Randomness, Uncertainty, and Economic Behavior: The Life of Money in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

My dissertation argues that fiction produced in England during the frequent financial crises and political volatility experienced between 1770 and 1820 both reflected and shaped the cultural anxiety occasioned by a seemingly random and increasingly uncertain world. The project begins within the historical framework of the multiple financial crises that occurred in the late eighteenth century: seven crises took place between 1760 and 1797 alone, appearing seemingly out of nowhere and creating a climate of financial meltdown. But how did the awareness of economic turbulence filter into the creative consciousness? Through an interdisciplinary focus on cultural studies and behavioral economics, the dissertation posits that in spite of their conventional, status quo affirming endings (opportunists are punished, lovers are married), novels and plays written between 1770 and 1820 contemplated models of behavior that were newly opportunistic, echoing the reluctant realization that irrationality had become the norm rather than a rare aberration. By analyzing concrete narrative strategies used by writers such as Frances Burney, Georgiana Cavendish, Hannah Cowley, and Thomas Holcroft, I demonstrate that late eighteenth-century fiction both articulates and elides the awareness of randomness and uncertainty in its depiction of plot, character, and narrative

Para além do controle: estratégias para a agência do design no Antropoceno

This thesis provides a moral appeal. It sets out to inspire makers, doers and thinkers to strategically act, beyond control, in knocking at the door of socio-ecological crisis in Anthropocene. What is the role of design in the Anthropocene? What kind of ethical principles can be considered? And what does this imply for ‘response-able’ practices? These questions bind together the non-linear assemblage that this thesis is. Action, reflection, problem and solution are interdependent and unfold together, like the petals of a blooming rose. Complexity may be absorbed with honesty rather than with confidence. The voice in this thesis is an ‘I’, and ‘I’ am an ecological constructivist. The grounds for ecological constructivism are inter-personal or rather inter-actor relationships. Places, objects, processes and organisms are seen as entangled entities and are approached with a ‘tentacular’ sensitivity: the humanities’ object of study is no longer ‘man.’ Research and researcher, life and the living, site and situation are inevitably interwoven. Every ‘thing’ and every ‘action’ are data. The data is collected through a personal, subjective lens combining design practice with theory. It is assumed that when carried out trough time, with honesty and integrity, research (about, through and for design) can bring us closer to morphs of truth. With a creative hunch, I collect clues as a hunter-gather. By coding, categorizing and interpreting like a detective, with frames such as ‘entanglement’, ‘submergence’ and ‘contamination’ the research employs the method of abduction to develop constructs and theories. These are then used to build the argument for seven moral pleas meant as persuasions: normative aspirations for design agency in the Anthropocene. Design actions may focus on themes such as: unfolding together; responding beyond control; loving our monsters; an obligation to disobedience; form follows potential and being into Anthropocene fiction. The journey then concludes with a re-enchantment of decency towards all that matters, an animistic approach with pragmatic logic that sees the wellbeing of humans, animals and environments as deeply connected. Human interventions would preferably set out to enable autonomous ‘sympoeitic’ stewardship of the planet by including intentions for the unintentional. The implications of this research are related to context and method. A recursive use of a myriad of methodologies, playing their role at different moments of the research, may have given completely different results in another context, which may not appeal to all researchers. Eventually the exploratory, rather than explanatory nature of this research, revealed one thing: the main aim is not to achieve results, but to create a stage on which many perspectives can unfold: the result is that results are not all that counts. Attitude, rather than telos, lies at the heart of design agency beyond control.Esta tese oferece um apelo moral. Tem como objetivo inspirar os criadores, realizadores e pensadores a agirem estrategicamente, além do controle, batendo à porta da crise socioecológica no Antropoceno. Qual é o papel do design no Antropoceno? Que tipo de princípios éticos podem ser considerados? E o que isso significa para práticas "capazes de responder"? Essas questões a não linearidade metodológica desta tese. Ação, reflexão, problema e solução são interdependentes e desdobram-se juntos, como as pétalas de uma rosa desabrochando. A complexidade pode ser absorvida com honestidade e não com confiança. A voz nesta tese é um 'eu' e 'eu' sou um construtivista ecológico. As bases para o construtivismo ecológico são as relações interpessoais, ou melhor, entre os atores. Lugares, objetos, processos e organismos são vistos como entidades entrosadas e são abordadas com uma sensibilidade 'tentacular': o objeto de estudo das humanidades não é mais 'homem'. Pesquisa e pesquisador, vida e vivência, local e situação estão inevitavelmente entrelaçados. Cada "coisa" e cada "ação" são dados. Os dados são coletados por meio de lentes subjetivas e pessoais, combinando a prática do design com a teoria. Presume-se que, quando realizada ao longo do tempo, com honestidade e integridade, a investigação (sobre, por meio de, e, para design) pode aproximar-nos de formas de verdade. Com um palpite criativo, coleto pistas como um caçador-coletor. Ao codificar, categorizar e interpretar como um detetive, com quadros como "entrosamento", "submersão" e "contaminação", a pesquisa emprega o método de abdução para desenvolver construções e teorias. Estas são então usadas para construir o argumento para os sete fundamentos morais significados como persuasões: aspirações normativas para agência de design no Antropoceno. As ações de design podem concentrar-se em temas como: desdobramento conjunto; respondendo além do controle; amar nossos monstros; uma obrigação de desobediência; a forma segue o potencial e o ser (existência) na ficção do Antropoceno. A viagem então termina com um reencantamento da decência em relação a tudo o que importa, uma abordagem animista com uma lógica pragmática que vê o bem-estar de humanos, animais e ambientes profundamente conectados. Intervenções humanas seriam preferencialmente estabelecidas para permitir a administração "simpoeítica" autónoma do planeta, incluindo as intenções para o não ntencional. As implicações desta investigação estão relacionadas com o contexto e com o método. O uso recursivo de uma miríade de metodologias, desempenhando o seu papel em diferentes momentos da investigação, poderá dar resultados diferentes em outros contextos, o que poderá não ser consensual na comunidade científica. Por fim, o caráter exploratório, ao invés de explicativo, desta investigação revelou que o objetivo principal não é alcançar resultados, mas criar um palco no qual muitas perspetivas possam desdobrar-se: o resultado é que os resultados não são tudo o que conta em investigação mas a jornada é em si também um aspeto importante. Atitude, ao invés de perseguir um fim (telos), está na essência de design agency consciente da impossibilidade de controle.Programa Doutoral em Desig

The End of the World

Our fear of the world ending, like our fear of the dark, is ancient, deep-seated and perennial. It crosses boundaries of space and time, recurs in all human communities and finds expression in every aspect of cultural production – from pre-historic cave paintings to high-tech computer games. This book examines historical and imaginary scenarios of Apocalypse, the depiction of its likely triggers, and imagined landscapesin the aftermath of global destruction. Its discussion moves effortlessly from classic novels including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to blockbuster films such as Blade Runner, Armageddon and The Terminator. The author also takes into account religious doctrine, scientific research and the visual arts to create a penetrating, multi-disciplinarystudy that provides profound insight into one of Western culture’s darkest and most enduring preoccupations

Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism

This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers--William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake--recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a "spectral" form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas's well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late-eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as "material social practice." All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called "Romantic.

Perspectives of university teaching in Costa Rica in times of digital media

Perspectives of university teaching in Costa Rica in times of digital media examines an educational approach to understand the space of learning that takes place in higher education. For that, a selection of viewpoints of digital media and university teaching are discussed in the light of a tradition: the Journeyman Years. The key research question is: what is a space of learning in higher education from the students and professor's perspectives at the Universidad de Costa Rica? Pertinent to this topic, other sub-questions are: what kind of spaces of learning are being ofered at the Universidad de Costa Rica? How to reconsider the space of learning at a university? Chapter Two introduces the Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) story, a leading metaphor for this manuscript where an approach to learning in terms of space is presented. Chapter Three examines two diferent knowledge approaches: frst, mechanistic thinking is highlighted in relation to digital media. Humans learn of natural phenomena through rational means, seeking to demystify and unveil a true world. Second, romantic thinking is featured in relation to higher education. Individuals learn about the world by engaging in practice while being social, experiencing directly the world in continuous change. Chapter Four presents an interpretation of the previous theoretical perspectives. After a selection of reviewed concepts, Learning by Wandering is proposed, a structure to analyze the construction of the space of learning in higher education. Chapter Five describes an ethnographic case study of the space of learning at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where 150 students and eight university teachers throughout diferent contexts are studied. Chapter Six features the major relevant fndings in my thesis to analyze university teaching in terms of space. In this chapter, a list of recommendations for the Universidad de Costa Rica is ofered, in order to foster higher education in terms of space

The End of the World

Our fear of the world ending, like our fear of the dark, is ancient, deep-seated and perennial. It crosses boundaries of space and time, recurs in all human communities and finds expression in every aspect of cultural production – from pre-historic cave paintings to high-tech computer games. This book examines historical and imaginary scenarios of Apocalypse, the depiction of its likely triggers, and imagined landscapesin the aftermath of global destruction. Its discussion moves effortlessly from classic novels including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to blockbuster films such as Blade Runner, Armageddon and The Terminator. The author also takes into account religious doctrine, scientific research and the visual arts to create a penetrating, multi-disciplinarystudy that provides profound insight into one of Western culture’s darkest and most enduring preoccupations

Player Types, Motivations & The Western Australian Live Action Role-Play Community: An investigation of Possible LARP Player & Digital Game Theory Compatibility

This thesis aimed to investigate the extent to which Bartle’s (1996) Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) player taxonomy can be applied to the classification of the motivations of the Western Australian Live Action Role-Play (LARP) community. This work resulted in the production of the refined LARPer Motivation Typology theory which can provide a greater understanding of the motivational behaviours of WA LARP participants for the benefit of scholarly researchers, LARP Organisers and individual LARP players

A Framework for Web Object Self-Preservation

We propose and develop a framework based on emergent behavior principles for the long-term preservation of digital data using the web infrastructure. We present the development of the framework called unsupervised small-world (USW) which is at the nexus of emergent behavior, graph theory, and digital preservation. The USW algorithm creates graph based structures on the Web used for preservation of web objects (WOs). Emergent behavior activities, based on Craig Reynolds’ “boids” concept, are used to preserve WOs without the need for a central archiving authority. Graph theory is extended by developing an algorithm that incrementally creates small-world graphs. Graph theory provides a foundation to discuss the vulnerability of graphs to different types of failures and attack profiles. Investigation into the robustness and resilience of USW graphs lead to the development of a metric to quantify the effect of damage inflicted on a graph. The metric remains valid whether the graph is connected or not. Different USW preservation policies are explored within a simulation environment where preservation copies have to be spread across hosts. Spreading the copies across hosts helps to ensure that copies will remain available even when there is a concerted effort to remove all copies of a USW component. A moderately aggressive preservation policy is the most effective at making the best use of host and network resources. Our efforts are directed at answering the following research questions: 1. Can web objects (WOs) be constructed to outlive the people and institutions that created them? We have developed, analyzed, tested through simulations, and developed a reference implementation of the unsupervised small-world (USW) algorithm that we believe will create a connected network of WOs based on the web infrastructure (WI) that will outlive the people and institutions that created the WOs. The USW graph will outlive its creators by being robust and continuing to operate when some of its WOs are lost, and it is resilient and will recover when some of its WOs are lost. 2. Can we leverage aspects of naturally occurring networks and group behavior for preservation? We used Reynolds’ tenets for “boids” to guide our analysis and development of the USW algorithm. The USW algorithm allows a WO to “explore” a portion of the USW graph before making connections to members of the graph and before making preservation copies across the “discovered” graph. Analysis and simulation show that the USW graph has an average path length (L(G)) and clustering coefficient (C(G)) values comparable to small-world graphs. A high C(G) is important because it reflects how likely it is that a WO will be able spread copies to other domains, thereby increasing its likelihood of long term survival. A short L(G) is important because it means that a WO will not have to look too far to identify new candidate preservation domains, if needed. Small-world graphs occur in nature and are thus believed to be robust and resilient. The USW algorithms use these small-world graph characteristics to spread preservation copies across as many hosts as needed and possible. USW graph creation, damage, repair and preservation has been developed and tested in a simulation and reference implementation

Networks, Epidemics and Collective Behavior: from Physics to Data Science

In the final quarter of the XX century the classical reductionist approach that had been driving the development of physics was questioned. Instead, it was proposed that systems were arranged in hierarchies so that the upper level had to convey to the rules of the lower level, but at the same time it could also exhibit its own laws that could not be inferred from the ones of its fundamental constituents. This observation led to the creation of a new field known as complex systems. This novel view was, however, not restricted to purely physical systems. It was soon noticed that very different systems covering a huge array of fields, from ecology to sociology or economics, could also be analyzed as complex systems. Furthermore, it allowed physicists to contribute with their knowledge and methods in the development of research in those areas. In this thesis we tackle problems covering three areas of complex systems: networks, which are one of the main mathematical tools used to study complex systems; epidemic spreading, which is one of the fields in which the application of a complex systems perspective has been more successful; and the study of collective behavior, which has attracted a lot of attention since data from human behavior in huge amounts has been made available thanks to social networks. In fact, data is also the main driver of our discussion of the other two areas. In particular, we use novel sources of data to challenge some of the classical assumptions that have been made in the study of networks as well as in the development of models of epidemic spreading. In the case of networks, the problem of null models is addressed using tools coming from statistical physics. We show that anomalies in networks can be just a consequence of model oversimplification. Then, we extend the framework to generate contact networks for the spreading of diseases in populations in which both the contact structure and the age distribution of the population are important. Next, we follow the historical development of mathematical epidemiology and revisit the assumptions that were made when there was no data about the real behavior of this kind of systems. We show that one of the most important quantities used in this kind of studies, the basic reproduction number, is not properly defined for real systems. Similarly, we extend the theoretical framework of epidemic spreading on directed networks to multilayer systems. Furthermore, we show that the challenge of incorporating data to models is not only restricted to the problem of obtaining it, but that it is also really important to be aware of its characteristics to do it properly.Lastly, we conclude the thesis studying two examples of collective behavior using data extracted from online systems. We do so using techniques that were originally developed for other purposes, such as earthquake prediction. Yet, we demonstrate that they can also be used to study this new type of systems. Furthermore, we show that, despite their unique characteristics, they possess properties similar to the ones that have been observed in the offline world. This not only means that modern societies are intertwined with the online world, but it also signals that if we aim to understand socio-technical systems a holistic approach, as the one proposed by complex systems, is indispensable.<br /

Controlling the Uncontrollable: Navigating Subjectivity in the perestroika and post-Soviet Prose of L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia

This dissertation deals with the daily, lived experience of women in the late- and post- Soviet Union as depicted in literature written around the time of its collapse. With respect to the specific challenges individuals in disempowered positions faced and the various ways they attempted to overcome them. The dissertation reexamines works by L. S. Petrushevskaia and L. E. Ulitskaia from the introduction of perestroika in 1987 through 2000. Drawing from studies of power in a range of contexts from Michel Foucault in 1970s France to Aleksei Yurchak in 2000s Russia, I focus my analysis on how any perception of control is portrayed as dubious, how individuals worked against traditional patriarchal power structures, and how the narrative structures replicate the environment of uncertainty and fear that came to mark the “Wild 90s” of Russian literature. I find that their protagonists’ constant navigation of subjectivity is particularly clear within the authors’ use of three topoi: corporeality, romantic relationships, and escapism. The first chapter argues that bodies do not only reflect subjective construction, but in fact become a primary vessel through which it takes place: while many texts depict how the regulation of bodies (and [self-]disciplining the body) indoctrinates subjects to codes of dominant (and patriarchal) social order, I find that these works also show the subjects’ reactions to such moments as situated in the physical. The second chapter examines how the binaries between private and public break down as individuals use the realm of interpersonal romantic relationships as a venue to challenge, refute, or adapt societal norms propagated by communist morality. The heroines manipulate and reinterpret dominant regulations on social relationships in attempt to lessen their suffering, much of which comes from living under the Soviet totalitarian regime. Their efforts are often not successful and many inevitably continue the cycle of violence that causes their pain in the first place, but their attempts to manipulate or resist regulations on social relationships is an example of testing the limits of subjectivity. Lastly, the third chapter ponders those moments when individuals try to escape psychologically. No longer striving toward the ideal, they attempt to create new spaces in which they are the ideal. These spaces do not fully free them from dominant power, but their search for an alternate understanding of reality – through fantasy, hallucination, delusion, madness, or other – allows them a greater sense of influence than does the society around them. Even when these efforts fail, the attempt itself is a form of resistance to the dominant culture. Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia’s prose depicts those who feel control slipping rapidly from their hands; my work analyzes how they resist, evade, manipulate, and perpetuate the techniques of power to which they are simultaneously victim.PHDSlavic Languages & LiteraturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145839/1/natalimc_1.pd