1,720,959 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Phenomenologies of Egalitarianism in Free Improvisation: A Virtual Performer Meets its Critics
Get PDFThis dissertation offers a descriptive, anthropological account of diverse phenomenologies of egalitarian ethics through an experimental ethnography of music and social interaction among performers of free improvisation. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with improvisers in Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco as a saxophonist and participant in these scenes, I show how performers of free improvisation refrain from instructing or criticizing their peers out of respect for their creative liberty and to maintain their experience of equal status. Consequently, I argue that canonical modes of musical ethnography tend to confirm the utopian conception of free improvisation, widely promoted in discourses on this form of musicking over the past half century, as a practice in which performers are liberated from aesthetic constraints and interpersonal hierarchies. This project highlights the shortcomings of typical modes of musical and anthropological fieldwork through an experimental fusion of ethnography and arts-technology research in which I have asked improvisers to critique the interactive and performance capabilities of a virtual performer, known as “Maxine.” Designed based on my experiences improvising with, watching, and listening to others, Maxine is simultaneously a virtual performer but also a form of interactive, algorithmic ethnography. By asking improvisers to play with this system and compare it to human performers, the fieldwork presented in this dissertation illustrates how improvisers espouse a wide variety of notions of how egalitarian experience is realized in how each player listens and responds to others in the course of performance. Crucially, it demonstrates that what is revealed in an encounter with a nonhuman social interactant like Maxine is precisely what often escapes canonical approaches to ethnographic fieldwork. Broadly speaking, while some improvisers regard continual displays of attentiveness from their partners as essential to the experience and performance of an egalitarian ethos in musical interaction, others regard these behaviors as injurious to the ideal of a nonhierarchical sociality in sound. In the process of offering this experiential account of egalitarianism, this dissertation illustrates the many ways in which the design of artificial social interactants implicitly poses a variety of provocative hypotheses about the nature of listening and musical cognition as it takes place between improvisers, many of which are yet to be tested through methodologies such as the one practiced in this project as well as analysis of recorded performances of free improvisation. Furthermore, I also argue that the methodology developed in this project suggests productive new avenues for phenomenologically-oriented ethnography in that encounters with an artificial social interactant like Maxine elicit commentary on real-time sociality as an experience which participants normally refrain from discussing, both within and far beyond free improvisation. By eliciting explicit articulations of ethical normativities, as conceived of by improvisers interacting with Maxine, this project also responds to recent work in the anthropology of ethics by suggesting that much of human moral experience may take the form of latent moral critiques, in which subjects experience an unfulfilled desire to express criticism of the behavior of their interlocutors but nonetheless refrain from doing so for a variety of reasons. Lastly, I argue that subjecting artificial social interactants to the evaluation of the human beings they are modeled upon constitutes a radically new, vibrant form of critical ethnography, one which is implicitly performed throughout the field of human computer interaction even if its practitioners hardly theorize it as such
Maxine’s Turing Test – A Player-Program as Co-Ethnographer of Socio-Aesthetic Interaction in Improvised Music
No full textBeyond the goal of refining system design to the needs and tastes of users, user evaluation of interactive music systems offers a method of examining the nature of musical creativity as understood by its human practitioners. In the case of improvising music systems, user study and evaluation of a system’s ability to improvise may be useful in the ethnomusicological study of musical interaction in contemporary improvised music. A survey of preliminary findings based on the interactions of an improvising system, Maxine, with several improvisers is discussed, with results suggesting methodological reconfigurations of the purpose and goals of evaluating of interactive musical metacreations
People are not Fixed Media
Get PDFSensory ethnography continually emphasizes that the sensorium is just as much a (product of) sociocultural practice as it is a biophysiological property of the human species (Pink 2015). Recognition of this point has prompted several shifts in ethnographic work. On the one hand, it has pushed ethnographers to include in their writing a greater discussion of how subjects engage with the world through their senses as well as how the putatively biological phenomenon of sensory perception is so highly variable across and within sociocultural milieux. On the other, it has inspired ethnographers to pursue media practices beyond text, particularly through ethnographic film or sound recording (Feld 1991). Regardless of form, this work has greatly increased the possibility for the reader, listener, or viewer to experience with their senses the social environment that subjects inhabit and where the ethnographer conducted fieldwork.This blog is published as Banerji, R., People are not Fixed Media., Platypus: The Castac Blog. April 12, 2022. https://blog.castac.org/2022/04/people-are-not-fixed-media/. Posted with permission
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
