VAST Challenge 2016: Streaming Visual Analytics

The 2016 VAST Challenge returns to the (fictional) island of Kronos to pose three Mini-Challenges. In Mini-Challenge 1, participants must design an innovative interactive visual interface that enables security investigators from the Euybia Island Resort and Conference Center to conduct real-time analysis of streaming data. In Mini-Challenge 2, the GAStech Corporation returns from the 2014 kidnapping disaster more committed than ever to tighten up operations at its new headquarters in Abila. Using data from stationary and mobile sensors of multiple types, participants must help the company to understand both operational issues as well as security issues. In Mini-Challenge 3, participants are asked to try their hand at the most complex VAST Challenge scenario to date: 2.5 days of live, streaming operational data. The VAST Challenge 2016 received 29 submissions and had participation from 72 reviewers

Visual Storytelling in the Cape Flats Gang Biopics Noem My Skollie (2016) and Ellen: Die Storie van Ellen Pakkies (2018)

Masters of ArtThis M.A. mini-thesis seeks to open up the post-apartheid South African biopic as a topic for serious historical scrutiny. While book-length written biographies published in the post-apartheid (and apartheid periods) are the subjects of a now quite extensive historiographical literature, biography on film – including in the form of filmic dramas – has been hitherto entirely ignored. Social history or marginalised lives and not political lives of struggle against apartheid have been the predominant subgenre within this emerging field: with sixteen biopics having been produced in the 2010s. But the field is dominated by white men. This thesis showcases the story-telling gifts of one young coloured film-maker through a meticulously detailed analysis of “visual story-telling” and “visual language” used in his two award-winning gang biopics, Noem My Skollie (2016) and Ellen. Die Stories van Ellen Pakkies (2018). Read in the context of the extended processes of production of these two films in which the central protagonists played a shaping background role, the thesis explores and compares the linear chronological, four-chapter, narrative structure of Noem My Skollie with the architecture of “the parallel narrative” used in the deeply disturbing Ellen. Die Storie van Ellen Pakkies (2018) The thesis is a celebration of the film-making talent of Daryne Joshua

Exhumations, reburials and history making in post-apartheid South Africa.

Magister Artium - MAThis mini-thesis, ‘Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa’, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site of Mapungubwe, the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West and the reburials carried out by the Missing Persons Task Team (MPPT) from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), particularly its unsuccessful attempt at exhumations at the Stikland Cemetery, in an attempt to understand how they form part of the production of history. These case studies conceive of the times of the precolonial, slavery and apartheid, and are all linked temporally to an envisaged future through ideas of nation building and nationalism. As narratives produced through these exhumations and reburials, they contribute to the notion of making the post-apartheid by remaking history and reconstituting nation. Each of these case studies are significant as they in some way have been utilized in a manner that is relevant to us in the new democratic South Africa. This mini-thesis aims at rethinking the role of archaeologists, the exhumation and reburial processes, the construction of ethnicity, how the dead are used to construct narratives of struggle against apartheid and in general the implications each of these have on the re-making of history. It also thinks about what the practices of exhumation and reburial mean conceptually and how they relate to the concept of missingness, which I refer to as the process of making absence or invisibility. Thinking about exhumations and reburial in this way has allowed reflection on the purpose of the practices, in terms of who it’s for and how it’s perceived by the stakeholders involved in each case. Through dissecting each of these issues one may be able to trace how the remains to be reburied become missing. Therefore, the question of exhumation and reburial is essential in thinking about what it does for the human remains and how their identity is either shaped or lost. This thesis mainly argues that the remains in each of the case studies go through various phases of missingness and that their reburials and memorialization, or in the case of Stikland the spiritual repatriation, inscribes them further into narratives of the times that they emerged from

UNCOVERING HIDDEN FRONTS OF AFRICA’S LIBERATION STRUGGLE: BLACK POWER, BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SOUTH AFRICA’S ARMED STRUGGLE, 1967-1985

Many scholars have argued the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)’s principal contribution was as an intellectual/student movement, and its main shortcoming the limited degree of active political and military opposition it was able to offer the apartheid regime. My dissertation, ‘Uncovering Hidden Fronts of Africa’s Liberation Struggle: Black Power, Black Consciousness, and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, 1967–1985’, broadens our understanding of this movement and moment in South African history by unearthing the little known history of BCM’s unrelenting engagement with armed struggle as a form of resistance to apartheid rule during the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of my dissertation charts the evolution of Black Consciousness (BC) inspired organisations such as the Azanian People’s Liberation Front (APLF), the Isandlwana Revolutionary Effort (IRE), and the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) from 1974–1982 as they organised for armed confrontation with the apartheid state. It then moves to a discussion of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) and its armed wing the Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA) that emerged in the 1980s as the BC alternative to the non-racialist nominally socialist African National Congress of South Africa (ANC-SA) after previous movements failed to consolidate themselves. Their failures are less important than examinations of why they failed, which reveals their struggles were mostly caused by BCM being outmanoeuvred and betrayed by the ANC-SA and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) in exile. The second part of my dissertation excavates how many new recruits of the Soweto generation attempted to radicalize Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) from within. While this is acknowledged by most MK scholars, they do not link this drive for radicalization with the politics of BC that a number of these recruits carried with them into the movement. From this perspective, the mutinies and internal suppressions that wracked MK during the 1980s need to be viewed as an internal ideological struggle for what the future of South Africa would look like. Although my work offers a careful historical reconstruction of previously under-explored events, my thesis suggests BCM’s vision of a future South Africa/Azania, where land and resources would be redistributed to the masses, was outmanoeuvred and defeated by bourgeois liberal-democratic and South African Communist Party (SACP) forces of the ANC-SA. Returning to this history helps frame contemporary struggles South Africa finds itself in as current movements strive to find answers to continued racism and economic inequality. While BC did not have all the answers, it offered a different vision of freedom that Black activists today have rediscovered

Time and religion in Hellenistic Athens : an interpretation of the Little Metropolis frieze

PhD ThesisTwo stones that form a part of the spolia on the Little Metropolis church (Aghios Eleutherios) in central Athens consist of a frieze depicting a calendar year. The thesis begins with a Preface that discusses the theoretical approaches used. An Introduction follows which, for reference, presents the 41 images on the frieze using the 1932 interpretation of Ludwig Deubner. After evaluating previous studies in Chapter 1, the thesis then presents an exploration of the cultural aspects of time in ancient Greece (Chapter 2). A new analysis of the frieze, based on ancient astronomy, dates the frieze to the late Hellenistic period (Chapter 3); a broad study of Hellenistic calendars identifies it as Macedonian (Chapter 4), and suggests its original location and sponsor (Chapter 5). The thesis presents an interpretation of the frieze that brings the conclusions of these chapters together, developing an argument that includes the art, religion and philosophy of Athenian society contemporary with the construction of the frieze. Given the date, the Macedonian connection and the link with an educational establishment, the final Chapter 6 presents an interpretation based not on the addition of individual images but on the frieze subject matter as a whole. This chapter shows that understanding the frieze is dependent on a number of aspects of the world of artistic connoisseurship in an elite, educated audience of the late Hellenistic period. Important is an awareness of their intellectual appreciation of the perfection of the cosmos and the links between this comprehension of a rational domain and religion. Coupling their wonder at these two spheres with the custom for enjoying enigmatic pieces of work leads to a conclusion that the frieze attempts to relate religion and astronomy, rather than present a straight-forward calendrical list of events

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”