiencing and mediating space in the context of Israel political geography. It does so by way of a close reading of Detroit, a short video work by Amir Yatziv where the construction plans of an urban combat training facility in the Israeli desert are the focus of attention (2009). Taking Detroitas a point of departure, I will present a number of works of art that address the phenomenon in which a military-inflected construction of space yields material and cognitive consequences, naturalising the military’s status as the guiding principle of daily life. Within this sub-genre of critical city- and landscape imagery in Israeli art, Yatziv’s work stands out as it turns the focus from the land itself towards its mediation. This approach, I argue, is highly productive for critical anti-military visual projects, as it directs attention towards those who code and decode urban military landscapes, and highlights the fact that while the borders between military and civilian mediations of space may be blurred, they are not lost just yet
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