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A Performer's Analysis of Dominick Argento's Miss Havisham's Wedding Night
No full textDominick Argento's Miss Havisham's Wedding Night is the least explored of his artistic output. A monodrama in one act for soprano, Miss Havisham's Wedding Night contains some of Argento's most beautiful and challenging music of his compositional output. The purpose of a detailed analysis of the structure and content of Argento's Miss Havisham's Wedding Night is to facilitate the solo vocal performer's interpretation. Argento's setting of Miss Havisham's Wedding Night is unique in that he musically translates the manic psychological state of the literary character. Argento structured the one act opera in such a manner that the music would illuminate the text and the audience might connect with the unstable psychological episodes and outbursts demonstrated by Miss Havisham. To that end, each section and phrase has its own psychological motivation, which in turn demands a varied musical and dramatic interpretation. Utilizing selected scenes from Miss Havisham's Wedding Night, the researcher will analyze Argento's musical manifestation of Dickens's literary work. This research will include an investigation into the manner in which Argento uses the shape of melody and the musical phrase along with the harmonic materials to enhance the text and dramatic content. The author will explore the musical nuances Argento incorporates in an effort to develop and portray Miss Havisham's psychological state. Through an analysis of the orchestral writing the author will show how Argento's aesthetic balance between the music and text represents the emotional and psychological implications of the monodrama
Dominick LaCapra's Postsecular Reflection: A Critical Reading
No full textThis article analyses the first traces of postsecular turn in historical theory, arguing that they first emerged in Dominick LaCapra’s book History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009) and in Allan Megill’s subsequent polemic with that work. The author claims that what prevails in LaCapra’s narrative is the rhetoric of “resisting apocalypse”, thus demonstrating how he inscribes postsecular themes with the issue of trauma, together with its religious connotations. The discussion between LaCapra and Megill is treated here as a point of departure for considering the forms that the postsecular can take in historical theory
Legacies of the Vietnam War: the long-term effects of bombing and herbicide spraying on post-war land use/cover in Southeast Asia
No full textThe Vietnam War left a deep and lasting legacy across Southeast Asia, where bombings, herbicide spraying, and other military activities disrupted ecosystems and livelihoods. During the conflict, over 7.5 million tons of bombs were dropped, and more than 74 million litres of herbicides were sprayed across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, creating widespread environmental damage and contamination. Decades after the conflict ended, these impacts persist, with about 20% of the land still contaminated by unexploded ordnance (UXO) and the long-term health effects of dioxin exposure from herbicides still affecting thousands of people. Despite these ongoing challenges, incomplete and imprecise historical records on the locations of bombing and spraying activities hinder efforts to map the exact locations of remaining UXO and residual dioxin. At the same time the long-term consequences of this contamination on both the environment and local community livelihoods remains poorly understood.
The aim of this thesis was to determine the long-term impacts of bombing and herbicide spraying on post-war land use/cover changes (LUCC) in Vietnam and Laos. To do so I had to first understand which areas were affected by the bombing and spraying and if declassified military records were reliable sources. Additionally, to analyse post-war changes, I had to determine the initial land use/cover (LUC) at the time of the war. I therefore present my work in three results chapters about (i) detecting Vietnam War bomb craters using declassified U.S. spy satellite imagery (Chapter 2); (ii) mapping historical LUC in Vietnam and Laos using declassified military topographic maps (Chapter 3); and (iii) determining the long-term impacts of bombing and herbicide spraying on post-war LUC using panel regression models (Chapter 4).
In Chapter 2 I developed machine learning methods to automatically detect bomb craters in declassified very-high resolution (0.6-1.2 m) KH-9 satellite imagery taken during the Vietnam War. The models achieved an overall F1-Score of 0.61 and predicted more than 500,000 bomb craters across two study areas covering parts of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I found that the detected craters were positively correlated with target locations available from declassified U.S. bombing records but provided more precise information on the impact locations of bombs.
In Chapter 3 I utilized topographic maps (1:50,000) created by the U.S. Army Map Service during the Vietnam War (1963-1973) to create detailed historical LUC maps of Laos and Vietnam. I compared multiple model architectures on the manually labelled training data, with the UNet++ achieving the best performance. The resulting maps, produced at 4 m and 30 m resolutions, include 10 LUC classes and achieved high overall accuracies of 98.8% for Laos and 98.6% for Vietnam on separate test sets. Analysis of the maps revealed forest cover losses of 18.2% in Laos and 25.0% in southern Vietnam (below 17°N) by 1990 and a 36.8% reduction of mangrove forests in Vietnam by 1996.
Finally, in Chapter 4, I combined declassified bombing and herbicide spraying records with the historical LUC maps created in Chapter 3 and existing LUC products derived from remote sensing data between 1990 and 2020. I aggregated the data across grid cells covering Laos, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam and used panel regression models to determine the long-term impacts of bombing and herbicide spraying on post-war forests and agricultural land, controlling for a comprehensive set of confounding variables informed by a directed acyclic graph. The results indicated that both bombing and herbicide spraying caused substantial losses of natural forests in the immediate post-war decades, with the strongest impacts in South Vietnam, where bombing was estimated to have reduced natural forest cover by as much as 25.8% by 1990. Over time, however, these negative effects declined, while the same exposures became increasingly associated with an expansion of plantation trees. In South Vietnam, the long-term effects of bombing resulted in an estimated 66.6% increase in the area of plantation trees between 1990-2020, with smaller effects in North Vietnam and Laos. Bombing also drove cropland expansion across all regions in the immediate post-war period, though these effects had largely disappeared by 2020. Together, these results indicated that wartime exposure to bombing and herbicide spraying was an important driver of Vietnam’s forest transition that started in the 1990s. This suggests that conflicts can reshape both forests and agricultural landscapes for many decades through long-lasting, path-dependent impacts.
With global conflict events almost doubling in the past five years, it is important to remember that the impacts of armed conflicts persist for decades after the fighting stops. My results indicate that bombing and herbicide spraying during the Vietnam War resulted in long-lasting, path-dependent, and regionally varying changes in land use/cover across Vietnam and Laos, including short-term losses of natural forests, short-term expansion of non-rice croplands, and long-term expansion of plantation trees. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates how historical data, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, can support evidence-driven mine action and guide more effective post-conflict interventions that address environmental legacies. Implementing such data- and evidence-driven approaches should therefore be an urgent priority to reduce the long-term negative impacts of past and current conflicts, both in Southeast Asia and beyond
Liaisons et déliaisons
No full textThe phenomenon of 'transfer cannot be cut down to the analytical treatment. This text studies the possible exchanges between history and psychoanalysis within the frame of a non-linear perception of temporal processes. The author wishes to set the links between the two domains within the realm of connections and disconnections, included into the social and cultural activities analyzed here within the context of the modern era.Le phénomène du transfert n'est pas réductible à la cure analytique. L'article étudie les échanges possibles entre histoire et psychanalyse dans le cadre d'une conception non-linéaire des processus temporels. Son auteur préconise de situer les rapports entre les deux disciplines sur le registre des liaisons et des déliaisons immanentes aux manifestations socio-culturelles analysées ici en prenant l'exemple de ce qu'elles furent à l'époque moderne.LaCapra Dominick. Liaisons et déliaisons. In: Espaces Temps, 80-81, 2002. Michel de Certeau, histoire/psychanalyse. Mises à l'épreuve, sous la direction de Christian Delacroix, François Dosse et Patrick Garcia. pp. 38-54
Synergistic Use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 to Map Natural Forest and Acacia Plantation and Stand Ages in North-Central Vietnam
No full textMany remote sensing studies do not distinguish between natural and planted forests. We combine C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (Sentinel-1, S-1) and optical satellite imagery (Sentinel-2, S-2) and examine Random Forest (RF) classification of acacia plantations and natural forest in North-Central Vietnam. We demonstrate an ability to distinguish plantation from natural forest, with overall classification accuracies of 87% for S-1, and 92.5% and 92.3% for S-2 and for S-1 and S-2 combined respectively. We found that the ratio of the Short-Wave Infrared Band to the Red Band proved most effective in distinguishing acacia from natural forest. We used RF on S-2 imagery to classify acacia plantations into 6 age classes with an overall accuracy of 70%, with young plantation consistently separated from older. However, accuracy was lower at distinguishing between the older age classes. For both distinguishing plantation and natural forest, and determining plantation age, a combination of radar and optical imagery did nothing to improve classification accuracy
Old-Growth Forest Disturbance in the Ukrainian Carpathians
No full textHuman activity has greatly reduced the area of old-growth forest in Europe, with some of the largest remaining fragments in the Carpathian Mountains of south-western Ukraine. We used satellite image analysis to calculate old-growth forest disturbance in this region from 2010 to 2019. Over this period, we identified 1335 ha of disturbance in old-growth forest, equivalent to 1.8% of old-growth forest in the region. During 2015 to 2019, the average annual disturbance rate was 0.34%, varying with altitude, distance to settlements and location within the region. Disturbance rates were 7–8 times lower in protected areas compared to outside of protected areas. Only one third of old-growth forest is currently within protected areas; expansion of the protected area system to include more old-growth forests would reduce future loss. A 2017 law that gave protection to all old-growth forest in Ukraine had no significant impact on disturbance rates in 2018, but in 2019 disturbance rates reduced to 0.19%. Our analysis is the first indication that this new legislation may be reducing loss of old-growth forest in Ukraine
Identifying European Old-Growth Forests using Remote Sensing: A Study in the Ukrainian Carpathians
No full textOld-growth forests are an important, rare and endangered habitat in Europe. The ability to identify old-growth forests through remote sensing would be helpful for both conservation and forest management. We used data on beech, Norway spruce and mountain pine old-growth forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians to test whether Sentinel-2 satellite images could be used to correctly identify these forests. We used summer and autumn 2017 Sentinel-2 satellite images comprising 10 and 20 m resolution bands to create 6 vegetation indices and 9 textural features. We used a Random Forest classification model to discriminate between dominant tree species within old-growth forests and between old-growth and other forest types. Beech and Norway spruce were identified with an overall accuracy of around 90%, with a lower performance for mountain pine (70%) and mixed forest (40%). Old-growth forests were identified with an overall classification accuracy of 85%. Adding textural features, band standard deviations and elevation data improved accuracies by 3.3%, 2.1% and 1.8% respectively, while using combined summer and autumn images increased accuracy by 1.2%. We conclude that Random Forest classification combined with Sentinel-2 images can provide an effective option for identifying old-growth forests in Europe
Determination of Structural Characteristics of Old-Growth Forest in Ukraine Using Spaceborne LiDAR
No full textA forest’s structure changes as it progresses through developmental stages from establishment to old-growth forest. Therefore, the vertical structure of old-growth forests will differ from that of younger, managed forests. Free, publicly available spaceborne Laser Range and Detection (LiDAR) data designed for the determination of forest structure has recently become available through NASA’s General Ecosystem and Development Investigation (GEDI). We use this data to investigate the structure of some of the largest remaining old-growth forests in Europe in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains. We downloaded 18489 cloud-free shots in the old-growth forest (OGF) and 20398 shots in adjacent non-OGF areas during leaf-on, snow-free conditions. We found significant differences between OGF and non-OGF over a wide range of structural metrics. OGF was significantly more open, with a more complex vertical structure and thicker ground-layer vegetation. We used Random Forest classification on a range of GEDI-derived metrics to classify OGF shapefiles with an accuracy of 73%. Our work demonstrates the use of spaceborne LiDAR for the identification of old-growth forests
Lessons from community-based payment for ecosystem service schemes: from forests to rangelands
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