Scalable visualization of spatial data in 3D terrain

Designing visualizations of spatial data in 3D terrain is challenging because various heterogeneous data aspects need to be considered, including the terrain itself, multiple data attributes, and data uncertainty. It is hardly possible to visualize these data at full detail in a single image. Therefore, this thesis devises a scalable visualization approach that focuses on relevant information to be emphasized, while less-relevant information can be attenuated. In this context, a noval concept of visualizing spatial data in 3D terrain and different soft- and hardware solutions are proposed.Die Erstellung von Visualisierungen für räumliche Daten im 3D-Gelände ist schwierig, da viele heterogene Datenaspekte wie das Gelände selbst, die verschiedenen Datenattribute sowie Unsicherheiten bei der Darstellung zu berücksichtigen sind. Im Allgemeinen ist es nicht möglich, diese Datenaspekte gleichzeitig in einer Visualisierung darzustellen. Daher werden in der Arbeit skalierbare Visualisierungsstrategien entwickelt, welche die wichtigen Informationen hervorheben und trotzdem gleichzeitig Kontextinformationen liefern. Hierfür werden neue Systematisierungen und Konzepte vorgestellt

Cinema at the End of Empire

How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain’s national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India

Investigation and Recovery of USS Westfield (Site 41GV151) Galveston Bay, Galveston County, Texas

This report represents the culmination of fourteen years of marine archeological investigations by PBS&J (now Atkins North America, Inc.) associated with the Texas City Channel Improvement Project. Over that time span Atkins’ investigations of the site of USS Westfield (41GV151) have included numerous remote-sensing surveys using various combinations of marine magnetometer, side-scan sonar, sector-scan sonar, sub-bottom profiler, and ROV; three diving investigations totaling 64 dives and over 72 hours of bottom time; and archeological salvage of Westfield resulting in the recovery of at least 8,380 artifacts. These combined efforts were undertaken in order to satisfy the responsibilities of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (Public Law 89-665; 16 U.S.C. 470) and the Antiquities Code of Texas (Texas Natural Resource Code, Title 9, Chapter 191). The archeological investigations reported in this document were conducted under Texas Antiquities Permits 3878, 4622, and 5271, issued by the Texas Historical Commission, and Federal Permits for Intrusive Archaeological Research on U.S. Naval Cultural Resources, Nos. PBSJ-2009-001 and PBSJ2009-0002, issued by the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. The minimum reporting and survey requirements for marine archeological studies conducted under a Texas Antiquities Permit are mandated by The Texas Administrative Code, Title 13, Part 2, Chapters 26 and 28, respectively. The results of six separate site investigations are reported in this document, including Contract DACW64-03-D-0001Delivery Orders 0004 and 0005, conducted in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and additional site assessments and data recovery conducted under Delivery Order 0006 and four subsequent delivery order modifications in 2007, 2009, and 2010. The results of Delivery Order 0004 conclusively demonstrated that the source of recorded anomaly GV0031 was a shipwreck (and given the site designation 41GV151), which tentatively matched the time period and characteristics of Westfield. The results of Delivery Order 0005 further substantiated the identity of 41GV151 as USS Westfield and concluded that the site demonstrates several criteria for eligibility to the National Register of Historic Places. Delivery Order 0006 resulted in the data recovery operations, which are the primary focus of this report

Images on the Move

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Stylization-based ray prioritization for guaranteed frame rates

Figure 1: Four different scenarios rendered with a conventional ray-based rendering engine and with the presented adaptive approach in a 1024×768 viewport. (a) shows the areas in which the rays are fully computed (left) and the resulting reconstruction by our algorithm (right). (b) shows how our approach can boost the frame rate while preserving the quality level. Our algorithm can also be applied to ray-tracing scenes with complex materials (c). Priority sorting of the expected visual quality of a pixel allows us to guarantee frame rates for every type of ray-based environment while maintaining a visually appealing result (d). Selected non-obvious artifacts, which are introduced by using our method for guaranteed frame rates, are marked with small arrows in (c) and (d). This paper presents a new method to control graceful scene degradation in complex ray-based rendering environments. It proposes to constrain the image sampling density with object features, which are known to support the comprehension of the three-dimensional shape. The presented method uses Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) techniques to extract features such as silhouettes, suggestive contours, suggestive highlights, ridges and valleys. To map different feature types to sampling densities, we also present an evaluation of the features impact on the resulting image quality. To reconstruct the image from sparse sampling data, we use linear interpolation on an adaptively aligned fractal pattern. With this technique, we are able to present an algorithm that guarantees a desired minimal frame rate without much loss of image quality. Our scheduling algorithm maximizes the use of each given time slice by rendering features in order of their corresponding importance values until a time constraint is reached. We demonstrate how our method can be used to boost and guarantee the rendering time in complex raybased environments consisting of geometric as well as volumetric data

Images on the Move: Materiality - Networks - Formats

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Images on the Move

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Aesthetics, Innovation, and the Politics of Film-Production at Lenfil'm, 1961-1991

This thesis examines the relationship between Lenfil´m film-studio and the Soviet Party-state apparatus in the context of successive reformist projects and shifting repertory strategies pursued by filmmakers and executives. Drawing upon archival records, cinema-historical scholarship, professional testimonies, and feature-films, it demonstrates a studio-specific approach to the institutional relations that shaped late-Soviet cinema as an artistic process, an industry, and a political sphere. In 1961, significant reorganizations of production at Lenfil´m assured an unprecedented devolution of executive responsibilities – commissioning, development, shoot-supervision – to new, cineaste-led production-units. These artistic cohorts were afforded sufficient license to shape their professional profiles around distinctive repertory policies, which reflected the artistic interests of their filmmakers, but were also compelled to adapt these proposals to the thematic categories fixed by late-Soviet cinema’s central administrative structures. This thesis asks how Lenfil´m cineastes negotiated ideological screening and pursued aesthetical innovation in filmmaking, towards which the administrative system was consistently suspicious or outright hostile. It then considers how the studio’s repertory profile changed in response to resurgent official orthodoxies in the 1970s, only to incorporate renewed privileging of art-cinema into this response by the end of that decade. In the 1980s, with perestroika, attempts at democratization and market-focused reform found these production-units to be the irreducible professional nuclei of late-Soviet cinema. Their structures, artistic identities, and decision-making prerogatives persisted beyond all practicality of adherence to an inflexible administrative system and a collapsing film-distribution network. Through production-histories, analysis of Communist Party policies, and detailed examinations of the reforms that modified studio-structures, this thesis argues that the final three decades of the USSR saw filmmakers and studio-level administrators develop heterogenous repertory innovations, despite the crudeness of official ideological oversight. Lenfil´m became the bastion of late-Soviet auteurism within an industrial system that ought, by its own measure, to have precluded this possibility

If it feeds, it leads : eating, media, identity, and ecofeminist food journalism

This project explored contemporary food journalism and placed it in the larger context of American history, asking how such media made eating a matter of public concern. In other words, it asked: how does food journalism invite us to our eating identities and what are the ethical obligations of food journalists? I used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine three contemporary media outlets, each originating at a different point in food journalism's history: The New York Times Food section, TV Food Network, and Vox Media's Eater. I historically contextualized these outlets and their content, further using them to make a larger critique of the current social order. Incorporating the history of food, media, consumerism, and the political economic institutions of the U.S., I also investigated how the active negotiation of civic/eating/consumer identities transformed into ethically compromised positions of hyperindividualism. This occurred within a context of a neoliberal consensus where market fundamentalism dominates the political conversations of worldmaking. Individuals are now expected to be isolated entrepreneurs, conforming to the needs of 'the market.' I thus argue that food media is neoliberalized and food journalists must match the logic of this worldview or face exclusion from a commercialized attention economy built on surveillance, predictability, and control. Taking the long view, I delineate how the liberalism that created modern journalism transformed into neoliberal media. Keeping residual elements of liberalism's once progressive project, I deconstruct the misguided presuppositions of neo/liberalism and offer a counterhegemonic approach to journalism and food media. Establishing a position of ecofeminist food journalism, I then explore how such media invites new, more caring citizens and better feeds the social and ecological connections necessary for democratic, human, and multi-species flourishing