51 research outputs found
Theoretical Criminology pragmatic criminology Ontology, epistemology, and irony: Richard Rorty and re-imagining Ontology, epistemology, and irony: Richard Rorty and re-imagining pragmatic criminology
No full textAbstract In this article I apply Richard Rorty's view of pragmatism to contemporary criminology through the lens of ontology and criminological theory, epistemology and methodological decision making, and irony in the neo-liberal academy. Although pragmatism in criminology is often used to refer to practical criminal justice suggestions drawn from conservative theories of criminology, in this article I argue that this singular use is an affront to pragmatism's philosophical pedigree. Consonant with pragmatism, this article includes practical suggestions about how Rorty's approach can be adapted to teach criminological theory, advance mixed methods research, and acknowledge the dangers inherent in careerist criminology
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Struggling to define value: a critical and discourse‐based study of strategic sensemaking in the recorded music industry
Get PDFDespite evidence suggesting that music is being consumed more than ever, the global market
for recorded music has lost more than one third of its value since its peak in 1999. This thesis
explores the implications and competing interpretations of this development via discourse
analysis of conversations between the author (a former industry ‘insider’) and 16 senior and
influential individuals representing both new and long-established industry stakeholders. The
research finds that music is still highly valued, but that the relative value attributable to
record companies is contested: not only by artists and consumers, but also by many others
who are exploiting new media and technologies to offer products and services which derive
value from music. Many strategic solutions have long been recognized or imagined by record
companies, but have failed to be executed. Such failure is traced to cognitive and social
obstacles to generative dialogue which impede collaboration between powerful stakeholders.
Building from the constructs in the participant texts, a number of identity-bound narratives
are elaborated, including tales attributed to protagonists such as the patron, the inventor and
the curator. From these, the concepts ‘Tin Pan world’ and ‘Wiki world’ are introduced to
frame and illustrate how obstacles to strategic collaboration are rooted in alternative value
systems, producing a dilemma which is as much social and political as it is commercial. On
the one hand is the desire to protect a long-established economic system of patronage and
cultural intermediation based on the principle of intellectual property. On the other is the
desire to disrupt this ideology and its restrictive power relations and narrow cultural
privileges, promoting instead broader civil rights to access and to generate cultural capital in
new ways made possible by developments in media and technology.
The research responds to calls for approaches which can incorporate the sociological and
political dimensions of industrial strategizing. It proposes that the study of discursive practice
and discursive resources together can make complex and unresolved dilemmas more visible
and discussible. Fragmentation of institutional power and the socially-constructed constraints
and enablers of change are themes of relevance not only to the music industry, but also to
other industries which are sustained by intellectual property rights and which face the threats
and opportunities of the so-called convergence in media and technology
Postwar Englishness in the fiction of Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Adam Thorpe
Get PDFThe widely-recognised crisis of Englishness in the 1980s and 1990s has generally been explained as a response to the end of empire. If the place of memories of the
First and Second World Wars in this crisis has been considered at all, these have generally been assumed to support a nostalgic version of English or British national
identity. Taking three contemporary British novelists-Graham Swift, Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe-as examples, however, this thesis argues that the late-twentiethcentury
memory of these conflicts is strikingly ambivalent, and that the contemporary crisis of Englishness must be understood not only as postcolonial, but also, in a
strong sense, as postwar.
The Introduction sets out the parameters of critical discussion of latetwentieth-century Englishness to date and explains my use of the term 'postwar', as marking the continuing cultural legacy of the world wars, and the process of interrogative re-reading of that legacy undertaken in the contemporary fiction I discuss. It also challenges the assumption that 'nostalgia' and a 'healthy' attitude to the past can necessarily be easily distinguished, through a discussion of postFreudian
psychoanalytic approaches to mourning and melancholia. Chapter One considers three writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Siegfried Sassoon, J. B.Priestley, and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to suggest the nature of the questions about Englishness, war and violence which re-emerge with the breakdown of Britain's postwar social and political consensus from the mid-1970s onward. Chapter Two
then discusses Graham Swift's early novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Waterland, arguing that critical attention to his metafictional concerns in Waterland
has meant that his interest in suburban English life as encrypting memories of war has been overlooked. Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy, charting a two-way process of haunting through which contemporary concerns with violence are read back into the historical and literary record of the First World War, and simultaneously seem to re-emerge in the present as the return of the violence underpinning a melancholic cultural attachment to the very English narrative of 'doomed youth'. My discussion in Chapter Four of Adam Thorpe's novels Ulverton, Still and Pieces of Light emphasises their exploration of the violence at the heart of the 'deep England' evoked in heritage representations of Englishness. I suggest, however, that Thorpe's attempts to find appropriate fictional forms for ambivalence and melancholia are at times closer to paralysed repetitions than to interrogations of Englishness. My argument concludes with a reading of Swift's Last Orders, which I contend enacts the beginnings of a movement beyond the wartime end of a certain England and Englishness. Its misreading by critics as parochial and nostalgic, I suggest, indicates the extent of critical misunderstanding of the troubled memory of the world wars in contemporary Britain. It also testifies to
the difficulty and the necessity of the creative and critical work on postwar Englishness undertaken by the writers considered in this study
A stochastic model for the evolution of the Web
No full textRecently several authors have proposed stochastic models of the growth of the Web graph that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to the "rich get richer" phenomenon. However, these models fail to explain several distributions arising from empirical results, due to the fact that the predicted exponent is not consistent with the data. To address this problem, we extend the evolutionary model of the Web graph by including a non-preferential component, and we view the stochastic process in terms of an urn transfer model. By making this extension, we can now explain a wider variety of empirically discovered power-law distributions provided the exponent is greater than two. These include: the distribution of incoming links, the distribution of outgoing links, the distribution of pages in a Web site and the distribution of visitors to a Web site. A by-product of our results is a formal proof of the convergence of the standard stochastic model (first proposed by Simon)
There's trouble in paradise: problems with educational metadata encountered during the MALTED project
No full textDbSurfer: A Search and Navigation Tool for Relational Databases
Get PDFAbstract. We present a new application for keyword search within relational databases, which uses a novel algorithm to solve the join discovery problem by finding Memex-like trails through the graph of foreign key dependencies. It differs from previous efforts in the algorithms used, in the presentation mechanism and in the use of primary-key only database queries at query-time to maintain a fast response for users
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