Referential Representation Research Articles

Complexity and materiality in representations of reality

ABSTRACT The article proceeds from the assumption that poststructuralism contains an ethical dimension despite contrary claims by many of its critics. This ethics can be seen in the poststructuralist refusal of representation and, importantly, allows for representative interventions when their benefits are assumed to outweigh any conceivable harm. As an elaboration of this ethics, the aim is to defend a representational strategy of complexity. Such a use of complexity parallels modernist and postmodern artistic representations advocating alienation or defamiliarization but is here examined specifically in relation to referential representations like history writing. The key ethical argument is that complexity in such representations can foreground the existence of radical alterity and foster an attitude of respect toward it. Hence, the central goal is not for representations to maximize presentational effectiveness as much as for them to provide a means of subverting representation in its oppressive, colonizing aspect, sometimes even at the cost of presentational appeal. In addition to discussing the general conditions for this subversion, the article outlines some potential means for constructing such representations, including the presentation of referential materials as disruptive elements; the way in which these disruptions foreground the sense-making nature of daily experience; and the related and desirable shift of investments of meaning and attributions of significance from author to reader.

TRACE

The deployment of vehicle location services generates increasingly massive vehicle trajectory data, which incurs high storage and transmission costs. A range of studies target offline compression to reduce the storage cost. However, to enable online services such as real-time traffic monitoring, it is attractive to also reduce transmission costs by being able to compress streaming trajectories in real-time. Hence, we propose a framework called TRACE that enables compression, transmission, and querying of network-constrained streaming trajectories in a fully online fashion. We propose a compact two-stage representation of streaming trajectories: a speed-based representation removes redundant information, and a multiple-references based referential representation exploits subtrajectory similarities. In addition, the online referential representation is extended with reference selection, deletion and rewriting functions that further improve the compression performance. An efficient data transmission scheme is provided for achieving low transmission overhead. Finally, indexing and filtering techniques support efficient real-time range queries over compressed trajectories. Extensive experiments with real-life and synthetic datasets evaluate the different parts of TRACE, offering evidence that it is able to outperform the existing representative methods in terms of both compression ratio and transmission cost.

Sequel as A Type of Metatext Practice: Philosophical Perspective

One of the results of the work is the assumption that the ontological status of the new "possible world" in the sequel and therefore its communicative success, are in direct correlation with the way of referential representation of the original.

Compression of uncertain trajectories in road networks

Massive volumes of uncertain trajectory data are being generated by GPS devices. Due to the limitations of GPS data, these trajectories are generally uncertain. This state of affairs renders it is attractive to be able to compress uncertain trajectories and to be able to query the trajectories efficiently without the need for (full) decompression. Unlike existing studies that target accurate trajectories, we propose a framework that accommodates uncertain trajectories in road networks. To address the large cardinality of instances of a single uncertain trajectory, we exploit the similarity between uncertain trajectory instances and provide a referential representation. First, we propose a reference selection algorithm based on the notion of Fine-grained Jaccard Distance to efficiently select trajectory instances as references. Then we provide referential representations of the different types of information contained in trajectories to achieve high compression ratios. In particular, a new compression scheme for temporal information is presented to take into account variations in sample intervals. Finally, we propose an index and develop filtering techniques to support efficient queries over compressed uncertain trajectories. Extensive experiments with real-life datasets offer insight into the properties of the framework and suggest that it is capable of outperforming the existing state-of-the-art method in terms of both compression ratio and efficiency.

Trauma and referentiality in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s famine novels

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novels, So Many Hungers! and He Who Rides a Tiger, provide an epistemological alternative to imperial narratives about the Bengal famine of 1943, that aligns with the concept of the minor as a cultural counter-discourse. Bhattacharya resists representations of a passive, humble population accustomed to poverty by featuring individuated characters with a realist aesthetic. Yet, realism is fractured by the mnemonic (silence, screams, ellipsis), and Bhattacharya shifts protagonists from referential to performative notions of identity. These techniques produce a sense of kinship with the famine victims and question the possibility of the referential representation of trauma.

AS INCOERENTES PERSONAGENS INSÓLITAS NAS NARRATIVAS CURTAS DE MIA COUTO: AS ESTRATÉGIAS DE CONSTRUÇÃO NARRATIVA E OS NOVOS DISCURSOS FANTÁSTICOS

Os estudos do discurso fantástico – lato sensu – na contemporaneidade têm voltado seu olhar crítico não tanto para os mesmos índices observados anteriormente por Todorov e seus coetâneos, que insistiram na instauração da ambiguidade, dúvida ou hesitação mantida para além do desfecho da história, senão que para a manifestação do insólito ficcional – identificado, ora, como categoria, ora, como gênero, ainda como efeito e assim por diante –, que passaria a ser visto como marca distintiva e essencial à literatura fantástica. Segundo essa perspectiva teórica, o insólito emergiria no seio da narrativa a partir de estratégias empregadas na elaboração do texto, implicando traços incoerentes na configuração de uma ou mais das categorias básicas da narrativa – personagem, tempo, espaço e ação –, que não se apresentaria(m) em consonância com as expectativas do modelo real-naturalista – comprometido com a representação referencial da realidade exterior. Entendendo-se que, dentre as demais, a personagem seja a categoria de maior relevância para a consumação do relato, dar-se-á, aqui, primazia à sua configuração insólita, com privilégio para narrativas em que a personagem surja antecipada no título, preferencialmente com referenciação direta ou indireta ao caráter insólito que a envolve. Tal fenômeno ficcional é comum em grande parte das narrativas curtas do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto, dentre as quais, elegeu-se para a presente leitura, que se sugere seja paradigmática, “O não desparecimento de Maria Sombrinha”, texto com que o escritor abre seu volume Contos de nascer da terra.

An interactive metadata model for structural, descriptive, and referential representation of scholarly output

The scientific metadata model proposed in this article encompasses both classical descriptive metadata such as those defined in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DC) and the innovative structural and referential metadata properties that go beyond the classical model. Structural metadata capture the structural vocabulary in research publications; referential metadata include not only citations but also data about other types of scholarly output that is based on or related to the same publication. The article describes the structural, descriptive, and referential (SDR) elements of the metadata model and explains the underlying assumptions and justifications for each major component in the model. ScholarWiki, an experimental system developed as a proof of concept, was built over the wiki platform to allow user interaction with the metadata and the editing, deleting, and adding of metadata. By allowing and encouraging scholars (both as authors and as users) to participate in the knowledge and metadata editing and enhancing process, the larger community will benefit from more accurate and effective information retrieval. The ScholarWiki system utilizes machine‐learning techniques that can automatically produce self‐enhanced metadata by learning from the structural metadata that scholars contribute, which will add intelligence to enhance and update automatically the publication of metadata Wiki pages.

Objects of Representation

I distinguish four questions within Kant's problem of reality: (1) What constitutes propositional content? (2) What constitutes truth? (3) What constitutes referential content? (4) What constitutes successful singular reference? I argue that Kant's transcendental idealism applies primarily to (3) - understood as: What makes some mental or linguistic items would-be referential representations - and secondly to (1). But with regard to (4) and (2), we do not create the objects and states of affairs in the world (there are human artifacts, of course, but most of them continue to exist quite independently of our representing activities). However the contents of our representations in (3) and (1) do depend crucially on our conventions and rules, which are almost always socially learned.

You don't have to believe everything you read: Background knowledge permits fast and efficient validation of information.

In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task (epistemic Stroop effect). Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information.

«Le romantique de la clarté». L’influence de la pensée camusienne sur l’œuvre de Miklós Mészöly

French prose exerted various influences on the Hungarian writer, Miklos Meszoly. The present study focuses on the impact of Albert Camus. The paper interprets the parallelisms of their world-views apparent in their writings, along the lines of the ‘light’ motif analysis in The Romanticism of Clarity , an essay by Meszoly on Camus. The light motif guiding the descriptions, based on an accurate perception of the factual world of Meszoly and Camus, does not only shed a light on the possible interpretations of the time concepts the two authors have but also, through the connection of referential representation and ontological/absurd present time, it enables us to gain a deeper insight into the poetics of prose of Meszoly.

The fan effect: a tale of two theories.

This article addresses J. R. Anderson and L. M. Reder's (1999) account of the differential fan effect reported by G. A. Radvansky, D. H. Spieler, and R. T. Zacks (1993). The differential fan effect is the finding of greater interference with an increased number of associations under some conditions, but not others, in a within-subjects mixed-list recognition test. Anderson and Reder concluded that the differential fan effects can be adequately explained by assuming differences in the weights given to concepts in long-term memory. When a broader range of data is considered, this account is less well supported. Instead, it is better to assume that the organization of information into referential representations, such as situation models, has a meaningful influence on long-term memory retrieval.

Desemanticizing pragmatics

This paper starts with a ‘metatheoretic’ discussion on the sociohistoric conditions of ‘pragmatics’ as a discourse genre, and identifies a complex set of antinomies in modern studies of language, in relation to which pragmatics is situated. Then, the paper investigates how such antinomies are manifested in the speech act theories of logico-linguistic and ethnographic approaches in terms of referential representation and social action, and suggests the possibility of reconstructing a theory of speech acts which may integratively reformulate both referential and social interactional facets of the problem.

Illustrations et modèles mentaux dans la compréhension de textes

Summary: Illustrations and mental models in text comprehension. We know that graphics in texts can be effective for learning, but we do not have much knowledge about how text comprehension interacts with graphics comprehension. Experiments have extensively investigated the effectiveness of pictures in promoting memory for factual information in texts. Cognitive psychologists have attempted to characterize the mental representation constructed during text comprehension. It is now generally agreed that understanding a text requires the construction ofa referential representation of the meaning of the text : a situational model or a mental model. The purpose of this paper is to show that mental model theory can provide an account for the beneficiai effect of illustrations in text comprehension. We first present a short survey of the works focusing on the role illustrations have on text memory and on text comprehension, and the mental model theory of text comprehension is presented. A survey of a series of experiments which show that understanding a text describing spatial environments leads to the construction of a spatial mental model are then presented. Finally, we present some recent works that show that pictures facilitate the construction of a mental model, even in domains of discourse that are not exclusively spatial. Key words : text comprehension, illustrations, mental models.

Favor Referential Representations

Avrutin and Hickok (1993) argue that agrammatic patients have the ability to represent nonreferential or "government" chains ("who... e") but not referential or "binding" chains ("which girl... e"). By contrast, we propose the "referential representation hypothesis," which suggests that agrammatics attempt to cope with their well-known capacity limitations by favoring referential or content-based representations. This predicts that agrammatic patients′ performance should degrade noticeably as task demands increase, and referential demands should take priority over computational ones. In a semantic task, referential phrases should lead to better or more accurate performances. In syntactic tasks, the availability of a referential or content-based representation will interfere with the development of a syntactic representation, resulting in worse syntactic performance on the referential phrases than on nonreferential ones. This predicts that agrammatic patients should incorrectly accept (resumptive) pronoun sentences with a referential wh-phrase because the pronouns will find the semantic or discourse referent of the referential wh-phrase and take it as an antecedent for the pronoun. However, they should reject a (resumptive) pronoun in a sentence with the nonreferential question constituent "who" or "what." "Who" and "what" will remain in syntactic form, since they have only grammatical content and therefore will have only a "nonreferential" syntactic representation. Consequently, they cannot serve as the antecedent of the pronoun. These predictions were largely confirmed by the results of a grammaticality judgement study. Agrammatics performed well on questions with pragmatic biases but failed to distinguish reliably between grammatical and ungrammatical questions where pragmatic biases were neutralized. They assigned especially low ratings to object gap sentences with referential wh-constituents, as predicted. They assigned relatively high ratings to ungrammatical subject pronoun sentences with either type of wh-constituent. The agrammatics accepted ungrammatical reflexive sentences even though syntactic number and gender features alone could have been used to correctly judge the sentences. We attribute this, too, to the unavailability of a reliable syntactic representation of those phrases with referential or extragrammatical semantic content.

Spatial information systems and information integration

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software today provides decision makers and land administrators with geometric and descriptive data management and processing tools. The benefits from these tools in an organization need no longer be demonstrated. However, descriptive and geometric forms are far from the only forms in which information can be represented. Their use allows only a partial modeling of the wealth of information in the real world. This paper consists of a reflection on the problem of integrating information in a GIS. The current situation as well as varied approaches possible for this integration are described. This is a starting point for the creation of a coherent framework in which diverse research efforts on modeling and representing spatial knowledge can take place. The accent is placed on the notion of referential representation (for example: spatial, schematic, descriptive) and on the necessity of this type of references to complete conceptual modeling from a developer's view of a GIS application integrating information. We present many examples in which the use of different “representation referencing schemes” is necessary for management and planning. These include traffic management, electrical engineering, geography. Finally, an example illustrates some partial solutions.