Aesthetic Mapping Research Articles

Stephen Graham, Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music

Stephen Graham, Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music

Ggtern: Ternary Diagrams Using ggplot2

This paper presents the ggtern package for R, which has been developed for the rendering of ternary diagrams. Based on the well-established ggplot2 package (Wickham 2009), the present package adopts the familiar and convenient programming syntax of its parent. We demonstrate that ggplot2 can be used as the basis for producing specialized plotting packages and, in the present case, a package has been developed specifically for the production of high quality ternary diagrams. In order to produce ggtern, it was necessary to overcome a number of design issues, such as finding a means to modify existing geometries designed for a 2D Cartesian coordinate system and permitting them to function in an environment that requires an additional spatial aesthetic mapping. In the present paper, we provide examples of this package in its most basic form followed by a demonstration of its ease of use, particularly if one is familiar with, and has a predilection towards using ggplot2 on a regular basis.

Jornal de pesquisa e diários de aula particular: Uma experiência formativa voltada ao ensino de acordeom para terceira idade

Neste trabalho apresenta-se a problematização de uma aplicação prática de Diários de Aula (ZABALZA, 2004) e do Jornal de Pesquisa (BARBOSA; HESS, 2010). Com intuito de pesquisar e teorizar sobre o ensino de acordeom voltado a alunos da terceira idade, este estudo possibilitou identificar fatores sobre a educação musical neste contexto. Foi perceptível, dentro dos diários analisados, como a qualidade da sala de aula, o mapeamento estético e a flexibilidade em relação à progressão de conteúdos auxiliam na motivação para o estudo musical. Enviado em: 06 de outubro de 2016.Aprovado em: 27 de novembro de 2016.

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford Christina Britzolakis (bio) The cognitive and aesthetic mapping of urban modernity has always relied heavily on notions of shock. From the 1880s onwards, neurological discourses occupied a central place in accounts of the origins of modernity, as well as in the genealogy of the modernist artifact. They serve as shorthand for the far-reaching reorganization of spatio-temporal experience brought about by changes in transport, energy, urban planning, communication and media, the "taylorizing" of labor in the factory, and the mass slaughter of modern mechanized warfare. The history of shock as a discursive formation of modernity, culminating in Freud's famous analysis in 1920 of the mechanisms of traumatic neurosis, is intertwined with notions of modernization itself as pathogenic.1 In recent years, a number of modernist scholars have embraced neurological readings of modernity, particularly in relation to the impact of visual technologies. Modernism, with its impressionistic sampling of the moment, is seen as decisively shaped by the advent of the cinema.2 If mass urbanized existence was conceived, from the outset, in terms of a constant assault on the senses, the nascent cinematic technology of the 1890s, based on the sudden and incessant displacement of images, formalized this principle as the basis of its medium (Charney and Schwartz).Attention emerges as, in Jonathan Crary's words, a problem of perceptual synthesis produced by "a social, urban, psychic and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory impact" (17).3 Crary's work has been pivotal in the impetus to resituate impressionist painting, and modernism more generally, in relation to the field of mass visual culture. What arguably remains elusive, however, is the geopolitical location of the literary "impression" as the widely acknowledged cornerstone [End Page 1] of an emergent modernist rhetoric. The situation of the novel around the turn of the century—in particular, the impressionist remodelling of the form by the James-Conrad-Ford group—registers an intense anxiety concerning the imagined boundaries of the metropolis. Critics have long recognized Conrad's sustained if ambivalent interrogation of European imperialism and its cultural consequences.4 Less attention has been paid, however, to his collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer (as he then was), between 1898 and 1908, which coincided with the appearance of many of Conrad's most well-known works. In his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1919), Ford claims that it was through their collaboration that a shared "impressionist" aesthetic was evolved: "we saw that life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains" (182).5 During the period of the Congo debates and the Boer War, Conrad and Ford were participating in a wider conversation about imperialism, race, and capitalist modernity that included figures such as H.G. Wells and the socialist politician and writer R.B. Cunninghame Graham and whose implications for impressionism, as a term of literary-historical analysis, have yet to be unravelled (Delblanco). The Edwardian moment was characterized by considerable interchange between what are now seen as "modernist" and popular fictional forms (Trotter, Daly). As collaborators, Conrad and Ford explored the various possibilities of contemporary mass-market genre fiction, such as Wellsian fantasy, travel fiction, invasion novels, political satire, espionage fiction, and the detective novel. I shall focus here on a few of these generic experiments: Ford's travel book The Soul of London (1905), the jointly-authored scientific "romance"-cum-political novel The Inheritors (1901), and Conrad's spy story The Secret Agent (1907). These texts, I shall argue, respond to a historically specific metropolitan experience of cognitive dissonance in the face of violently reconfigured relations among urban, national, and global space. Their generic instability, or hybridity, is symptomatic of their attempted "cognitive mapping," in Fredric Jameson's phrase ("Modernism and Imperialism" 52), of the imperial world-order, following an accelerated period of European expansionism. What is at stake is a crisis in the location of a metropolitan subject increasingly grasped as an ensemble of particularized and disjunct sensory experiences. "Impressionism," the rubric which, by Ford's account, unites his and Conrad's literary endeavors during the 1900s, names, among other things, the conversion of late 19th century...

The Aesthetic Mapping of Nature in the Second Franklin Expedition

Like British travellers on the Grand Tour or in the English Lake District, early nineteenth-century British explorers recorded their responses to nature partly in terms of the prevailing conventions of landscape appreciation — the Sublime and the Picturesque. While searching for a Northwest Passage, the four British officers of the second Franklin expedition compiled in their published writing and painting an aesthetic map for portions of the Canadian North. The practice of these aesthetic conventions helped to preserve the sojourning Britons’ sense of identity, but also promised a certain blindness to the unique northern environment.

The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859

The aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque comprised the perceptual baggage with which early nineteenth-century British explorers and travellers combed the globe. As important to their identification of space as measurements of longitude and latitude, these two schemata governed the ways in which the Canadian Arctic was described and depicted during the British search for a Northwest Passage from 1819 to 1859. During the last ten years of this period, when the majority of mariners travelled and resided in the arctic archipelago, more and more fanciful representations appeared on the aesthetic map that their writing and painting were charting. These more fanciful mappings opened a wider discrepancy between perception of landscape and environmental reality, which invited disastrous consequences for the searchers, but in the face of the growing realization that Franklin's crews had been consumed by the arctic nature, the need to mask the terror of the realm by invoking modes of describing and depicting European nature became paramount. The adaptation by means of the genial Sublime and the Picturesque of the land, rather than the traveller, if it did not provide what can be considered a realistic picture of the North today, nevertheless fortified British optimism and morale sufficiently to see the search for Franklin through to a successful conclusion.Key words: arctic exploration 1819-59, the Sublime, the Picturesque, aesthetic mapping