Early Representations Research Articles

Smartphone-Based Vibration Monitoring Studies of a Pedestrian Link Bridge

Vibration-based structural health monitoring has gained a new pace with the rise of emerging consumer-grade sensor technologies. Accelerometers embedded in smartphones are among those which provide ubiquitous data potential with minimal burden to administrators. This research presents the preliminary findings of modal identification results obtained from smartphone sensors positioned on a single-span pedestrian link bridge. While a good number of modal identification studies are available in the literature, most of them correspond to short-term tests which are unlikely to capture seasonal features impacting identification results. In this study, the authors summarise a large vibration dataset from the testbed bridge with repetitive measurements taken over a month. The identification results presented herein are early representations of the daily and monthly temporal behaviour of modal frequencies observed throughout the tests.

The Role of Martyrdom and Victimhood in the Memory of the Greek Civil War Refugees in Czechoslovakia through the Prism of ‘Refugee’ Literature

This article focusses on the narratives of collective victimhood and martyrdom in the memories of refugees from the Greek Civil War (GCW, 1946–1949) to post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia (later, the Czech Republic). It analyses literary production by refugees, that is, ego-documents, popular history books and fiction, assessing refugees’ motivations in writing their own histories. It investigates the role of collective victimhood and its effect on the diaspora's identity, its aims and its functions. It determines that the narratives of martyrdom were an early representation by GCW refugees to portray themselves as heroic partisans and anti-fascist fighters and gain the high ground on the moral side of the conflict. Such perceptions, however, have in some cases persisted among communist-oriented authors to this day. This article distinguishes them from more personal expressions of collective victimhood, allowing for a plurality of interpretations of their refugee experience as well as a greater variety of motivations for capturing it in written form for a broader audience. This study aims to show how fluid and permeable these narratives of collective victimhood have been and how fundamentally they have affected the constitution of the GCW diaspora's identity.

“And then We Were Taken to Ravensbrück.” Early Oral Testimonies About Ravensbrück and Its Sub Camps

Abstract This article focuses on the analysis and interpretation of 15 testimonies collected immediately after the war by David Boder and by the Polish Historical Institute in Sweden with women deported to Auschwitz, evacuated to Ravensbrück in its last two phases and then to Malchow. The study of their statements can provide both a historical overview of Ravensbrück and its sub camps in 1944 and 1945, and help identify the effects of the camp, an overthrown social context, on individuals, women in this case, and groups. The comparative exam of the interviews allows to identify the crucial events and experiences which constitute the core of the interviewees’narration and representation of the events. The situations and episodes they chose to recall may explain their perception of the events and reveals a gendered perspective which affected their memories in terms of the selection of the events and their focus on specific issues. The memories were recalled in relation to social frames, which were different from those the survivors were previously used to and pertained to the context of the camp. These coordinates constitute a net which can provide an insight into the mechanism of memory construction and early representation of the Holocaust.

The ‘Moving Plant of Bengal’: introduction to Western gardens, naming and early representation, poetic and graphic

The early history of the European ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moving Plant of Bengal’, now Codariocalyx motorius, but for long known as Desmodium gyrans, is discussed, as is its introduction to Western gardens and its scientific description. The pre-eminent role of James Kerr (1737–1782) in sending seeds and drawings by an anonymous Bengali artist to John Hope, John Fothergill and William Cullen is described, and the use of it made by Hope in his botanical lectures. References by the poets Erasmus Darwin and Maria Montolieu are discussed, as also its graphic representation by the engravers Frederick Polydore Nodder and Yves-Marie Le Gouaz, and in paper mosaic by Mary Delany. Also discussed is a paper by Pierre M. A. Broussonet in which the discovery of the plant was attributed to Lady Anne Monson.

Enhanced recovery after surgery for oncological breast surgery reduces length of stay in a resource limited setting.

Early recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols in breast surgery optimizes resources and reduces healthcare costs by facilitating early discharges. These protocols are well established in tertiary centres, but not commonly adopted in regional centres. ERAS implementation potentially impacts smaller hospitals significantly, where resources are limited and persistent bed shortages with mounting waitlist pressures exist. Our study evaluates the feasibility of early discharge with the application of our ERAS protocol to mastectomies in a resource-constrained and rural setting. Breast cancer patients who underwent mastectomies with or without reconstruction between January 2017 and July 2023 were retrospectively reviewed. From January 2022, we implemented a standardized ERAS protocol for patients undergoing mastectomy. This incorporated a combination of pre-, intra- and post-operative elements to enhance patient readiness for discharge. Our study compared these patients (post-ERAS group) with the outcomes of mastectomies performed prior to January 2022 (pre-ERAS group). 104 patients were identified. In the post-ERAS group, 74.4% were discharged within 24 h compared to 23.1% in the pre-ERAS group. Length of stay was reduced from 2.26 to 1.42 days. There were no differences in unplanned clinician reviews or early representation to the emergency department between the two groups. Reducing the length of stay without increased complications can be achieved in a resource-limited environment with our protocolized ERAS principals. Our protocol has been instrumental in allowing safe discharges within 24 h. Other regional centres may benefit in adopting strategies implemented by us for their own ERAS protocols in breast cancer surgery.

Right to counsel? A mixed‐methods evaluation of the St. Louis County initial appearance program

AbstractResearch summaryLegal representation is a critical right in the criminal legal process, yet it is unclear when representation is guaranteed. Further, many individuals find obtaining legal representation difficult and expensive. The current study is an evaluation of an initial appearance program implemented in St. Louis County, Missouri. This mixed‐methods study focuses on understanding if and how providing counsel at initial appearance affects the bond amount, release type, and length of pretrial detention. Data from official court records and interviews with project staff and stakeholders suggest that early, free representation at arraignment can facilitate release on recognizance and lowered bail amounts. Results from a series of interaction models suggest that this type of programming may be able to help reduce some racial disparities. Our thematic analysis indicates that courtroom stakeholders see value in the program for the defendants, the criminal process, and the courtroom workgroup dynamics during pretrial stages.Policy implicationsThe results reflect the need for early representation in the legal process. Representation can potentially reduce some of the racial and ethnic disparities in case processing, which are relatively stark and can lead to downstream effects like a greater likelihood of recidivism and conviction. Currently, most funding for public defenders is inequitable to that of the prosecutor's office, and this work speaks to the necessity of providing representation that begins with the initial appearance and continues throughout the life of the case. This work also highlights how outside funding can be used to support more equitable and fair case processing in the criminal legal system.

Communication Strategies on Twitter: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan

ABSTRACT While several studies have explored strategic communication in relation to military intervention, this study analyses communicative strategies in the context of military withdrawals and redeployments. We focus on the case study of the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan to analyse which (and how) strategic narratives were discursively mobilised by the US administration on Twitter (now known as X) to seek public support and legitimacy for its operations. Findings suggest that key narratives of securitisation, national interest and responsibility were deployed through macro strategies of transcendence, bolstering, blaming and mitigation. We claim that while early representations of the war in Afghanistan were depicted as an unavoidable mission, the overarching discourse has now shifted to portrayals of the war being unsustainable and no longer needed by the United States.

Representing the Ring-Net in Word and Image

This article sets out to reveal the way that word and image are combined in wholly inventive ways in the work of artist, Will Maclean and poet/historian, Angus Martin. The initial exhibition by Maclean The Ring-Net in 1978, and the publication of Martin’s book The Ring-Net Fishermen in 1981, were their early representations of the world of herring fishing. Their word-image collaborations brought a sensory experience to a new audience: an experience akin, in fact, to the multi-dimensional reality of the ring-net fishermen themselves. The correspondence between the two men during their research period revealed their determination to give absolute priority to the oral testimony of the fishermen above that of any commentators (professional or otherwise) on the industry. The correspondence also signalled the need for the use of both word and image to communicate and transfer information with real accuracy. This article focuses not only on the original Ring-Net research but also on a more recent collaboration where Martin’s poems are set alongside Maclean’s ink drawings in the publication One Time in a Tale of Herring (2010). There are a number of areas of overlap between Maclean’s drawings and the hand-written selection of Martin’s fishing poems. First there is the ‘thingly’ element: the attention above all to nouns and verbs in the poems and the unadorned nature of the drawings; second the phenomenological: the priority given to the sensuous aspects of the fisherman’s experience in the poems and the link to the gestural expressionism of the drawings. Most arresting of all, though, is the way that the image seeks the word and the word seeks the image.

Moving beyond "nouns in the lab": Using naturalistic data to understand why infants' first words include uh-oh and hi.

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as uh-oh, hi, more, up, and all-gone, are typically among the first to appear in infants' vocabularies. We combined a behavioral experiment with naturalistic observational research to explore how infants learn and represent this understudied category of high-frequency, routine-based non-nouns, which we term "everyday words." In Study 1, we found that a conventional eye-tracking measure of comprehension was insufficient to capture U.S.-based English-learning 10- to 16-month-old infants' emerging understanding of everyday words. In Study 2, we analyzed the visual and social scenes surrounding caregivers' and infants' use of everyday words in a naturalistic video corpus. This ecologically motivated research revealed that everyday words rarely co-occurred with consistent visual referents, making their early learnability difficult to reconcile with dominant word learning theories. Our findings instead point to complex patterns in the types of situations associated with everyday words that could contribute to their early representation in infants' vocabularies. By leveraging both experimental and observational methods, this investigation underscores the value of using naturalistic data to broaden theories of early learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

History of the administration of psychedelics in France.

This article reviews the historical protocols for the administration of "classic" psychedelics in France, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Taking a chronological approach, it investigates the way mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin were administered, the subjects involved, the route of administration, the dosage, and the epistemological context of the research. From the 1930s, the Sainte-Anne school dominated French experimentation with psychedelics, inserting these studies on "hallucinogens" into a biological conception of therapeutics, where the notion of "shock" dominated. The sessions show particularly anxious experiences, sometimes described as "torture" by the patients who underwent them. With just a few rare cases of recovery reported, these substances were not considered as medicines, but rather as tools for exploration in the context of experimental research; thought of not as psychedelics ("mind manifesters") but as psychodysleptics ("mind disruptors"). While these tools could be useful for the diagnosis of sick patients, French physicians did not manage to demonstrate clear therapeutic benefits in the use of psychedelics, perhaps because of their reluctance, in most cases, to determine an optimum dose, and also very often to appreciate the context of administration and the relationship with the patient. This article allows us to understand the reasons for the therapeutic failures reported by these early French psychedelic researchers, but also to help explain the current reluctance of French health professionals who in the face of the "psychedelic renaissance" remain strongly influenced by the very negative early representations of these substances.

La représentation de Jeanne d’Arc dans la France du XVIe siècle: Politique, religion et genre dans L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orléans (1580)

This article proposes an interpretation of Fronton du Duc’s L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orleans (1580), an important early adaptation of Joan of Arc’s story partially based on contemporary records of her trial. Through a close reading of this little-known work, the article shows that the Jesuit playwright consciously made use of three types of discourse—politics, religion, and gender. As this piece was written for the French king’s visit to Lorraine, Fronton du Duc underlines the alliance between France and Lorraine and highlights the image of a united France. By calling attention to the divide between Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, the author anachronistically makes use of Joan of Arc’s story to emphasize the religious dimension of late sixteenth century French nationalism. Besides, Fronton du Duc brings a gender discourse into play to underscore Joan of Arc’s “feminity,” and thus maintains Joan’s mystical role without affecting the masculinized image of the French state. This specific portrayal of Joan of Arc corresponded to the historical context of the French wars of religion in the second half of the sixteenth century and marked a crucial step in the early representation of Joan of Arc as a national heroine.

Under the Sign of the Clock: Queer Time, AIDS Time and Clery's Clock

In this essay, I focus on the 1987 song ‘Under Clery’s Clock’, by Irish punk band The Radiators and written by Philip Chevron, also of The Pogues. The song was simultaneously a groundbreaking early representation of gay identity in Irish music, Chevron’s own coming out, and the first AIDS charity song in Ireland. I draw on theories of queer time and recent literary studies of form to emphasize the song’s impact in its cultural contexts. Offering a remarkable representation of the emergence of a specifically Irish gay identity during the 1980s AIDS crisis, the song tries to synch gay love within the temporal structures of family and nation—figured most clearly in the song’s titular clock, a Dublin signpost for courting couples. The song connects queer longings for a visible place in the culture to a heteronormative temporal and cultural form of meeting under a public clock. Situating the song in the cultural and arguable invented history of the clock, I argue that this gesture of inclusion is more intervention than accommodation, a figure of queer resistance in a culture that rendered gay identity so often invisible and illegible.

Erotonoir, pornographic representation, and transxploitation in Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss

ABSTRACT Black Kiss (Vortex 1988–1989) is a comic book limited series created by Howard Chaykin whose first edition was marked by controversy, due to its explicit content revolving around violence and pornography. Black Kiss is characterized by a crime plot revolving around a few main characters, heavily relying on noir tropes and fast-paced sexploitation, spun by the quest for a mysterious pornographic reel. Besides the shocking factor, however, the comic book is arguably ground-breaking for its time for its deployment of an articulated trans female protagonist that brings forward issues related to gender representation, trans women fetishization and exploitation, as well as social prejudice and transphobia. Using the noir premises of the narrative as a guiding thread, this article examines the correlations between the articulation of a peculiar erotic noir setting, the graphic representation of sex, and how this early representation of queer trans sexuality is constructed – highlighting both its positive and its negative aspects.

Interpretation of Misarticulated Words by Children With and Without Speech Sound Disorders.

Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) often struggle with forming early representations for phonemes and words, which could impact their speech production as well as their lexical access. This difficulty may limit their ability to accurately identify nonexemplar productions of words, such as developmental misarticulations produced by peers. The purpose of this study was to examine word interpretation of misarticulated words by children with SSD. Seventeen monolingual English-speaking preschoolers were assessed for language, phonological processing, and articulation skills. Participants heard three types of words: accurate productions (e.g., "leaf"), common misarticulated productions (e.g., "weaf"), uncommon misarticulated productions (e.g., "yeaf"), and unrelated nonwords (e.g., "gim"). Children were presented with these words aurally and asked to select the picture that matched what they heard-either a real object or a blank square. The proportion of real object picture selections was calculated for each word type and compared within subjects. The findings indicate that children with SSD reliably associated common misarticulated words with pictured objects more frequently than they did in the uncommon misarticulation condition. These results were compared between subjects to typically developing (TD) peers' responses using a one-way analysis of variance. The results indicate that children with SSD identified common substitutions as real object pictures more often than TD peers. The results of this study suggest that children with SSD are sensitive to the commonness of misarticulations; however, they accept common substitutions as real object pictures significantly more often than TD peers.

An Illustrated History of the Maṇḍala: From Its Genesis to the Kālacakratantra

An Illustrated History of the Maṇḍala: From Its Genesis to the Kālacakratantra

Craniomandibular osteology of Manidens condorensis (Ornithischia: Heterodontosauridae) from the upper Lower Jurassic of Argentina

ABSTRACT Heterodontosauridae is a clade that appears early in the ornithischian fossil record, and includes small-bodied, highly specialized species characterized by an unusual heterodont dentition. Although known from relatively few taxa, the early representation of the clade and unsolved phylogenetic relationships within heterodontosaurids and among early ornithischians implies that novel information has a marked effect on broader phylogenetic hypotheses and our understanding of early diversification patterns within Ornithischia. This paper describes the cranial osteology of the heterodontosaurid Manidens condorensis based on computed micro-tomographic scans of MPEF-PV 3211 and MPEF-PV 3809. This enabled more detailed descriptions of previously recognized bones, corrections to the literature, and the identification of undescribed elements. We present a new skull reconstruction and propose an emended diagnosis in light of novel anatomical information. Areas of jaw muscle attachment were identified and compared with Heterodontosaurus and Lesothosaurus, and mandibular function among heterodontosaurids is discussed. Our results indicate that diverse skull morphologies and functions existed among Early Jurassic ornithischians, with Manidens being intermediate between the plesiomorphic cranial shape and function associated with a generalist diet in ornithischians such as Tianyulong and Lesothosaurus, and the more derived cranial construction specialized for herbivory identified in heterodontosaurids from South Africa such as Heterodontosaurus.

Curated Desertscapes in Ancient Egyptian Tombs and Investigating Iconographies of the Wild

Because of a long-standing bias toward examining human representation in Egyptian art, scholars have overlooked many details of how wild animals are rendered, at least until recently. Usually, the stylistic differences between animals and humans in ancient Egyptian art are emphasized to support the argument that animals and their environs encapsulate ancient Egyptian ideas of “chaos”, while humans and their cultivated world encapsulate “order”. A closer look at animal representations shows that the same artistic restraints were placed on both human and animal representation, such as with the use of the canon of proportions, strict register lines, and iconicity. This article examines predynastic and early dynastic material and surveys representations of desert animals from Egyptian tombs from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom to demonstrate that their artistic treatment is still rule-bound and conforms to a sense of visual order. This paper challenges some of the scholarly interpretations, which assert that dichotomous ideas of chaos and order were represented stylistically and iconographically.

Afterword: Some Illustrations

Afterword: Some Illustrations

Constructing a Crisis: The Role of Symbolic and Structural Violence in Ireland’s HIV Epidemic

Ireland’s HIV rate has increased substantially since 2014. ‘Common sense’ explanations for these rising rates in the media and elsewhere have attributed the growing problem to ‘lifestyle’ choices, emphasizing increased risk-taking, complacency and a lack of personal responsibility, particularly among young people and gay men. Rather than a lack of individual responsibility however, it is systemic and institutional deficits that have given rise to Ireland’s sexual health crisis. This article briefly explores how processes of symbolic and structural violence have worked in tandem to contribute to this situation. Analysis of these processes starts with an exploration of early media representations of AIDS and how these helped to shape present representations of HIV. Examples are provided of contemporary Irish print media coverage of HIV, showing how this tends to responsibilize those living with HIV for acquiring the virus. By way of a counter argument, the article shows how the capacity of people to take responsibility for their health is diminished by inequalities embedded in the structure of the health system.

'Federation or Death': The Beginnings and Early Ideology of Cypriot Anarchism

The article presents a first overview of the emergence and early development of anarchism in the Republic of Cyprus, utilising archival material. It contextualises Cypriot anarchism within the broader wave of political ideas making their appearance after the island's de-facto partition in 1974, tracing the formation of the first anarchist groups and the circulation of early Cypriot anarchist publications. It moves on to briefly discuss three key historical moments of anarchist political expression, followed by an examination of early Cypriot anarchist political ideology, noting the general commitment towards social and political autonomy, as well as the influence of radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism and postcolonial thought. It then moves on to examine the issue of grand narration in early anarchist representations of Cypriot history, concluding with Cypriot anarchist perspectives on the federal reunification of Cyprus.