Representation Paradigm Research Articles

Literary form and historicised relationality: theorising the city as text in Teju Cole’s novels

ABSTRACT This essay explores the representation and theorisation of the city in Teju Cole’s novels – Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011), and Tremor (2023). It argues that Cole’s writing articulates a new grammar of city-ness premised on historicised relationality and comparative thinking, thus challenging paradigms of urban representation that universalise the Western city. In particular, I propose that Cole’s novels offer a rewriting of Lagos and New York as specifically textual constructions, in which histories of modernity and colonisation get crystallised into their social geographies and cultural infrastructures. By close reading these texts and by drawing from the insights of postcolonial and literary urban studies, I analyse the formal devices – from variations in perspective to restricted focalisation – that Cole employs to textualise the city and its political histories. Through form, Cole’s novels raise crucial questions, both ethical and narrative, about representability, language, and historical violence in urban settings.

Transculturation in Latin American Video Game Production: Between Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism

This research explores the manifestation of transculturation, a literary paradigm designed to situate Latin American production in the context of globalization, in video game production, evaluating its applicability to the study of cultural representation. Embracing a documentary research and content analysis methodology, the study analyzes 29 video games from nine Latin American countries, classifying them as “regionalist” or “cosmopolitan” based on settings, themes, audiovisual elements, and intertextual references. The regionalist category exhibits a preference for realism, natural settings, representation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural preservation. Conversely, the cosmopolitan category favors the fantastic, urban settings, reinterpretation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural exchange. By scrutinizing video games through the lens of transculturation, the study revalidates this theory as a relevant paradigm for understanding cultural representation in the digital age, offering new insights into the interplay between local and global influences in Latin American video game narratives.

Dual Contrastive Learning Network for Graph Clustering.

Graph representation is an important part of graph clustering. Recently, contrastive learning, which maximizes the mutual information between augmented graph views that share the same semantics, has become a popular and powerful paradigm for graph representation. However, in the process of patch contrasting, existing literature tends to learn all features into similar variables, i.e., representation collapse, leading to less discriminative graph representations. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method called dual contrastive learning network (DCLN), which aims to reduce the redundant information of learned latent variables in a dual manner. Specifically, the dual curriculum contrastive module (DCCM) is proposed, which approximates the node similarity matrix and feature similarity matrix to a high-order adjacency matrix and an identity matrix, respectively. By doing this, the informative information in high-order neighbors could be well collected and preserved while the irrelevant redundant features among representations could be eliminated, hence improving the discriminative capacity of the graph representation. Moreover, to alleviate the problem of sample imbalance during the contrastive process, we design a curriculum learning strategy, which enables the network to simultaneously learn reliable information from two levels. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Investigating Posthumanism through the Medium of Self-Representation Using Instagram's Augmented Reality (AR) "Camera Effect"

The Augmented Reality camera effects feature on Instagram provides users with the freedom to create, experiment, and share visual content without limitations, thereby presenting diverse self-images. Remarkably, Indonesia, ranking fourth globally in terms of Instagram users in 2022, demonstrates remarkable adoption of this AR camera effects feature, indicating rapid adoption of new media technology. This research investigates how users engage with this technology to redefine their identities and transcend traditional human boundaries. Through a desk study method, this study analyzes the "Camera Effect" feature on Instagram as a focal point for understanding the phenomenon of self-representation and exploring the concept of posthumanism. By referencing Frank Webster's theory of information society and the posthuman concept in literature, this research reveals that the AR feature on Instagram is a powerful cultural medium for self-representation, overcoming limitations between humans and technology in Indonesian Society. Self-representation becomes pivotal in posthumanism, and AR technology enables exploration and experimentation of diverse identities and expressions. Thus, Instagram's AR technology provides users with new ways to represent themselves, transforming the paradigm of representation and self-identity.

Learning intrinsic shape representations via spectral mesh convolutions

We introduce spectral-based convolutional operators embedded within Generalized Graph Neural Networks (G-GNNs). These operators enable deep learning on graphs through a learnable, energy-driven evolution process. This approach empowers us to impose specific properties on the graph convolutional kernel directly derived from the corresponding variational formulations. Our model incorporates both parameterized and non-parameterized graph Laplacian-based energies within the generalized graph convolutional layer to address features like smoothness, sharpness, and compact support. By making appropriate choices within our G-GNN framework, we pave the way for designing novel paradigms for 3D shape representation, reconstruction, and processing, while also enabling effective feature embeddings for intrinsic neural fields.

A Content Based Analysis of Cultural Depictions in English Textbook

The role that culture plays in teaching English as a global language is complicated by the language's widespread usage in a variety of international situations. Using a well-known paradigm of cultural representation in ELT textbook design by PCTB for grade 9, this study focused on a content analysis of four categories: objects, practices, viewpoints, and persons. The researcher has used qualitative research methods and content analysis as a tool for the analysis. Cultures, which are made up of a society's behavioural patterns that include details about common daily activities and rituals. The variety of foreign cultures that were depicted in these textbooks was obviously unbalanced. This is explained by the fact that the cultures of English-speaking nations are normal in comparison to other civilizations across the globe. It is believed that using English as an international language can help students become more proficient in cross-cultural communication and improve their intercultural competency.If writers of instructional materials focus more on the significance of global culture, this can be made achievable. By using content analysis method the research has evaluated the content of the textbook.

Homo villicus in the cinema environment.

The relevance of the topic of Homo villicus lies in its capacity to disrupt conventional paradigms of human representation and cultural understanding within the sphere of symbolism. The aim of this study is to investigate Homo villicus within the realm of symbolic representation, examining its unique characteristics and its role in contemporary philosophical discourse. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing literature review, conceptual analysis, discourse analysis, case studies, content analysis, comparative analysis, psychological assessments, ethical considerations, and critical discourse analysis. The results of this study highlight the importance of an acratic approach to governance that uses Homo villicus, generating a counter-hegemonic discourse and intensifying the interaction between culture, cinema, and self-management. This study highlights the dynamic cultural influence of Homo villicus, which actively seeks to balance its inner forces and “build itself” through self-revolution. Furthermore, it explores the cinematic nature of self-construction, emphasizing the participation of viewers in the creation of screen products and the role of film in directly representing behavior. It also highlights the potential of Homo villicus in transforming dissatisfied models into personal models. Homo villicus’ distinctive self-demonstration technology, drawing from contemporary expositions and eschewing reliance on prior presentations, underscores its role as an innovative lens through which to explore cultural history on its terms.

The Politics of Taking No Position: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

Since the 1970s, thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has been dominated by two lines of inquiry: firstly, regarding artists’ decisions to make one kind of work versus another, and secondly, concerning the curators, critics, collectors, and viewers who together determine art’s meaning and value. Works of Institutional Critique following in this lineage argue that artworks are permeated by the social relations that predominate in their immediate context. Works’ meaning and value emerge, immanently, in relation to this ground. Yet thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has failed to account for the way that contemporary art’s representational conditions impact artistic production. In this paper, I fill a gap in art discourse surrounding the stakes of artistic production amid what Kobena Mercer calls “inclusionism.” Work by the duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, I argue, reveals that––within contemporary art’s prevailing representational paradigm––of similar importance to the position one takes, is one’s position as subject. A series of exhibitions produced by Chung and Maeda between 2009 and 2021 prove that one of the primary meanings of Institutional Critique within the field of contemporary art production is the possibility of refusing the reduction of a work to its maker’s subject position. Chung and Maeda’s work can be seen as articulating insight into the objective conditions of contemporary artistic production, distribution, and reception––specifically regarding the gallerists who invited the duo to exhibit––and thereby pointing beyond contemporary art’s representational double bind.

Enhancing XML-based Compiler Construction with Large Language Models: A Novel Approach

Considering the prevailing rule of Large Language Models (LLMs) applications and the benefits of XML in a compiler context. This manuscript explores the synergistic integration of Large Language Models with XML-based compiler tools and advanced computing technologies. Marking a significant stride toward redefining compiler construction and data representation paradigms. As computing power and internet proliferation advance, XML emerges as a pivotal technology for representing, exchanging, and transforming documents and data. This study builds on the foundational work of Chomsky's Context-Free Grammar (CFG). Recognized for their critical role in compiler construction, to address and mitigate the speed penalties associated with traditional compiler systems and parser generators through the development of an efficient XML parser generator employing compiler techniques. Our research employs a methodical approach to harness the sophisticated capabilities of LLMs, alongside XML technologies. The key is to automate grammar optimization, facilitate natural language processing capabilities, and pioneer advanced parsing algorithms. To demonstrate their effectiveness, we thoroughly run experiments and compare them to other techniques. This way, we call attention to the efficiency, adaptability, and user-friendliness of the XML-based compiler tools with the help of these integrations. And the target will be the elimination of left-recursive grammars and the development of a global schema for LL(1) grammars, the latter taking advantage of the XML technology, to support the LL(1) grammars construction. The findings in this research not only underscore the signification of these innovations in the field of compilation construction but also indicate a paradigm move towards the use of AI technologies and XML in the context of the resolution of programming traditional issues. The outlined methodology serves as a roadmap for future research and development in compiler technology, which paves the way for open-source software to sweep across all fields. Gradually ushering in a new era of compiler technology featuring better efficiency, adaptability, and all CFGs processed through existing XML utilities on a global basis.

Trajectory-User Linking via Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Attention Networks

Trajectory-User Linking (TUL) is crucial for human mobility modeling by linking different trajectories to users with the exploration of complex mobility patterns. Existing works mainly rely on the recurrent neural framework to encode the temporal dependencies in trajectories, have fall short in capturing spatial-temporal global context for TUL prediction. To fill this gap, this work presents a new hierarchical spatio-temporal attention neural network, called AttnTUL , to jointly encode the local trajectory transitional patterns and global spatial dependencies for TUL. Specifically, our first model component is built over the graph neural architecture to preserve the local and global context and enhance the representation paradigm of geographical regions and user trajectories. Additionally, a hierarchically structured attention network is designed to simultaneously encode the intra-trajectory and inter-trajectory dependencies, with the integration of the temporal attention mechanism and global elastic attentional encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our AttnTUL method as compared to state-of-the-art baselines on various trajectory datasets. The source code of our model is available at https://github.com/Onedean/AttnTUL .

Within the Space of Drawing: Lines and the Locus of Creation in Architectural Design

This paper considers the practice of drawing lines in the context of architectural design. The core argument is that drawing lines generates the conditions for creative thought. Moreover, this initial claim is discussed in the context of the creative process in architectural design, as lines play an indispensable role in the locus of creation. First, the so-called “representational paradigm” about hand drawing is critically discussed, leading to the exposition of a new philosophical account regarding drawing. This new position consists of three theses: (I) it regards the drawing surface as a topos or “space of drawing”; (II) it regards drawings as situated figurations; (III) and it regards lines as processes. Jointly, these three theses form the “performative paradigm”, casting each aspect of the drawing process in terms of an unfolding dynamic in which inhabitative imagination and aesthetic sensibility play decisive roles. Lastly, these conclusions are formalized in a design model.

Syntactic ASP forgetting with forks

Answer Set Programming (ASP) constitutes nowadays one of the most successful paradigms for practical Knowledge Representation and declarative problem solving. The formal analysis of ASP programs is essential for a rigorous treatment of specifications, the correct construction of solvers and the extension with other representational features. In this paper, we present a syntactic transformation, called the unfolding operator, that allows forgetting an atom in a logic program (under ASP semantics). The main advantage of unfolding is that, unlike other syntactic operators, it is always applicable and guarantees strong persistence, that is, the result preserves the same stable models with respect to any context where the forgotten atom does not occur. The price for its completeness is that the result is an expression that may contain the fork operator. Yet, we illustrate how, in some cases, the application of fork properties may allow us to reduce the fork to a logic program.

Jade for Bones in Hongshan Craftsmanship: Human Anatomy as the Genesis of a Prehistoric Style

Jade artifacts produced in prehistoric China continue to generate extensive scholarly interest. In the absence of textual data, inferring how works functioned in Jade Age communities remains challenging. This paper focuses on Hongshan 红山 culture (4500–3000 BCE) jades, a distinctively styled corpus primarily recovered from late fourth millennium BCE graves in northeastern China. Recent finds within and beyond the Hongshan core zone have enriched the jade inventory and expanded the known scope of its stylistic variations. The analysis sheds light on enigmatic types, reveals the complex representational nature of this corpus, and clarifies the mimetic intentions that resulted in the soft rounded forms characteristic of the style. Most objects examined were unearthed at Hongshan ceremonial centers and have sound excavation pedigrees. Their study relies on contextual archaeological data and comparative visual analysis and draws on the broader Hongshan material world. Further considerations include environment, funerary practices, materiality, cognition, and human anatomy. Ultimately, the paper uncovers new paradigms of figural representation that should open fresh investigative avenues for specialists of early China. Preliminary evaluation of jades unearthed further south at Lingjiatan 凌家滩 and Liangzhu 良渚 sites suggests that some late Neolithic societies adopted Hongshan practices. Current evidence hints at members of prehistoric communities attempting, through jade works, to rationalize their physical circumstances and assert their social power by symbolically fusing with elements of their environments.

Vocation: Theory and Practice

The core paradigm of the role of the phenomenon of vocation in being of a human as a spiritual mystery and a rational choice at the same time is emphasised. We consider the problem of the mystery of vocation in the spiritual-axiological (Christological) context of consideration and secular (so-called profane) understanding with a logical approach to modern-rational, research, and empirical paradigms of understanding and representation. The work analyses the results of the study of the guidance and actions of Ukrainian psychology students regarding the realisation of one’s vocation in the field of spiritual searches, in real life and virtual life space. The phenomenon of vocation is considered as a significant personal construct, which becomes a factor in its successful life self-realisation and achievement of psychological well-being. It is stated that a conscious vocation is a key to the successful professional self-determination of a young person and a factor in the effectiveness of their further professionalisation.

Holding the Pen: Visions and Revisions of the American South in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

ABSTRACT The paper traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams’s neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist’s voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South. Dessa Rose challenges those well-known, white-authored representations of the South that either emit or distort the Black perspective. Its structure, especially its initial reliance on the monocular, fragmenting white gaze and its subsequent disruption of this mode of seeing ultimately allow Dessa to emerge as the only reliable narrator, thus amplifying – what is more, enabling – the eventual catharsis while producing a complexly fragmented vision of the South.

From Word Types to Tokens and Back: A Survey of Approaches to Word Meaning Representation and Interpretation

Abstract Vector-based word representation paradigms situate lexical meaning at different levels of abstraction. Distributional and static embedding models generate a single vector per word type, which is an aggregate across the instances of the word in a corpus. Contextual language models, on the contrary, directly capture the meaning of individual word instances. The goal of this survey is to provide an overview of word meaning representation methods, and of the strategies that have been proposed for improving the quality of the generated vectors. These often involve injecting external knowledge about lexical semantic relationships, or refining the vectors to describe different senses. The survey also covers recent approaches for obtaining word type-level representations from token-level ones, and for combining static and contextualized representations. Special focus is given to probing and interpretation studies aimed at discovering the lexical semantic knowledge that is encoded in contextualized representations. The challenges posed by this exploration have motivated the interest towards static embedding derivation from contextualized embeddings, and for methods aimed at improving the similarity estimates that can be drawn from the space of contextual language models.

Simultaneous denoising and resolution enhancement of seismic data based on elastic convolution dictionary learning

Enhancing seismic resolution is a key component in seismic data processing, which plays a valuable role in raising the prospecting accuracy of oil reservoirs. However, in noisy situations, existing resolution enhancement methods are difficult to yield satisfactory processing outcomes for reservoir characterization. To solve this problem, we develop a new approach for simultaneous denoising and resolution enhancement of seismic data based on convolution dictionary learning. First, an elastic convolution dictionary learning algorithm is presented to efficiently learn a convolution dictionary with stronger representation capability from the noisy data to be processed. Specifically, the algorithm introduces the elastic L1/2 norm as a sparsity constraint and employs a steepest gradient descent strategy to efficiently solve the frequency-domain linear system with substantial computational cost in a half-quadratic splitting framework. Then, based on the learned convolution dictionary, a weighted convolutional sparse representation paradigm is designed to encode the noisy data to acquire an optimal sparse approximation of the effective signal. Subsequently, a high-resolution dictionary with a broadband spectrum is constructed by the proposed parameter scaling strategy and matched filtering technique on the basis of atomic spectrum modeling. Finally, the optimal sparse approximation of the effective signal and the constructed high-resolution dictionary are used for data reconstruction to obtain the seismic signal with high resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio. Synthetic and field dataset examples are executed to check the effectiveness and reliability of the developed method. The results indicate that this method has a more competitive performance in seismic applications compared with the conventional deconvolution and spectral whitening methods.

The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890–1940

The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890–1940

Graph neural networks for representing multivariate resource usage: A multiplayer mobile gaming case-study

The emergence of Multiplayer Mobile Gaming (MMG) applications is intertwined with a plethora of Quality of Service and Quality of Experience requirements. Resource usage prediction can provide valuable insights into the corresponding orchestration and management process in the form of several proactive functionalities in resource scaling, service migration, task offloading and scheduling. These processes are crucial in the Cloud and Edge environments exploited by MMG applications. Thus, producing accurate resource usage predictions concerning these types of applications is of paramount importance. To that end, we propose a resource usage representation paradigm based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The novelty of this approach is based on the process of leveraging the dependencies that exist among the various types of computational resources. Furthermore, we expand upon this representation approach to develop a GNN-based Encoder-Decoder model that caters to the complexities of resource usage and can provide multi-step resource usage predictions. This model is compared against numerous well-established Encoder-Decoder and Deep Learning prediction models to assess its efficiency. Finally, the proposed model is incorporated in a proactive Horizontal Autoscaling solution that manages to outperform a standard reactive Horizontal Autoscaling approach in the context of a large-scale simulation, in terms of various performance metrics, while keeping the volume of the required computational resources to a minimum. The findings of this work showcase the importance of developing novel approaches in order to represent resource usage and the numerous benefits in the context of application performance and resource consumption that may derive from such scientific endeavors.

IDENTITY OF CULTURE OF BLACKS AND WHITES IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF SOLOMON (A PERSPECTIVE OF POSTMODERNISM)

The cultural identity in a society is the characteristic and signifier to the existence and dimension of society in their life. Life of community in the broadest sense exists in paradigm of reflection and representation in the plots of norm, ideology, tradition and aesthetic involved in and it should not be the dichotomy in space and time in transferring the meaning of life. It is the forms of integrity, responsibility in orders of values, hope, ideals and future. The article represents the life of human being in following, encouraging, accompanying, even fighting for how to reach the cultural identity in terms of rational and historical times. Colored with the problems of social stratification, race, and gender, this novel tries to convey the forms of paradoxical analyses and sharply elaborated in the structure of oxymoron in which imply on the studies of culture in a society to find out the self-identity. The analyses of the research are in the approach of post-modernism discussed as the reaction to the established modern era and its colors, meanwhile the data analyzed in terms of qualitative method with the techniques of interpretative qualitative in the steps of data comprehensively read, interpretation of meaning and critical analysis.