Censoring Maps in Google China? Visual Analysis through Foucault\u27t Power/Knowledge

This thesis explores aspects of map censorship in Google China through a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s power/knowledge. Comparing results of content analysis of maps in Google Ditu in Google China and Google Maps in Google Dot Com, the thesis analyzes the degree of censorship of maps in the Google geoweb. My findings are a higher density of labeling in Google Ditu in comparison with Google Maps, the absence of VGI in Google Ditu, the limitation of zoom level at Google Ditu, and the absence of Street View in China. This thesis suggests possible explanations to differences in map information between Google Ditu and Google Maps

The Institute of New Feelings: Plastic Identities and Imperfect Surfaces

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into the visible and invisible areas of screens. Such experience, and our plastic identities that reside within, marks a collaborative attempt between designers and audience to establish a new protocol of liquid perspectives functioning within and beyond digital space. Digital plasticity itself is a practice, as well as an inextricable process of understanding and deploying identities in the contemporary media-saturated pluralistic environment

NEARCHOS. Networked Archaeological Open Science: Advances in Archaeology Through Field Analytics and Scientific Community Sharing

The full release and circulation of excavation results often takes decades, thus slowing down progress in archaeology to a degree not in keeping with other scientific fields. The nonconformity of released data for digital processing also requires vast and costly data input and adaptation. Archaeology should face the cognitive challenges posed by digital environments, changing in scope and rhythm. We advocate the adoption of a synergy between recording techniques, field analytics, and a collaborative approach to create a new epistemological perspective, one in which research questions are constantly redefined through real-time, collaborative analysis of data as they are collected and/or searched for in an excavation. Since new questions are defined in science discourse after previous results have been disseminated and discussed within the scientific community, sharing evidence in remote with colleagues, both in the process of field collection and subsequent study, will be a key innovative feature, allowing a complex and real-time distant interaction with the scholarly community and leading to more rapid improvements in research agendas and queries

Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future : The Potential of Digital Archaeology

Mobilizing the Past is a collection of 20 articles that explore the use and impact of mobile digital technology in archaeological field practice. The detailed case studies present in this volume range from drones in the Andes to iPads at Pompeii, digital workflows in the American Southwest, and examples of how bespoke, DIY, and commercial software provide solutions and craft novel challenges for field archaeologists. The range of projects and contexts ensures that Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future is far more than a state-of-the-field manual or technical handbook. Instead, the contributors embrace the growing spirit of critique present in digital archaeology. This critical edge, backed by real projects, systems, and experiences, gives the book lasting value as both a glimpse into present practices as well as the anxieties and enthusiasm associated with the most recent generation of mobile digital tools. This book emerged from a workshop funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities held in 2015 at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. The workshop brought together over 20 leading practitioners of digital archaeology in the U.S. for a weekend of conversation. The papers in this volume reflect the discussions at this workshop with significant additional content. Starting with an expansive introduction and concluding with a series of reflective papers, this volume illustrates how tablets, connectivity, sophisticated software, and powerful computers have transformed field practices and offer potential for a radically transformed discipline.https://dc.uwm.edu/arthist_mobilizingthepast/1000/thumbnail.jp

A Participatory Archives Approach to Fostering Connectivity, Increasing Empathy, and Building Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explores two pandemic-era projects conducted by the Museum and Archives of North Vancouver (MONOVA) using a participatory archives framework during the COVID-19 pandemic. #NorthVanStories, a rapid-respond social media collecting project, ran from May to September 2020 and received over 200 submissions. #NorthVanStories–Living Histories, a digital video oral history project, ran from summer 2020 to fall 2021 and produced five videos with seven storytellers from diverse and vulnerable communities. This paper discusses the power of collaborative documenting, storytelling, and memory-making to foster connectivity, increase empathy, and build resilience. It highlights the benefits of working collaboratively with organizations and communities; successful approaches to planning and outreach activities; the importance of flexibility and sustainability when working with communities in times of crisis; and how to ensure the future relevance of archives by being responsive to contemporary events and community interests

Navigating The Manosphere: An Examination Of The Incel Movements’ Attitudes Of Sexual Aggression And Violence Against Women

There is a considerable and established literature on the topic of violence against women. Yet, there remains understudied areas of foci with lesser attention paid to its occurrence within online and digital contexts. Of particular interest is the networked misogyny and sexism of the online group that self-identifies as “involuntary celibates”, or “incels”. Drawing on data collected from online forums and chat rooms, the language and discourse of this particular group are analyzed through an integrated conceptual framework encompassing hegemonic masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and patriarchy to better understand the prevalence and types of violence promoted by “incels”. Emerging themes revealed the pervasiveness of rape culture, pro-attitudes of violence against women, male victimization and oppression, sexual entitlement, and masculinity crises

Virtual Legacies: Genealogy, the Internet, and Jewish Identity

As Jewish identities become more hybridized in what Manuel Castells calls a "network society," genealogical research intensifies the questioning of how Jews identify and who identifies as Jewish. Jewish identities based on relation, location, and devastation develop out of genealogical research, especially when networks such as the internet increase access to information and communities of other researchers. Mining the internet for genealogical information and searching for heritage only add to the possibilities of Jewish identity, revealing Jewish kin, connections to a particular place, or the tragedy of the Holocaust--evidence of the ways in which the World Wide Web changes Jewish identity formation. The internet is a virtual gathering place for the commemoration and study of Jewish life and culture, even as its use challenges conventional modes of Jewish community and identity formation. Through its treatment of the internet and Jewish identity, this dissertation explores new media and their cultural impact, arguing that new media enable penetrable and osmotic identities instead of reifying delimited parameters. Using Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," Hayden White's "emplotment," Vivian M. Patraka's "goneness," and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's "hereness" as critical lenses through which to view Jewish genealogical Web sites, I show how the narratives on Jewish genealogical research Web sites, cyber-shtetls, and personal genealogy Web sites and blogs reveal constructions of Jewish identity that have never before been articulated as viable options for forming Jewish communities. Jewish communities of relation, location, and devastation may resemble other Jewish communities, but they are unique in that they are virtual--their homes are online. The narratives found on each genre of Web site are functions of postmemory, in that they are the results of family lore, emplotted in order to tell coherent family histories. The "hereness" of postmemory confronts the "goneness" of much of the lives and times that compose Jewish culture, allowing for the creativity that emplotment requires. When Jewish genealogists search for their heritage online, they encounter communities of other genealogists who are just as eagerly emplotting their own genealogical narratives

The American Assembly: Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property

Examines intellectual property issues as the arts sector joins other sectors in the race to deal with an increasingly information-driven economy