Representational Choices Research Articles

Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back

Probable Impossibilities:Historical Romance Readers Talk Back Suzanne Keen (bio) I take as my starting point Phelan's conception of narrative progression: "the synthesis of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics" (12). I accept Phelan's claim that "[t]extual dynamics are the internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle to ending, and readerly dynamics are the corresponding cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics" (13). The responses of readers are hard to get at, but collaboration between rhetorical narrative theory that admits a role for audiences (narrative, authorial, and actual) and reader research is desirable. To illuminate the bridging "interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments" (13) enacted by readers in response to narrative encoding, I consider a small sampling of the copious social media and paratextual evidence of readerly dynamics in responses to Diana Gabaldon's as yet unfinished time-slip historical romance sequence, the Outlander novels (1990–2014).1 My response underscores the efficacy of Phelan's model by showing that it illuminates the vital role of audiences of [End Page 127] narratives quite different from those he presents (passing a fundamental test for a proposed theory, which should work as well to account for popular as for scholarly readerships). If, as Phelan argues, the authorial audience has attributes "assigned by the author but on the basis of the author's assumptions about likely readers," then the author's communication with her diverse actual readers (in this case, by means of her blog and through her published commentary, The Outlandish Companion) highlights some of those assumptions. Some methodological challenges arise from a commitment to considering readerly dynamics that allows actual audiences onto Phelan's chart. Gabaldon's readers are legion: she commands a worldwide audience for books that have sold more than twenty million copies and have been translated into thirty-eight languages.2 The New York Times bestselling novels have received a boost from their adaptation into a popular Starz television series. Though most of Gabaldon's readers are presumed to be women, the millions of viewers of her television series include many men: the series premiere, "Sassenach," drew equal proportions of men and women in the strongest multiplatform debut of a new series in the history of the network (West).3 With a potential authorial audience of that scale, we must assume recruitment from an actual audience of great diversity. Authorial audience members, as inferred from among other data points on her Website and those reproduced in The Outlandish Companion (369–95), enjoy reading very lengthy novels (9,073 paperback pages so far), sustain interest in a fiction delivered serially, and tolerate fairly long gaps between installments—though potentially they require the "methadone" of Gabaldon's book recommendations to tide them over (571–77). Whether they read for the sex scenes, for the historical reconstructions of events, because they find eighteenth-century medicine fascinating, or simply to follow familiar characters, can and must vary. That Gabaldon engages with her readers shows in her acknowledgement of "… the Readers, who both instigated this book and supplied me with a great deal of its content by asking questions, suggesting Things They Would Like to Know, and providing all sorts of interesting miscellanea" (Outlandish Companion v). Though Gabaldon tries to teach these readers about the error of presentism (343), their responses include passionate presentist denunciations of her representational choices, which (valuing plausibility and verisimilitude) she defends as influenced by the historical period and not under her own control at all (129, 191, 341).4 The author [End Page 128] meets her readers more than partway, blithely admitting minor errors and oversights caught by readers (136, 374), but she stoutly defends her rights as a maker. Rather than joining in the self-deprecating assessment of Gabaldon readers as Obsessenachs, who turn to fan sites to endure Droughtlander periods between novels, I suggest that Gabaldon's real audience talks back and the real author engages with them, within limits. The fictional world of Outlander consists on the one hand of a rigorously researched eighteenth century (with persuasively rendered locations and episodes in the Scottish Highlands, Paris, the Caribbean, coastal and mountain colonial North Carolina, and...

Learning from Quality Issues of BPMN Models from Industry

Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues.

Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses Claire Laville Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Omri Moses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $65.00 (cloth). High modernists were known to reject “the realism of character” (as Gertrude Stein described the novels of George Eliot), with its static social types and transparent personal motivations. Since the 1960s, many critics have extrapolated those representational choices into a wholesale rejection of consciousness or subjectivity. Out of Character sets out to “repsychologize” modernism while avoiding the error of depth psychology—in short, the idea that each of us possesses a truer self than the outward-facing one, or that we can explain our present behavior in reference to a concrete, traumatic event in the past. For Stein, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot, the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson and William James offered a way to describe character that was thick with the transitory stuff of life, a holism in which the meaning of the whole was always changing. For Moses, vitalist modernism offers a corrective to other critical movements, which he gathers into two loose groups: those that view the self as the product of external forces (including Frankfurt School critical theory, Foucauldian analysis, and behaviorism) and those that see it as a conservative edifice needing to be subverted or shattered (poststructuralism and queer theory). Out of Character is a strikingly optimistic book. It takes characters widely associated with mental paralysis—Stein’s Melanctha, Eliot’s Prufrock—and recasts them as agents with the power to transform their circumstances, within limits. Most of the action takes place in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the “middle ranges of agency,” in which one is aware of some, but not all, of the forces bearing upon oneself and acts tentatively and locally.1 Like Sedgwick, Moses is amenable to a biological picture of life. He accepts that there is some evolutionary basis for our species-wide interest in fictional characters, yet his suggestions are more accommodating than the cognitive-literary mainstream would be. One prominent adaptationist view holds that we read fiction in order to better predict the outcomes of social situations; Moses offers instead that the value of literature is its difference from real life, its allowing us to try out the “reactions we might have toward others when our own instrumental calculations are not at issue” (58). This follows from Bergson’s principle of creative evolution, which stipulates that culture, rather than being an epiphenomenon of the survival instincts, actually contributes to the evolution of life. [End Page 257] The reading of Bergson is lucid and subtle throughout. Moses sketches out a genealogy of vitalism intertwined closely with classical pragmatism, beginning with the physiological investigation of memory and habit in 1880s Germany. (His insistence on distinguishing vitalism from pragmatism is not entirely convincing.2) From investigations scientific and aesthetic, Bergson and William James concluded that learned inattention, rather than diluting perception, makes perceptions meaningful. Moses finds in their writings a pluralistic alternative to some recent ethico-political studies of modernism. Where some critics have tried to determine the ethical valence of art’s seeming withdrawal from the social world (either it represents a retreat from war and empire, or the inadequacy of politics as such), Moses simply observes that modernists—and the psychologies of perception that inspired so many of them—were uniquely alert to the “variability in response that make[s] social and political freedom a value in the first place” (48). This is a liberal and a pragmatic aesthetic virtue as much as a vitalist one. Bergson linked habit with comedy at a time when the discourse surrounding habit was fatalistic and very often a conduit for racist and sexist ideology. In his early essay “Laughter,” Bergson argued that laughter interrupted the human tendency to automatism, including the capitulation to type. “Melanctha,” Stein’s novella depicting an African American community in Baltimore, has been widely read against the backdrop of social Darwinism, with Melanctha’s death from tuberculosis said to be a punishment for poor self-control. In contrast, Moses shows that the text enacts a comic Darwinism in which habits are value-neutral...

Who Represents the Interests of Undocumented Immigrants? A Study of State Legislators

Do elected officials represent those who lack voting rights and political power, specifically undocumented immigrants? While part of a legislator’s geographic constituency, undocumented immigrants provide little electoral benefits and thus are marginalized by most legislators. I present a theory of intersectional linked fate, positing that Latino legislators are responsive to undocumented Latino constituents, even when others are not. To test the theory’s expectations, I conduct the first field experiment and empirical examination of legislator responsiveness to undocumented persons. The results, based on representational choices in 28 U.S. state legislative chambers, indicate that legislators generally respond less to undocumented Latinos than Latino citizens, but that Latino legislators respond similarly to undocumented and citizen Latino constituents. The results also show a surprisingly high level of legislative responsiveness to undocumented immigrants. This study has important theoretical implications for representation, the definition of constituent, and what constitutes the meaning of democratic citizenship.

The ethics of speech and thought representation in literary journalism

This article applies a discourse analytical approach to the reporting of speech and thought in order to explore the parameters of core ethical quandaries in literary journalism, focusing in particular on the reconstruction or re-imagining of dialogue and thought. It thus focuses on the journalists’ duties, firstly, towards their sources (specifically, to both the propositional content and the verbatim words of their subjects’ truth claims), and, secondly, their perceived obligations towards their readers (regarding narrative accessibility, drama, resolution and lucidity). It then proceeds to discuss recent book-length examples of literary journalism from Spain and France. The article’s central claim is that an alternative approach to such issues is identifiable in Spanish journalist Javier Cercas’s work, in particular in his widely acclaimed re-exploration (2009) of the attempted coup d’etat in Madrid in 1981. Cercas’s text, like many notable examples of literary journalism, is informed by a comprehensive set of interviews and by exhaustive archival research. Cercas goes further, however, in the thoroughness and rigour of the attribution of his reconstructions of speech and thought. The book incorporates, moreover, many explicit or implicit markers of a reported idea’s dubitative or tentative status, a concern which continually shapes the text’s overall representational choices, and which can be seen as a timely response to calls for writers working within a literary journalism tradition to develop a form of implicit ethical contract with their readers.

Sensitivity of Twenty-First-Century Global-Mean Steric Sea Level Rise to Ocean Model Formulation

AbstractTwo comprehensive Earth system models (ESMs), identical apart from their oceanic components, are used to estimate the uncertainty in projections of twenty-first-century sea level rise due to representational choices in ocean physical formulation. Most prominent among the formulation differences is that one (ESM2M) uses a traditional z-coordinate ocean model, while the other (ESM2G) uses an isopycnal-coordinate ocean. As evidence of model fidelity, differences in twentieth-century global-mean steric sea level rise are not statistically significant between either model and observed trends. However, differences between the two models’ twenty-first-century projections are systematic and both statistically and climatically significant. By 2100, ESM2M exhibits 18% higher global steric sea level rise than ESM2G for all four radiative forcing scenarios (28–49 mm higher), despite having similar changes between the models in the near-surface ocean for several scenarios. These differences arise primarily from the vertical extent over which heat is taken up and the total heat uptake by the models (9% more in ESM2M than ESM2G). The fact that the spun-up control state of ESM2M is warmer than ESM2G also contributes by giving thermal expansion coefficients that are about 7% larger in ESM2M than ESM2G. The differences between these models provide a direct estimate of the sensitivity of twenty-first-century sea level rise to ocean model formulation, and, given the span of these models across the observed volume of the ventilated thermocline, may also approximate the sensitivities expected from uncertainties in the characterization of interior ocean physical processes.

Students’ reported justifications for their representational choices in linear function problems: an interview study

Thirty-six secondary school students aged 14–16 were interviewed while they chose between a table, a graph or a formula to solve three linear function problems. The justifications for their choices were classified as (1) task-related if they explicitly mentioned the to-be-solved problem, (2) subject-related if students mentioned their own characteristics as representational users, (3) context-related if contextual features surrounding the choice were mentioned and (4) representation-related if formal characteristics of the representations were pointed out. Justifications were mostly task- and subject-related, although contextual and representational features also played an important role. Some students (reportedly) tried to reconcile different (task-, subject-, context- and representation-related) factors before selecting a representation, which was interpreted as an attempt to use their meta-representational competence to make appropriate representational choices. The influence of the didactical contract and the experimental contract on students’ representational choices, as well as the tensions between them, are also discussed.

Digital image manipulation and avatar configuration: implications for inclusive classrooms

This paper outlines concerns for inclusive classrooms involving personal digital image modifications and selections, as well as avatar configurations. Classroom interactions incorporate various dimensions of personal appearance; however, educators try to make them primarily about knowledge and wisdom. Students in environments where they can interact with each other face‐to‐face are constantly immersed in issues involving their exterior manifestations. However, the utilisations of digital media in the classroom and in the online delivery of instruction are providing new ways of manipulating the digitised images of individuals, as well as their characteristic patterns of speech and motion. The rising popularity of avatars in education (such as in Second Life) also provides a new spectrum of representational choices. Individuals who reconstitute their images so as to appear more ‘normal’ may achieve results that are more problematic than liberating, however. Fostering the development of manipulated images and avatars for the purposes of educational interaction can also be construed as an attempt to ‘erase’ stigma and in effect disempower individuals, especially those with disabilities. Likewise, image modification can be incorporated into bullying initiatives as part of efforts to ridicule and marginalise. In endeavours to mitigate these problems, faculty and staff can model the creative and empowering use of digital image and avatar technologies while celebrating (and not eradicating) their own idiosyncratic personal characteristics.

What counts as a flexible representational choice? An evaluation of students’ representational choices to solve linear function problems

This study evaluated students’ representational choices while they solved linear function problems. Eighty-six secondary-school students solved problems under one choice condition, where they chose a table, a formula, or both to solve each problem, and two no-choice conditions, where one of these representations was forced upon them. Two conceptualisations of representational flexibility were used: a groupwise conceptualisation, where group-based measures of students’ fluency with the different representations were used to determine which representational choices could be considered flexible, and an individualised conceptualisation, where each individual student’s fluency with each of the representations to solve each problem type was taken into account when determining which choices could be considered flexible for that particular student. A strong correlation between groupwise flexibility and choice condition accuracy, and an even stronger correlation between individualised flexibility and choice condition accuracy were found. The implications for research and instruction are discussed.

An exploration of the role natural language and idiosyncratic representations in teaching how to convert among fractions, decimals, and percents

Using qualitative data collection and analyses techniques, we examined mathematical representations used by sixteen ( N = 16) teachers while teaching the concepts of converting among fractions, decimals, and percents. We also studied representational choices by their students ( N = 581). In addition to using geometric figures and manipulatives, teachers used natural language such as the words nanny and house to characterize mathematical procedures or algorithms. Some teachers used the words or phrases bigger, smaller, doubling, and building-up in the context of equivalent fractions. There was widespread use of idiosyncratic representations by teachers and students, specifically equations with missing equals signs and not multiply/dividing by one to find equivalent fractions. No evidence though of a relationship between representational forms and degree of correctness of solutions was found on student work. However, when students exhibited misconceptions, those misconceptions were linked to teachers’ use of idiosyncratic representations.

The HealthAgents ontology: knowledge representation in a distributed decision support system for brain tumours

AbstractIn this paper we present our experience of representing the knowledge behind HealthAgents (HA), a distributed decision support system for brain tumour diagnosis. Our initial motivation came from the distributed nature of the information involved in the system and has been enriched by clinicians’ requirements and data access restrictions. We present in detail the steps we have taken towards building our ontology starting from knowledge acquisition to data access and reasoning. We motivate our representational choices and show our results using domain examples used by clinical partners in HA.

The Ethical Stance of Testimony: Memory Politics and Representational Choices

The Ethical Stance of Testimony: Memory Politics and Representational Choices

The Power of Stereotypes: Anchoring Images Through Language in Live Sports Broadcasts

Televised sport offers a rich context for investigating the processes that influence particular uses of language. Here, the authors consider how pressure on sport commentators to connect with audiences results in reliance on preestablished narratives that draw heavily on stereotypes. They investigate how television sport commentators negotiate tensions between stereotypes of a particular country’s playing style and on-field action that challenges those stereotypes. Their interdisciplinary approach—drawing from social psychology, communication, media studies, sport studies, and cultural studies—provides a textual analysis of New Zealand commentary in a pivotal Rugby World Cup game between France and New Zealand. The authors identify three different ways in which national stereotypes lead commentators to produce interpretations that do not always accurately represent the action on the field. They conclude that sport commentary in an international context operates to create and reinscribe symbolic differences between nations, even in the face of visual evidence that is ambiguous or actively contradicts the words used to describe it. The analysis demonstrates how powerfully national stereotypes influence commentators’ representational choices.

Powell’s point: ‘denial and deception’ at the UN

This article examines the use of visual representation in Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on 5 February 2003. The article borrows from Charles Goodwin’s theory of professional vision to argue that Powell’s presentation failed to develop a shared vision of the material presented. The primary flaw in this regard was Powell’s failure to acknowledge and account for the differences between modes of visual representation. Projections of text, photographs, video, maps and computer-generated illustrations were presented as synonymous forms of visual evidence. By not accounting for the unique properties of these media, Powell failed to articulate the images as evidentiary statements. What was to be a convincing display of visual evidence was instead a weak and discontinuous PowerPoint slide show. Using Powell’s presentation as a case-study, the author stresses the need to be more critically aware of one’s representational choices in acts of communication.

SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION, REPRESENTATION, AND CONTESTED IDENTITIES

The increased flexibility facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies has enabled anti-war activists to garner great control over representations of their arguments. This paper explores the value of the symbolic dimension of collective action through three cumulative forms of analysis: understanding how the symbolic domain is used; explaining the strategic choices behind this use; and, finally, linking these representational choices to the subjective experience of the individual and their processes of political identity construction. Many groups lacked a coherent online strategy. The reasons for this are threefold. First, use reflects the organizational structure and ideological principles of the groups. Second, by emphasizing diversity and inclusion most groups wanted their online material to be as accessible as possible and as a result censored anything too opinionated or deemed too radical. Third, there was an enduring emphasis upon local place and face-to-face communication. This made groups' online interventions lack coherence because they were often aiming their representations at particular populations. In a study of Muslim anti-war activism the relationship between these representational choices and the processes of identity construction were explored. Muslim activists sought support by asserting a collective religious commonality and by aligning with sympathetic others to counter stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists. This re-ignited a historical tension as to the place of religion within anti-war activism. Consequently, Muslims struggled to articulate their claim to multiple identities, and online representations limited those who attempted to develop overt and complicated new religious political identities.

“Qui a peur du lycée musulman?” Media representations of a Muslim school in France

The present article analyses a corpus of 151 journalistic texts reporting the controversies around the operation of a Muslim school in France during 2006–2007, at the eve of the presidential elections. The aim is to explore how journalistic representations of a Muslim school operate in relation to dominant textured images of France as a political community. Journalistic texts are analysed in terms of their “representational choices” and the discursive strategies through which they choreograph the “pan-semiotic” categories of language that make sense of this institution, as a school. The analyses show how journalistic texts enact competing discursive constructions of a political community, and how they deploy lexicogrammatical, metaphoric and metonymic elements of language to choreograph the scriptural space in relation to which the school is made sense of. The corpus bears testimony of the media's “definitional power” over semiotic categories, and how these are deployed in the broader negotiation of struggles over constituencies in the field of power politics.

Engaging learners and the community through the study of monuments

This essay provides an argument for the study of monuments and provides an analytical framework to promote thoughtful study. The essay focuses on three points of analyses that educational leaders should consider when exposing their students to monuments. These include: an analysis of referent—the person or event being memorialized; an analysis of design—the aesthetic and representational choices made in the monument’s creation; and an analysis of reception—the meaning that individuals take away from a monument. The authors conclude that monuments can be an effective way to actively engage students in history, art and various other subjects, as well as involving them in the discourse of collective memory.

Variability in transcription and the complexities of representation, authority and voice

This commentary addresses the complexities of representation in sociolinguistic transcripts, considering the meaning potentials of different representational choices at the level of both ideology and identity. It considers the kinds of authenticity and evidence that are indexed by simplified versus more detailed transcripts, suggesting that a simplified transcript may give more direct access to elements of the original speaker's voice. Second, it discusses the role of transcripts as scholarly texts, and questions their use as sociolinguistic records suitable for reinterpretation by scholars who do not have access to the original recordings. Third, it emphasizes that the use of non-standard orthographies is an unreliable source of data on sociolinguistic variation, because few authors use non-standard forms in consistent and principled ways. Fourth, it proposes that translations may take different forms depending on whether they are efforts to be `faithful' to `authentic' speech in the target versus the source language. Finally, it reflects on the act of transcription as part of professional practice and identity among linguists.

Lessons From a Comparison of Work Domain Models: Representational Choices and Their Implications

As methods in cognitive work analysis become more widely applied, questions regarding the impact of modeling choices and similarities in modeling efforts across projects and domains are increasingly relevant. However, no explicit comparison of models of similar systems has been reported. This paper compares independently developed work domain analysis (WDA) models of two command and control environments. Similarities in model content and the types of nodes included provide evidence that WDA techniques can capture fundamental elements regarding purposes and constraints. These points of agreement provide a common starting point for developing work domain representations of military command and control systems. The comparison also revealed differences between the models. Although differences in content reflected differences in scope of coverage and level of detail, other differences corresponded to more fundamental choices in modeling approach. These included the treatment of sensors, level of integration in the model, and representation of particular abstract constraints. Examination of these more fundamental differences pointed to important degrees of freedom in how to represent a WDA and clarified the implications of these modeling choices for guiding design. Actual or potential applications of this research include aiding analysts in making work domain modeling choices as well as producing work domain models of command and control environments.

A Piece of Place: Modeling the Digital on the Real in Second Life

Digital worlds exist as synthetic models and have no need for the constraints of the real world. This freedom allows digital worlds a vast design space of representational choices, ranging from near correspondence to the real world to complete abstraction. The digital world Second Life was designed to allow its residents enormous creative freedom and to be as broadly appealing as possible. Second Life chose to mirror the real world in many important aspects in order to provide a place that felt familiar and comfortable, while granting freedoms not possible in the real world. This Article will cover the environment of Second Life, the reasons for the choice and the challenges that arose.