Dense Description Research Articles

Tales of Online Learner Autonomy: Highlights and Challenges in the Disruptive Age

When the new normal learning mode capitalized on technologically mediated communication, it created a high learner-content interaction while honing critical thinking and collaborative skills to achieve optimal learning. The disruption brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic instilled a sense of independence and flexibility in learning. The aim of this autoethnography is to consider the accounts of the author’s independent learning throughout the pandemic in an online course. The author’s comments, insights, and observations, which formed dense descriptions of the lived realities and were interpreted and analyzed through an autoethnographic lens, constituted a significant portion of the data. The findings show that students who engage in online learner autonomy assume complete accountability and exercise control over the learning process, thereby strengthening their capacity for independent and cooperative learning. Students face difficulties when they are overly flexible and independent, which leads to uncritical assessment of the material covered. The problem can be solved by applying critical thinking.

Caring for herd animals in Isluga

Chapter 3 of the book Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric, first published in 2002, is presented in this article. It is based on periods of fieldwork carried out between 1986 and the late 1990s. In the previous chapter of the book, it was suggested that camelid domestication arose from the taming of successive generations of animals as part of the daily practices of herding. Domestication was not a once and forall event in the distant past. The present article focuses on the thick description of Isluga people’s herding strategies duringthe 1980s and 1990s. Isluga is an Aymara community in the Chilean highlands, bordering with Bolivia. Caring for camelidsin this community constitutes a process whereby herders sustain and renew lasting relationships between human beingsand herd animals. Cycles of time and space are described in order to contextualisehow and where the herders look after their llamas, alpacas and sheep. All Souls Day marks the arrival of the rainy seasonand Carnival is the event which brings it to an end. The austral summer solstice occurs on the cusp between these two festivalsand coincides with the fiesta of St. Thomas. Isluga people call themselves the «children of Saint Thomas», in a tradition which is inscribed in the topography of their territory. The other season of the year is cold and dry. It is associated with the winds of St. James the Greater and St. Anthony of Padua.The annual cycle therefore unfolds in a calendar of saints’ days accompanied by atmospheric phenomena, which nurturethe pasture grounds. The herding activities take place in a volcanic landscape associatedwith land forms which are perceived to be animated and gendered. The earth is personified as the Wirjin Tayka or Pachamama and the hills as Uywiri. Isluga people engage with these beings on a daily basis. These land forms can serve as aviadores, «providers», associated with the fertility and wellbeing of camelids and sheeps. The composition of the herds of llamas and alpacas is analysed, as well as the classifications Isluga people make accordingto age and gender. Camelid nomenclature is based on the disposition of dark and light colours in the coat of llamas and alpacas. Isluga people use names for their camelids which are intimately related to birds and other beings in their surroundings.The dense description offered makes it possible to analyse the regenerative cycle of water, pasture and fleece in a comparative ethnography, in the light of themes developed in other parts of the book, from which this article has been extracted.

Virtual communities of practice for novice occupational therapists: a vehicle for learning, support and professional identity strengthening?

Healthcare practitioners delivering services in rural and underserved areas need timely access to appropriate knowledge to optimise the care they deliver. Novice generalist occupational therapists in South Africa experience this need as they respond to a high demand for hand therapy. Embedded within a study aimed at identifying their support and development needs, this article describes participants' experience of a virtual community of practice. A qualitative case study design was employed. Nine occupational therapists participated in a virtual community of practice that met fortnightly for meetings and interacted on WhatsApp. Data were collected through photo elicitation, facilitated reflection, and case discussions. An online survey questionnaire was used to evaluate participants' experience of this virtual community. Thematic analysis was applied to the anonymous responses submitted by participants (n=7). A number of strategies were employed to ensure the trustworthiness of results including prolonged engagement, member checking, peer examination, reflexive reading and writing, triangulation, and a dense description of participants to enable readers to evaluate the transferability of results. Three themes were generated from analysis. The first theme, versatile support, describes participants' experience of being helped and supported, appreciating the immediacy of support, and being able to share resources. A vehicle for learning captures participants' experience of mutual learning, opportunity to reflect, to acquire knowledge and skills, and develop their clinical reasoning. Finally, the community of practice was grounding: learning opportunities were contextually relevant and participants were able to consolidate their professional values and identity. Participants raised the importance of using online platforms that were accessible, recommended a group size of 5-10 members, and proposed 60-90-minute meetings held weekly or fortnightly. A virtual community of practice provided both support and professional development opportunities for therapists delivering hand therapy. Careful planning and implementation to upscale this intervention are recommended for rehabilitation personnel delivering care to underserved communities in South Africa. The logistics of virtual communities need to mitigate for connectivity difficulties, and online platforms should enable real-time support. Participant satisfaction and the evaluation of implementation outcomes should be considered in the design of virtual communities of practice.

Cuaderno (etno)gráfico

The purpose of this essay is to present and reflect on the creation of an «(ethno)graphic notebook» based on a master's research on the uses and meanings attributed to instruments with wheels (handcarts, loading carts, refrigerator carts, warehouse carts, supermarket carts, etc.), in and around a public market (Velame, 2023) in João Pessoa-PB, Brazil. Between 2021 and 2023, drawings, photo collages and paintings were produced, forming a visual ethnography of the «carrinhos» present in the lives of various social actors. This essay reflects on the creative, imaginative and data organization processes in the construction of this drawn (ethno)graphy, exploring a visual perspective on the wheelbarrows and their narratives. The work is enriched by methodological techniques, standing out for the «critical and dense description» (Tsing, 2019; Geertz, 2015), adopting an ethnographic approach focused on the «art of seeing, art of being, art of writing» (Winkin, 1998).

Shape variation and sex differences of the adult human mandible evaluated by geometric morphometrics

In cases of osseous defects, knowledge of the anatomy, and its age and sex-related variations, is essential for reconstruction of normal morphology. Here, we aimed at creating a 3D atlas of the human mandible in an adult sample using dense landmarking and geometric morphometrics. We segmented 50 male and 50 female mandibular surfaces from CBCT images (age range: 18.9–73.7 years). Nine fixed landmarks and 510 sliding semilandmarks were digitized on the mandibular surface, and then slid by minimizing bending energy against the average shape. Principal component analysis extracted the main patterns of shape variation. Sexes were compared with permutation tests and allometry was assessed by regressing on the log of the centroid size. Almost 49 percent of shape variation was described by the first three principal components. Shape variation was related to width, height and length proportions, variation of the angle between ramus and corpus, height of the coronoid process and inclination of the symphysis. Significant sex differences were detected, both in size and shape. Males were larger than females, had a higher ramus, more pronounced gonial angle, larger inter-gonial width, and more distinct antegonial notch. Accuracy of sexing based on the first two principal components in form space was 91 percent. The degree of edentulism was weakly related to mandibular shape. Age effects were not significant. The resulting atlas provides a dense description of mandibular form that can be used clinically as a guide for planning surgical reconstruction.

Learning General Descriptors for Image Matching With Regression Feedback

Recent advances on feature descriptors for image matching put more emphasis on encoding invariances ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g</i> . illumination invariance) to promote the descriptors’ discriminative power. However, according to the information entropy, more invariance implies greater certainty and less informativeness in a descriptor. Consequently, descriptors encoding too many invariances usually show poor generalization to unknown image changes, lacking enough informativeness to cover the large uncertainty in unseen scenes. This limits the application scenarios of learned descriptors. In this paper, we propose to alleviate this issue from the perspective of informativeness and we thus design hierarchical consistent constraint by introducing regression feedback in a self-supervised manner. Combined with the hardest-within-batch matching constraint, we form a novel dual supervision framework, to encourage the descriptor to learn an informative representation while maintaining a good discriminative power. Moreover, to fully mine the context information hidden in image and boost the informativeness in turn, we present AANet, a descriptor network that efficiently predicts dense description by the powerful Attentional Aggregation of multi-level features. Experiments across challenging feature matching on HPatches, RDNIM datasets, and visual localization tasks on Aachen Day-night dataset show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art descriptors while keeping encouraging efficiency. The application of visual 3D reconstruction on various scenarios also demonstrates the high generalization ability of our method.

SAR and Optical Image Registration Based on Deep Learning with Co-Attention Matching Module

Image registration is the basis for the joint interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images. However, the significant nonlinear radiation difference (NRD) and the geometric imaging model difference render the registration quite challenging. To solve this problem, both traditional and deep learning methods are used to extract structural information with dense descriptions of the images, but they ignore that structural information of the image pair is coupled and often process images separately. In this paper, a deep learning-based registration method with a co-attention matching module (CAMM) for SAR and optical images is proposed, which integrates structural feature maps of the image pair to extract keypoints of a single image. First, joint feature detection and description are carried out densely in both images, for which the features are robust to radiation and geometric variation. Then, a CAMM is used to integrate both images’ structural features and generate the final keypoint feature maps so that the extracted keypoints are more distinctive and repeatable, which is beneficial to global registration. Finally, considering the difference in the imaging mechanism between SAR and optical images, this paper proposes a new sampling strategy that selects positive samples from the ground-truth position’s neighborhood and augments negative samples by randomly sampling distractors in the corresponding image, which makes positive samples more accurate and negative samples more abundant. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy of SAR–optical image registration. Compared to the existing conventional and deep learning methods, the proposed method yields a detector with better repeatability and a descriptor with stronger modality-invariant feature representation.

Clap, Clap, Clap - Unsystematic Review Essay on Clapping and Applause.

The rationale for the following unsystematic review article is to provide a dense description of clapping behavior from an ethological, psychological, anthropological, sociological, ontological, and even physiological perspective. The article delves into its historical uses, possible biological-ethological evolution, and primitive and cultural polysemic-multipurpose social functions. It explores the different distal and immediate messages transmitted by the simple act of clapping, to its more complex attributes like synchronicity, social contagion, as a device of social status signaling, soft biometric data, and its, till now, mysterious subjective experience. The subtle distinction between clapping and applause will be explored. A list of primary social functions will be introduced based on the literature on clapping. In addition, a series of unresolved questions and possible research avenues will be suggested. In contrast, out of the scope of the essay and published as a second article will be the contents of clapping morphological variations and a comprehensive description of purposes achieved through them.

The experience of creating a database "The photographic images of students of educational institutions of the State labor reserves of the Sverdlovsk region (1940s-50s)"

The purpose of the database is to reconstruct the "ceremonial" and "non-official" portraits of students of state labor reserves (using the example of visual images of students of educational institutions of the Sverdlovsk region in the 1940s and 50s). The analysis of the information contained in the database will in the future allow answering a number of research questions and identify important characteristics of the visual image and social portrait of students: types of activities, including various aspects of work and educational activities, "bodily activity" of students; acts of human interaction and non-verbal communication (gestures, facial expressions, body poses, etc.); objects of material culture used; everyday stereotypes of behavior reconstructed through a series of photographs; "atypical experience", description of deviant groups of students, irregular clothes, atypical behavior. When creating the database, the concepts of visual images in L.N. Mazur's historical research, D. Zeitlin's digitalization of visual anthropology, G. Kreidlin's nonverbal semiotics, and K. Girtz's "dense description" were taken into account. The results of the study are: 1) development and description of the database structure that allows taking into account the features of visual sources aimed at reconstructing the "ceremonial" and "non-official" portraits of students of educational institutions of the Sverdlovsk region in the 1940s and 50s through a detailed description of the poses, gestures, visual behavior, spatial interaction, clothes and shoes of the persons depicted in the photo; 2) primary analysis of 145 photographs from the official albums of 4 educational institutions devoted to the description of the results of their participation in the All-Union Socialist Competition in 1943-1945; 3) more accurate identification and systematization of external behavioral practices of students based on the database; 4) demonstration of the possibilities of detailed description of images by means of the database to identify individual sides of the "non-official portrait" of students. The results of the study can be used in the study of everyday life and socio-cultural portrait of students in the Soviet period.

Relational, Appreciative, and Process-oriented Digital Storytelling: A Duoethnography

Abstract In this paper, we propose an approach to group and community digital storytelling based on the following pillars: (a) extensive periods dedicated to group forming; facilitating meaningful interactions and members synergies through organized group work activities, (b) cultivating an appreciative and inclusive culture that takes advantage of the individual differences, and (c) a process-oriented practice, informed by systems thinking, that listen to the individuals’ voices and needs as well as to the group-as-a-whole process. In this context, digital storytelling could help people and communities to re-author themselves in more empowering, meaningful, and life-promoting ways. In the first part of this work, we discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our approach, we describe the details of a first pilot offering, and we provide an initial narrative evaluation by the participants. In the second part, we engage in an evocative duoethnography of our practice to provide a narrative, performative, in-context, and dense description of our lived experience as designers and facilitators, and as human beings that we actively participated in the unfolding of our program. Implications for the transformative power of duoethnography are discussed.

WhatsApp and the Platformization in Brazil: a dense description of agents articulated in control practices mediated by the platform

Resumo Este artigo propõe-se a descrever o sistema de controle estruturado a partir do uso do WhatsApp no Brasil, localizando as relações entre estratégias de influência do debate público executadas por agentes nacionais e as estratégias de mercado de dados e modulação algorítmica da Meta Platforms Inc., empresa de tecnologia dona da plataforma. Partindo do conceito de plataformização e de uma abordagem analítica influenciada pela Teoria do Ator-Rede, o WhatsApp é posicionado na análise como um membro sociotécnico não-humano de uma rede de relações que envolve objetivos econômicos e políticos de atores humanos, nivelando ambos em importância e entendendo que a inserção da plataforma modifica profundamente as práticas e formas de organização social no país. O objetivo é entender as condições conjunturais que fazem o WhatsApp ser um importante elemento na vida dos brasileiros e qual o papel do modelo de mercado da Meta para as técnicas de controle que emergem com esse uso.

Learning Enriched Feature Descriptor for Image Matching and Visual Measurement

Recent feature descriptor research has witnessed tremendous progress with the development of the deep neural network. However, most existing descriptors solely focus on learning strong discriminativeness with deep invariant features, neglecting their representation ability and rich hierarchical clues hidden in images, which could further establish high-quality matches via implicit hierarchical comparisons in rich representative descriptor space. In this paper, we consider both the discriminative and representation ability of feature descriptors to enrich the descriptor space with a novel representative learning framework. On the one hand, we introduce Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) as a prior term to guide our descriptor to learn a powerful representation and robustness in a self-supervised manner. on the other hand, we present an adaptive triplet loss, which penalizes the triplet loss according to the descriptor matching distances in order to encourage our descriptor to learn strong discriminativeness. Moreover, to fully use the information encapsulated in images and boost the representation ability, we propose a novel HIerarchical Feature Transformer Network (HIFT), which derives dense descriptions from the semantic and cross-scale enhanced hierarchical features in a local-to-global manner. Extensive experiments on popular feature matching and visual localization benchmarks show that HIFT achieves highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Applications on visual measurement tasks of visual 3D reconstruction and ego-motion estimation also demonstrate the high generalization ability of our method. Our model is avaliable at https://github.com/Ray2OUC/HIFT.

Rheintochters Donaufahrt – Carmen Sylva’s Travelogue: A Historical Period as Seen Through the Eyes of a Queen

Elisabeth of Vienna (1843-1916) (penname Carmen Sylva), was the queen of Romania between 1869 and 1916. She authored a comprehensive oeuvre with a clear pro-dynastic tendency that is highly relevant from the point of view of cultural history and collective memory. The present study is focused on the analysis of the travel journal Rheintochters Donaufahrt, which will be discussed with the help of a cultural studies methodology, namely Clifford Geertz’ concept of “dense description.” When read through this conceptual lens, the text appears multidimensional, the traveler/narrator does not merely observe geographical and historical landmarks but undertakes a cultural journey with multipronged implications. We do not encounter mere culturalist descriptions, but rather a network of symbols implying interculturality, imagology, and the staging of a multicultural world with which the contemporary globalized world is increasingly confronted.

Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

Abstract Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely connected, detective fiction typically follows a trajectory in which the history of the central mystery becomes progressively clearer through the accumulation of information and detail, whereas the Gothic traditionally seeks to maintain and heighten a sense of disorientation. Exploring the tension between Disco Elysium’s Gothic elements and its status as a detective game allows for a richer appreciation of the political and social commentary that emerges from both its narrative and gameplay.

An Integrative Model of Intercultural Interaction: A Qualitative Analysis Experience

The study of intercultural interaction has recently become one of the topical problems of social psychology. Considered often in the context of developing intercultural competence, they nevertheless ignore the mechanisms that underlie the causes of effective or ineffective communication. The mechanism by which intercultural competence contributes to intercultural efficiency is described in an integrative model of intercultural interaction, which unites a group of theories of communicativistic and socio-psychological approaches. This model substantiates the contribution of uncertainty and anxiety to the effectiveness of intercultural communication, which has been widely studied in quantitative studies. The aim of the study is to test the idea of the role of the situation of uncertainty and anxiety in the situation of intercultural interaction using qualitative analysis. The research was carried out based on a theoretical socio-psychological model of intercultural interaction. Using the in-depth interview method and subsequent phenomenological data analysis, a dense description of effective and ineffective intercultural communication was obtained from the point of view of each of the four aspects of the model: anxiety, uncertainty, social identity and intergroup anxiety. As a result of the analysis, data were obtained that reveal the content of some of the blocks of the model (intercultural abilities, communication efficiency, management of uncertainty), as well as a new block (emotion management) was identified and the properties of connections (between anxiety management and communication efficiency, between emotion management and anxiety management) were highlighted. Since the qualitative analysis made it possible to adjust the theoretical integrative model of intercultural interaction, and also revealed additional components of the model that develop theoretical ideas about the mechanisms underlying effective and ineffective communication, the results of this study can serve as a basis for the practice of the training of specialists working in the field of international relations: teachers of multicultural education, HRs in the field of international business, specialists in intercultural consulting, etc.

FORMS OF ADDRESS AMONG LAW STUDENTS IN 19TH CENTURY SÃO PAULO: SYMMETRICAL RELATIONSHIPS

This paper, which traces the forms of address within the point of view of the socio-historical analysis of language, is based on the theory of language socialization (OCHS, 1996) and the theory of the interpretation of cultures (GEERTZ, 2011), and is inspired by the approach of communities of practice (ECKERT, 2000). The theories defend that the apprehension of any meaning assigned by a particular group depends on a dense description that provides an understanding of the web of meanings in which the subjects are immersed. Methodologically, it is based on the framework of the dimensions of power (BROWN; GILMAN, 1960), on the evidential paradigm (GINZBURG, 1989), and the proposal for the comparison on the grand scale developed by Elias (2001). The interpretative analysis of the forms of address allowed the separation of linguistic indicators from the uses that expressed sensitivities, correlating language and socio-cultural structure. The analysis shows that você is used to express aggressive behavior and fit of rage; você, in Bakhtinian view of carnival (BAKHTIN, 1987), sets the low in the place of the high in the address scale.

Accelerated masked transformer for dense video captioning

Dense video captioning aims to generate dense descriptions for all possible events in an untrimmed video. The task is challenging that it requires accurately localizing events in the video and simultaneously describe each event with a sentence. Current approaches usually decompose this task into two independent stages—the proposal localization stage and the caption generation stage, resulting in a suboptimal solution. Masked Transformer (MT) model [30] has been proposed to integrate the two stages and optimize them in an end-to-end philosophy. Despite the superior performance that the MT has achieved, its runtime efficiency is unsatisfactory which severely limits its applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we devise an improved Accelerated Masked Transformer (AMT) model that enjoys the dual-benefit of effectiveness and efficiency. Taking MT as our reference model, we respectively introduce accelerating strategies to the two stages: 1) in the proposal localization stage, we introduce a lightweight anchor-free proposal in company with a local attention mechanism; and 2) in the caption generation stage, we introduce the single-shot feature masking strategy along with an average attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets ActivityNet-Caption and YouCookII demonstrate that AMT achieves competitive performance on both datasets with significant speed improvement. On the ActivityNet-Caption dataset, AMT reduces up to 2× running time with comparable performance when compared to the reference MT model.

Técnicas e instrumentos de recolección de información: análisis y procesamiento realizado por el investigador cualitativo

El propósito de este articulo radica en analizar e interpretar la pluralidad de las perspectivas que nos muestran los puntos de vista coincidentes y contrapuestos entre el investigador y los sujetos, siendo paradójicamente uno de los aspectos que enriquece y nutre de complejidad y diversidad de técnicas e instrumentos de recolección de información en el análisis y procesamiento de la investigación cualitativa. Entre las técnicas de recolección de información consideradas se destacan la observación participante, el grupo nominal, Delphi, entrevista a profundidad, grupos focales, revisión documental, taller investigativo y técnicas proyectivas, y en cuanto los instrumentos se recalcan la guía de observación, anecdotarios, diario del investigador y artefactos. En relación al análisis y procesamiento de la información indagada se enfatizan la inducción analítica, método comparativo constante, codificación, descripción densa, análisis de contenido y análisis del discurso, perspectiva de mapeo y la triangulación. Todas y cada una de ellas permiten revelar como piensan, sienten y actúan los sujetos involucrados en una investigación, razón principal por la que es primordial aplicar cada técnica e instrumento adecuadamente, proporcionando una enorme riqueza informativa que pueden corregir los sesgos propios de cada método.

Jornalismo das periferias

Nas periferias da Região Metropolitana de São Paulo (RMSP), maior macrometrópole do Brasil, observam-se iniciativas de produção jornalística conformadas em políticas editoriais assumidamente vinculadas ao território. Para compreender a realidade dessa prática comunicacional, uma pesquisa de campo pautada pela ideia de descrição densa de Clifford Geertz (2008) foi desenvolvida entre 2018 e 2019. O objetivo do trabalho – alcançar uma interpretação possível sobre a prática jornalística nos territórios periféricos da RMSP – é organizado em três frentes: contexto de pesquisa (as periferias), sujeitos de pesquisa (jornalistas das periferias) e fenômeno pesquisado (jornalismo das periferias). Atesta-se que os significados atribuídos pelos sujeitos da pesquisa – configuração epistêmica da abordagem etnográfica segundo Geertz – a seus fazeres comunicacionais, suas identidades e seus territórios são plurais e complexos.

Enseñanza de la historia y concepciones de ciudadanía en las prácticas de profesores en formación

This article reports on a study on the practical training of history and social science teachers, in order to analyze the history teaching approaches implemented by trainee teachers in the context of their professional practice and to project the relations that it would be possible to establish with different understandings of citizenship. Specifically, a multiple case study was developed from the application of different types of interviews associated with classroom observations, which allowed an intensive approach to the object of study. For the analysis of the information, some principles of Grounded Theory were combined with guidelines of a Dense Description. The results report the historiographic approaches and didactic discipline that predominate in the teaching of history teachers in training and that are rather traditional in nature, which could project a link with citizenship conceptions also traditional from a thematic perspective since they open up some possibilities from a logical procedure.