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Sedimentation, modular construction, and the musical first person:A portfolio of 12 compositions, with an accompanying commentary
Get PDFThis thesis comprises a portfolio of twelve compositions written between 2016 and 2023, an accompanying commentary, and an electronic file containing recordings of the pieces included. It brings together solo works, pieces for ensembles of smaller sizes (including instrumental fragments from an opera in progress), and a characteristic portion of a completed double concerto for piano, trumpet, and orchestra.My primary interest is the accretion of a style in music. How does music unfold through juxtaposing material produced at different times, creating a set of temporally marked, quasi-geological deposits—the alluviation of a musical first-person voice—from material drawing on a personal musical past and shared historical experience? I examine the function of three concepts: sedimentation; distorted quotation (of myself and others); and ‘inaudible counterpoint’ in my compositional practice.The commentary begins with an overview of the portfolio and a glossary of terms.In the Introduction, section 1, I examine the horizontal (temporal) and vertical (harmonic) aspects of my compositional practice, conceptualising them in relationship to historical models drawn from György Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Part I (sections 2 and 3), I look at counterpoint as a model for my compositional work, beginning with a set of canons I wrote during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, examining a practice I call sedimentation, the contrapuntal juxtaposition of materials written at different times, in several groups of pieces.Part II (section 4) examines the juxtaposition of materials written at different times in dramaturgical practice, in modular disposition rather than contrapuntal invention, in three pieces (for solo cello, for solo violin, and for string quartet). The first of these pieces evokes my own work as a teenager, the second a short work by Telemann, the last a mass by Johannes Ockeghem. In Part III (section 5) of the thesis, I examine how I have arrived at a concept central to my current practice: ‘inaudible counterpoint’ written against unexpressed quotations. From the direct evocations of older music described in the previous section, I move on to three pieces written in response to unexpressed but pre-existing sound material (either music by Sciarrino and Bach, or aspects of a soundscape, e.g. storm sirens).In the Conclusion (section 6), I give a recapitulatory account of my results and suggest directions for further exploration of the musical first person as a subjective, biographical, aesthetic concept.<br/
Fluidity of Sharīʿa and the Modern State:Inheritance Rights of Childless Widows under Shīʿa Personal Law in British India and Pakistan
Get PDFThe Qurʾān grants a childless widow a one-fourth share in the inheritance of her husband. However, this right is limited to movable property under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school in South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). In December 2021, Pakistan’s parliament extended a childless widow’s inheritance right to include immovable property under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school. This paper examines the historical processes that contributed to the formulation and subsequent reformulation of the legal rule governing the inheritance right of a childless widow under the Ithnā ʿAsharīyya school. It identifies distinct but interconnected phases in which sharīʿa was transformed within the institutional structure of the modern state during the colonial and post-colonial periods. By doing so, the paper highlights the fluidity of sharīʿa as a legal tradition, which adapted to changing circumstances in different historical contexts
Feminine plural: revealing representations of overlooked women’s experiences in Paula Delsol’s La Dérive (1964) and Ben et Benedict (1977)
Get PDFIn this thesis, I examine the work of French filmmaker Paula Delsol, specifically her two major films, La Dérive (1964) and Ben et Benedict (1977). Both films foreground certain overlooked aspects of women’s experiences of sex, reproductive politics, motherhood and unpaid domestic and wage labour. A small number of commentators have recognised La Dérive but only within a framework of auteur criticism, reclaiming it as a lost Nouvelle Vague text and (mis)labelling Delsol in terms of a putative feminism. Ben et Benedict, meanwhile, remains almost completely unknown in Francophone and Anglophone literature. Viewing her cinema for the first time by examining relevant facets of the conditions of production, I adopt a new critical framework for approaching Delsol’s work. I explore how these two films supplement contemporaneous and twenty-first century understandings of women’s lived experiences during the 1960s and 1970s. I consider a range of materials from each decade, including popular women’s magazines, advertisements, essays, manifestos, televised newsreels and films which indicate popular understandings of key aspects of women’s experiences circulating at the time, and add to them with archival research and more recent theoretical perspectives. These socio-political contexts –referred to throughout as “snapshots” – are used for evaluating each film via close textualanalysis of selected scenes from La Dérive and Ben et Benedict. I interrogate the extent to which Delsol’s films and their thematic and formal treatment of the rarely considered facets of women’s work, sexual encounters, reproductive futures and relationships with motherhood, may knowingly or unknowingly supplement, and indeed challenge, representations of these same issues in other media of the time. I argue that Delsol’s films make a significant contribution to French cinema through their unexplored representations which expand critical perceptions of some overlooked aspects of women’s experiences in parts of 1960s and 1970s France
Constructing a Tutte polynomial for graphs embedded in surfaces
Get PDFThere are several different extensions of the Tutte polynomial to graphs embedded in surfaces. To help frame the different options, here we consider the problem of extending the Tutte polynomial to embedded graphs starting from first principles. We offer three different routes to defining such a polynomial and show that they all lead to the same polynomial. This resulting polynomial is known in the literature under a few different names including the ribbon graph polynomial, and 2-variable Bollobas-Riordan polynomial.Our overall aim here is to use this discussion as a mechanism for providing a gentle introduction to the topic of Tutte polynomials for graphs embedded in surfaces
Constraining systematic uncertainties using T2K Near Detector with X and Y FGD2 scintillator layers information in Markov chain Monte Carlo framework
Get PDFT2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. It consists of a near detector (ND280) and a far detector (FD) Super-Kamiokande to make precise measurements of neutrino oscillations parameters and ultimately to determine the presence of CP violation in the lepton sector. The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) produces a muon (anti-)neutrino beam which is aimed towards the Far Detector 295km away. The work presented here uses data collected by ND280, which measures neutrino flux and interaction cross sections pre-oscillation, and utilises a Monte Carlo Markov chain framework to constrain the predicted event spectra for the Far Detector. The flux and interaction models used in this analysis are parameterised via prior predictions and uncertainties from theoretical calculations, external data and precise flux measurements. In this thesis, a discussion on the inclusion of new samples using X and Y scintillator layer information in FGD2 to constrain events on Carbon and Oxygen as target materials. T2K has made world-leading measurements of Oscillation parameters, with the ND280 data providing crucial measurements to reduce the uncertainty by a factor of 6 to the Far Detector prediction. This analysis utilises ND280 data from T2K Runs2-9, and flux and cross section models used in the Oscillation Analysis of 2021.<br/
The Commentariat: A Demographic, Ideological and Rhetorical Analysis of Twitter Power-Users
Get PDFWhen political issues are discussed in the public sphere, whose opinions do we hear? This is a central democratic question, as those who commentate on political issues have a profound effect on public opinion (Zaller, 1992; Page, 1996). However, the way political commentary operates on social media has yet to be fully explored. This is a crucial omission, as political communication on social media platforms is dominated by a select few individuals (Bracciale et al., 2018). This subset of “power-users” – individual accounts who receive significant audience engagement – produce a large share of the political content that Twitter users are exposed to (Guo et al., 2020). Yet past literature has yet to answer three questions: 1) Who are Twitter’s political power-users from a professional and demographic perspective? 2) How extreme are power-users in terms of their issue opinions? And 3) To what extent do power-users influence the tone of political discussion on the platform? This thesis presents three empirical papers to investigate these questions, leveraging a dataset of 6.5 million tweets on Brexit, a highly salient issue which mobilised both elites and the public (Hobolt et al., 2018). The key contribution of this thesis is the identification of citizen opinion leaders – members of the public who possess a significant online political audience – as a new category of online political commentator. Citizen opinion leaders make up a large contingent of the most-shared accounts on Twitter (Paper #1) and play a central role in the spread of incivility in online political discussions (Paper #3). More broadly, this thesis provides evidence of how issue extremity and incivility on Twitter is driven by the platform’s political “commentariat”, a topic neglected by prior literature (Papers #2 and #3). Methodologically, it presents novel applications of text-scaling and time-series analysis to investigate such effects
Ready Player One: The Challenges and Opportunities of Sustainable Freelance Labour in the UK Videogames Industry
Get PDF'In a world beset with rampant speculative development, I think the process of excavation can be as interesting, if not more interesting, than what was found’: Engaging multiple publics in developer-funded archaeology, from the field to the final report.
Get PDFUnderstanding inclusion in crowdsourcing digital platforms: The case of UNAL Innova in Colombia
Get PDFThe use of digital platforms has risen in all spheres of social life. The role they play in including different communities and those that can be traditionally excluded is less understood, especially in developing countries. The current research examines the question: to what extent can excluded groups be included in digital platforms? It examines the UNAL Innova crowdsourcing platform in Colombia and some of its subsequent derivations. The study adopts Strong Structuration Theory (SST) as a theoretical framework and sensitising device. Various sources of qualitative data were collected in Colombia between the second half of 2021 and February 2022. The data included interviews, document analysis, and netnography. The data were triangulated and analysed thematically using qualitative data analysis software. The research findings reveal that the internal structures of the platform were challenged by the creation of derivations of the original platform to expand its purpose of use and include different groups. However, external structures and the reorganisation of different agents curbed its purpose and led to the platform being used mainly by academics as a nichesourcing platform. Consequently, the reproduction of other internal structures did not serve wider communities, limiting the opportunity for the digital platform to be used by excluded social groups. The study contributes to the digital platforms and ICT4D literature by revealing the difficulties that digital platforms face in promoting digital inclusion. It shows how different implicit or explicit exclusionary practices in digital platforms can hinder the opportunity for excluded groups to have an active role in digital scenarios. The study also contributes to the literature on the digital inequalities and digital divide by theorising inclusion as an outcome of the interaction between different human and technological agents under specific internal and external structures. In addition, the study contributes to the Strong Structuration Theory (SST) framework by emphasising the role of material properties and features of technology and how they can influence or hinder inclusion.Regarding practice, the study demonstrates to practitioners and policymakers that top-down visions of inclusion can underestimate the barriers faced by excluded groups in benefiting from digital platforms. Hence, it calls for alternative governance to promote the involvement of wider groups in platform decision-making and, instead of competitive approaches, to embrace structures that promote collaboration and collective production. Research limitations and avenues of future research are also discussed. <br/
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