TUBE (Text-cUBE) for discovering documentary evidence of associations among entities

User-driven discovery of associations among entities, and documents that provide evidence for these associations, is an important search task conducted by researchers and do-main information specialists. Entities here refer to real or abstract objects such as people, organizations, ideologies, etc. Associations are the inter-relationships among entities. Most current works in query-driven document retrieval and finding representative subgraphs are ill-suited for the task as they lack an awareness of entity types as well as an intu-itive representation of associations. We propose the TUBE model, a text cube approach for discovering associations and documentary evidence of these associations. The model con-sists of a multi-dimensional view of document data, a flexible representation of multi-document summaries, and a set of operations for data manipulation. We conduct a case study on real-life data to illustrate its applicability to the above task and compare it with the non-TUBE approach

HOMUNCULUS Bearing Incorporeal Arcticulations

This dissertation studies ‘the Arctic in Change’. In contrast to a traditional research setting, its aim is to engage with questions that respond to both ‘the Arctic’ and ‘in Change’ as preformed answer and outcome. Since ‘the Arctic’ is not constituted by a single definition, mode, science, art, discipline, method, state, continent, image, symbol, instance, agent or unit, it is considered and treated with the means and matters of bricolage in the spirit of post-qualitative inquiry. Accordingly, this approach requires involvement from a multiplicity of theoretical, methodological and research material: the intra-actions of performativity theory, the genealogy of discursive material practices, studies on perception, visual culture, aesthetics and ethics, art & design, ecology and ethology, as well as the politics residing in them. Furthermore, the recognition of the partiality, influence and agency of the elements constituting this study beyond the rationalised and controlled research design requires a more fluid manner of writing, deriving from the ideals of writerly and open text, infused with inter- and intratextuality and co-conducted in phenomenological writing to produce a novel conduct in avoiding firm structuring and hierarchy while pursuing open-ended objectives. The analysis begins by compromising the cohesion of Arctic representations as objects with unaltered identities, exhibiting a diorama of a polar bear. The seemingly neutral and passive object occupies several inherited subject positions that emerge from it as material outcomes. The representation holds the capacity to record the audience’s corporeality through sensory and motoric traces and to perform through their bodies as fixed prepositions. The encounter endangers and re-establishes the participatory subject and object positions as co- and counter to each other. How representations are conducted is foremost a question of the manipulation of distance, which proceeds from aesthetics to epistemological and ontological conditions. Different characteristics emerge, disappear, become manageable or are in reach depending on their distance, which is defined as the relationship between the point of perception and the perceived. Attempts to overcome this distance with various scientific technologies and artistic techniques are inevitably influenced by what comes in-between. To penetrate the distance with direct bodily engagements for the purpose of Arctic investigation, is an act limited to the ontology of the knowing body. In order to perform under the natural and cultural environmental conditions related to the Arctic, the body is contained and reproduced as non-Arctic with specific material arrangements within the research vessel, from labour to recovery, to maintain it as a societal human subject. These discursive–material arrangements constitute the human body through an incorporeal–animal binary, constructed within the equipment of ergonomics and exercise inherited from agriculture and industrialisation. When the same adjustment, human–animal, is conducted in micro-space, it is transferred into the colonial project of discipline and cultivation as a rectilinear school: it emerges as an invasive species in the regional circular ‘ecology’ and as cultural violence towards the landscape that is formed by seasonal and regional movement that happens in circles, conducting the livelihood and the identity of the People. The reading and rewriting of the landscape, as well as the history and memory of the bodies within it, do not place these human–animal binaries beneath one another, but rather within an act of performative restructuring. While certain iconic animals, are considered representatives of the Arctic region, in the animal activist’s attempt to speak for the other, to witness animal subjectivity with documentary techniques and technologies, they do not succeed in ethically mediating or negotiating the subjectivity of the animal-other as such. Such technique produces a hybrid subjectivity of the human, animal and recording technology combined that also fails to free itself from the weight of the genealogy of the human–animal relations of trapping, hunting, slaughter and putting on display. While problematising the capability to engage with the animal subject as an animal, the study further indicates the ‘small other’ taking place in subject–object encounters, restating ‘in-between’ as ‘in-the-midst’. The human–animal relation contained in an artefact, and its capacity to contain and surface such genealogies, is finally studied in the context of contemporary political debate on the use, meaning and matter of the inuksuit, communities building and enacting stone figures erected traditionally by the Inuit for various purposes. While the inuksuit have been adopted by the national state with its colonial practices towards the indigenous peoples, the inukshuk re-emerges as a re-establishment of identity and power over life and region, natural, social and political bodies. The questions throughout the thesis suggest that ‘the Arctic’ is not accessible or returnable as the ‘truth’; it is not capable to exist in the Lacanian Real, resisting all definitions and relations. It is composed in linguistic, imaginary and symbolic manner and matter as a figuration ‘arcticulated’ into an entity existing only ‘in Change’. This entity is to be expressed with a figure that bends and reads in multiple modes. The Arctic is therefore a bearing in which one can dwell as a human being, where this being owes and invests itself in an intra-face, named a ‘homunculus’, a transferring and conducting of human characteristics. The outcomes ought to enable radical and critical thinking towards the ‘taken for granted’ truths of the Arctic as an object of inquiry through established metatheoretical conceptualisations. The ‘homunculus’ is offered as a guide for understanding the forms and matters of politics on the issue in a new way in order to have an impact on political science and beyond.Väitöskirjan tutkimuskohteena on ”Arktinen muutoksessa”. Perinteisesti tutkimuskysymyksestä johdettavan tutkimusasetelman sijaan tutkimuskohteen osat ”Arktinen” ja ”muutoksessa” tulkitaan ennakko-olettamina, tutkimusvastauksina, jolloin tutkimustavoitteeksi syntyy näihin lopputulemiin johtavien tutkimuskysymysten löytäminen. Koska Arktinen ei koostu yhdestä määritelmästä, modaliteetista, tieteen- tai taiteenalasta, oppiaineesta, metodista, valtiosta, mantereesta, kuvasta, symbolista, tilanteesta, toimijasta tai yksiköstä, käsitellään sitä brikolaasina jälkilaadullisen tutkimuksen hengessä. Lähestymistapa edellyttää useiden erilaisten teoreettisten, metodologisten ja tutkimusaineistollisten lähtökohtien hyödyntämistä performatiivisuusteoriasta genealogiaan, havainnon, visuaalisen kulttuurin, estetiikan, etiikan ja taiteen tutkimukseen, ekologiasta eläinten käyttäytymistieteeseen, sekä niiden poliittisen luonteen tunnistamiseen. Tavoitteen saavuttaminen edellyttää tiukasti kontrolloitua tutkimusasetelmaa ja raportointia joustavampaa kirjoittamistapaa, liikkuen fenomenologisesta kirjoittamisesta ja avoimesta tekstistä, intertekstuaalisuuteen ja intratekstiin, välttäen tutkimusta rajoittavia rakenteita ja hierarkioita, uudenlaisten sisältöjen ja avointen lopputulosten tuottamiseksi. Tutkimusanalyyttinen matka alkaa Arktisen representaatioiden koheesion ja identiteetin muuttumattomuuden kyseenalaistamisella. Tiedekeskuksen jääkarhudiorama ymmärretään performatiivisena artefaktina, joka ilmeisen neutraalina ja passiivisena esillepanona sisällyttää joukon polveutuvia subjektipositioita ja materiaalisia voimasuhteita. Jääkarhun representaatiolla on kapasiteetti tallentaa yleisön ruumiillisuus sensorisina ja motorisina jälkinä, ja liikuttaa yleisöään prepositioihin, asemoiden subjektin ja objektin tietynlaiseen keskinäissuhteeseen. Representaatioiden tuottamisessa on keskeisesti kysymys etäisyyden manipuloinnista, edeten estetiikasta, epistemologisiin ja ontologisiin kysymyksiin. Eri piirteet ilmaantuvat, katoavat, tulevat hallittaviksi tai tavoitettaviksi riippuen etäisyydestä eli suhteesta havaitsijan ja havainnoitavan välillä. Yritykset ylittää etäisyys tieteen käyttämien teknologioiden sekä taiteellisten tekniikoiden avulla tuottavat välittävän ja väliin tulevan tason, josta tulee erottamaton osa havainnoitavaa kohdetta. Yritys ylittää etäisyys Arktiseen suoran kehollisen kontaktin keinoin rajoittuu väistämättä tietävän kehon ontologiaan. Kuten tutkimusaluksella, Arktisen luonto- ja kulttuuriympäristössä suoriutuva keho on säilötty ja uudelleentuotettu ei-arktisena erityisillä materiaalisilla järjestelyillä ja tekniikoilla, säilyttääkseen inhimillisen kehon länsimaiseen yhteiskuntaan sovitettavana. Ihmiskehoa tukeva eläinten hyötykäytöstä liikkumisessa sekä maatalouden ja teollisuuden voimansiirrossa. Näin ollen ihmiskehoa muokkaavat diskursiivismateriaaliset käytännöt rakentuvat ihmisen ja eläimen yhdistävästä teknologisesta suhteesta, jossa eläimen ruumiillisuus on muutoin poissaolevana. Kun ihmisen ja eläimen agraarisesta suhteesta syntyvä mikro-tilallinen rakennekaava siirretään osaksi koloniaalista koulutusta ja kurinpitoa, ilmenee kultivointi suorakaiteenmuotoisena kouluympäristönä. Lineaarisuus ja suorakulmaiset muodot toimivat vieraslajin tavoin vaarantaen alueellisen kehällisen ekologian, toimien kulttuurisena väkivaltana kehällisen ja kausittaisen liikkeen muodostamaa maisemaa kohtaan, joka liittyy erottamattomana osana luontaiselinkeinoihin ja alueelliseen ryhmäidentiteettiin. Maiseman lukeminen ja uudelleenkirjoittaminen, ja sen sisältämien kehojen historia ja muisti, eivät aseta eläin-ihmis binaarin osapuolia toisilleen alisteisiksi, vaan keskinäiseen performatiiviseen suhteeseen. Tiettyjen ikonisten eläinten, kuten poron, tunnistetaan edustavan Arktista aluetta. Eläinaktivistiset yritykset todistaa eläimen subjektiivista kokemusta eri dokumentointitekniikoiden ja teknologioiden välittämänä epäonnistuvat todentamaan eläimen kokemuksen eettisesti. Kyseiset tekniikat tuottavat eläimen sijaan hybridisen subjektiviteetin koostuen ihmisen, eläimen ja tallentavan teknologian yhdistelmästä, joka ei onnistu vapautumaan tappamisen genealogiastaan, kuten ansapyynnistä, metsästyksestä, teurastuksesta ja voitonmerkeistä. Eläimen subjektiviteetin autenttisen esittämisen problematiikka paljastaa ”pienen toisen” läsnäolon subjektin ja objektin välisessä suhteessa, jolloin suhteen tarkastelu “toista” kohtaan muuttuu välisestä keskiseksi. Ihmisen ja eläimen suhteen genealogian tallentuminen artefaktiin, joka toimii niin säilönä kuin esiintulopintana, tutkitaan lopuksi osana poliittista debattia koskien Kanadan Inuiitti- yhteisöjen eri tarkoituksiin perinteisesti kivistä pystyttämien inuksuk-hahmojen käyttöä ja merkitystä. Inukshuk edelleen toimii maisemallisesti alkuperäiskansaan kuuluvia ihmisiä toisiinsa, elinkeinoonsa, sekä ympäristönsä eläimistöön konkreettisesti sitovana sosiaalisen ja poliittisena ruumiina, samalla kun kansallisvaltio on kolonisoinut sen käyttöä. Kysymykset läpi tutkielman johtavat ymmärrykseen että ”Arktinen” ei avaudu tai palaudu ”totuudeksi” Lacanilaisessa ymmärryksessä, jossa ”Todellinen” vastustaa kaikkia määritelmiä ja suhteellistuksia. Arktinen koostuu lingvistisestä, kuvitteellisesta, kuvallisesta ja symbolisesta hahmotelmasta, joka on ”arktikuloitu” olevaksi vain ”muutoksesssa”. Tämän kokonaisuuden voi ilmaista hahmolla, joka taipuu ja on luettavissa eri modaliteeteissa. Arktinen on siten asema ja suuntima, jossa voidaan säilyä ihmisinä, investoiden siihen oman inhimillisen jälkensä ’homunculuksen’. Tutkimustuloksen on tarkoitus mahdollistaa radikaali ja kriittinen tapa ajatella Arktista totuudellisuutta, joka on ”otettu annettuna”, kehitettyjen metateoreettisten konseptien avulla. Homunculus toimii oppaana ymmärrykseen arktisen poliittisuudesta, uudistaen käsityksiämme yli politiikkatieteen rajojen

Dream work: the art and science of Fin de Siècle fantasy imagery

In this dissertation, I argue that the fantasy imagery of tum-of-the-century British illustrators Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sidney Sime, and French filmmakers Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl functions as visual rhetorical "texts" that explicate contemporaneous ideas about the self. At the fin de siecle, models of the self were shaped, in part, by scientific thought that interrogated themes of materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, univalence and multivalence, permanence and impermanence. Dream Work grapples with these oppositions, the questions they brought up, and the provisional answers they elicited. I argue that both the science and the design considered in this study dealt with these oppositions, and the models of the self they elaborated, through a shared visual rhetoric of literal representation or hazy abstraction. I reveal this shared visual rhetoric through analysis of the form of the design considered in this study and its relationship to visual aspects of contemporaneous scientific discourse. I first show how Rackham's imagery, which echoes the visual vocabulary of physiognomical diagrams, deals with material aspects of self and mind. But Rackham's work likewise positions the mind as part of a grand continuum with the natural world. I describe the ways that Beardsley's imagery fluctuates between expression of material and ethereal elaborations of the self manifested in contemporaneous dream theory. And I show how Sime's imagery - which mirrors late nineteenth-century notions of the realms of other dimensions - probes abstract qualities of the self in strangely material forms. Finally, I discuss the ways that the mystifying abstraction that characterizes tum-of-the-century ideas about time, space, and motion marks the mutable selves expressed in Méliès and Cohl's work. In this dissertation, I likewise challenge the hegemony of the written word and of verbal analytical methods for interpreting visual entities. My goal, however, is not to dispense with the verbal analysis of visual artifacts. Rather, my intention is to foreground visual rhetorical analysis as a powerful method for understanding the visuality of both visual and verbal entities

Respawn

In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world

Between Selves and Others: Exploring Strategic Approaches within Visual Art

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This body of research investigates how visual artists express ideas or meanings about Otherness and issues of belonging in their art. The focus of this study is on women artists with an (East) Asian diasporic background; however, the context of the inquiry includes other American and European artists of various cultural backgrounds. A further aim is to explore the artistic strategies and the historical circumstances of the works as well as to understand the theoretical correlations. The author of this study is a visual artist who has been exploring similar issues in her own artistic practice. In order to examine various themes of Otherness, selected pairs of artists – where at least one is a woman artist of (East) Asian diasporic background – are compared and analysed using the following four categories: literary devices (such as irony, parody, connotation or juxtaposition), reappropriation (cultural references which are reclaimed and transformed), anamorphic situations (distortion of conventional ways of viewing in order to become aware of other bodily senses and experiences), and theoretical correlations (connections between artistic practice and relevant theoretical concepts). The specific artists and artworks chosen are: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) with Patty Chang’s Melons (at a Loss) (1998), Lorna Simpson’s work in the 1980s and 1990s with Nikki S. Lee’s Projects (1997-2001), Guillermo Gómez-Peña with Fiona Tan, and Yong Soon Min with Mona Hatoum. In addition, the author presents critical social and cultural developments that influenced these works such as the historical background of representations of Asian women in America, the rise of the Asian American movement, and the shift in contemporary art discourse from concerns of ‘identity politics’ to a ‘post-identity’ framework. Finally, correlations are made between the artistic strategies and relevant theoretical discussions about representations of race and gender, the role of power, knowledge, and truth in ethnographic practices of identification and categorization, and the function of place and ‘cultural identity’ in relation to concepts of origin and belonging. The results of this research confirm the significance of cultural, historical, and geographic experiences on both the conception and reception of visual art and indicate that various artistic strategies have the potential to expose and undermine culturally constructed meanings of difference. Despite the abundance of research conducted in this area, the scope and framework of this particular study are original not only because it is written from the perspective of a practicing artist, but also because the focus on artistic practices from women artists with (East) Asian diasporic backgrounds is located within a more wide-ranging investigation of artistic approaches that articulate and interrogate themes of Otherness

FAMILY AND OTHER RELATIONS A thesis examining the extent to which family relationships shape the relations of art.

Access to the full-text thesis is no longer available at the author's request, due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Access removed on 28.11.2016 by CS (TIS).This thesis is sited in contemporary issues concerning gender and identity in relation to the arts. It aims to examine the nature of the family and the extent to which relationships and identities in the family might be analogous to the relations of fine art; these include relations between the artist and the artwork, between what is defined as 'art' and what is not, between the artwork and the viewer. It also touches on some of the other, innumerable relationships encountered in the arts: relations of materials form, feeling, thinking and making. The thesis contains a discussion of the nature of family identities and relationships based on my own experiences in the mid-twentieth century and today. Families are at first divided into two main types, nonnative and ethicaL These types represent the difference between ideal or stereotypical family relations and the way families actually live in practice. Analogies are made between normative families and traditional modes of defining art and ethical family relations and ethical notions of art. In the last chapter I suggest that relations that are core and normative are linked to marginal relations through ethical links made by liminal figures that pass between them. Although issues of identity, patriarchy and binary difference appear in theoretical writings on art criticism and practice, there appears to be little contemporary debate in these issues in relation to the family and its relationships. The thesis begins to map out the terrain of such a field of enquiry

Un-Natural Histories: The Specimen as Site of Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art

One of the primary functions of museums is the deployment of knowledge through collected artifacts. In the case of natural history museums, these collections consist largely of preserved specimens that all share the marks of the human hand as a result of the processes of preservation and display. Such processes result in the transformation of nature into objects of material culture. Given the challenges that arise from shifting definitions of the natural history specimen in an age when life is being re-defined and re-configured, and living matter is treated as a mutable and expressive substance, I question how our perception of the “order of life” has been impacted by recent developments in genetic manipulation, tissue engineering, and DNA taxonomy. I extend the discussion of the impact of the human hand on natural objects to include the practices of contemporary artists who employ taxidermy, wet preservation, field research, scientific illustration, and biotechnology to investigate the shifting relationship between living organisms and taxonomy. I focus on the hierarchical nature of knowledge in art and science, the changing use of language in classification, systems of preservation and display, and mutations and hybrid organisms, to suggest that natural history as a discipline, can be viewed as a mediating factor between the museum, on the one hand, and both scientific and art practices on the other. The specimen therefore functions as a site of knowledge production that merges both the museological impulses of preservation and conservation with the scientific/laboratory-based impulses of experimentation and alteration

Explorations: Five Science Fiction Stories

These stories explore a universe populated by the stuff of space opera—enormous space stations, mysterious alien artifacts, starships and terraforming and emission nebulae, a human civilization that over millennia has spread across the galaxy. These explorations are not conducted by the usual swashbuckling heroes of space opera, however, but rather by the sorts of people who would have to live and make a living in such a future. The perspectives from which this future is explored include those of an asteroid miner who loses his ship even as he is discovering the wonders of art, a man whose misuse of neurological technology has robbed him of his memories but left him with skills and capabilities that he might prefer not to have, an innocent apprentice commercial attaché who comes face to face with a terrible decision that offers the solution to a banal contractual dispute, a planetary engineer turned con artist who is at the end of his life offered the opportunity to finally become what he had dreamed of being in his youth, and a young contract lawyer who discovers that the letter of the law is far less clear-cut than her studies had led her to believe. These stories are explorations, not only of this future and the characters who live there, but also of science fiction as a genre and the creative process by which such a future as is depicted here gets created, or explored, or discovered