‘It’s a riot’: Reading infrastructure in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

Chapter 6 documents a more specific and exploratory follow the thing research technique to uncover the digital-material architecture of Bitcoin. Treating the Bitcoin code as both a text and material, a single bitcoin is followed through the decentralised protocol “from” Australia “to” the United States. By tracing the spatial relationships between miscellaneous paraphernalia that facilitate the transaction, from proprietary software to Bitcoin mining rigs, the chapter navigates the material culture of the Bitcoin blockchain. This involves opening up source code for inspection to uncover the functional performativity of the network. The spatial lens used reveals several material infrastructures such as undersea cables, data centres, pools of Bitcoin mines, active nodes, and third-party wallet software, that assemble to form operational modes of centralisation.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test critical conservation approaches through conceptual architectural interventions that integrate the evolution of a significant urban building, the Temple of Dagan in Ugarit, the capital of an important Bronze Age civilisation in Syria, with the pre-existing phases of the site and offer a paradigm for the presentation of the city’s evolution. This reflection aims to investigate how far the remaining fabric can frame the original architectural experience of the place allowing the visitors of the ruins to contextualise the architectural development of the temple.Design/methodology/approachA detailed reading of archaeological reports and the French mission’s architectural interpretation as well as in situ surveys and architectural and urban analyses were carried out to inform this conservation reflection, which primarily explores the potential of critical conservation approaches for key architectural interventions. The main vehicle is a virtual reconstruction approach to probe the proposed critical conservation principles and their success in highlighting the stratigraphy of a site.FindingsThe work shows that critical conservation approaches can make a distinct contribution to the understanding of the ruins; in particular, the virtual approach can handle effectively the presentation of the intangible experience of the temple (original processional routes) and its archaeological stratigraphy.Research limitations/implicationsThe poor condition of the temple, being exposed for more than 80 years after excavation, have limited further architectural analysis as some evidence is confusing to read in situ. The pre-conservation analysis, therefore, was based more on the archaeological mission’s work, which is comprehensive.Social implicationsThe reconstitution of the temple’s architectural layers in a coherent narrative will have educational value as it will highlight the development of architectural perception and techniques during the Bronze Age. Debate on the application of such tools by managers of the site may enhance the visitors’ appreciation of the ruins. The digital output itself constitutes an engaging material that enhances the public understanding of the site and its rich stratigraphy.Originality/valueThe study is the first attempt to constitute an architectural experience out of the confusing ruins integrating the archaeological evidence in the frame of contemporary conservation and architectural design. As one of the predominant urban artefacts in Ugarit, the Temple of Dagan witnessed at least a millennium of the city’s history and thus the conservation strategy of its intense development and stratification reflects the whole city.

Recent research into architectural form analysis using deep learning (DL) methods has shown potential to identify features from large collections of building data, shedding new light into formal aspects of our built environment. As these methods begin to enter architectural, urban, and policy design contexts, it becomes important to develop critical approaches to employing them. In this paper, we document and reflect upon our efforts to create a custom dataset of 3-D models of 331 wooden churches located within the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe, and to use DL methods to explore this dataset with the goal of revealing unexpected formal traits and advancing architectural scholarship on this subject. While existing scholarship groups them into four distinct stylistic categories, our analysis reveals stylistic overlaps, previously undetected micro styles, and shared architectural features. We posit the resulting analyses as an example of an ‘architectural distant reading’ that enriches our understanding of this architectural typology through an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of its formal characteristics based on a large architectural dataset. Crucially, drawing on recent developments in critical data and algorithm studies, we show how the dataset construction and subsequent analyses, and their results, were shaped by slow, manual data curation processes, methodological constraints, subjective decisions, and engagements with archives, domain experts. We thus illustrate how DL techniques might be contextualized for architectural studies in relation to other modes of knowledge and labour, and offer a detailed case study of state-of-the-art computational methods enriching established approaches to architectural form and historical analysis.

Decontamination of select infrastructure materials after a radiological incident using a water-based formulation

Sleep-wake disturbances in supra-and infratentorial stroke: an analysis of post-acute sleep architecture and apnea

The cortex of the brain is organized into clear horizontal layers, laminae, which subserve much of the connectional anatomy of the brain. We hypothesize that there is also a vertical anatomical organization that might subserve local interactions of neuronal functional units, in accord with longstanding electrophysiological observations. We develop and apply a general quantitative method, inspired by analogous methods in condensed matter physics, to examine the anatomical organization of the cortex in human brain. We find, in addition to obvious laminae, anatomical evidence for tightly packed microcolumnar ensembles containing approximately 11 neurons, with a periodicity of about 80 microm. We examine the structural integrity of this new architectural feature in two common dementing illnesses, Alzheimer disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. In Alzheimer disease, there is a dramatic, nearly complete loss of microcolumnar ensemble organization. The relative degree of loss of microcolumnar ensembles is directly proportional to the number of neurofibrillary tangles, but not related to the amount of amyloid-beta deposition. In dementia with Lewy bodies, a similar disruption of microcolumnar ensemble architecture occurs despite minimal neuronal loss. These observations show that quantitative analysis of complex cortical architecture can be applied to analyze the anatomical basis of brain disorders.

Infrastructure materials are essential components of the nation’s infrastructure and transportation systems. Deteriorating infrastructures require the development of computational tools to predict fracture behavior. The extended-finite-element method (XFEM) has been recently developed to eliminate remesh efforts by allowing crack propagation within continuous elements. The object of this study is to employ XFEM and image analysis techniques to numerically investigate fracture behavior within infrastructure materials. The XFEM was addressed with a discontinuous crack and inclusion enrichment function with the level-set method. The crack growth and stress intensity factors were also formulated. An extended-finite-element fracture model (XFE-FM) was developed with the MATLAB program for predicting fracture behavior with single-edge-notched beam (SEB) and split tensile (ST) tests. The developed XFE-FM was first validated with SEB testing on a homogeneous sample. In order to capture the real material microstructure, the digital samples of asphalt concrete and concrete specimens were generated with imaging processing and ellipse-fitting techniques. The predicted crack propagation with XFE-FM simulation on digital samples was compared with the fracture pattern of lab-tested specimens. The comparison results on open-mode middle-notched and mixed-mode offset-notched SEB and ST tests indicate that the developed XFE-FM has the ability to accurately predict fracture behavior within heterogeneous infrastructure materials.

Due to memory loss, people with dementia are increasingly disorientated in space, time, and identity, which causes profound experiences of insecurity, anxiety, and homesickness. In the case study presented in this article, we explored how architecture can support people in coping with this challenge. We took a novel approach to offer architects insights into experiences of living with dementia. Starting from a critical realist and constructionist approach, we combined ethnographic techniques with an architectural analysis. This case study offers insights into the experiences and activities of a woman living with dementia within the architectural context of her home. We describe how the physical and social environment provided her guidance through sequences of day-to-day activities. This study highlights how architecture can support people with dementia in orientating by accommodating places for (1) everyday activities and (2) privacy and togetherness.

By drawing an analogy between precedent analysis in architecture and close reading in literary studies, this paper advocates for the potentially radical pedagogical consequences of incorporating close reading into architectural education and practice. Precedent analysis is presented as a textual strategy in a predominantly visual field that affords architects the opportunity to parse the vast amount of knowledge and intricate decision‐making that comprises the architectural process. The enduring relevance and disciplinary importance of close reading in the field of literary studies is showcased as a useful precedent for the field of architecture, which has struggled to maintain a dialogue between long‐standing disciplinary debates on autonomy and the role of theory in architecture and contemporary narratives that see architecture as a socially embedded practice. While precedent analysis has obvious limitations as a vehicle for the study of architecture, it does have the potential to transcend its traditionally formalist reputation and engage in a dialogue with contemporary design concerns by revealing the insidious ways power structures infiltrate spatial language.

Reviewed by: Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media ed. by Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger Noah Arceneaux (bio) Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media Edited by Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 258. This anthology feels like an eclectic, overcrowded academic panel. There is a theme, indeed even a compelling one, for which a few key chapters are perfectly aligned. Some other essays are tangentially connected, while others are connected only on an impossibly broad conceptual level. And, like a conference presentation, some of the works offer nuggets of insight rather than fully realized academic projects. John Durham Peters describes the collection in a foreword as a "refreshing counter-blast to the ethereal narrative" of modern media (p. vii). In contrast to hyperbolic rhetoric and public fascination with cloud computing and ubiquitous online access, this collection explores the intersection of media systems and the infrastructure that makes content creation, distribution, and mass consumption possible. In the formal introduction, the editors emphasize that historians of the military and capitalism first recognized the importance of logistics for the circulation of resources, with scholars in other fields then adopting the focus. A school of "critical logistical studies" formed, and this book claims to be the first collection to apply this lens to the study of media industries, which circulate physical goods and ideas on a global scale. The authors draw from a range of previous scholars, with the works of Paul Virilio and Anna Tsing cited frequently. The collection's theme is exemplified in the third part, titled "Supply Chain Media." Michael Palm documents the revival of vinyl records and the reliance on the postal system and specialized software that unite seller [End Page 604] and buyer, while also acknowledging the ecological impact of this industry. Nicole Starosielski focuses on the network of undersea cables that make global internet traffic possible. A handful of companies with ties to particular nations dominate this field, a legacy of the colonial, imperial era of the past. There are, however, several historical works on geopolitics and telecommunications, including the work of Dwayne Winseck, not referenced in this chapter. In one of the most compelling chapters, Kay Dickinson connects the decentralized, exploitative nature of modern film production with the state of higher education, which has its own cadre of underpaid adjuncts. Dickinson challenges instructors to instill some political consciousness into their students while simultaneously giving them the necessary skills for employment in the world of film. Another compelling chapter is Matthew Hockenberry's, which connects the latest generation of voice-activated computer programs, including Siri, to original visions of the telephone as an instrument to optimize efficiency. The connection between the ostensible theme of the collection and a few of the other essays is less clear, including four focused on the Atlantic slave trade. This horrific phase in world history was most certainly a grand act of logistics, albeit one for nefarious ends, though it is not immediately clear what these respective works illuminate about contemporary media industries. Susan Zieger's analysis of slave ships, for example, performs a close reading of the "bills of lading" for such vessels to find evidence for the tragic loss of life that occurred during the passage from Africa. But to view these paper documents as "logistical media," as the essay does, suggests a category of evidence so broad that it threatens to lose its value. Another chapter about the movement to repatriate African Americans to Ghana seems even more detached from the anthology's focus. Shannon Mattern's essay advocates for scholars to devote attention to the sounds created by different systems for regulating logistics, from bells to work songs to the beeps of RFID tags. This is an intriguing proposition and relates to the growing field of sound studies, though it is more a provocation than a full explication of exactly what new insights this aural evidence might reveal. Starosielski's work on undersea cables has a similar quality, in that it suggests more questions than answers. The analogy between this anthology and an eclectic conference panel is not intended as a slight, as indeed the serendipitous jumbling of topics...

So pervasive and persistent is the as an assignment at the university level that it is tempting to consider it as a synecdoche for the English essay. Certainly, there are many types of literature assignments-the research piece, character study, and so forth-in even the most conservative or restricted programs. But there is something integral about this one. The close reading is basic to the pedagogic practice we tend to value most highly, the detailed discussion that takes place in the seminar session. It occurs as an assignment in a number of guises and a variety of contexts, most particularly in the essay and in the examination sight passage. In a discipline that timetables mastery of material first, and theoretical inquiry later if at all, it is often the closest we come in the classroom to the deliberate, or even incidental, inculcation of skills or explanation of methodology, the closest we come to articulating what a reading practice is or might be and the reasons for it. Because it is so common that it is taken for granted, so institutionalized that it is invisible, so central to our concerns that it provides a most basic text, the close reading assignment functions as an index to English in the academy. What is said and not said about it, how it is placed and displaced, hold clues to how we view work in English studies and the construction of those studies as discipline and profession, inquiry and institution. This article is written from a Canadian, and specifically English-Canadian, perspective. Without trying to postulate an all-purpose disciplinary model, it might be suggested that in English Canada there is a particularly interesting mix of paradigms that predominate in Britain and the United States respectively. Each is a latent content where the other is manifest, however. The greats or and society questions typical of British examinations, for example, require at base a new critical-style close reading (Longhurst 152), even as new critical approaches in the United States academy are often justified through Leavisian appeals, although they may not go by that name. Both have in common a notion of the mimeticism of literary study, of a reflective relationship of reader to author and work, which is found, and perhaps founded, in the writings of I.A. Richards. While the close reading with its concomitant assumptions has come under fire from all quarters, it persists in our practices, and especially pedagogic ones. Here, the concern is less to criticize the close reading than to analyze this institutionalization and intractability.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare is often positioned as a solution to the greatest challenges facing global health. Advocates propose that AI can bridge gaps in care delivery and access, improving healthcare quality and reducing inequity, including in resource-constrained settings. A broad base of critical scholarship has highlighted important issues with healthcare AI, including algorithmic bias and inequitable and inaccurate model outputs. While such criticisms are valid, there exists a much more fundamental challenge that is often overlooked in global health policy debates: the dangerous mismatch between AI’s imagined benefits and the material realities of healthcare systems globally. AI cannot be deployed effectively or ethically in contexts lacking sufficient social and material infrastructure and resources to provide effective healthcare services. Continued investments in AI within unprepared, under-resourced contexts risk misallocating resources and potentially causing more harm than good. The article concludes by providing concrete questions to assess AI systemic capacity and socio-technical readiness in global health.

The Prompter’s Box: Modern Drama and Literary Criticism Alan Ackerman When Modern Drama was established by A.C. Edwards at the University of Kansas in 1958, the dominant approach to the study of the drama within American universities, and indeed of all literary genres, was New Criticism. Although this term covered a very wide range of critical approaches, all shared an interest in close reading of the literary text and, in the interest of scholarly rigour, insisted on the firm exclusion of all such non-textual material as the cultural, social, and biographical context of the work. The dominance of this critical orientation posed serious problems for the study of drama in general and modern drama in particular. —Marvin Carlson, “A Difficult Birth: Bringing Staging Studies to the Pages of Modern Drama” [P]rior to theorizing about literary language, one has to become aware of the complexities of reading. —Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight I begin this instalment of “The Prompter’s Box” on the journal’s fiftieth anniversary by quoting from the first paragraph of Marvin Carlson’s article, which appears in the following pages, not only to dispute its basic assumptions but also, and more important, to ask why the foremost scholar of theories of the theatre – and one of the first to publish in this journal nearly fifty years ago – should believe that Modern Drama was and remains dominated by the New Criticism, that there are two fundamentally opposed hermeneutic models for studying drama (“literary interpretation” and “stage interpretation”), and that the former “hampers” understandings enabled by the latter. In the late 1950s, far from being in a dominant position, the New Criticism (or the range of critical approaches classed under that rubric) had fallen from favour. Among many others, Murray Krieger’s The New Apologists (1956), Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image (1957), each in diverse ways, devastatingly critiqued critical approaches that privileged an autonomous and autotelic poetic text, and this brief list does not include the increasing influence of social scientists such as Lucien Goldman and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Myth-and-Symbol school in American literary [End Page 475] studies of the 1950s, Marxist Humanism, and so on. Lacking space for a comprehensive history here, I refer the reader, for starters, to Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism, where he describes the “moribund condition of the New Criticism” in 1957 (4). But already in 1954, in an article later included in Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man speaks of the New Criticism as finished: “[E]ven when the influence of the New Criticism reached its height, it remained confined within its original boundaries. . . . Over the last five years, a far-reaching change has taken place here and abroad, putting the entire question of literary studies in a different perspective” (21). For obvious reasons, critics of the Cold War became increasingly interested in sociological, political, and psychological questions. Modern Drama, moreover, gives no sign of a “difficult birth” (Carlson’s ironic reference to Samuel Beckett) with respect to either the dominant critical paradigms of the 1950s or the relationship of page to stage. In addition to including articles on productions in Rome, London, Stockholm, and Paris, the first issues present articles that can hardly be characterized as firmly excluding “all such non-textual material as the cultural, social, and biographical context of the work.” The very first article makes liberal reference to Eugene O’Neill’s intentions in writing The Iceman Cometh: “[W]e would do well, if we want to come to terms with the ‘deeper’ meaning of The Iceman Cometh, to assume that he had something specific and important in mind, and to try to discover what it was” (Day 3). Without endorsing this critical approach, we would have to agree that it seems untroubled by the New Criticism. Other articles in the first issue deal with the subjects of adaptation and translation (Hellman of Anouilh, Lerner of Shaw); the pertinence of national, historical contexts; the importance of specific actors; and the shaping influence of audiences on the stage and in the box office. In the second issue of the journal, A...

The aim of this thesis is to appraise the value of two quite different critical approaches to Doris Lessing's Children of Violence series and to bring these approaches together into a close reading of the five novels. The chronology and contents of Children of Violence have resulted in this series of novels becoming a seminal force in the gestation and development of neo-feminism. This role is examined more closely to assess the degree to which the ideas in the series have anticipated and affected the development of this social movement. From this viewpoint the protagonist, Martha Quest, may be seen to represent the archetypal twentieth-century feminist, trying to practice an alternative set of values about marriage, motherhood, love and the family; trying to meld political and personal commitment. Yet this critical approach fails to demonstrate the unity of this series of novels. It is not through this approach that the coherence of patterns of action and imagery in Children of Violence is explained. The unity of the series may be seen to emanate from a quite different tradition: through the archetype of the quest. Thus the second critical approach examined below studies the form of Children of Violence more closely, placing the novels in the context of the literary tradition of the 'Bildungsroman'. A close reading of Doris Lessing's writings about literary theory and practice reveals the .conservatism of her ideas about literature. Despite the structural experimentation in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Golden Notebook, Lessing's commitment is to the realist tradition of the 'great' novels of the nineteenth century. It is this conservatism which is generally underestimated in critical approaches to her work. The close reading of the five novels which follows attempts to illustrate the unity of this series of novels through the progression of the quest. It is argued that Martha Quest may most accurately be seen as a member of a clearly defined elite rather than Everywoman. The protagonist must move forward and fulfill her destiny, the observation of social phenomena along the way is not as 'lifelike' as it may at first appear. The inadequacy of the traditional feminist approach in relation to this series of novels calls into question the practice of feminist literary criticism as it is presently defined. In the Introduction below it is argued that the feminist critic must begin to develop new directions and a more sophisticated theory about the situation and social function of the literary text. Through this process of revision we may continue to see Doris Lessing's fiction anew, to understand that in her work there are threads of conservatism as well as radicalism, there is a deep commitment to preserve the past as well as provide for the future.

Reviewed by: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches ed. by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally Susan Neal Mayberry Eds. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 160 pp. $52.99. Of Toni Morrison’s last six novels, A Mercy (2008) provides the lone title prefaced with an article that specifies the presence or, in this case, absence of definiteness of the noun. A motif echoing throughout her œuvre, the presence of absence is also, in this case, reflected by Morrison’s clearly and frequently stated intention to explore a time before American slavery became identified with race. In their 2011 collection of essays, Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally set out to present “a reader’s guide to A Mercy, a storehouse of various approaches” that will not only provide Morrison scholars and students with “an assortment of avenues” into the text’s treatment of race, broadly interpreted, difference and absence, but of other social determiners such as gender, religion, geography, and class (1). And they do. In tribute to them, I attempt in this review not only to provide an overview and assessment of those critical approaches, but to engage with them as the editors intend. The book begins with an exploration of geographic, ecological, and domestic space as defined by James Braxton Peterson and Anissa Janine Wardi. While this reader finds Peterson’s essay to rely a tad too heavily on critical jargon, I do appreciate the cutting edge of a piece that, rightly, critiques Morrison’s among contemporary ecocritical texts: “It is in/through relationships between hypothetical and (regular/normal) focalization that certain eco-critical and narratological understandings emerge in close readings of Morrison’s A Mercy” (10). I also owe to this opening chapter the location of several pieces needing critical alignment in the literary puzzle that is the novel. First, Peterson concurs with Wardi and reviewer La Vinia Delois Jennings, who designate its setting as colonial Maryland and Virginia. Jennings writes elsewhere: “A third-person narrator from a limited perspective provides the back stories for Florens, Jacob and the other characters who live or work on Jacob’s burgeoning Virginia estate.” Doubting in my usual Hamletesque fashion my own decision that Vaark’s farm would lie in what we now call upstate New York, I appeal to two other [End Page 463] respected Morrison scholars, wailing, “Well, what about the moose?” I envy the definiteness of an immediate reply from one: I can’t vouch for moose’s habitats during that period. But Morrison (not that she matters) and the descriptions in [the] narrative indicate that Vaark settles in Virginia. Morrison is keen to show that the laws established in [Virginia and Maryland] were intended to “racialize” blacks. Historically, I don’t think New York supports the kind of narrative we have in Mercy. I may have misread the text—but I believe if you download reviews and articles on Mercy, you may discover that MOST readers agree on Maryland and Virginia. I don’t have time to confirm the setting (in the middle of a deadline), so please check with other readers…. Based upon the narrative details, I believe [Vaark] travels from Maryland and settles in Virginia. When I concede that the old New World map named pretty much everything north of Maryland “Virginia” but plead that the other narrative detail I was considering is that Willard “had trouble getting used to the rougher, colder region he was moved into” after his “harder but more satisfying days in Virginia” (A Mercy 174-75), this same irrepressible colleague answers my call in no uncertain terms: “I think this uncle bequeathed [Vaark] land in this god-awful proprietary colony of VA.” Semi-deflated but still stubborn, I forward my questions to a fellow New Yorker who can’t resist the challenge despite being “off to Guatemala with 15 honors stu in seven days, with 23 × 7 hrs. worth of things to do between now and then”: [S]o I’ll keep this short, but I agree with you about the northern location of the Vaark farm. In fact, I have no clue how...