Mutual Awareness Research Articles

Commentary on “Does Seeing One Another’s Gaze Affect Group Dialogue? A Computational Approach”

This commentary elaborates on the role of “grounding” as a focal theoretical concept and tries to contextualise the claims formulated by the paper at hand in previous CSCL discussions. It tries to give fingerposts for enriching and refining the concept of grounding from a pedagogical point view. It also suggests to use mutual awareness of eye-gaze in the context of dialogical learning.

Design Patterns for Visualization of User Activities in a Synchronous Shared Workspace

Scholars in fields such as Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) have extensively covered the general theme of distributed collaboration in the past few decades. Recent advances in web technologies have pushed forward the boundaries of what is possible to create on the web, aiding the development of various types of collaborative software. Standing on the shoulders of previous research, and in the light of the new web technologies, we here outline the development of what we label a “synchronous shared workspace”. The purpose of the system is to serve as a web-based collaboration tool for small groups of geographically and/or temporally dispersed persons within a learning context. Designing this type of system presents interesting challenges on how to graphically visualize the presence of others and their activities, i.e. awareness information. Further, the system provides other types of functionalities such as visualizing previous activities and real-time manipulation of media objects that provides challenges for designers. Utilizing a “design pattern” approach, this paper explores visualization patterns for collaboration in shared workspaces in order to support mutual awareness and coordination activities. Five design patterns were implemented in the system and evaluated by a small group of online learners. The results support the notion that visualization of awareness information is a complex issue and that the work to provide effortless coordination of collaboration is a research interest that needs more attention.

Lessons of cooperation between government and non-governmental organizations in emergency management in the czech republic

The purpose of this research is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current forms of cooperation between government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in emergency management in the Czech Republic, while presenting a detailed overview of the key criteria of the effective Czech model, which could be potentially used by other organizations or countries. Previous research has focused on cooperation between government and NGOs in flood risk management, but emergency management concerns more than floods. The scope has been expanded to include volunteer firefight ers and rescue workers, the other NGO players in emergencies in the Czech Republic. The research presents an overview of the cooperation between the Czech government and NGOs in various forms of emergency management. Using document review and a series of interviews with emergency management experts, several aspects of cooperation were considered: formalization, timing, level, and type. The research findings demonstrate that some emergency management activities can be very effec tively performed by NGOs and their volunteers. In the Czech Republic, integration into the national Integrated Rescue System guarantees a minimum standard of performance. Since volunteers work for free and their work has much lower expenses, they perform their activities in a more cost-effective way than the state. However, this is not valid for the whole emergency management system, but only for such activities that can be assigned to volunteers when there are enough willing volunteers and the NGOs and their volunteers are formally integrated into the rescue system. The Czech experience could be interesting for other countries, particularly post-communist countries, because all emergency systems work with information, and the human factor plays a role everywhere. Thus, it is concluded that some basic aspects of cooperation in Czech emergency management, focused on sharing information and strengthening mutual trust and awareness, could be considered as universal.

Context Weaver: Awareness and feedback in networked mobile crowdsourcing tools

Mobile crowdsourcing allows people to collect data using a large pool of participants. In this paper, we focus on mobile crowdsourcing for citizens to solve local issues in context. We argue that such crowdsourcing environments need to support exploration, a continuous, opportunistic, and multi-perspective process that existing crowd sensing systems cannot easily support. We have developed a system called Context Weaver, which connects participants using networked mobile devices in order to support collaborative exploration, and conducted field trials to understand the effect of networking participants in the crowdsourced data-collection activities that encompass planning, execution, and analysis phases. We discuss a methodology for exploratory mobile crowdsourcing by citizens based on the provision of mutual awareness and rapid feedback in context. The proposed methodology can provide a basis for a model of networked mobile crowdsourcing which can exploit not only the man-power but also the creativity of citizens to gather relevant data.

Unprintable Lyrics: The Unpublished Poems of William Morris

Unprintable Lyrics:The Unpublished Poems of William Morris Florence S. Boos (bio) Almost all the poetic works of William Morris were published in his lifetime, with the exception of forty-two personal lyrics he drafted in the late 1860s and 1870s. The tone of several of these poems resembles that of the “idle singer[’s]” wistful monthly lyrics in the Earthly Paradise, and others are grieving, personal, introspective, and as “unmediated” in their emotional nuances as anything he ever wrote. Almost all of these lyrics were apparently drafted between the publication of Morris’s Life and Death of Jason in 1867 and the appearance of his Earthly Paradise in 1868–1870, and four of them did find their way into periodicals in 1869–1870. He reproduced eleven more in his 1870 hand-illuminated copy of A Book of Verse, and several in the 1891 Poems by the Way, along with some but not all of those he had copied out in A Book of Verse. The rest, however, were left unpublished at his death, and in what follows I will suggest some reasons for this omission. In volume twenty-four of the Collected Works (1910–1915), his daughter May Morris reprinted without comment a selection of these poems, among them the four he had published in periodicals, and she added three more in her 1936 Artist, Writer, Socialist, a sequence of publication which obscured their unity.1 She also took one of the verses in Eddic meter to Dame Bertha Phillpott, an authority in Old Norse,2 but put it aside when she understood it was not a translation, but a ‘nordic’ expression of Morris’s grief in sublimated form. Students of Morris’s life and work have long known about the affair conducted by Morris’s wife Jane Morris and Dante Rossetti between 1868 or 1869 until as late as 1874, as recorded in contemporary letters William Bell Scott sent to his partner Alice Boyd as well as Jane Morris’s and Dante Rossetti’s extensive correspondence made available in 1964, and more recently in carefully annotated scholarly editions.3 These document the lovers’ frequent long visits (among many other things), and the obligatory social contacts with Rossetti occasioned by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company weekly gatherings. Except for the poems just mentioned, Morris absorbed the implications of his wife’s affair with his erstwhile friend in stoic silence, whereas Rossetti freely transposed his experiences into the [End Page 193] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. William Morris in 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer. [End Page 194] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. The Morris and Burne-Jones Families in 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer. sonnets of “The House of Life,” protected by the fiction that these honored the memory of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal. A gender-reversed parallel to this dispiriting period in Morris’s personal life emerged in May 1868, when Georgiana Burne-Jones discovered the first of Edward Burne-Jones’s many extramarital liaisons.4 Morris had made many lifelong friends at Oxford, but the closest by proximity in interests and temperament was Ned Jones, and their two families had shared countless meals and travels together. Mutual awareness of intertwined betrayals must have cast a shadow over their long-standing goodwill, in ways that may have found expression on 25 May 1869, when Morris wrote Burne-Jones that “I am afraid I was crabby last night, but I didn’t mean to be, so pray forgive me—we seem to quarrel in speech now sometimes, and sometimes I think you find it hard to stand me . . . but again forgive me for I can’t on any terms do without you. / Yours / W. Morris” (MacCarthy, p. 215). The more than twenty-year time lapse between the Collected Works (1910– 1915) and Artist, Writer, Socialist (1936) may have smoothed the path for the now-elderly May Morris to (re)print several more of these poetic responses to her parents’ estrangement as an act of loyalty to her father’s memory. Proprieties had [End Page 195] become less rigid, Jane Morris had died in 1914, and May may well have wished to...

What is quality in assisted living technology? The ARCHIE framework for effective telehealth and telecare services.

BackgroundWe sought to define quality in telehealth and telecare with the aim of improving the proportion of patients who receive appropriate, acceptable and workable technologies and services to support them living with illness or disability.MethodsThis was a three-phase study: (1) interviews with seven technology suppliers and 14 service providers, (2) ethnographic case studies of 40 people, 60 to 98 years old, with multi-morbidity and assisted living needs and (3) 10 co-design workshops. In phase 1, we explored barriers to uptake of telehealth and telecare. In phase 2, we used ethnographic methods to build a detailed picture of participants’ lives, illness experiences and technology use. In phase 3, we brought users and their carers together with suppliers and providers to derive quality principles for assistive technology products and services.ResultsInterviews identified practical, material and organisational barriers to smooth introduction and continued support of assistive technologies. The experience of multi-morbidity was characterised by multiple, mutually reinforcing and inexorably worsening impairments, producing diverse and unique care challenges. Participants and their carers managed these pragmatically, obtaining technologies and adapting the home. Installed technologies were rarely fit for purpose. Support services for technologies made high (and sometimes oppressive) demands on users. Six principles emerged from the workshops. Quality telehealth or telecare is 1) ANCHORED in a shared understanding of what matters to the user; 2) REALISTIC about the natural history of illness; 3) CO-CREATIVE, evolving and adapting solutions with users; 4) HUMAN, supported through interpersonal relationships and social networks; 5) INTEGRATED, through attention to mutual awareness and knowledge sharing; 6) EVALUATED to drive system learning.ConclusionsTechnological advances are important, but must be underpinned by industry and service providers following a user-centred approach to design and delivery. For the ARCHIE principles to be realised, the sector requires: (1) a shift in focus from product (‘assistive technologies’) to performance (‘supporting technologies-in-use’); (2) a shift in the commissioning model from standardised to personalised home care contracts; and (3) a shift in the design model from ‘walled garden’, branded products to inter-operable components that can be combined and used flexibly across devices and platforms.Please see related article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0305-8.

A Qualitative Study on the Adaptation Process of Middle-Aged and Elderly Couples with Retired Husbands

This study examined the retirement adaptation process for middle-aged and elderly couples. Twelve couples who had experienced retirement were recruited by theoretical sampling. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed through the grounded theory approach of Strauss and Corbin (1998). This study showed the results of 124 concepts, 41 sub-categories and 17 categories indicated through an open coding process. As a paradigm in axial coding, the causal conditions in the adjustment procedures of elderly couples whose spouses are retired were ``retirement preparation,`` ``retirement acceptance,`` and ``marital satisfaction.`` A central phenomenon was ``crisis and conflicts of twilight couples.`` The contextual conditions that correspond to this phenomenon were ``psychological separation from adult children,`` ``division of household labor,`` and ``economic status.`` The action/interaction strategies to control the phenomenon were ``recognition of marital relationships,`` ``conflicts coping,`` ``resolution methods,`` and ``self-reflection.`` The intervening conditions that facilitate action/interaction strategies were ``attitudes of husbands,`` ``mutual awareness of couple,`` ``health status,`` and ``support systems.`` The consequences were ``readaptation of marital relationships,`` and ``unresolved conflicts,`` and ``trying alone.`` This research classified middle-aged and elderly couples`` adaptation into three types such as mutual effort, separation & resignation, and conflicts vestige. The findings provide basic information to develop a retirement adaptation program for the middle-aged and elderly.

“I know you’ve seen it!” Individual and social factors for users’ chatting behavior on Facebook

An online survey (N=207) investigated how the seen-function influences users’ answering behavior in Facebook chatting. The seen-function is a chat-feature that provides more transparency over the course of a chat conversation and thus may also intensify the mutual awareness of chat partners. Based on the need to belong and fear of ostracism as motivators for user behavior it was hypothesized that users with a higher value of these personality traits would have a higher expectation for others to answer immediately and a higher perceived obligation to answer immediately. Indeed, fear of ostracism and need to belong were positively related to perceived obligations to answer and expectations toward chat partners. However, the perceived obligation to answer immediately was higher than the average expectation toward others to do so. Looking for different clusters of users, we found three groups of users in the data set that differ in terms of their expectations and perceived obligations.

Parasocial Interaction and Parasocial Relationship: Conceptual Clarification and a Critical Assessment of Measures

Parasocial interaction and parasocial relationship are often conflated conceptually and methodologically, leaving researchers unclear as to which concept is being tapped. This research clarifies these concepts and experimentally compares the most common measure of parasocial interaction, the Parasocial Interaction Scale (PSI-Scale), with a newer measure, the Experience of Parasocial Interaction Scale (EPSI-Scale). Participants (N = 383) viewed a brief videorecording of a woman who either bodily addressed the viewer or not, then completed a questionnaire. The EPSI-Scale was a better measure of parasocial interaction, understood as a within-viewing experience of mutual awareness, whereas the PSI-Scale may measure short- or long-term liking, or something else. To avoid conceptual and empirical confusion, researchers must choose measures with greater care.

Deploying and Visualising Teacher’s Scripts of Small Group Activities in a Multi-surface Classroom Ecology: a Study in-the-wild

There is a fast growing interest in the use of interactive surfaces in collaborative learning contexts. These devices hold the promise to enrich a typical collocated class by enabling learners to interact with digital content while maintaining face-to-face mutual awareness. However, little has been done to help teachers deploy and monitor the learning scripts for their planned small group activities in a classroom enhanced with these kinds of devices. We present an approach for deploying and visualising the teacher's script for small group idea generation and problem solving activities in a multi-surface classroom ecology that is composed of multiple interactive tabletops, public vertical displays and a teacher's dashboard. We frame our study by drawing on design guidelines for classrooms with multiple interactive surfaces and combine these with principles of scripting and orchestration of learning activities. The paper presents the results and experiences of the implementation of our approach, in an authentic deployment of our classroom ecology, held over 8 weeks in a semester, involving 150 university students and 4 teachers. The paper concludes with remarks about the strengths and shortcomings of our approach, to be taken into account by learning practitioners and designers.

Managing competing organizational priorities in clinical handover across organizational boundaries.

Handover across care boundaries poses additional challenges due to the different professional, organizational and cultural backgrounds of the participants involved. This paper provides a qualitative account of how practitioners in emergency care attempt to align their different individual and organizational priorities and backgrounds when handing over patients across care boundaries (ambulance service to emergency department (ED), and ED to acute medicine). A total of 270 clinical handovers were observed in three emergency care pathways involving five participating NHS organizations (two ambulance services and three hospitals). Half-day process mapping sessions were conducted for each pathway. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 39 participants and analysed thematically. The management of patient flow and the fulfilment of time-related performance targets can create conflicting priorities for practitioners during handover. Practitioners involved in handover manage such competing organizational priorities through additional coordination effort and dynamic trade-offs. Practitioners perceive greater collaboration across departments and organizations, and mutual awareness of each other's goals and constraints as possible ways towards more sustainable improvement. Sustainable improvement in handover across boundaries in emergency care might require commitment by leaders from all parts of the local health economy to work as partners to establish a culture of integrated, patient-centred care.

Uslûb al-Hiwâr al-Qur’âni bayna al-Muslimîn wa al-Nasâra ‘inda Badî’uzzamân Sa’îd al-Nursi

In order to solve some issues, the scholars’ dialogue often generates new ideas as it works to clarify the values of al-Qur’an and to enrich their understanding about it. Therefore, Nursi pointed to unite at present not only with the Muslim community and even with Christians, aside from the differences and disputes over union issues. It is possible to do so when the Muslims and the Christians refrain from their controversies among them. Nursi’s idea does not mean that he does not recognize any differences between them. There are some significant differences between the Christian and the Muslim faith, but those differences should not prevent them from the most important goal to provide new humanitarian look for human life, where God is the axis and the divine will for the moral values of this point. Nursi believes that the current religious relationship marred by erroneous thought as the result of post-modernism worldview. In fact, al-Qur’an recommended a mutual awareness of the communities that shapes them to gain a common goal in God witnesses as the divine values of this modern civilization in opposition to “clash of civilizations”, but this task needs some efforts to discuss on Quranic Dialogue. This dialogue could be undertaken well, as long as it sets out with full love and affection rather than with the fierce conflict and distress. Thus, Nursi introduced new ideas into interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians, to build a true civilization based on mutual relations of love.

Integrating usability work into a large inter-organisational agile development project: Tactics developed by usability designers

In this paper we examine the integration of usability activities into a large inter-organisational agile development project. Inter-organisational agile projects possess unique attributes. They involve multiple stakeholders from different organisational contexts and are thus characterised by competing priorities. Team members also lack a mutual awareness of what constitutes work. These issues make the collaboration between project teams challenging. Meanwhile collaboration between usability designers and agile project teams is an integral part of the integration of usability activities into agile development projects. We carried out an interpretive case study on a large inter-organisational agile development project to examine how usability designers and agile project teams collaborate in this project type. Results showed integration goals were achieved through five tactics deployed by the usability designers. These tactics were negotiating inclusion; upward influencing, placating expert users, establishing credibility and diffusing designs. The implications of these findings are summarised in the form of three propositions that pertain to how usability designer–agile project team collaborations might be organised in agile development projects. Further, the role of the usability designer in ensuring the integration of usability activities is also emphasised.

Drivers' communicative interactions: on-road observations and modelling for integration in future automation systems

Social interactions with other road users are an essential component of the driving activity and may prove critical in view of future automation systems; still up to now they have received only limited attention in the scientific literature. In this paper, it is argued that drivers base their anticipations about the traffic scene to a large extent on observations of social behaviour of other ‘animate human-vehicles’. It is further argued that in cases of uncertainty, drivers seek to establish a mutual situational awareness through deliberate communicative interactions. A linguistic model is proposed for modelling these communicative interactions. Empirical evidence from on-road observations and analysis of concurrent running commentary by 25 experienced drivers support the proposed model. It is suggested that the integration of a social interactions layer based on illocutionary acts in future driving support and automation systems will improve their performance towards matching human driver's expectations.Practitioner Summary: Interactions between drivers on the road may play a significant role in traffic coordination. On-road observations and running commentaries are presented as empirical evidence to support a model of such interactions; incorporation of drivers' interactions in future driving support and automation systems may improve their performance towards matching driver's expectations.

Social Stability within the Nigerian State

Consistencies about issues relating to human social interaction, mutual awareness, social norm and social order all smack of social stability. Theories addressing social issues abound and remain crucial for the development and advancement of human society. The social stability of any given society could be the result of a process of which commencement was beak and murky but traversed hurdles of varied social problems. As an important factor for political stability, social stability is an ingredient of national sovereignty of which itself is the minor of natural of national identity. The extent to which the content of social stability applies to Nigerian national sovereignty remains focus of the piece. Could Nigeria actually boast of sovereignty with viable social stability? The possible answer produces the question of whether the country is enmeshed in any form of identity crises.

Referral and collaboration between South African psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers: Views from some psychiatrists

<p><strong>Background. </strong>Referral between psychiatrists and spiritual workers (e.g. Christian pastoral care workers, traditional healers, imams, rabbis and others) in the heterogeneous South African (SA) society is complicated and requires investigation to establish appropriate norms. </p><p><strong>Objective. </strong>To capture the views of some local psychiatrists on referral and collaboration between SA psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers. </p><p><strong>Methods. </strong>This explorative qualitative study involved indepth, semistructured interviews with 13 local academic psychiatrists selected through purposive sampling. Each participant had a single interview with the aim of exploring themes related to the referral and collabora­tion process between psychiatrists and spiritual advisers. Theme content analysis of interview transcripts was done. Results for one of the six identified themes are reported; other results are reported elsewhere. </p><p><strong>Results. </strong>Within the theme ‘referral and collaboration between psychiatrists and spiritual professionals’, three subthemes were identified: facilitating appropriate referral and intervention for individual users; information sharing and mutual awareness between disciplines; and addressing stigmatisation of users with psychiatric conditions.</p><p><strong>Conclusion. </strong>Dialogue between psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers should be developed on an individual practitioner and facility basis, as well as on an organised basis between representative societies. The process of formalising a relationship between local psychiatrists and different spiritual workers may, however, still have some way to go.</p>

Referral and collaboration between South African psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers: Views from some psychiatrists

Background. Referral between psychiatrists and spiritual workers (e.g. Christian pastoral care workers, traditional healers, imams, rabbis and others) in the heterogeneous South African (SA) society is complicated and requires investigation to establish appropriate norms. Objective. To capture the views of some local psychiatrists on referral and collaboration between SA psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers. Methods. This explorative qualitative study involved indepth, semistructured interviews with 13 local academic psychiatrists selected through purposive sampling. Each participant had a single interview with the aim of exploring themes related to the referral and collabora­tion process between psychiatrists and spiritual advisers. Theme content analysis of interview transcripts was done. Results for one of the six identified themes are reported; other results are reported elsewhere. Results. Within the theme ‘referral and collaboration between psychiatrists and spiritual professionals’, three subthemes were identified: facilitating appropriate referral and intervention for individual users; information sharing and mutual awareness between disciplines; and addressing stigmatisation of users with psychiatric conditions. Conclusion. Dialogue between psychiatrists and religious or spiritual advisers should be developed on an individual practitioner and facility basis, as well as on an organised basis between representative societies. The process of formalising a relationship between local psychiatrists and different spiritual workers may, however, still have some way to go.

Beasley, Rebecca and Bullock, Philip Ross (eds). Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (review)

REVIEWS 549 forced the dancers to supplement their earnings by performing in cabarets all over Petrograd, innovation became central. It was during this time (NEP) that Balanchine switched from dancing to choreographing, making works for his group, the Young Ballet, as well as for operas and plays in the Maly Theatre. There, in 1923, he choreographed dances for a new production of RimskiiKorsakov ’s Golden Cockerel, working with the ‘soon-to-be-legendary’ (p. 204) conductor Samuil Samosud. According to Kendall, Samosud ‘not only heard the music but saw it’ (p. 205), something for which Balanchine would later become renowned. The aim of the Maly was to bring the arts more in line with the new Revolutionary tradition. Later that year, George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra with music written by Iuri Shaporin was mounted, for which Balanchine again made the dances. By then he had become the city’s ‘go-to guy’ (p. 207). Had Lenin not died in January 1924, leading to the abandonment of the NEP, it is debatable whether Balanchine would have left the Soviet Union at all and American ballet would have been significantly poorer. As Kendall has shown in this well researched and highly readable book, these opportunities for Balanchine to choreograph in stimulating projects showcased his talents and gave him the background he needed for his eventual assimilation into the Ballets Russes in 1924, and ultimately for his work in the USA. Department of Dance, University of Roehampton Geraldine Morris Beasley, Rebecca and Bullock, Philip Ross (eds). Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xv + 309 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. The thirteen essays in this beautifully produced volume are based on a conference held at the University of London in 2009. The publishers’ claim that it ‘offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture’ is misleading. For one thing, it focuses on only sixty or so years of a relationship that goes back several centuries; for another, as Ken Hirschkop notes in the Afterword, ‘most of the events recorded and discussed […] take place in London’ (p. 259); and finally it follows hard on the heels of Anthony Cross’s A People Passing Rude (Cambridge, 2012). Nevertheless, the essays cover a wide range of topics embracing literature, drama, history, art history, film studies, dance and music. The propensity for single volumes arising from conference papers to lack overall coherence is moreover partially offset by a tightly-focused introduction together with the authors’ mutual awareness of their colleagues’ contributions. SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 550 The chapters are organized along chronological lines. After Laurence Senelick’s survey of the presence and influence of Russia on the British stage during the nineteenth century, Michael Newton sets out to show that, although the British often regarded the figure of the Russian nihilist as a representation of Russianexcess,itcouldalsobeadaptedforconcernsthatwereclosertohome,as illustrated by Oscar Wilde’s play Vera; or the Nihilists, based on the trial of Vera Zasulich. Charlotte Alston discusses the impact of the international Tolstoyan movement on Britain, including in particular aspects such as the vegetarian movement and the international peace movement. Robert Henderson charts the history of the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel and the part played by its founder, Aleksei Teplov. Stuart Young documents the range of productions of Russian plays in London from 1900 to 1945, examining in particular the contribution of Fedor Komissarzhevskii. We then turn to two chapters on musical topics. Philip Ross Bullock explores the impact of Russian music in London from 1895 to 1926, arguing that the ‘Russian repertoire owed its success principally to figures who worked outside of and even against scholarship and criticism, and who derived their authority by appealing directly to popular taste’ (p. 116), while Ramsay Burt explores the contrasting British responses to Nizhinskii’s choreographic approach to Le Sacre du printemps within the broader context of the Ballets Russes and their European reception. Further chapters continue to demonstrate the volume’s eclectic approach. Caroline Maclean looks at the modernist magazine Rhythm, published between 1911 and 1913, in particular the...

Introduction: Human Rights and the History of Violence in the Early British Empire

AbstractSpecialists on early modern violence and on human rights history have much to gain through collaboration, or at least mutual awareness. Human rights historians are increasingly drawing on studies of early modern violence. However, as contended here, early modernists tend to approach the subject framed by their own geographical areas of interest. As such, we lack an overarching sense of violence and its meanings across the Tudor and Stuart realms and colonies, something that would be of great utility in understanding how developments in the early modern period relate to later ones. In the interests of promoting such broader investigation and comparison, the present essay briefly surveys important aspects of the approach to violence in the English, Irish and Atlantic historiographies, and in the literatures of massacre and of human rights. In doing so, it sets the essays included in this special edition in their historiographical contexts and highlights crucial interventions. It concludes with thoughts not only on how a more comprehensive understanding of violence in the early British empire might be of value to human rights historians, but how the new meta‐narrative of human rights history might spur greater comparative work amongst early modernists.

Online Persona as Hybrid-Object: Tracing the Problems and Possibilities of Persona in the Short Film Noah

Online Persona as Hybrid-Object: Tracing the Problems and Possibilities of Persona in the Short Film Noah