Understanding Lists: Umberto Eco\u27s Rhetoric of Communication and Signification

This project, Understanding Lists: Umberto Eco’s Rhetoric of Communication and Signification, begins and ends with an observation and warning suggested throughout Eco’s work: lists are the origin of culture and the Internet as the Mother of All Lists threatens to end culture. To understand this warning, I turn to Eco’s work on lists, contextualized within a 2009 exhibition at the Musée du Louvre and in an illustrated collection, The Infinity of Lists. This project offers an analysis of Eco’s understanding of lists concurrent to his commentary on the social and cultural implications of the algorithmic-obsessed Internet age. To understand his argument, this project collects hints of insight through his corpus. In Eco’s cultural aesthetics, he celebrates the notion of openness that invites and encourages audience participation in the interpretation of texts with multiple possibilities. With his interpretive semiotics, Eco offers a theory of culture grounded in signification and communication. Signification consists of the codes of culture that make meaning and interpretive response possible. Communication is the labor of sign production and interpretation. Throughout his literary praxis, Eco implements these theoretical notions into story-form, and with his fifth novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, affirms the mutual necessity of communication and signification. Ultimately, Eco urges us to list as a response to the threats of algorithmic processing of big data that displaces and replaces the human interpreter. For Eco, listing a form of communication that requires the labor to wade through information, activate codes of signification, and interpret cultural meaning

John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricœur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Review of the book John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricœur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)Recension de l'ouvrage John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricœur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Sea otters in a California estuary: Detecting temporal and spatial dynamics with volunteer monitoring

Abstract Volunteer monitoring can support conservation of imperiled wildlife, by providing higher resolution data in space and time than those available from professional scientists. However, concerns have been raised that data collected by amateurs are inaccurate or inconsistent and thus do not allow for robust detection of spatial or temporal trends. We evaluated the rigor and value of volunteer monitoring data for one iconic wildlife species, the southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris nereis), in Elkhorn Slough estuary in central California, USA, and explored whether volunteer monitoring could provide added value to complement limited professional surveys. First, we compiled and analyzed sea otter counts taken on daily ecotourist boat trips along the estuary, and then compared temporal patterns to data collected by professional scientists tasked with monitoring this federally listed species. Second, we analyzed data on sea otter abundance, habitat use, and behavior collected by a team of trained volunteers, the Elkhorn Slough Reserve Otter Monitoring Program. Overall, we demonstrated the ability to detect important ecological patterns relevant to sea otter conservation and wetland habitat management using volunteer‐derived datasets. Long‐term trends and inter‐annual variability were similar between professional agency monitoring data and volunteer datasets. Moreover, the much higher frequency of volunteer observations allowed for seasonal and tidal dynamics to be detected that could not be revealed by less frequent professional monitoring. We found higher sea otter abundance in the estuary in spring–summer, indicating seasonality in use of the estuary. We detected differences in habitat use of the estuary between higher and lower tides, and greater frequency of foraging at low tide and in certain areas. Volunteer observations revealed fine‐scale differences in habitat use: eelgrass beds were used much more heavily than adjacent areas only a few meters away. Volunteer data can thus provide critical information about coastal habitat use and behavior that can improve conservation strategies for threatened wildlife species