“Software agents and haunted media : the twitter bot as political actor"

This report examines the rhetorical construction of Twitter bots as nonhuman political agents in press coverage of the 2016 U.S. election. It takes the rhetorical framing of “the Twitter bot” as a case study to argue that Twitter bots are a contemporary example of what media historian Jeffrey Sconce calls “haunted media” -- a communication technology that has been culturally ascribed an “uncanny” “agency.” First, this report provides a comparative close reading of two pieces from The Atlantic and The New York Times as examples of mainstream press coverage of bots shortly before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Second, drawing on Sconce’s analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century media ecologies, it argues that “the Twitter bot” has been rhetorically constructed as haunted media through discourses that are inseparable from larger political narratives. The third and final section speculates on possible theoretical frameworks to expand this project in further inquiries. This report aims to demonstrate that haunted media narratives predate and persist beyond a specific election cycle or medium, and to argue that the construction of “haunted media” occurs alongside constructed concepts of democracy in our technologically mediated society. In doing so, this report contributes to the field of rhetoric of digital technology by bringing it further into conversation with political rhetoric.Englis

The Dilemma of The Sum of Us

In this essay, James Taylor raises many questions about the familiarity of McGhee’s work as well as its reception in the public. In his essay, The Dilemma of The Sum of Us, Taylor ponders why McGhee’s work is so widely embraced and critically acclaimed when there have been many researchers and writers who have shared similar arguments before. His analysis covers works by Gunnar Myrdal among others and he explores how mainstream writers often succeed through “intellectual appeals to white liberal sentimentality”

2014-2015 Lynn University Wind Ensemble - The Wind Symphony: Movement 3

Program Liturgical Symphony / Fisher Tull Symphony No. 20, op. 223 Three Journeys to a Holy Mountain / Alan Hovhaness Symphonies of Wind Instruments / Igor Stravinsky Symphony No. 8, Trinity, op. 84 / Arnold Rosnerhttps://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_windensemble/1010/thumbnail.jp

Combining Geographically Weighted Regression and Geovisual Analytics to investigate temporal variations in house price determinants across London in the period 1980-1998

Hedonic price modelling attempts to uncover information on the determinants of prices - in this case the prices are those of houses in the Greater London area for the period between 1980 and 1998. The determinants of house prices can include house attributes (such as size, type of building, age, etc.), neighbourhood attributes (such as proportion of unemployed people in the neighbourhood or local tax rates) and geographic attributes (such as distance from the city centre or proximity to various amenities) (Orford 1999). Almost all applications of hedonic price models applied to housing are in the form of multiple linear regression models where price is regressed on various attributes. The parameter estimates from the calibration of this type of regression model are assumed to yield information on the relative importance of various attributes in influencing price. One major problem with this approach is that it assumes that the determinants of prices are the same in all parts of the study area. This seems particularly illogical in this type of application where there could easily be local variations in preferences and also in supply and demand relationships. Hence, it seems reasonable to calibrate local hedonic price models rather than global ones – that is, to calibrate a model form which is flexible enough to allow the determinants of house prices to vary spatially. Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) (Fotheringham et al. 2002) is a statistical technique that allows local calibrations and which yields local estimates of the determinants of house prices. GWR was recently used to investigate spatial variations in house price determinants across London separately for each of the years between 1980 and 1998 (Crespo et al. 2007). The result of the GWR analysis is a set of continuous localised parameter estimate surfaces which describe the geography of the parameter space. These surfaces are typically visualised with a set of univariate choropleth maps for each surface which are used to examine the plausibility of the stationarity assumption of the traditional regression and different possible causes of non-stationarity for each separate parameter (Fotheringham and al. 2002). The downside of these separate univariate visualisations is that multivariate spatial and non-spatial relationships and patterns in the parameter space can not be seen. In an attempt to counter this inadequacy, in a previous study we suggested to treat the result space of one single GWR analysis as a multivariate dataset and visually explore it (Demšar et al. 2007). The goal was to identify spatial and multivariate patterns that the separate univariate mapping could not recognise. In this paper we extend this approach with the temporal dimension: we use Geovisual Analytical exploration to investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics in a time series of GWR hedonic price models. The idea is to merge the time series of GWR result spaces (one space per year) into one single highly-dimensional spatio-temporal dataset, which we then visually explore in an attempt to uncover information about the temporal and spatio-temporal behaviour of parameter estimates of GWR and consequently of underlying geographical processes

Picturing the Demon Drink: How Children were Shown Temperance Principles in the Band of Hope

The UK Temperance movement attracted millions of members in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including children. Probably the most successful of the many groupings was the children’s organization, the Band of Hope (1847–1995), and there is a rich legacy of teaching materials, including magic lantern slides, which enables later generations to discover and evaluate its use of visual discourse. This article explores the visual means by which the message was spread and members were gained, sustained, and given material for their own missionary endeavors. The argument highlights the importance of the pioneering visual tools for communicating these messages used by the Band of Hope