Popular Artifacts Research Articles

“The revolution born out of a swear”: populist humour, carnivalization, and mass protest in Romania

ABSTRACT This article aims to make two contributions. First, at a theoretical level, I briefly outline an embedded narrative approach to populism, which is critical of treating it solely as an ideology or ontologizing it. This alternative approach provides a better understanding of the connection between populism, humour, and insults. Second, at an empirical level, I argue that the 2018 mass protests against the political elite in Romania were unique in that they turned a gendered and violent insult into a guiding political slogan, reiterated across both high and popular culture. Influential intellectuals, such as Gabriel Liiceanu, the most reputed public philosopher in Romania, proclaimed that this was a “swear (înjurătură) that unites us all” inspiring a new anti-communist “revolution”. By examining both the political imagination of the “institutional intellectuals” and popular artefacts (from T-shirts to popular songs), I interpret the Romanian protests and the role of “bad language” and populist humour as an expression of the carnivalization of politics and the intensification of antagonism in post-communist Romania.

EEG Artifacts Removal: A Detailed Review Based Study

Electroencephalography, or EEG for short, is a technique used to record the electrical activity of the brain. This EEG detects errors that affect how the human brain functions. This method is the most commonly used for recording the brain in laboratory research, clinical investigations, patient health monitoring, diagnostics, and a variety of other applications due to its non-invasiveness and cost-benefit ratio. Most EEG recordings are contaminated by a variety of irregularities, including those caused by electrode displacement, motion, ocular, and muscular activity related EMG anomalies. These unwanted artifacts may make it difficult to distinguish genuine information from them, in addition to confusing the brain's information processing that supports them. EEG signal artifacts can be removed in a variety of ways. The top and most popular artifact reduction techniques are listed on this page as PCA, pure EEG, and wavelet transform. The study provides a thorough evaluation of current artifact identification and removal methods from scalp EEG for all conceivable EEG-based applications.

A quick survey of EEG signal noise removal methods

An Electroencephalogram (EEG) is produced as a consequence of the electrical voltage of neurons in the brain. The EEG signal is crucial for detecting brain activity and attitude. Because this signal has very low amplitude, it is easily corrupted by different artefacts. The study and analysis of brain signals in the presence of these artifacts is a challenging task. ECG, EOG, EMG, and motion are the popular artifacts that induce disturbance to the EEG signal. This survey paper emphasizes the artifact elimination methods with their substantial parameters that must be considered during the study of published research on this trend.

Illuminating the Vita Nuova: Phoebe Anna Traquair, Evelyn Paul, and Medievalist Practices of Visual Mediation

ABSTRACT The article carries out a close, comparative reading of two modern illuminated editions of the Vita nova by an Arts and Crafts artist, namely Phoebe Anna Traquair (1902) and a London-based art professional, Evelyn Paul (1916). After a short reconstruction of the historical and social context fostering the revival of illumination in mid-to-late Victorian Britain, the article unpacks the inner mechanism of pictorial, decorative, and typographical mediation that the two illuminators designed to translate the verbal sign and convey a distinctive visual interpretation of the libello. It considers how their editions introduced the ‘elite arts of poetry’ and manuscript illumination within the intellectual and economic reach of the middle-class mass public seeking cultural cultivation. It ponders how these popular artefacts mediated Dante’s book of poetry for a whole new reading public.

Enterprise architecture artefacts as instruments for knowledge management: a theoretical interpretation

ABSTRACT Enterprise architecture (EA) involves a collection of special documents, or artefacts, describing various aspects of an organisation from an integrated business and IT perspective. Knowledge management is a practice of generating, storing and sharing knowledge within an organisation and EA artefacts can be clearly viewed as special instruments for managing knowledge. Based on the analysis of EA artefacts used in 27 diverse organisations, we study the properties of the most popular artefacts through the conceptual lenses of knowledge management. Specifically, we analyse what forms of knowledge these EA artefacts represent, what knowledge management strategies they implement, what knowledge management systems they leverage and how these features correlate with other properties of EA artefacts. This study provides arguably the first available in-depth analysis of EA artefacts as instruments for managing knowledge. Our analysis demonstrates a wide diversity of EA artefacts from the perspective of their approaches to knowledge management.

A linearly extendible multi-artifact removal approach for improved upper extremity EEG-based motor imagery decoding.

Non-invasive multichannel Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings provide an alternative source of neural information from which motor imagery (MI) patterns associated with limb movement intent can be decoded for use as control inputs for rehabilitation robots. The presence of multiple inherent dynamic artifacts in EEG signals, however, poses processing challenges for brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. A large proportion of the existing EEG signal preprocessing methods focus on isolating single artifact per time from an ensemble of EEG trials and require calibration and/or reference electrodes, resulting in increased complexity of their application to MI-EEG controlled rehabilitation devices in practical settings. Also, a few existing multi-artifacts removal methods though explored in other domains, they have rarely been investigated in the space of MI-EEG signals for multiple artifacts cancellation in a simultaneous manner. Building on the premise of previous works, this study propose a semi-automatic EEG preprocessing method that combines Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition driven by low-rank approximation and a Multi-channel Wiener Filter (GEVD-MWF) that employs a learning technique for simultaneous elimination of multiple artifacts from MI-EEG signals. The proposed method is applied to remove multiple artifacts from 64-channel EEG signals recorded from transhumeral amputees while they performed distinct classes of upper limb MI tasks before decoding their movement intent using a selection of features and machine learning algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed GEVD-MWF method yields significant improvements in MI decoding accuracies, in the range of 13.23%-41.21% compared to four existing popular artifact removal algorithms. Further investigation revealed that the GEVD-MWF approach enabled accuracies in the range of 90.44% - 99.67% using "single trial" EEG recordings, which could eliminate the need to record and process large ensembles of EEG trials as commonly required in some existing approaches. Additionally, using a variant of the sequential forward floating selection algorithm, a subset of 9 channels was used to obtain a decoding accuracy of 93.73%±1.58%. Given its improved performance, reduced data requirements, and feasibility with few channels, the proposed GEVD-MWF could potentially spur the development of effective real-time control strategies for multi-degree of freedom EEG-based miniaturized rehabilitation robotic interfaces.

Early Māori photography as commodified object: Mementoes, miniatures and material culture

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a boom in the different forms of material culture of the photographic image with the emergence of cheap methods for its mass (re)production. The material culture extended into postcards, illustrated books, magic lantern slides and stereoviews, but also into the much-less discussed area of souvenir china. These commodified objects of illustrated porcelain were popular mementoes of places visited, physical reminders of spaces encountered, made possible through newly developing modes of leisure culture and organized travel. Edwardian New Zealand was no exception, where images of the Māori were a striking presence within its visual culture. This was a country that was beginning to promote its cultural uniqueness partly through its Indigenous population, with early tourism literature referring to the country as Maoriland. New Zealand souvenirs depicted images of the Māori and Māoritanga (Māori culture) on decorative china essentially for consumption by local tourists and travellers. This article considers these commodified objects in the context of photography as material culture, exploring their social biography and the manner in which the images were reproduced and altered. It contends that in addressing keepsake china as objects bearing photographic images, and in positioning these souvenirs as popular artefacts within a scopic culture, a more complex argument of variant readings emerges.

Copyright, Transformativeness, and Protection for Internet Memes

Internet memes have become popular artifacts of mass communication in digital culture. They are, by definition, reiterative as they remix already existing content to produce new communicative statements. This theoretical study, which lies at the intersection of media technologies, society, and media law, explores the legal implications of such memetic appropriation vis-à-vis the U.S. copyright law. With the help of legal research analysis and theoretical framework of remix culture and internet memes, the study shows how and why memes deserve legal protection as transformative work.

Realistic hair simulator for skin lesion images: A novel benchemarking tool.

Automated skin lesion analysis is one of the trending fields that has gained attention among the dermatologists and health care practitioners. Skin lesion restoration is an essential pre-processing step for lesion enhancements for accurate automated analysis and diagnosis by both dermatologists and computer-aided diagnosis tools. Hair occlusion is one of the most popular artifacts in dermatoscopic images. It can negatively impact the skin lesions diagnosis by both dermatologists and automated computer diagnostic tools. Digital hair removal is a non-invasive method for image enhancement for decrease the hair-occlusion artifact in previously captured images. Several hair removal methods were proposed for skin delineation and removal without standardized benchmarking techniques. Manual annotation is one of the main challenges that hinder the validation of these proposed methods on a large number of images or against benchmarking datasets for comparison purposes. In the presented work, we propose a photo-realistic hair simulator based on context-aware image synthesis using image-to-image translation techniques via conditional adversarial generative networks for generation of different hair occlusions in skin images, along with ground-truth mask for hair location. Hair-occluded image is synthesized using the latent structure of any input hair-free image by deep encoding the input image into a latent vector of features. The locations of required hair are highlighted using white pixels on the input image. Then, these deep encoded features are used to reconstruct the synthetic highly realistic hair-occluded image. Besides, we explored using three loss functions including L1-norm, L2-norm and structural similarity index (SSIM) to maximize the image synthesis visual quality. For the evaluation of the generated samples, the t-SNE feature mapping and Bland-Altman test are used as visualization tools for the experimental results. The results show the superior performance of our proposed method compared to previous methods for hair synthesis with plausible colours and preserving the integrity of the lesion texture. The proposed method can be used to generate benchmarking datasets for comparing the performance of digital hair removal methods. The code is available online at: https://github.com/attiamohammed/realhair.

Νon-monuments: Popular artifacts and their function

Νon-monuments: Popular artifacts and their function

Viewpoint and image schemas in multimodal political discourse

This paper investigates the ways in which multimodal artefacts on social media can infuse a simple object with political meaning. Using a cognitive linguistic framework, I examine the sudden conceptual enrichment of the umbrella, an object that became the defining symbol of the 2014 Hong Kong suffrage protests. The paper contends that the enrichment of the umbrella, which allowed it to represent the political values of the protesters, was enabled by the conceptual integration of cultural frames and viewpoints in artistic illustrations, which retained the shield-like functionality of the umbrella while simultaneously enhancing its symbolic meaning. First I explore the material affordances of the umbrella and the rudimentary schemas that restrict how the umbrella can be depicted. Second, I analyze two popular artefacts disseminated online. One is a cartoon that draws from the iconic “Tank Man” photo from Tiananmen Square. The other artistically alters the Hong Kong flag to look like a configuration of umbrellas. Building on the basic schemas of the umbrella, both multimodal artefacts insert new viewpoints that prompt the re-construal of the original frame. Third, I posit that the new frames and schemas of the artefacts informed how protesters and the Hong Kong government understood the movement as it unfolded.

Kultūros vartojimas: meno suvokimo tyrimo įžvalgos

Straipsnyje nagrinėjamos pagrindinės kultūros vartojimo definicijos – meno suvokimo tyrimo galimybės ir įžvalgos. Meno suvokimas suponuoja meno produktus, meno kūrėjus, meno vartotojus ir visuomenę. Analizuojama, kaip menas vartojamas, ką apie jį mano vartotojai, kokią jis daro įtaką ir kaip jis siejasi su tiriamųjų nuostatomis. Remiantis Lietuvos socialinių tyrimų centro Sociologijos instituto (anksčiau – Lietuvos filosofijos ir sociologijos institutas (LFSI), Socialinių tyrimų institutas (STI)) duomenimis, meno suvokimas analizuojamas kognityviu ir emociniu lygmenimis, išskiriant pagrindinės – estetinės – meno funkcijos raišką. Jauni žmonės su didesniu kultūriniu kapitalu labiau suvokia meną estetiškai ir mėgsta sudėtingesnį meną. Globalizacijos sąlygomis populiarėjant Holivudo produkcijai, dažnai jis tampa gyvenimo įvaizdžių kūrėju jauniems žmonėms. Masinės komunikacijos priemonės, ypač emocionaliai patrauklus kino menas, sukuria naują realybę, kuri padeda konstruoti kasdienio gyvenimo modelius.

Authenticity of the Basotho Hat: Perceptions of Weavers and Vendors

The authenticity of crafts/artifacts has been at the center of tourism debates for some time. There is disagreement among researchers on the conceptualization of the term. This paper contributes to clarifying the understanding of the concept by examining the authenticity of the Basotho hat (Mokorotlo) from the perspectives of weavers, corporative members, traditional leaders and street vendors at the Maseru and Maputsoe border posts, the main entry and exit points of Lesotho. The Basotho hat is an authentic product, and a popular artifact and memorabilia that is directly identified with Lesotho. It serves as both a cultural icon of Lesotho and part of the everyday attire of the Basotho people. The Basotho hat has gone through minor changes in response to local and tourist demands for new enhanced products. Lesotho is rich in cultural attractions that can be capitalized on to develop cultural tourism. The Lesotho Tourism Development Corporation, a destination management and marketing organization, can capitalize on products that are already popular with tourists to market it as part of cultural tourism. This has an added advantage to improve the livelihoods of impoverished Basotho. However, the government should implement mechanisms to certify the authenticity of hats for added appeal to tourists. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p981

Writing, Reading, Writing: Scribal Culture and Magical Texts in Early Modern Venice

Magical texts enjoyed a very wide circulation during the early modern period. Their nature allowed them to satisfy a variety of publics and interests: they represented a popular genre across different social and cultural hierarchies. The particular responses which magical books and papers elicited through reading and reproduction make them a very interesting case study for the analysis of the modes of proposal and reception of texts. The circular relationship between reading and writing — incidentally, an inevitable by-product of censorship — allows us not only to establish the impact of this literature on readers and users, but also to witness the process of constant re-elaboration of contents and forms. Elastic par excellence, addressing both men and women, the literate as well as the illiterate, in early modern Venice magical books and papers were widely popular artefacts. The paper aims to portray some of the key features of this output, by considering the modes and procedures through which texts were created and reading was enacted.

Anthropocentric Distance in National Geographic's Environmental Aesthetic

Tourism is the way we understand the world: tourists travel in an increasingly mediated environment in which ubiquitous promotional material and other popular artifacts employ stunning images and romantic travel narratives to describe local environments. Tourist texts “sell” local landscapes to entice visitors, employing an environmental aesthetic that urges travel. With its mission to “explore the planet,” the National Geographic Society contributes to this tourist aesthetic. This essay examines three special issues on Africa simultaneously published by the National Geographic Society: its official journal, National Geographic, and its sister magazines, National Geographic Traveler, and National Geographic Adventure. The photographic images and travel narratives in these tourist texts produce an environmental aesthetic that positions the traveler at the center of these environments. This essay first analyzes how National Geographic constructs Africa's environmental landscapes. These magazines depict Africa as a vast desert plain, a wilderness theme park, and a part of the global scenery. The second part of the analysis examines how National Geographic locates the tourist in these environments. I discuss how National Geographic positions the tourist as protagonist, expert, and hero of Africa's environment. In the conclusions, I argue this environmental aesthetic renders Africa invisible through anthropocentric distance, and I discuss the need for more critical readings of tourist discourse.

Nostalgia for Crisis: Representing Revolution in North American Popular Culture

In contemporary North America we no longer have revolutions; instead we have nostalgia for revolution. Benjamin Arditi’s Politics on the Edges of Liberalism argues that the continued presence of marginal radical politics in Western liberal democracies is evidence of our nostalgia for revolution and that we are mourning an ideal state of the past. I argue that another more widespread site of evidence for our nostalgia for revolution is the proliferation of popular artefacts branded with revolutionary iconography. As a symbol, revolution is omnipresent in North American culture. It is on our t-shirts, magazine covers, book jackets, advertising posters,and in our language and conversations describing new political realities and cultural contexts.We are collectors of revolutionary culture: we wear it, read it, buy it, and talk about it.

Translation Spells: From Shakespeare's Page to the Tourist Stage

ABSTRACTThis paper explores ways in which the craft of translation becomes the Kraft of tourist visits. It examines popular artefacts, from German guidebooks to Scotland and amateur performances of Macbeth in German dialect, to educational resources. Through these everyday cultural artefacts, translation casts a long spell on the imagination of German tourists. Translation plays at the interface between performance and writing, spelling out in literary form that which in tourism is enacted and enfleshed. It is for such reasons of doubling that translators have long been compared to magicians and tricksters, and ascribed powers similar to those found in witchcraft.

Mobility analysis of a complex structured ball based on mechanism decomposition and equivalent screw system analysis

The complex and articulated ball is one of the popular artifacts for collections and is highly expandable and collapsible. This paper investigates the mechanism structure of this magic ball by hypothetically decomposing the mechanism into kinematic loops and chains and subsequently into basic kinematic sub-chains, leading to the analysis of the mobility of the ball mechanism. Dismantling those kinematic chains which do not contribute to the mechanism mobility, the magic-ball mechanism is decomposed into a number of kinematic chains, and further disintegrated into two distinct types of elementary platforms with three and four legs respectively. The theory of the relationship of a screw system and its reciprocal system is then used to identify both common constraint and virtual constraint in each of the elementary platforms and to examine the mobility of those platforms. The analysis is then extended to the mobility analysis of the closed-loop circular kinematic chain and supplementary chains. A systematic analysis is hence produced in mechanism decomposition and in the analysis of virtual constraints. The paper produces a theoretical basis for the mobility analysis of the mechanism using mechanism decomposition and screw system analysis.

Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas (review)

Reviewed by: Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas Audrey Kerr Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas. By Michaele Thurgood Hayes. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 180 , 35 illustrations, appendix.) At first, Dressing Up Debutantes appears to be a neutral chronicle of the Coronation tradition in San Antonio, Texas—an objective depiction of pageantry in a Southern city. But as the author unfolds the traditions of Coronation and the events that inaugurate young aristocrats into San Antonio's social elite, it becomes clear that she wishes to confirm the importance of material rituals for local aristocrats while critiquing the use of such rituals to alienate lower-class whites and minority groups from long-standing conventions. Coronation is a 90-year-old system of pageantry originated by the founding father of the (fraternal) Order of [End Page 106] the Alamo who first organized this extravagant production to elect an Order queen. It has grown to become a 10-day fiesta filling all of the streets and banquet hall of San Antonio with a myriad of events, including four citywide parades. Although San Antonio hosts a Hispanic majority, most of the events and almost all of the queens are Anglo in descent, and the manipulation of Mexican cultural motifs—the presence of folklorico performers, for example—erroneously implies that a commemoration of Hispanic heritage is part of the celebration. In practice, Coronation is a localized and deeply symbolic commemoration of American Southern Anglo life, as well as a proclamation of this life as "royal": those who are included in Coronation courts are the social monarchy of San Antonio who inherit both the social obligations and privileges that accompany "noble" birth. Queens are selected based on the ornateness of their gown tapestry and their confidence and poise; even lineage is second to charm, grace, attire, and showmanship. Robes are evaluated based on the length and beauty of the train; judges also observe the elaborateness of the stitching and the historicity (or originality) of the theme that is stitched into—and the story that is told through—the gown design. The cost of the robes (including the trains) is so exorbitant that participation in Coronation is indeed the ultimate demonstration of high status. Hayes effectively makes the argument that class distinctions in San Antonio are confirmed by the powerful social mores established in Coronation, and that the traditions of this event are a microcosm of the social, political, and economic allegiances of city residents. To this end, the robes have three effects: first, they are the premier material landscape of a community ritual; second, they illuminate family traditions and secure family standing; and third, and most important, the robes have the symbolic and actual power to solidify class boundaries. As highbrow patterns of behavior will trickle down, mimicry and imitation abound in similar events around the city organized by lower classes. In other words, the true power of the Coronation may inadvertently be its influence on all tiers of San Antonio society, even while welcoming only a very small and exclusive group to take part in the major events. Excluded groups adapt the ceremonialism by organizing, for example, African American and Latino courts, and by selecting queens with more modest dresses and less extravagant crowns, who are celebrated in smaller pageants. The principal contribution of this book is its unique exploration of the deeply symbolic material traditions of the elite that must, on one hand, borrow Hispanic cultural motifs to perpetuate tradition, then, on the other hand, discriminate against Hispanics and other groups for their own cultural preservation. As part of an Oxford University Press series on material culture, Hayes's is a fine complement to the other works in this collection on corresponding themes. This book, finally, is about the fabric—both literal and figurative—of San Antonio's social environment. To this end, it successfully uses the community's most revered and popular artifacts to construct its social identity, and model its social texture. [End Page 107] Audrey Kerr Simon's Rock College Copyright © 2001 American Folklore Society