29 research outputs found
Anti-computing
We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations. Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels
Anti-computing
Anti-computing explores forgotten histories and contemporary forms of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It also asks why these moments tend to be forgotten. What is it about computational capitalism that means we live so much in the present? What has this to do with computational logics and practices themselves? This book addresses these issues through a critical engagement with media archaeology and medium theory and by way of a series of original studies; exploring Hannah Arendt and early automation anxiety, witnessing and the database, Two Cultures from the inside out, bot fear, singularity and/as science fiction. Finally, it returns to remap long-standing concerns against new forms of dissent, hostility, and automation anxiety, producing a distant reading of contemporary hostility.At once an acute response to urgent concerns around toxic digital cultures, an accounting with media archaeology as a mode of medium theory, and a series of original and methodologically fluid case studies, this book crosses an interdisciplinary research field including cultural studies, media studies, medium studies, critical theory, literary and science fiction studies, media archaeology, medium theory, cultural history, technology history
Disruptive Technologies with Applications in Airline & Marine and Defense Industries
Disruptive Technologies With Applications in Airline, Marine, Defense Industries is our fifth textbook in a series covering the world of Unmanned Vehicle Systems Applications & Operations On Air, Sea, and Land. The authors have expanded their purview beyond UAS / CUAS / UUV systems that we have written extensively about in our previous four textbooks. Our new title shows our concern for the emergence of Disruptive Technologies and how they apply to the Airline, Marine and Defense industries. Emerging technologies are technologies whose development, practical applications, or both are still largely unrealized, such that they are figuratively emerging into prominence from a background of nonexistence or obscurity. A Disruptive technology is one that displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry or a ground-breaking product that creates a completely new industry.That is what our book is about. The authors think we have found technology trends that will replace the status quo or disrupt the conventional technology paradigms.The authors have collaborated to write some explosive chapters in Book 5:Advances in Automation & Human Machine Interface; Social Media as a Battleground in Information Warfare (IW); Robust cyber-security alterative / replacement for the popular Blockchain Algorithm and a clean solution for Ransomware; Advanced sensor technologies that are used by UUVs for munitions characterization, assessment, and classification and counter hostile use of UUVs against U.S. capital assets in the South China Seas. Challenged the status quo and debunked the climate change fraud with verifiable facts; Explodes our minds with nightmare technologies that if they come to fruition may do more harm than good; Propulsion and Fuels: Disruptive Technologies for Submersible Craft Including UUVs; Challenge the ammunition industry by grassroots use of recycled metals; Changing landscape of UAS regulations and drone privacy; and finally, Detailing Bioterrorism Risks, Biodefense, Biological Threat Agents, and the need for advanced sensors to detect these attacks.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1038/thumbnail.jp
Linguistic variation across Twitter and Twitter trolling
Trolling is used to label a variety of behaviours, from the spread of misinformation and hyperbole to targeted abuse and malicious attacks. Despite this, little is known about how trolling varies linguistically and what its major linguistic repertoires and communicative functions are in comparison to general social media posts. Consequently, this dissertation collects two corpora of tweets – a general English Twitter corpus and a Twitter trolling corpus using other Twitter users’ accusations – and introduces and applies a new short-text version of Multi-Dimensional Analysis to each corpus, which is designed to identify aggregated dimensions of linguistic variation across them. The analysis finds that trolling tweets and general tweets only differ on the final dimension of linguistic variation, but share the following linguistic repertoires: “Informational versus Interactive”, “Personal versus Other Description”, and “Promotional versus Oppositional”. Moreover, the analysis compares trolling tweets to general Twitter’s dimensions and finds that trolling tweets and general tweets are remarkably more similar than they are different in their distribution along all dimensions. These findings counter various theories on trolling and problematise the notion that trolling can be detected automatically using grammatical variation. Overall, this dissertation provides empirical evidence on how trolling and general tweets vary linguistically
The Playful Citizen
This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies
Trust in music: Musical projects against violence in northern Colombia
Colombia's protracted civil war is characterized by cycles of pervasive distrust and violence. The people I work with are involved in projects across the north of the country aimed in part at
breaking these cycles. In this dissertation I offer an applied ethnographic analysis of the dynamic
relations between local forms of trusting, music making and (non)violence. While I recognize
music's impact is sometimes minimal or negative, I focus on projects with demonstrable positive
impact as part of my commitment to the struggles of my interlocutors. My account is
comparative, describing individuals and groups from different towns, sub regions, and
positionalities within the conflict, and engaging with similar but contrasting musical styles and
projects. I show that musical practices in which participants aim to maximize the breadth of
participation (the number of people engaged) tend to foster thin trusting across a broad radius of
people, whereas musical practices aimed at the maximum depth of experience of a reduced
number of performers tend to generate thick trusting among reduced pools of people.
Peacebuilding requires both thin and thick trusting, but the latter can preclude broad
organization. I consider festivalization of the musical practices I describe as a means of
constructing a parallel peace. While partly successful it can reproduce in miniature some of the
violences associated with clientelistic coercive trusting. I present one national project as an
exemplar of best practice. The Legión del afecto works to generate an imbricated peace through
radically inclusive projects in which young people practice and champion both thick and thin
trusting, and peaceful living together, using a wide range of musical practices as part of an
integrated, reflexive methodology. My arguments are based in, and seek to finesse, semiotic and
phenomenological accounts of music as social life
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The institutional and archival social ecologies of a state mental hospital’s records, 1870 to present
In this dissertation, I construct the social ecologies of records from a state mental institution in order to explicate the impact and value of the records to different groups and individuals over time, with a focus on the social implications of the organizational records becoming archival objects. I engage with the repercussions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 on the access of health information, and posit what are the social complexities underlying potentially sensitive institutional records in general. My research site is a still-active facility that arose out of the Reconstruction South, and exclusively served the state’s African American population until it was desegregated after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the theoretical frameworks of social constructionism, and specifically Actor-Network Theory, I examine the discursive work that mental hospital records perform in order to mediate relationships between people. The design of the research is rooted in sociological and archival activist research so that I can focus purposefully on the power inequalities and silent participants within record ecologies. I collected data for my study from archival registers and minutes from several distinct eras in the hospital’s history and from interviews with people who currently have or had substantive connections to the creation, management, or use of the archival collection, including former and current facility personnel. In order to construct themes from the data, I use grounded theory with an emphasis on situational analysis and critical discourse analysis. By employing multiple means of analysis, I form a longitudinal picture of the human and non-human participants involved in record-creation and record-keeping work at the hospital. I also develop several major themes, including accountability, classification, the development of psychiatry, and power, which point to the overarching institutional use of records to help bureaucratic bodies control various populations and maintain hierarchies. In illustrating how the records support and perpetuate hegemonic structures, I advocate for a pluralization of the stakeholders who have the right to be included in the discussions about if and how the historical records are to be preserved and accessed.
Informatio
No hay Sólo un Idioma, No hay Sólo una Voz: A Revisionist History of Chicana/os and Latina/os in Punk
Through a media historical analysis of Chicana/o and Latina/o participation in punk scenes in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, this dissertation decenters whiteness as the taken-for-granted subject position within punk and problematizes existing scholarship that assigns a unified and coherent political ideology to Latina/o punks. This work follows Fiona I.B. Ngò and Elizabeth A. Stinson’s imperative to excavate punk’s past and present in order to “rewrit[e] the idea of margin and center” within punk historiography and scholarship, and extends Mimi Thi Nguyen’s arguments against the periodization of women of color feminisms in punk as “timely but also temporary” interventions during moments of crises to include Chicana/o and Latina/o involvement in punk. By tracking the development and evolution of punk scenes in predominantly Latina/o and working-class areas of Los Angeles and Chicago over the span of approximately forty years, I insist upon the continuous co-presence of Latina/os (as well as other people of color) in punk, and the importance of critically engaging questions of race, class, nation, and power in punk’s past and present. I also argue against a singular notion of “Chicano Punk,” in which all participants in predominately Chicana/o and Latina/o punk scenes are assumed to hold similar motivations, objectives, ideologies, and aesthetic sensibilities. Examining multiple scenes across several decades reveals instead a complex and sometimes contradictory history of Latina/o participation in American punk scenes, with widely varying politics and aspirations across decades and even within individual scenes. Rather than attempt to make a grand argument about nearly forty years of “Chicano Punk,” it is more fruitful to look closely at several individual scenes in order to explore how discourses of race, as well as social, political, and economic factors shape Latina/os’ relationships to punk at particular times and in particular places. Though the conclusions I draw are largely specific to the particular scenes under examination, my study demonstrates the need to reexamine punk’s complicated relationship to race and points to several areas of inquiry through which a reexamination may be achieved
Postwar Journeys: American and Vietnamese Transnational Peace Efforts since 1975
This dissertation explores U.S.-Vietnam postwar relations through the transnational peace endeavors of American and Vietnamese ordinary citizens. The subjects of the study included Vietnamese refugees, children of American personnel and Vietnamese women, American and Vietnamese veterans and their families, relatives of fallen soldiers on both sides, and other civilians who experienced the impacts of war one way or another. The dissertation also highlights the roles of nongovernmental organizations and individuals who strove for peace and mutual understanding through transnational humanitarian and cultural activities. The study’s major argument is three-fold. First, American and Vietnamese ordinary citizens were active historical actors in their changing environments. Second, it was ordinary citizens of both countries who laid the groundwork for U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic normalization. Third, the “universal human aspirations and emotions” (to borrow historian Akira Iriye’s words) played a significant role in U.S.-Vietnam postwar relations. This research reveals a plethora of boundary-crossing interactions between American and Vietnamese citizens, even during the times of extremely restricted diplomatic relations between the two nation-states. Bringing to center stage American and Vietnamese citizens’ efforts to solve postwar individual and social problems, this dissertation aims to bridge a gap in the scholarship on the U.S.-Vietnam relations