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

Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization

This design paper presents new guidance for creating map legends in a dynamic environment. Our contribution is a set of guidelines for legend design in a visualization context and a series of illustrative themes through which they may be expressed. These are demonstrated in an applications context through interactive software prototypes. The guidelines are derived from cartographic literature and in liaison with EDINA who provide digital mapping services for UK tertiary education. They enhance approaches to legend design that have evolved for static media with visualization by considering: selection, layout, symbols, position, dynamism and design and process. Broad visualization legend themes include: The Ground Truth Legend, The Legend as Statistical Graphic and The Map is the Legend. Together, these concepts enable us to augment legends with dynamic properties that address specific needs, rethink their nature and role and contribute to a wider re-evaluation of maps as artifacts of usage rather than statements of fact. EDINA has acquired funding to enhance their clients with visualization legends that use these concepts as a consequence of this work. The guidance applies to the design of a wide range of legends and keys used in cartography and information visualization

Transmedial Narration

This open access book is a methodical treatise on narration in different types of media. A theoretical rather than a historical study, Transmedial Narration is relevant for an understanding of narration in all times, including our own. By reconstructing the theoretical framework of transmedial narration, this book enables the inclusion of all kinds of communicative media forms on their own terms. The treatise is divided into three parts. Part I presents established and newly developed concepts that are vital for formulating a nuanced theoretical model of transmedial narration. Part II investigates the specific transmedial media characteristics that are most central for realizing narratives in a plenitude of different media types. Finally, Part III contains brief studies in which the narrative potentials of painting, instrumental music, mathematical equations, and guided tours are illuminated with the aid of the theoretical framework developed throughout the book. Suitable for advanced students and scholars, this book provides tools to disentangle the narrative potential of any form of communication

Transmedial Narration

This open access book is a methodical treatise on narration in different types of media. A theoretical rather than a historical study, Transmedial Narration is relevant for an understanding of narration in all times, including our own. By reconstructing the theoretical framework of transmedial narration, this book enables the inclusion of all kinds of communicative media forms on their own terms. The treatise is divided into three parts. Part I presents established and newly developed concepts that are vital for formulating a nuanced theoretical model of transmedial narration. Part II investigates the specific transmedial media characteristics that are most central for realizing narratives in a plenitude of different media types. Finally, Part III contains brief studies in which the narrative potentials of painting, instrumental music, mathematical equations, and guided tours are illuminated with the aid of the theoretical framework developed throughout the book. Suitable for advanced students and scholars, this book provides tools to disentangle the narrative potential of any form of communication

Tracing image and bodily displacement in modern and postmodern dance

Through time the dancer has been both celebrated and disadvantaged by antithetical ideas: the division of soul and body, form and matter, life and death, artist and audience. For the romantics, the dancing body stood in a relationship to poetic thought in much the same way as the dancer stood to the body. Notions of the body in early modernism arose from cultural and political constructs through which poets and writers examined the nature of truth. These poets, Yeats in particular, hinted at a premise that a whole history of culture may be necessary to explain why women and art may not be considered as \u27thinking bodies\u27. The notion of truth and of the female dancing form became bound up in the idea of the symbol of art, beauty and truth. Contemporary dance forms have evolved in various movements which either celebrated and lauded or rejected and satirised the dancer and the dancing image. Either way, the cultural and political movements of the twentieth century have bequeathed a residue of impressions surrounding bodily image. The current processes employed in today\u27s dance practice, all of which contour the scope and diversity of contemporary dance, are couched in the multifaceted presence of postmodernism. Alongside such constructs is the fact that the twentieth century has been centred in the desire to \u27create an image\u27 and a subsequent preoccupation whole bodily image. But there are also many other channels through which the idea and use of image in postmodern dance are expressed. For instance, postmodern artists orchestrate and play with the idea of image to deconstruct forms, to lay bare the object of the dance process and in so doing, they disrupt, fragment and question established precepts and perceptions of culture. Postmodern theorists and artists also examine the literary, cultural and philosophical phenomena of politics, technology, identity and change. An examination of postmodern treatment of imagery can illuminate some of the particular processes by which choreographers explore ideas and incorporate them into their work. Postmodern dance can produce positive images for women and illuminate the conditions of men and women in defiance of the dominant constructions of gender and the hegemonic views of existence working in our culture. Gendered constructions in modernist dance forms have effected the evolution of body image whilst postmodern dance offers a complexity that \u27deconstructs\u27 these images

A Memetic Analysis of a Phrase by Beethoven: Calvinian Perspectives on Similarity and Lexicon-Abstraction

This article discusses some general issues arising from the study of similarity in music, both human-conducted and computer-aided, and then progresses to a consideration of similarity relationships between patterns in a phrase by Beethoven, from the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A flat major op. 110 (1821), and various potential memetic precursors. This analysis is followed by a consideration of how the kinds of similarity identified in the Beethoven phrase might be understood in psychological/conceptual and then neurobiological terms, the latter by means of William Calvin’s Hexagonal Cloning Theory. This theory offers a mechanism for the operation of David Cope’s concept of the lexicon, conceived here as a museme allele-class. I conclude by attempting to correlate and map the various spaces within which memetic replication occurs

What Do We Mean by the Meanings of Music?

Drawing upon a recent review of the topic by Cross and Tolbert (2009), this paper briefly illustrates the diversity of theories concerning the nature of meanings in music and the challenges that need to be resolved to advance the field. A scheme for layered macro- and micro-theories for neural, mental and behavioural systems is outlined to facilitate the development of a systematic and coherent body of theory. The core of the paper charts the evolutionary origins of a specific macro- theory of the organisation all the components of the human mind. This “mental architecture,” known as Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (Barnard, 1985), incorporates not one, but two qualitatively distinct forms of meaning. Propositional meanings represent referentially specific ideas while implicational meanings encapsulate a yet more abstract and holistic form of meaning that blends conceptual material with the products of immediate distal and bodily sensations. While both forms of meaning interact in the interpretation and expression of musical meaning, such meanings are argued to be primarily implicational in nature. The paper concludes with a short discussion of how this approach might usefully be applied in the development of more precise specification of what music might mean in its various facets