Cultural translation : a value or a tool? Let’s start with Gramsci!

Ein Vordenker, der in der internationalen Diskussion um « cultural translation » so gut wie nie diskutiert wird, ist Antonio Gramsci. Der Philosoph aus Sardinien, von Kindes Tagen an in Zweisprachigkeit (Sardisch-Italienisch) geübt, hat ein feines Sensorium für kulturelle Differenzen ausgebildet. In seinen Gefängnisjahren übersetzt er – als intellektuelles Training – aus dem Russischen und dem Deutschen ins Italienische, und in den Gefängnisheften setzt er sich wiederholt mit dem Begriff der traducibilità (Übersetzbarkeit) auseinander: Übersetzbarkeit von Sprachen, aber auch von Kulturen. Der Artikel geht den Linien nach, die von Gramscis Überlegungen zu der aktuellen Diskussion gezogen werden können, und diskutiert am Ende vergleichend die Positionen Homi K. Bhabhas und Gayatri Spivaks

What do on campus students do with mathematics lecture screencasts at a dual-mode Australian university?

The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) is one of Australia's leading distance education providers, with about three quarters of its students enrolled in distance mode. While it can certainly be argued that screencasted lectures extend learning opportunities for students who cannot physically attend classes by providing a near live lecture experience, the question is raised: Would students who were given a choice and purposely enrolled on campus access these recordings, and if so, for what purpose? This paper uses a case study approach to investigate this question with a first year Operations Research course allowing on campus and distance enrolments. Data analysed and matched to follow individual students' behaviours includes lecture attendance rolls, weekly screencast access on the course Moodle site, anonymous solicited student feedback provided by attendees in the last two lectures and a student survey at the end of semester. While a number of students used the recordings to catch up on missed classes, the majority of enrolled students stated that they attended classes because they had decided to enroll on campus rather than in distance mode, as they valued interaction with the lecturers and the ability to receive an immediate answer to questions

Kant on Religious Feelings - An Extrapolation

The religious feeling considered in this paper is the feeling of awe that can be construed in the extrapolation of the feeling of respect for the law. The latter itself can be better understood in analogy to the feeling of the sublime. Hence the thesis of my interpretation and extrapolation is: a characterization of the religious feeling in Kant’s critiques of reason and their analyses of feelings is possible. It has to be understood in analogy to the feeling of respect for the law and thus to the feeling of the sublime. The religious feeling would, as certain formulations suggest, refer to awe of the inconceivable size of God. The religious feeling of awe would also be a feeling caused by reason -- an instance of a judgement-based feeling. The respective judgement is a reflexive judgement, an achievement of the reflecting faculty of judgement. The religious feeling would resemble Schleiermacher’s ”plain feeling of dependence’, but given the analogy with the dialectics of the sublime, it would also include the complementary component of self-elevation

The stratification of nature in the Dierentuinwijk of Ghent : a park and a sewer as two poles of development in a new quarter for the city

In 1905 the city-engineer Victor Compyn presents the project for the allotment of the ‘Muinkmeersen’, partly on the grounds of the former zoological garden of Ghent. He structures the residential areas around two components. In the north we find a square, the ‘Muinkpark’, that is in fact a small remnant of the zoological garden. In the south, the Oude Schelde is being filled up and substituted by a sewer. There, Compyn plans a star-shaped street pattern that consists of two diagonal streets and one central north-south oriented axis that connects the square with the junction of the southern streets. With the filling up of the Oude Schelde, the last testimony of the former ‘natural’ hydrography of the Muinkmeersen had disappeared. Or not entirely, for the ‘course’ of the Tentoonstellingslaan – one of the two diagonal streets in the south – almost completely equals that of the filled up branch of the Schelde. Like zoological gardens and municipal parks, networked infrastructures for sewerage and drinking water can be understood as urban constructs of nature. Each in its own way, they display the ambition to canalize nature in a concentrated and systematical way in order to give shape to a severely controlled urban landscape. By exhibiting its gratifying components in zoological gardens, public parks, and the conscious planting of avenues on the one hand, and by hiding and diverting its disagreeable properties underground on the other, nature is being deliberately stratified into a visible and an invisible pole. In the case of the Dierentuinwijk these two poles are explicitly deployed to give shape and meaning to a newly built part of the city. During the Belle Epoque, city engineers, urban planners and theorists were particularly concerned about a rather ‘picturesque’ approach, where the presence of nature was manipulated in order to intensify the experience of the city. Many among them were present at the Premier Congrès International et Exposition Comparée des Villes, held in Ghent in 1913. Lectures were held by Raymond Unwin, Charles Buls, Joseph Stübben, Louis Vander Swaelmen, and also by engineer Alphonse Soenen who had formerly collaborated with Compyn, drawing a plan that indicated the vaulted and filled up waterways of Ghent. Through the specific case of the Compyn project for the Dierentuinwijk of Ghent, this paper intends to examine whether the implementation of underground infrastructures can be read as an equivalent counterpart of other constructs of nature in the city, such as municipal parks and planted avenues. It questions to what extent the filtering away of nature – especially waterways – is applied as a means of manipulation of nature and the urban landscape. Therefore, the paper will not only discuss the project of Victor Compyn, but will also confront it with the general discourses of the picturesque-minded contemporaries of Compyn at the time

Media masters and grassroot art 2.0 on Youtube

Communication in the Web 2.0 context mainly works through images. The online video platform YouTube uses this form of visual communication and makes art forms of Western societies visible through their online videos. YouTube, as cultural reservoir and visual archive of moving images, accommodates the whole range of visualising creative processes – from artistic finger exercises to fine arts. A general characteristic of YouTube is the publishing of small everyday gestures of the ‘big ones’ (politicians, stars), like small incidents and their clumsiness in everyday actions, e.g. Beyonce´s fall from the stage or Tom Cruise’s demonic pro-scientology interview. Through their viral distribution on different platforms, these incidents will never be covered up or disappear from the public view. At the same time big gestures and star images are replicated and sometimes reinterpreted by the ‘small people’ who present themselves in the poses and attitudes of the stars. Generally, a coexistence of different perspectives is possible. YouTube allows polysemic and polyvalent views on the everyday and media phenomena. This article relies on YouTube research 2 that started in 2006 at the New Media Department of the Goethe University of Frankfurt. The results of the research have already presented representative forms and basic patterns, that is to say, categories for the clips appearing here. These kinds of clips, recurring in the observation period, have an impact on the basic representation of art or artistic expression within moving images on this platform. Methodologically the focus leads to the investigation (which has to be adequate to the specifics of the medium, or ‘media adequate’) of new visual structures and forms which can create – consciously or unconsciously – an art form. After focusing on the media structures, it will be discussed whether any and, if so, which ‘authentic’ new forms were developed solely on YouTube and whether these forms are innovative and can be characterised as avant-garde. This article first takes a small step in evaluating how to get from a general communication through means of visuality in web 2.0, an often endless chatty cheesy visual noise 3 – to the special quality of a consciously created aesthetic. From where do innovative aesthetic forms emerge, related to their media structures? 4 Are they the products of ‘media amateurs’ 5 or do we have to find new specifications and descriptions for the producers? The definition of a ‘media amateur’ describes technically interested private individuals who acquire and develop technology before commercial use of the technology is even recognisable. Just as artists are developing their own techniques, according to Dieter Daniels, media amateurs are autodidacts who invent techniques, rather than just acquire knowledge about them (see for example the demo scene, the machinima, brickfilm producers as well as many areas of computer gaming in general 6). The media amateur directly intervenes in the production processes of the medium and does not just simply use the medium. What is fascinating is the media amateur’s process of self education – not the result – and the direct impact on the internal structure and the control of the medium. 7 Media amateurs open a previously culturally unformed space of experience. This only partially applies to most of the YouTube clips in the realms of the visual arts; it is here most important to look at the visual content. This article discusses all these concepts and introduces new descriptions for the different forms of production: the technically oriented media master, the do-it-yourselfer, the tinkerer, the amateur handicraftsman and the inventor. It outlines a basic research project on ‘visual media culture’ (a triangulation of research on media structure and iconography) of the presented online video platform. It is a product of the analysis of clips focusing on the media structure, analyzing the creative handling of images and the deviations and differences of pre-set media formats and stereotypes

Perusinis II. Fall: Der Alzheimer Patient R.M. Geschichte, Genealogie und Genetik eines psychiatriehistorischen Falls

1.American Journal of Alzheimer`s Disease and Other Dementias: 2010; 25:189-192 100th anniversary of PERUSINI`S SECOND CASE: PATIENT RM and his KINDRED Im Jahre 1907 wurde der Münchener Korbmacher RM als ,,Zweifelhafter Fall“ in der damals ,,Königlich Psychiatrischen Klinik“ in München behandelt. Die diesbezüglich 1909 von Alzheimers Assistenten Gaetano Perusini publizierte Kasuistik siedelt den offensichtlichen Symptomausbruch im Jahr 1899 an. Dieser gemutmaßte extrem frühe Krankheitsbeginn (38.Lebensjahr des RM) sowie Perusinis familienanamnestischer Hinweis ,,ein Bruder desselben soll nicht recht gescheut sein“ erforderte intensive Recherche zu Geschichte und Genealogie dieses psychiatriehistorischen Falls, um das eventuelle Vorliegen einer heredofamiliären Form von Morbus Alzheimer mit Beginn im frühen Lebensalter zu diskutieren. Detaillierte Untersuchungen über acht Generationen konnten zwar psychiatrische Auffälligkeiten im Stammbaum des Probanden aufzeigen, aber keinen Nachweis einer autosomal-dominanten Form der “Early-Onset Alzheimer`s Disease“ erbringen. 2.Nervenheilkunde: 2010; 29:850-852 Alzheimer und Perusini: Patient RM und sein Stammbaum 1773-2009 Die ersten vier Fälle der Alzheimerschen Krankheit wurden in Alzheimers histopathologischem Laboratorium von dem italienischen Neuropathologen Gaetano Perusini untersucht. Das Weiterverfolgen von Perusinis Hinweis zur auffälligen Psychopathologie des Bruders des RM zeigt noch 1923 die identische differentialdiagnostische Überlegung „Arteriosklerose“ wie bereits 1907 beim Probanden selbst. Das Nachvollziehen der damals angewandten relevanten Untersuchungsmethoden zur Sicherung der Verdachtsdiagnose „Progressive Paralyse“ weist erhebliche Ungenauigkeiten in der Dokumentation auf, so dass verschiedene Differentialdiagnosen zu diskutieren sind. Kurz vor ihrem Tod konnte eine APOE-Genotypisierung der gemäß nervenärztlicher Diagnose an dementiellem Syndrom erkrankten Enkeltochter von Perusinis II.Fall durchgeführt werden. Die Genotypisierung konnte das Vorliegen einer autosomal-dominanten Form des Morbus Alzheimer mit frühem Beginn nicht belegen. 3.Nervenarzt: 2011; 82:363-368 La malattia di Alzheimer-Perusini: Zum 100. Jahrestag der Publikation Gaetano Perusinis Die Arbeit zielt ab auf Honorierung der Verdienste des Wissenschaftlers Gaetano Perusini (1879-1915). Durch seine genau ein Jahrhundert zurückliegende Veröffentlichung ,,Über klinisch und histologisch eigenartige psychische Erkrankungen des späteren Lebensalters“ kann er als Wegbereiter für das moderne Konzept des altersunspezifischen Beginns der Alzheimerschen Krankheit gelten. Gaetano Perusini arbeitete wissenschaftlich zusammen mit Ugo Cerletti, Alois Alzheimer, Franz Nissl sowie Emil Kraepelin und war beteiligt an der Herausgabe der ,,Folia Neurobiologica“. In seinem persönlichen Schicksal spiegelt sich die Tragik des 1.Weltkrieges: An den Folgen seiner Verwundung durch einen Granatsplitter verstarb Gaetano Perusini im Alter von nur 36 Jahren