'Countries in the Air': Travel and Geomodernism in Louis MacNeice's BBC Features

In the middle stretch of his twenty-two-year BBC career, the poet and producer Louis MacNeice earned a reputation as one of the ‘undisputed masters of creative sound broadcasting’, a reputation derived, in part, from a huge range of radio features that were founded upon his journeys abroad. Through close examination of some of his most significant overseas soundscapes – including Portrait of Rome (1947) and Portrait of Delhi (1948) – this article will consider the role and function of travel in shaping MacNeice’s engagement with the radio feature as a modernist form at a particular transcultural moment when Britain moved through the end of the Second World War and the eventual disintegration of its empire

Augmentation not Duplication: Considerations for the Design of Digitally-Augmented Comic Books

Digital-augmentation of print-media can provide contextually relevant audio, visual, or haptic content to supplement the static text and images. The design of such augmentation—its medium, quantity, frequency, content, and access technique—can have a significant impact on the reading experience. In the worst case, such as where children are learning to read, the print medium can become a proxy for accessing digital content only, and the textual content is avoided. In this work, we examine how augmented content can change the reader’s behaviour with a comic book. We first report on the usage of a commercially available augmented comic for children, providing evidence that a third of all readers converted to simply viewing the digital media when printed content is duplicated. Second, we explore the design space for digital content augmentation in print media. Third, we report a user study with 136 children that examined the impact of both content length and presentation in a digitally-augmented comic book. From this, we report a series of design guidelines to assist designers and editors in the development of digitally-augmented print media

Validation of the French version of the alcohol, smoking and substance involvement screening test (ASSIST) in the elderly

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Substance use disorders seem to be an under considered health problem amongst the elderly. The Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST), was developed by the World Health Organization to detect substance use disorders. The present study evaluates the psychometric properties of the French version of ASSIST in a sample of elderly people attending geriatric outpatient facilities (primary care or psychiatric facilities).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>One hundred persons older than 65 years were recruited from clients attending a geriatric policlinic day care centre and from geriatric psychiatric facilities. Measures included ASSIST, Addiction Severity Index (ASI), Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI-Plus), Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), Revised Fagerstrom Tolerance Questionnaire-Smoking (RTQ) and MiniMental State(MMS).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Concurrent validity was established with significant correlations between ASSIST scores, scores from ASI, AUDIT, RTQ, and significantly higher ASSIST scores for patients with a MINI-Plus diagnosis of abuse or dependence. The ASSIST questionnaire was found to have high internal consistency for the total substance involvement along with specific substance involvement as assessed by Cronbach’s α, ranging from 0.66, to 0.89 .</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The findings demonstrate that ASSIST is a valid screening test for identifying substance use disorders in elderly.</p

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon on BBC radio, 1946-1976

This article, the first academic discussion of Greek tragedy on BBC Radio, offers a historical outline of the production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia plays from the inaugural Greek tragedy on the Third Programme in 1946 to a landmark experimental production on Radio 3 thirty years later. This case-study demonstrates the importance of the radio medium in the reception history of Greek tragedy in twentieth-century Britain, and opens up discussion of the social and cultural impact of these productions. The radio medium, in permeating cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries, undoubtedly brought knowledge and experience of Greek tragedy in performance to an audience which was at once massive and diverse, and situated beyond the theatrical and educational spheres usually occupied by Greek tragedy. Attention is focused on the collaborative relationship between radio producers (such as Val Gielgud, Raymond Raikes, and John Theocharis) and translators and writers (such as Louis MacNeice, Philip Vellacott and Gabriel Josipovici), which secured a steady flow of new scripts for production, introductory talks for broadcast, and explanatory articles for publication in the Radio Times. The process also, importantly, encouraged the emerging function of the producer as textual editor for the medium, manipulating the script for realization in the visualizing imagination of the listener

Emotional Ambivalence across Times and Spaces: Mapping Petrarch’s Intersecting Worlds

Petrarch stands at the top of Mount Ventoux and proclaims his longing to return home. His soul turns toward Italy. Yet Petrarch has no “home” as such, and Italy does not exist except as a post-imperial territorial designation. There certainly is no Italian nation. How can we understand these paradoxes? How does Petrarch’s passion relate to the question of nation formation? Through an exploration of Petrarch’s emotional responses to Italy, and by tracking his variable senses of space and time, this essay explores the tensions expressed by a deracinated intellectual caught between two different but contemporaneous ontological formations: the traditional and the modern. Here, the concept of “the traditional” is not treated as being the same as “the pre-modern.” Rather the essay works with a post-binary method of ontological valences or orientations. The colliding valence s of Petrarch’s evocations are used to illustrate the ways we can open up alternative lines of inquiry into a crucial period in the life of Italy. The essay seeks an alternative to the mainstream tendency to either to make contentious overstatements or to slide into overcautious interpretative ambiguity