Derek Mahon's Seascapes Mediated through Greece: Antiquity in Modernity, Nature in Abstraction.

The article investigates various approaches to seascape in selected poems of the contemporary Irish poet, Derek Mahon, set against the background of references to Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney or Odysseus Elytis. The sea provides a perspective that cannot be overestimated in trying to get an insight into the communication and the clash between the culture of the South and the North. The two nations have often glimpsed at their reflection in the mirror of the surrounding seas, their history and mentality determined by their geographical position and largely insular experience. Elements such as the isolation from the mainland; the perception of the sea as a personification of the force ruling over life and death, as a threat and a promise; or the focus on some characteristic natural phenomena such as light or surface dominate the seascape imagery both in Greek and Irish literature. The sea often constitutes a border of antagonistic and complementary worlds: dream and reality, light and darkness, male and female, the real world and the underworld – and the vantage point of the poet changes accordingly. Some poems under discussion also explore a series of myths linked with the sea, the best known of which, the Odyssey, has remained a frame of reference for numerous contemporary Greek and Irish poets. Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. As Longley once observed, “his part of Mayo” reminds him of Ithaca (sandy and remote) and of Greece in general: “I’ve often thought that that part of Ireland . . . looks like Greece. Or Greece looks like a dust-bowl version of Ireland,” which triggers further deliberations on seascape as the common ground for the two countries. Just as Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo, Mahon’s Cyclades provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. The focus of this article is Derek Mahon’s seascapes: purely Greek (‘Aphrodite’s Pool’), Irish seen through the prism of the Greek ones (‘Achill’) and purely Irish (‘Recalling Aran’). The level of abstraction in the last category is compared with Odysseus Elytis’s imagery of the Cyclades, while the first poem demystifies a practice which I termed as ‘myth trading’, one of consumerist tourism techniques

Criticality, experimentation and compciity in the LA Review of Books' Digital Humanities controversy

No abstract available

Ethics and Practical Reason

In this review of essays on the topic of practical reason, the neo-Humeanism of philosophers such as James Drier, according to whom reasons are instrumental, is shown to be susceptible to the objections of Kantian philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard: the fact that you desire to X can never entail that you ought to X. Kantianism, however, comes under attack from neo-Aristotelian philosophers such as Berys Gaut, who argues that it is a mistake to identify goodness with being the object of free rational choice

Descriptive metadata for the CAVA repository

This document describes the descriptive metadata schema devised for the CAVA (human Communication: an Audio-Visual Archive) Project

CAVA (human Communication: an Audio-Visual Archive)

In order to investigate human communication and interaction, researchers need hours of audio-visual data, sometimes recorded over periods of months or years. The process of collecting, cataloguing and transcribing such valuable data is time-consuming and expensive. Once it is collected and ready to use, it makes sense to get the maximum value from it by reusing it and sharing it among the research community. But unlike highly-controlled experimental data, natural audio-visual data tends to defy easy classification, and may lead to idiosyncratic solutions to preservation, metadata and access issues. It is not uncommon for vital and unique data to languish on VHS tapes in personal collections. Natural data can often be used for more than the purpose its collector intended. Researchers may be able to save time and money, or improve the depth of their observations and conclusions, by reusing existing data instead of collecting their own. Despite its usefulness, data in personal collections does not lend itself to being shared between researchers and institutions on a large scale. This is largely due to the absence, until now, of a centralised data archive to support such research and to offer opportunities for collaborative work. CAVA (human Communication: an Audio-Visual Archive) is a JISC-funded project based at University College London in collaboration with the UK Data Archive (UKDA), running from April 2009 to March 2010

Introduction: critical thought, media and practice

No abstract available

Aftershock: Serving 9/11 Displaced Workers

On September 30, 2004, the Heldrich Center hosted a symposium in New York to reflect upon the efforts of the September 11th Fund's Employment Assistance Program to help more than 11,000 dislocated workers from the New York region find new jobs and launch new careers. This publication reports the proceedings of that symposium

Consolidation of graphite thermoplastic textile preforms for primary aircraft structure

The use of innovative cost effective material forms and processes is being considered for fabrication of future primary aircraft structures. Processes that have been identified as meeting these goals are textile preforms that use resin transfer molding (RTM) and consolidation forming. The Novel Composites for Wing and Fuselage Applications (NCWFA) program has as its objective the integration of innovative design concepts with cost effective fabrication processes to develop damage-tolerant structures that can perform at a design ultimate strain level of 6000 micro-inch/inch. In this on-going effort, design trade studies were conducted to arrive at advanced wing designs that integrate new material forms with innovative structural concepts and cost effective fabrication methods. The focus has been on minimizing part count (mechanical fasteners, clips, number of stiffeners, etc.), by using cost effective textile reinforcement concepts that provide improved damage tolerance and out-of-plane load capability, low-cost resin transfer molding processing, and thermoplastic forming concepts. The fabrication of representative Y spars by consolidation methods will be described. The Y spars were fabricated using AS4 (6K)/PEEK 150g commingled angle interlock 0/90-degree woven preforms with +45-degree commingled plies stitched using high strength Toray carbon thread and processed by autoclave consolidation