Friends of Musselman Library Newsletter Fall 2016

From the Dean (Robin Wagner) Library Exhibits GettDigital: Sports Reels Research Reflections: The Gettysburg Superstar (Devin McKinney) Remembering 9/12 Will Power: 400 Years After the Bard Treasure Island (Robin Wagner) Margin of Error A Call to Activism in the Summer of \u2765 (Richard Hutch \u2767) Digital Scholarship: The New Frontier (Julia Wall \u2719, Lauren White \u2718, Keira Koch \u2719) Scrapbooks and Photo Albums: Snapshots of History (Clara A. Baker \u2730) Soldiers\u27 Scrapbooks (Laura Bergin \u2717) A Book of Dreams (Alexa Schreier) Who Do You Think You Are? (Timothy Shannon) From Professor-Student to Collaborators (Jesse Siegel \u2716) The Mysterious Easel Monument (William Tuceling \u2770) Gifts to Special Collections and College Archive

Written with the Finger of God: Divine and Human Writing in Exodus

The presence of writing in the book of Exodus must be considered not only for its contribution to the narrative as story, but also as a witness to several key socio-political issues (such as the interplay of textuality and orality in ancient Israel), for the role of writing in the history of Israel\u27s religion, and for the struggle to define, through several centuries and editorial layers, the nature of YHWH\u27s true image\u27\u27 in the world

Film adaptation for knowing audiences: analysing fan on-line responses to the end of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Critics of film adaptations of literary works have historically evaluated the success or failure of the movie on the grounds of its fidelity to the original book. In contrast popular arguments for medium specificity have questioned whether fidelity is possible when adapting one medium to another. This article follows recent academic work which has focused awareness on the processes of adaptation by examining evidence of reading and viewing experience in online and social media forums.      The broader research project explored the online Twilight fan community as an example of a ‘knowing audience’ acquainted with both novel and film. Here we focus on the strong response within fan forums to the surprise ending of the final film adaptation Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012). The research uses the forum, blog and facebook page as sites for evidence of reading experience as defined by the Reading Experience Database (RED). The analysis sheds new light on the tensions that exist between fidelity and deviation and the article positions fan audiences as intensive readers who gained unexpected pleasure from a deviation from a canon. It argues that fans are also collaborators within the adaptation process who respect authorial authority and discuss the author’s, scriptwriter’s and director’s interpretation of the novel for the screen. The research identifies the creative and commercial advantages to be gained from a collaborative and open dialogue between adaptors and fans.  Keywords: Adaptation, fandom, online fan communities, Twilight, reading experience, film, audiences, fidelity, canon, collaboration, screenwriting, franchise, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg, Bill Condo

Finding Streams in Knowledge Graphs to Support Fact Checking

The volume and velocity of information that gets generated online limits current journalistic practices to fact-check claims at the same rate. Computational approaches for fact checking may be the key to help mitigate the risks of massive misinformation spread. Such approaches can be designed to not only be scalable and effective at assessing veracity of dubious claims, but also to boost a human fact checker's productivity by surfacing relevant facts and patterns to aid their analysis. To this end, we present a novel, unsupervised network-flow based approach to determine the truthfulness of a statement of fact expressed in the form of a (subject, predicate, object) triple. We view a knowledge graph of background information about real-world entities as a flow network, and knowledge as a fluid, abstract commodity. We show that computational fact checking of such a triple then amounts to finding a "knowledge stream" that emanates from the subject node and flows toward the object node through paths connecting them. Evaluation on a range of real-world and hand-crafted datasets of facts related to entertainment, business, sports, geography and more reveals that this network-flow model can be very effective in discerning true statements from false ones, outperforming existing algorithms on many test cases. Moreover, the model is expressive in its ability to automatically discover several useful path patterns and surface relevant facts that may help a human fact checker corroborate or refute a claim.Comment: Extended version of the paper in proceedings of ICDM 201

A Stronger Europe in the World: Major Challenges for EU Trade Policy. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 02/2020

On 29 January 2020, Dr. Sabine Weyand, Director-General for Trade at the European Commission, gave a lecture on “‘A stronger Europe in the world’: Major challenges for EU trade policy” at the College of Europe in Bruges. She started out with the challenges posed by the rise of populism and the shift towards more power-based relations and protectionism, arguing that trade is increasingly seen as a proxy through which the battle for political supremacy is fought. Dr. Weyand then explained the trade priorities of the new European Commission: reforming the World Trade Organisation for the benefit of a predictable, rules-based multilateral system; managing the bilateral relations with major powers including the United States, China and the United Kingdom; contributing as a ‘geopolitical Commission’ to other policy fields and in particular the European Green Deal; and levelling the playing field by promoting EU standard

Teach phenomenology the bomb: Starship Troopers, the technologized body, and humanitarian warfare

Paul Verhoeven's SF films are often concerned with how the future body will be reshaped as a technological device. Starship Troopers strangely departs from Verhoeven's own work, other SF films, and current directions in cultural theory by seeing the future body as one that is more organic than mechanical. Drawing upon and challenging ideas developed by Paul Virilio, this article argues that Starship Troopers' departure from the notion of the 'post-human' mechanized body needs to be understood not as a nostalgic reassertion of de-technologized subjectivity. Rather, Verhoeven's film sees the idea of the pure body as a dangerous anachronism. And, this article further argues, Starship Troopers suggests that narratives of human salvation - such as those that arose during Nato's interventions in the Balkans - often conceal an appetite for territorial conquest

Event-sequences, plots and narration in computer games

Starting with the debate between ludologists and narratologists this essay tries to show that there is a narrative aspect in computer games which has nothing to do with background stories and cut scenes. A closer analysis of two sequences, taken from the MMORPG Everquest II and the adventure game Black Mirror, is the basis for a distinction between three aspects of this kind of narrative in computer games: the sequence of activities of the player, the sequence of events as it is determined by the mechanics of the game and this sequence of events understood as a plot, that is as a sequence of chronologically ordered and causally linked events. This kind of narrative is quite distant to the prototypical narrative which is the basis of most of the narratology. But actually all media, not only computer games, need their own narratology

Introduction: Ain’t It Evil to Live Backwards? : A Hip Hop Perspective of Religion

Historically, Black religion has been the cornerstone of the African experience in America. Due to the peculiar institution” of slavery and the ways this institutional residue still affect the lives of slave descendants, Hip Hop provides a forum to simultaneously acknowledge similarities and highlight differences. What scholars of religion and Hip Hop studies have revealed are the ways in which the effectiveness and our very understanding of “religion” changes when we bring Hip Hop in to the mix