1,720,960 research outputs found
Stigma and stigmata: Demon possession and sexual violence in post-recession American horror cinema
No full textThis thesis is a contemporaneous analysis of the subgenre of demon-possession film in post-recession American horror. Demonic possession horror operates under generic codes and conventions that are explicitly gendered. In her foundational work on horror cinema, Barbara Creed (1993) argues that the spectacle of the possessed female body could have subversive potential. However, in general she notes that the presence of monstrous feminine bodies in horror serves the political purpose of expressing reactionary and masculinist fears rather than feminist desires for subjectivity. The project explores how the demon-possession subgenre re-emerged as a popular and profitable subgenre in American horror cinema in the post-recession era when feminism experienced a renewed popularity in mainstream media and popular culture. My research explores the relationship between demon possession films of this time and popular feminist discourse and reactionary, “popular” misogyny. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2016) describes popular misogyny as a contemporary iteration of anti-feminism that is expressed and disseminated through technology and social media, circulating sexually violent public discourse and rhetorically normalizing violence against women. In this thesis I analyse demon-possession horror films that include textual references to sexual violence such as Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (Prest, 2011); Darling (Keating, 2015); and Lovely Molly (Sanchez, 2011). Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of affect, whereby negative emotions “stick” to marginalised subject positions (2004), I argue that the emotions of disgust, hate and fear become attached to the women who experience sexual violence in these films in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, these films are contrasted with demon-possession films featuring possessed men, as male-possession narratives tend to feature sexual and gender-based violence by possessed male bodies against women. In the final chapter, I discuss films influenced by the #MeToo movement that perform feminist and epistemic interventions to the more reactionary depictions of sexual violence
‘Here. Now. Ours’: interrogating the use of situated Augmented Reality electronic-literature to increase awareness of a city’s green, public spaces
No full textThe aim of this practice-based research is to investigate the use of situated Augmented Reality electronic literature (eLit) as a new way of increasing awareness of a city’s green spaces in its citizens. Its hypothesis is that both its situated nature and the embodied nature of its Augmented Reality (AR) can make it effective in increasing awareness of those green spaces – as well as increasing agency & civic will. The use of new Augmented Reality (AR) technology combined with situated eLit brings an innovative approach to raising public awareness while also highlighting ideas about urban psychogeography, play, public and private ownership of urban environments, and surveillance capitalism. This hypothesis can also be formulated as the question ‘Can eLit and AR increase awareness of the reader’s shared public, green spaces and increase their civic will that, in turn, they act on?’ To answer that question, this research includes both a written theoretical component and the development, testing, and meta-reflection of a smartphone-based AR app, Here. Now. Ours. The app was designed to increase awareness of urban green, public spaces and was put to the test in a Case Study with participants. As an interdisciplinary and intermedial piece of research that saw participants becoming an Augmented Wandersmänner across a city, the methodology had to be generative, phenomenological, ambient, epistemic, ethnographic, examining digital power structures, and critiqued sharply – a Critical Reflection chapter, after the Case Study Results, critiques the work and details the difficulties it faced. Participants in the Case Study were debriefed and interviewed with both quantitative and qualitative questions which gave the research its results. The results of the case study can be put simply as: in the majority, participants stated they were more aware of their city’s green spaces through the use of situated AR eLit. The significance of this investigation is demonstrating that situated eLit has a place beyond the screen and in enabling people to understand the street, better, while also demonstrating that tools can be created to actualise agency
Between realities: investigating temporal relations between stillness and movement in contemporary artists\u27 lens-based imagery
No full textTemporal registers of stillness and movement in lens-based imagery, traditionally defined under the terms of photography and film, are in many ways two faces of the same coin, one representing time as a frozen moment and the other as the passing present. Contemporary imaging techniques allow the two faces to overlap, contort and distort beyond recognition, suggesting that the original function of the two-faced coin is rendered obsolete. This art practice-based research proposes that the coincidence of stillness and movement in contemporary imagery, while emphasizing rather than erasing their singular functions, can produce distinctively unique relations between the media that extend their potential for temporal inquiry.
The following research investigates the coin in the process of a toss, when both media are equally in play. Taking the Quadrangle building of NUI Galway, Ireland, as a point of departure for a new body of research material, I compiled an archive of digital photographs and videos over the course of a twelve month period. These images were subsequently used to construct a twenty-minute video installation titled Quad (2013) that served as an essential working case study at the mid-point of the research project. The images slide from stasis to motion and back again thus creating visual rhythms that often provide no discernible separation point between the two temporal states of stillness and movement.
My findings contend that the final iteration of my practical research contributes significantly to a growing body of artistic works that utilize contemporary media imaging techniques to produce temporal rhythms of exchange between stillness and movement. Furthermore, these works seek to establish a notably contemplative encounter between the imagery and the spectator. Three related videos, Presence, Return and Landing, form one gallery installation titled Between Realities (2016). The videos negotiate a shared space in which the opposing rhythms of stillness and movement are refracted through one another, and out of which unexpected temporal relations can surface
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
The Key: Abstraction, Embodiment, and Proper Distance within the Virtual Home
No full textThe emergence of virtual reality (VR) humanitarian filmmaking as a genre over the past ten years has generated a large body of critical debate around the efficacy and ethics of VR as a tool for generating empathy towards marginalised communities. Whilst numerous studies have indicated the potential for VR to impact empathy levels of end users, there have been recurrent critiques of the power dynamics of VR production, as well as the value of empathy as a means of producing social change. Lacking in these discussions has been a detailed consideration of VR aesthetics and the extent to which stylistic strategies impact audience positioning. Through the example of the animated VR experience The Key (Celine Tricart, 2019), this article will explore experience design in the context of ethical debates around humanitarian VR. As an interactive, narrative experience that addresses themes of loss and displacement, The Key can be productively analysed in relation to both VR ethics and wider cultural understandings of home and belonging. Responding to ethical debates around proximity within immersive experiences, the article will examine aesthetic strategies within The Key for ensuring what Roger Silverstone has labelled “proper distance” between the user and the virtually represented space. Through its use of visual abstraction and simplification, as well as the limited physical interaction it affords with its virtual world, the virtual home of The Key will be understood as a site of resistance to universalising narratives of home, one which invites critical reflection on the factors that determine our access to shelter
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