60 research outputs found
In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon
No full textFrequently referred to as New Zealand’s most famous and least public author, Janet Frame occupies a curious place in the nation’s literary and cultural history. With her feted literary production largely overshadowed by her dramatic personal history, Frame is, to paraphrase one critic, an author obscured by her image. The present study takes the form of an analysis of this characterisation of Frame in all its attendant implications: biomythical, socio-cultural, multimedia, and extraliterary. Inverting the traditional mode of analysis, we will frame our subject, as it were, by focusing not on the author’s own literary production, but on the promotion and reception of her work in an increasingly heterogeneous range of media/contexts, examining Frame’s transformation from obscure author to New Zealand icon in relation to an ever expanding range of appropriations. Far from superfluous artefacts subordinate to traditional modes of literary analyses, the ephemeral and ancillary evocations of authorial identity that form the basis of our study have an animating and vitalising influence on Frame’s career and celebrity status, testifying to the integral role of mass media in the perpetuation of her biographical legend and construction of her iconic status. By concealing their inherently discontinuous nature through their re-presentation of the subject as an historically determined presence, these manifold appropriations simultaneously purport to present us with an authentic and incontrovertible image of the author, a guarantee that gains added significance in the case of famously hermetic celebrities such as Frame. The increasingly visual nature of Frame’s authorial construction creates the illusion of the foreclosure of the gap between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and unknowable. Through this process, Frame’s likeness becomes increasingly ubiquitous while retaining the mysterious qualities essential to her appeal as both an experimental author and enigmatic celebrity. But rather than re-present her rise to prominence as ameliorative in its manifestation, our analysis reveals Frame’s authorial imago to be a contended site of cultural production, mediating the impact and influence of artists commercial and political commodities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century New Zealand. Refashioned as a secularised, multimedia re-presentation of irrepressible artistic individuality in the face of social and global impediment, Frame’s remarkable life/story is indelibly etched into New Zealand’s cultural imaginary; the famously reclusive author granted the status of Kiwi Icon
In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon
No full textFrequently referred to as New Zealand’s most famous and least public author, Janet Frame occupies a curious place in the nation’s literary and cultural history. With her feted literary production largely overshadowed by her dramatic personal history, Frame is, to paraphrase one critic, an author obscured by her image. The present study takes the form of an analysis of this characterisation of Frame in all its attendant implications: biomythical, socio-cultural, multimedia, and extraliterary. Inverting the traditional mode of analysis, we will frame our subject, as it were, by focusing not on the author’s own literary production, but on the promotion and reception of her work in an increasingly heterogeneous range of media/contexts, examining Frame’s transformation from obscure author to New Zealand icon in relation to an ever expanding range of appropriations. Far from superfluous artefacts subordinate to traditional modes of literary analyses, the ephemeral and ancillary evocations of authorial identity that form the basis of our study have an animating and vitalising influence on Frame’s career and celebrity status, testifying to the integral role of mass media in the perpetuation of her biographical legend and construction of her iconic status. By concealing their inherently discontinuous nature through their re-presentation of the subject as an historically determined presence, these manifold appropriations simultaneously purport to present us with an authentic and incontrovertible image of the author, a guarantee that gains added significance in the case of famously hermetic celebrities such as Frame. The increasingly visual nature of Frame’s authorial construction creates the illusion of the foreclosure of the gap between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and unknowable. Through this process, Frame’s likeness becomes increasingly ubiquitous while retaining the mysterious qualities essential to her appeal as both an experimental author and enigmatic celebrity. But rather than re-present her rise to prominence as ameliorative in its manifestation, our analysis reveals Frame’s authorial imago to be a contended site of cultural production, mediating the impact and influence of artists commercial and political commodities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century New Zealand. Refashioned as a secularised, multimedia re-presentation of irrepressible artistic individuality in the face of social and global impediment, Frame’s remarkable life/story is indelibly etched into New Zealand’s cultural imaginary; the famously reclusive author granted the status of Kiwi Icon
The exhaustive genomic scan approach, with an application to rare-variant association analysis
No full textRegion-based genome-wide scans are usually performed by use of a priori chosen analysis regions. Such an approach will likely miss the region comprising the strongest signal and, thus, may result in increased type II error rates and decreased power. Here, we propose a genomic exhaustive scan approach that analyzes all possible subsequences and does not rely on a prior definition of the analysis regions. As a prime instance, we present a computationally ultraefficient implementation using the rare-variant collapsing test for phenotypic association, the genomic exhaustive collapsing scan (GECS). Our implementation allows for the identification of regions comprising the strongest signals in large, genome-wide rare-variant association studies while controlling the family-wise error rate via permutation. Application of GECS to two genomic data sets revealed several novel significantly associated regions for age-related macular degeneration and for schizophrenia. Our approach also offers a high potential to improve genome-wide scans for selection, methylation, and other analyses
METAINTER: meta-analysis of multiple regression models in genome-wide association studies
No full textFracture: The reception of the 'other' author in Aotearoa
No full textThe fracturing of cultural identity is a common trope in postcolonial literatures. Traditional binaries of 'self' and 'other' are now complicated by cultural hybridities that reflect the intersectionality of migrant identities, indigeneity and the postcolonial national 'self'. Where the binaries 'self' and 'other' do not hold, creative forms like the novel can go some way towards exploring hybrid and 'other' experiences, both as a reinscribing and reimagining of the centre, and as a complex 'writing back'. This thesis investigates the complex positioning of the hybrid or double-cultured individual in Aotearoa in the last forty years. While postcolonial models have been used to expose the exoticisation of the 'other' in fictional texts, Part One of this thesis goes a step further by applying these models to real authors and interrogating their representations as static objects/products in the collective 'text' of media items written about them. Shifts in 'our' national literary identity can be traced in changes in responses to 'other' authors over time. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the first part of this thesis proves that there are differences in the media‟s portrayal of six Māori and 'other' ethnic authors: Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Kapka Kassabova, Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila and Cliff Fell, beginning with the 1972 publication of Ihimaera‟s Pounamu Pounamu and ending in 2009 with Tusiata Avia‟s Bloodclot. Part One of this thesis mixes media studies, postcolonial literary analysis, and cultural theory, and references the work of Ghassan Hage, Graham Huggan, Margery Fee, Patrick Evans, Mark Williams, and Simone Drichel. Part Two of this thesis is comprised of a novel, Fracture. While Part One constitutes an investigation of the positioning of the 'other' author, Part Two is a creative exploration of two double-cultured and dispossessed indigenous characters' lived experience. The novel follows a Greek-New Zealand woman and a Māori man who go to a rural pā to protest fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. While the first part of the thesis explores the positioning of the „other‟ outside of the white self, the novel aims to portray the effects of such 'othering,' on the individual and demonstrate how the historical/political event can be a real experiential locale for the 'other'
Fracture: The reception of the 'other' author in Aotearoa
No full textThe fracturing of cultural identity is a common trope in postcolonial
literatures. Traditional binaries of 'self' and 'other' are now
complicated by cultural hybridities that reflect the intersectionality
of migrant identities, indigeneity and the postcolonial national 'self'.
Where the binaries 'self' and 'other' do not hold, creative forms like
the novel can go some way towards exploring hybrid and 'other'
experiences, both as a reinscribing and reimagining of the centre, and
as a complex 'writing back'. This thesis investigates the complex
positioning of the hybrid or double-cultured individual in Aotearoa in
the last forty years. While postcolonial models have been used to expose
the exoticisation of the 'other' in fictional texts, Part One of this
thesis goes a step further by applying these models to real authors and
interrogating their representations as static objects/products in the
collective 'text' of media items written about them. Shifts in 'our'
national literary identity can be traced in changes in responses to
'other' authors over time. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the
first part of this thesis proves that there are differences in the
media‟s portrayal of six Māori and 'other' ethnic authors: Witi
Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Kapka Kassabova, Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila and
Cliff Fell, beginning with the 1972 publication of Ihimaera‟s Pounamu
Pounamu and ending in 2009 with Tusiata Avia‟s Bloodclot. Part One of
this thesis mixes media studies, postcolonial literary analysis, and
cultural theory, and references the work of Ghassan Hage, Graham Huggan,
Margery Fee, Patrick Evans, Mark Williams, and Simone Drichel. Part Two
of this thesis is comprised of a novel, Fracture. While Part One
constitutes an investigation of the positioning of the 'other' author,
Part Two is a creative exploration of two double-cultured and
dispossessed indigenous characters' lived experience. The novel follows a
Greek-New Zealand woman and a Māori man who go to a rural pā to protest
fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. While the first part of the thesis
explores the positioning of the „other‟ outside of the white self, the
novel aims to portray the effects of such 'othering,' on the individual
and demonstrate how the historical/political event can be a real
experiential locale for the 'other'
Analysis of the progression of systolic blood pressure using imputation of missing phenotype values
No full text
Quick, “Imputation-free” meta-analysis with proxy-SNPs
No full textAbstract Background Meta-analysis (MA) is widely used to pool genome-wide association studies (GWASes) in order to a) increase the power to detect strong or weak genotype effects or b) as a result verification method. As a consequence of differing SNP panels among genotyping chips, imputation is the method of choice within GWAS consortia to avoid losing too many SNPs in a MA. YAMAS (Yet Another Meta Analysis Software), however, enables cross-GWAS conclusions prior to finished and polished imputation runs, which eventually are time-consuming. Results Here we present a fast method to avoid forfeiting SNPs present in only a subset of studies, without relying on imputation. This is accomplished by using reference linkage disequilibrium data from 1,000 Genomes/HapMap projects to find proxy-SNPs together with in-phase alleles for SNPs missing in at least one study. MA is conducted by combining association effect estimates of a SNP and those of its proxy-SNPs. Our algorithm is implemented in the MA software YAMAS. Association results from GWAS analysis applications can be used as input files for MA, tremendously speeding up MA compared to the conventional imputation approach. We show that our proxy algorithm is well-powered and yields valuable ad hoc results, possibly providing an incentive for follow-up studies. We propose our method as a quick screening step prior to imputation-based MA, as well as an additional main approach for studies without available reference data matching the ethnicities of study participants. As a proof of principle, we analyzed six dbGaP Type II Diabetes GWAS and found that the proxy algorithm clearly outperforms naïve MA on the p-value level: for 17 out of 23 we observe an improvement on the p-value level by a factor of more than two, and a maximum improvement by a factor of 2127. Conclusions YAMAS is an efficient and fast meta-analysis program which offers various methods, including conventional MA as well as inserting proxy-SNPs for missing markers to avoid unnecessary power loss. MA with YAMAS can be readily conducted as YAMAS provides a generic parser for heterogeneous tabulated file formats within the GWAS field and avoids cumbersome setups. In this way, it supplements the meta-analysis process.</p
A one-degree-of-freedom test for supra-multiplicativity of SNP effects.
No full textDeviation from multiplicativity of genetic risk factors is biologically plausible and might explain why Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) so far could unravel only a portion of disease heritability. Still, evidence for SNP-SNP epistasis has rarely been reported, suggesting that 2-SNP models are overly simplistic. In this context, it was recently proposed that the genetic architecture of complex diseases could follow limiting pathway models. These models are defined by a critical risk allele load and imply multiple high-dimensional interactions. Here, we present a computationally efficient one-degree-of-freedom "supra-multiplicativity-test" (SMT) for SNP sets of size 2 to 500 that is designed to detect risk alleles whose joint effect is fortified when they occur together in the same individual. Via a simulation study we show that the SMT is powerful in the presence of threshold models, even when only about 30-45% of the model SNPs are available. In addition, we demonstrate that the SMT outperforms standard interaction analysis under recessive models involving just a few SNPs. We apply our test to 10 consensus Alzheimer's disease (AD) susceptibility SNPs that were previously identified by GWAS and obtain evidence for supra-multiplicativity ([Formula: see text]) that is not attributable to either two-way or three-way interaction
- …
