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Researching the creative and cultural industries: a guide to qualitative research
No full textResearch into creative and cultural organisations has proliferated, benefitting from insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Starting a research journey can be daunting in such a diverse field. This book provides expert insights into research process and practice, with a qualitative focus.
The book helps readers to plan, execute and analyse research, turning their work into data, results and new knowledge. Taking an individual perspective, the author addresses a trilogy of paradigms, methodologies and methods, and applies them to the whole research process, from start to finish. The book seamlessly links theoretical and conceptual aspects with best research practice along the way.
A book for researchers at all stages of their work, the resources are also valuable for students and reflective cultural practitioners who want to know how to plan, implement and evaluate their research project
Neural bounding
No full textBounding volumes are an established concept in computer graphics and vision tasks but have seen little change since their early inception. In this work, we study the use of neural networks as bounding volumes. Our key observation is that bounding, which so far has primarily been considered a problem of computational geometry, can be redefined as a problem of learning to classify space into free or occupied. This learning-based approach is particularly advantageous in high-dimensional spaces, such as animated scenes with complex queries, where neural networks are known to excel. However, unlocking neural bounding requires a twist: allowing – but also limiting – false positives, while ensuring that the number of false negatives is strictly zero. We enable such tight and conservative results using a dynamically-weighted asymmetric loss function. Our results show that our neural bounding produces up to an order of magnitude fewer false positives than traditional methods. In addition, we propose an extension of our bounding method using early exits that accelerates query speeds by 25 %. We also demonstrate that our approach is applicable to non-deep learning models that train within seconds. Our project page is at https://wenxin-liu.github.io/neural_bounding/
Errata for Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History
No full textIt’s always frustrating to find errors in a work that has already gone to press/been through peer review, but unfortunately my friend Pete Christian has unearthed a few minor mistakes that I want to put out here. Thanks to Pete, who also says that none of this detail affects the overall argument of the text
The Black PhD experience: stories of strength, courage and wisdom in UK academia
No full textThis ground-breaking work tells the stories of Black postgraduate students from application to graduation, outlining the joys, struggles and heartbreaks they have experienced on the road to gaining the highest terminal degree, a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD). From the sciences, arts, humanities and through to social sciences, this book details how the experiences of Black students in the academy are inextricably tied to the experiences of Black communities in Britain as a whole. Black PhD students consistently face institutional racism, hostility, and structural barriers in their struggle to be heard and recognised. Through it all, these students strive and achieve amazing outcomes against the odds. This work is a celebration of their educational genius and tenacity. It is also however a damning indictment of the current state of UK higher education and doctoral studies. Radical change, rooted in anti-racist and decolonial practice is desperately needed. This work is a call to actio
The last days of the urban burial ground: horror, reform and gothic fiction
No full textBook synopsis: Graveyard Gothic is the first sustained consideration of the graveyard as a key Gothic locale. This volume examines various iterations of the Gothic graveyard (and other burial sites) from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, as expressed in numerous forms of culture and media including poetry, fiction, TV, film and video games. The volume also extends its geographic scope beyond British traditions to accommodate multiple cultural perspectives, including those from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. The seventeen chapters from key international Gothic scholars engage a range of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping potential future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic is a landmark volume defining a new area of Gothic studies
Ottinger’s Berlin: exotic of the everyday
No full textBook synopsis: The first English language scholarly collection of articles on the leading Berlin based German artist and film-maker Ulrike Ottinger. The articles engage with the full range of the works, from the early Berlin feature films of the 1970s and .'80s to the ethnographic documentaries also including the art exhibitions, photography shows, installations, and artist books. The book brings together feminist film theorists with art historians and cultural theorists, each with a distinctive and detailed perspective on the queer fabulist genres of Ottinger now in her 80s
Cryo-EM structure of the R388 plasmid conjugative pilus reveals a helical polymer characterized by an unusual pilin/phospholipid binary complex
Get PDFBacterial conjugation is a process by which DNA is transferred unidirectionally from a donor cell to a recipient cell. It is the main means by which antibiotic resistance genes spread among bacterial populations. It is crucially dependent upon the elaboration of an extracellular appendage, termed "pilus," by a large double-membrane-spanning secretion system termed conjugative "type IV secretion system." Here we present the structure of the conjugative pilus encoded by the R388 plasmid. We demonstrate that, as opposed to all conjugative pili produced so far for cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure determination, the conjugative pilus encoded by the R388 plasmid is greatly stimulated by the presence of recipient cells. Comparison of its cryo-EM structure with existing conjugative pilus structures highlights a number of important differences between the R388 pilus structure and that of its homologs, the most prominent being the highly distinctive conformation of its bound lipid
Utopian spaces
No full textThis chapter explores a line of influence in the architecture of American intentional communities from the Associationist movement of the nineteenth century down to the hippy communes that emerged in 1965, built, after Drop City, around the shape of the geodesic dome. This hippy modernism borrowed freely from the ideas of Charles Fourier and Buckminster Fuller and fostered a community that included Stewart Brand, who went on to think about the shape of space colonies and early models of the Internet
Candidate qualifications and out-group support: evidence from Afghanistan
Get PDFCan qualifications help candidates from historically marginalized groups win over
out-group voters? We help answer this question with an original conjoint experiment
fielded on a face-to-face survey conducted in three Afghan provinces between
2016 and 2017. The conjoint asked over 2,400 Afghan respondents to rank and
choose between profiles of hypothetical candidates with varying gender, ethnic and
educational attributes. We explore whether candidate qualifications – as measured
by educational attainment – can amplify respondents’ support for hypothetical candidates
from two social groups traditionally underrepresented in Afghan politics:
women and Hazaras, a predominately Shi’a ethnic minority group. We find that
higher qualifications consistently increase male (non-Hazara) respondents’ ranking
and likelihood of choosing profiles with female (Hazara) candidates. These gains,
however, do not completely offset male (non-Hazara) respondents’ in-group biases.
Qualifications help but are not enough to dismantle voter preferences for in-group
candidates
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