The Santa Clara, 2018-10-25

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/tsc/1078/thumbnail.jp

Form, science, and narrative in the anthropocene

A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena

Spartan Daily, April 26, 2018

Volume 150, Issue 37https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2018/1036/thumbnail.jp

The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder\u27s The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces

I first saw Métis artist Terril Calder\u27s 2014 stop-frame feature, The Lodge, an independently made, relatively small- budget film, at its premiere at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts festival, held annually in Toronto, Canada. The feature-length animation played to a full house at the Light-box Theater downtown. Many were there to attend the five-day festival, which is dedicated to Indigenous media made by and for Indigenous people. Others were there because as members of Toronto\u27s general public they wanted to catch a movie during a night out in the city. Since then The Lodge has shown at various other independent venues. It isn\u27t what you might think of as commercial fare. Its audiences are not huge. However, for those who do view The Lodge, the film presents a creative space to rethink our sense of boundaries in a number of ways: boundaries between human/nonhuman, white/Indigenous, male/female, spectator/film-object. In this essay, I argue that the film is thus an invitation to question the naturalness of hegemonic identity assumptions that demarcate such boundaries. I interviewed Calder (via Skype and subsequent email correspondence) soon after I saw the film, and I situate a close textual analysis of the film within the context of her intent and the burgeoning scholarly dialogue between Indigenous studies and ecocritical studies. The scholarly dialogue, as Joni Adamson and I write in the introduction to our recent anthology, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016), argues for clear sighted understandings of multi-faceted human/more-than-human relationships that exist outside of binaries imposed by Western notions of progress . Similarly, Steven Loft, coeditor of Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, writes of an Indigenous media cosmology that is replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things and that is not predicated on Western foundations of thought (xvi). Calder extends such Indigenous worldviews of connectedness to cinema and animation in particular

Socially expressive communication agents: A face-centric approach

Interactive Face Animation - Comprehensive Environment (iFACE) is a general purpose software framework that encapsulates the functionality of “face multimedia object”. iFACE exposes programming interfaces and provides authoring and scripting tools to design a face object, define its behaviors, and animate it through static or interactive situations. The framework is based on four parameterized spaces of Geometry, Mood, Personality, and Knowledge that together form the appearance and behavior of the face object. iFACE capabilities are demonstrated within the context of some artistic and educational projects

Transductive Learning with String Kernels for Cross-Domain Text Classification

For many text classification tasks, there is a major problem posed by the lack of labeled data in a target domain. Although classifiers for a target domain can be trained on labeled text data from a related source domain, the accuracy of such classifiers is usually lower in the cross-domain setting. Recently, string kernels have obtained state-of-the-art results in various text classification tasks such as native language identification or automatic essay scoring. Moreover, classifiers based on string kernels have been found to be robust to the distribution gap between different domains. In this paper, we formally describe an algorithm composed of two simple yet effective transductive learning approaches to further improve the results of string kernels in cross-domain settings. By adapting string kernels to the test set without using the ground-truth test labels, we report significantly better accuracy rates in cross-domain English polarity classification.Comment: Accepted at ICONIP 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1808.0840