The Creative and Reflexive Realms of Gamaturgy

This article introduces the synergy between theatre, games, and social activism that I have coined “Gamaturgy.” Gamaturgy, in both the creative and reflexive realms, as I describe them, is derived from theatrical dramaturgy and provides new ideas for creating and critically analyzing serious videogames, especially social issue games. First, I sketch out the formative dramaturgical influences from Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre, Paulo Friere's transitive pedagogy, and Victor Turner's concepts of the liminoid and social justice. I then expand this unique way of play-making into the realm of creative gamaturgy as a way of creating experiential interactions and constructing meanings in the design and creation of serious videogames. As for the aim of finding a new form of thematic analysis for videogames, I use my original case study The Pipeline Pinball Energy Thrill Ride Game to demonstrate a method of recovering meanings from games through the implementation of reflexive gamaturgy

‘At sea, at night’ and ‘Mitya’s love’ como ejemplo del uso postrevolucionario del subtexto in Ivan Bunin’s

Bunin’s undoubted innovation and contribution to the development of the literature of the 20th century is now regarded as a consequence of his creation of new artistic forms, extension of the philosophic intentions of prose, stimulating the modification of the short story and novel, the creation of an original aesthetic programme, tightly connected with his philosophical conception of the world. Thoughtful interpretations of love and death, and the creation of a new type of female character, are other artistic innovations of the writer. A special, condensed form of narrative (in the writer's own words), an intricate and peculiar style, in particular bi-plane narrative, are definitive Bunin’s merits which influenced the further development of literature. Subtext conveys not only the internal drama of reflection, but also a tragic conflict between man and the world, ideal and reality, as well as the impossibility of comprehending the complexity of the universe. An example of such a use of subtext can be seen in "V Nochnom More" (At Sea, at Night) and "Mitina Liubov" (Mitya’s Love).La indudable innovación y contribución de Bunin al desarrollo de la literatura del siglo XX es ahora vista como una consecuencia de su creación de nuevas formas artísticas, de la extensión de sus intenciones filosóficas de la prosa, estimulando la modificación de la historia corta y la novela, la creación de un programa estético original, estrechamente conectado con su concepción filosófica del mundo. Las interpretaciones reflexivas sobre el amor y la muerte, y la creación de un nuevo tipo de personaje femenino, son otras innovaciones artísticas del escritor. Una forma especial, condensada de la narrativa (en propias palabras del escritor), un estilo intrincado y peculiar, en particular de una narrativa biplana, son méritos definitivos de Bunin que influyeron en el desarrollo de la literatura. El subtexto transmite no solo el drama interno de la reflexión, sino también un trágico conflicto entre el hombre y el mundo, lo ideal y la realidad, así como la imposibilidad de comprender la complejidad del universo. Un ejemplo de este uso de subtexto que se puede ver en "V Nochnom More" (At Sea, at night) y "Mitina Liubov" (Mitia’s love)

Chapter 9 ‘Putting the Fun Back into Fundamentalism’

EPDF of Chapter 9 available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.This thought-provoking collection takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject of humour in Islam. It ranges across sociological, cultural, theological and political themes, presenting examples of comedy in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The book also investigates humour’s role in fundamentalism, addresses sensitive contexts of freedom of speech and blasphemy, and corrects common misunderstandings about laughter in Islam

A Beginning Investigation of High-Leverage and Best Practices for Engaging LGBT Students of Color: An Action Research Project

My focus for this research is best practices in secondary ELA for LGBT students of color. Specifically, I examined diversity, differentiation, inclusive education, culturally responsive pedagogy; strategies, scaffolding, effective instruction, high leverage practices, evidence-based practices; and subject-specific, disciplinary issues related to my goals for teaching improvement. This focus aligned with several INTASC Standards for teacher professional development. Additionally, I considered how studying my own practice in line with INTASC Standards could improve my own instruction and therefore, student learning. My purpose for this study was to determine how well my instruction utilized best practices in secondary ELA for LGBT students of color. I will monitor and test my own professional growth by comparing and contrasting my instruction and planning against my research questions. These standards tie into my research questions by having me focus on instructional development and professional development and critiquing my best practices. Ultimately, my research and study findings demonstrate a range of successes and failures, along with implications for further research and professional development

Syntax-Aware Multi-Sense Word Embeddings for Deep Compositional Models of Meaning

Deep compositional models of meaning acting on distributional representations of words in order to produce vectors of larger text constituents are evolving to a popular area of NLP research. We detail a compositional distributional framework based on a rich form of word embeddings that aims at facilitating the interactions between words in the context of a sentence. Embeddings and composition layers are jointly learned against a generic objective that enhances the vectors with syntactic information from the surrounding context. Furthermore, each word is associated with a number of senses, the most plausible of which is selected dynamically during the composition process. We evaluate the produced vectors qualitatively and quantitatively with positive results. At the sentence level, the effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated on the MSRPar task, for which we report results within the state-of-the-art range.Comment: Accepted for presentation at EMNLP 201

Aspects of style attribution arrangement of cover version of pop-vocal composition

The purpose of the research is to theoretically develop methods of characterisation and attribution of the style of arranging a pop-vocal composition. The algorithm of analytical actions in the process of auditory examination of the specifics of the musical language of the arrangement aimed at identifying the genesis of the style profile of a pop-vocal composition is determined. In this regard, the parameters of tempo rhythm and phonism are defined as the basic criteria for recognising the stylistic dominant of the instrumental component of a song genre composition. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive study of the creative specifics of pop-song arrangements using a systematic typological approaches, inductive and structural-functional methods of analysing musical compositions, and also includes a descriptive auditory method and a method of comparative stylistic characterisation of arrangements, carried out on the principle of contrasting comparisons or comparisons based on the similarity of creative methods of instrumentation, form formation, tempo rhythmic, melodic and thematic and harmonic organisation of the musical material of instrumental accompaniments, is a method of identifying the stylistic dominant (genesis) of a song genre work with a particular direction of popular, jazz, folk or academic music. The research resulted in the theoretical development of a methodology for style attribution of arrangements of cover versions of works of popular song genres

Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Means of Influence on Public Opinion in Political Context: Speech Manipulation in the Media

The manipulation problem in the media has been still pressing. Processes and techniques intended for making an influence on public opinion and behaviors are in ongoing improvement, making it difficult to access an objective image of the world. Therefore, this research aims at emphasizing the importance of speech (language) means that form a basis of manipulations in mass communications. To achieve this, authors have provided the systematization of social influence processes in the media and made techniques and means of speech influence clearer. Authors provided a content analysis of texts of 2018 from the media using news resources of different countries ('Russia Today', 'RIA Novosti', 'Ukrinform' and 'Fox News Channel') as an example. The research subject consists of news materials of a politico-social nature on Russia’s participation in the Syrian conflict. Authors have empirically revealed a clear desire to influence readers of the media resources using covert means of the manipulative influence. In total, they have found five types of manipulative speech influence in texts of the media. There are self-presentation, semantic speech strategies, persuasive strategies, hit piece and information manipulation. A lexical toolkit of speech manipulation includes euphemisms, dysphemisms, slogan words, speech metaphorization, etc. Media texts have become more and more complicated as they contain hints, precedent phenomena, irony, as well as metamessages of informative presentation. Each media of the selected ones more or less uses means of speech manipulation in varying degrees. Applications of such methods of influence (in number) almost directly depend on a political attitude towards an object

Urhobo Folklore and Udje Aesthetics in Tanure Ojaide\u27s In the House of Words and Songs of Myself

In his article Urhobo Folklore and Udje Aesthetics in Ojaide\u27s In the House of Words and Songs of Myself Mathias Orhero argues that Ojaide\u27s poetry incorporates Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje style. Using African New Criticism as its theoretical anchor, this paper reveals that Ojaide amply deploys Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje aesthetics in both the form and contents of his poetry and thus, he continues as a modern Urhobo Udje maestro of the hybrid tradition. This paper also brings Ojaide\u27s recent collections to critical lenses, especially as masterpieces of his Urhobo folkloric and Udje adaptations. Orhero concludes by suggesting that further scholarship on the influence of Urhobo folklore and Udje aesthetics should be done on Ojaide\u27s other poetry collections