Modes Of Representation Research Articles

A Jointly Guided Deep Network for Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Remote Sensing Text–Image Retrieval

Remote sensing (RS) cross-modal text–image retrieval has great application value in many fields such as military and civilian. Existing methods utilize the deep network to project the images and texts into a common space and measure the similarity. However, the majority of those methods only utilize the inter-modality information between different modalities, which ignores the rich semantic information within the specific modality. In addition, due to the complexity of the RS images, there exists a lot of interference relation information within the extracted representation from the original features. In this paper, we propose a jointly guided deep network for fine-grained cross-modal RS text–image retrieval. First, we capture the fine-grained semantic information within the specific modality and then guide the learning of another modality of representation, which can make full use of the intra- and inter-modality information. Second, to filter out the interference information within the representation extracted from the two modalities of data, we propose an interference filtration module based on the gated mechanism. According to our experimental results, significant improvements in terms of retrieval tasks can be achieved compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. The source code is available at https://github.com/CQULab/JGDN .

Meditations on Writing Hell

Abstract This essay is a broken elemental thing composed of cuts, by which is meant outtakes. Outtakes are scenes or sequences that never make it into a film. The scenes collected here have been retrieved from the cutting floor of the editing suite in its author's mind and reassembled in ways that hold onto an ambitious claim—to think of narrative cuts and silences as interruptive forces in the operation of writing and the imaginative rendering of the abattoir. Working with outtakes helps the author approach, in a new way, questions the author has been exploring for a while now: How can writers critically respond to the existence of abattoirs? What strategies might writers engage to render normalized forms of violence against animals strange and even intolerable through particularly literary practices, strategies, and generic forms? Literally, caesura means “cutting.” It evokes pause. Space for breath, for detours in modes of multispecies literary representation. If the line—working on the assembly line and writing a certain kind of poetic line—is an orientation that draws literature and the abattoir together, as Joseph Ponthus's autofictional poem essay On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021) suggests, this essay also suggests that the slash is an allied critical-creative orientation that equally requires engagement.

Review: Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

Review: <i>Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome</i>

“Je est un autre”: Beckett’sNot I, Rimbaud, and Synesthesia

AbstractThis article demonstrates that Beckett’s play Not I derives from a hitherto unrecognized source: Rimbaud’s poem of synesthesia, “Voyelles.” Revealing the significant intertextual links between Beckett’s play and Rimbaud’s poem, the article demonstrates that the striking central image of Not I—the disembodied mouth spewing out an almost incomprehensible torrent of words—directly recalls Rimbaud’s image for the vowel I in “Voyelles.” Beckett uses Rimbaud, the article argues, in a way that is distortive and translational: the image for I is carried across languages and across sensory planes: from French to English, from words on the page to theatrical performance; from verbal to visual and sensory experience. The correspondences between Not I and “Voyelles” are not only directly intertextual, however, but conceptual. Beckett draws particularly on two Rimbaudian concepts: the otherness of the poetic I, and the notion of a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” Adapting and translating Rimbaud’s conception of synesthesia in “Voyelles,” Beckett develops a theatrical mode that explores and manipulates various forms of cross-sensory experience, including synesthesia, to produce a “theater of the nerves.”

Singapore’s Grassroots Environmental Movement: Modes of Representation in the Garden City

Singapore’s model of illiberal democracy has translated into a style of environmental governance that scholars describe as ‘authoritarian environmentalism’ (AE) for its top-down, non-participatory nature. AE in Singapore has given rise to a manicured, cosmeticized landscape in which nature is selectively integrated into urbanity to offer outside observers the impression of a ‘Garden City’.&#x0D; A gap in the literature exists regarding the response the grassroots environmental movement in Singapore has mounted to AE. This paper contends that the movement seeks to restore individuals’ personal connections to the land, both in its undamaged state and current degradation, in a bid to appreciate nature from whichever baseline one can remember. As a guiding structure, the paper references a framework developed by sociologist Kate O’Neill and identifies local examples of the variables ‘formal representation’ and ‘informal channels’. The former variable refers to movement participation in formal negotiations and policymaking. The latter variable describes solidarity-building with the aim of cultivating an organic, just transition to a green Singapore&#x0D; This paper argues that Singapore’s illiberal mode of governance limits the environmental movement’s access to channels of formal representation, compelling it to rely heavily on informal representation to achieve environmental change. This paper recommends a hybrid model of formal and informal representation as key to the success of the movement. For its emphasis on the influence of a country’s political context on its present-day environmental governance, this paper has utility as a reference point for other developmental states which exhibit interventionist, utilitarian policymaking.

A Survey of the Literature

AbstractDatafication has a literary history. This essay takes up that history to repair to the apparent novelty of contemporary mass personalized politics the history of the novel as one cultural technology for personifying the masses. The machinery of mass personalization was set in motion long ago. However discrepant its emergent scenes may now seem, they have been multiply fused along the way, issuing from a common substrate of survey culture. Section 1 considers a magazine humor column linking the Elmira Community Study of voting and the Kinsey Reports on sex on the basis of their shared statistical methods. Section 2 considers the American Statistical Association’s proposition that statisticians are exemplars of democracy and its warning against the popular mistrust of their cultural prominence. Section 3 recasts the “death of the novel” as a name for the disruptive force of survey culture on literary value and the displacement of the classical genre system by the mass cultural genre system. Taking up mathematical formalism in the service of social realism, popular genres—science fiction, crime fiction, and erotica—and minority literatures ascendant in the mid-century US—gay, Black, and ethnic literatures—developed modes of narrative representation for an age of statistical aggregation.

Neo-Naturalistic Drama: a Study of British Drama After 1950

The present paper is an endeavour to show the development of Neo-naturalism as a distinctive dramatic mode of social representation. Neo-naturalism is unanimously seen as a unique appearance of theatricality in the 1950s. In order to understand this Neo-naturalistic drama and its unparallel contribution, it is worthwhile to see how it emanated at a crucial historical juncture. It was a point in time when drama had lost its direction and purpose. Neo-naturalism appeared as a major dramatic model to reverse the inaction and decadence during the second half of the twentieth century. This paper also highlights the role played by John Osborne in being an initiator of this theatricality and taking this Neo-naturalism to a zenith. This Neo-naturalism achieved what was beyond the expectations of the dramatic critics during 1950s. Neo-naturalism can be seen as a force of social transformation and a committed defence against all evils of the society

A Process and a Frame: Ballet on Instagram and a Sense of the World

Over the last several years Instagram has significantly reshaped how ballet and ballet practice appear as gestures. Compared to its institutional sites of display, ballet on Instagram shows shifts in visual ideology, aesthetic materiality, and relationship to its audience. The platform’s technological, digital, and visual specificities transformed the operating image of ballet on it. I argue that Instagram changed ballet’s mode of representation by reformulating its social and temporal profile, while shifts in ballet’s contextual and visual appearance overhauled its ideological workings.In Instagram’s environments, the body exists as ballet’s proxy—held in place by the collective digital labour of social media users. Moreover, ballet on Instagram is an infinite diary of the body in becoming, powerfully reflecting Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘end of the world that is of no end’ (Nancy 1993: 5). I employ Nancy’s ideas of image, sense, and singularity, and I look into the dialectics between the matter and the sign to describe the body’s digital outline in relation to its material signature. Ballet on Instagram is embedded in the vast, propulsive, yet unpredictable environment of the digital and is both reshaped and challenged by it.

Grounding the Landscape: Epistemic Aspects of Materiality in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Open-Air Painting

This article examines how notions of “material” and “materiality” were infused, both technically and discursively, into American landscape painting in the late nineteenth century. Focusing particularly on the praxis of open-air painting as consolidating a new mode in landscape painting as well as a new artistic identity, this article argues that painting outdoors was perceived by artists in terms of agency, uniting painter, painting, and landscape; but unlike earlier romantic or Transcendentalist approaches, this idea was not conceived of as a solely spiritual union but, rather, as a mode that is embedded in the mundane, in the existence of objects, of embodied engagement and material means. The overt affinity between the basic idea of the praxis—painting outdoors in ‘real’ nature—and material aspects of art-making, is discussed as the underpinning of a new emerging episteme of American landscape painting, while considering the environment wherein this phenomenon was cultivated within a specific moment in American culture. Paintings and texts, generated by American painters and critics between the late 1870s and the 1890s, are read in this article through the lens of recent theoretical phenomenological approaches to landscape, illuminating the unique role that materiality played in these representations. Moreover, tying the findings to the changing conceptions of both landscape and art in the Gilded Age, the article concludes that landscape painters of the ‘new generation’ sought to evade commodifying tendencies of image-making by deliberately engaging with materiality, devising a mode of landscape representation that would not succumb to the flattening steamroller of capitalist consumer culture.

The characteristics of diagrams in scientific explanations: Multimodal integration of written and visual modes of representation in junior high school textbooks

AbstractThere is a growing research examining the use of visual diagrams in scientific explanations. However, current research in this area is mostly based on case studies involving a few explanations from one or two topics in science. There are few systematic studies that examine more broadly how diagrams are used in relation to scientific explanations across a range of scientific texts. The aim of this study is to investigate the characteristics of diagrams in scientific explanations found in Grade 7–10 science textbooks covering many topics in biology, chemistry, earth and space sciences, and physics. The study is informed by the theories of systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics and applies a mixed methods approach to textbook analysis. A content analysis was first carried out to systematically identify the image functions (e.g., narrative, analytical, classificational) in all the diagrams (N = 749) and compare their distributions across different genres (e.g., explanation, information, experiment). This is followed by a multimodal discourse analysis to understand how the various image functions are combined with the linguistic features of the written text in the construction of scientific explanations. Quantitative results reveal explanation diagrams are characteristically different from diagrams used in other genres in terms of a higher usage of narrative function, temporal function, and annotated caption. Qualitative results further show how these image functions are typically used to support the reasoning of the explanation focusing on dynamic processes and time‐bounded sequences. This study has implications to our understanding of how diagrams are used to support the construction of scientific explanations.

On seagulls, hedgehogs, and foxes: Representation, reconstruction, and the challenge of getting from here to there

The common bond linking feminist theories of identity politics and process ontologies is that, while differing in their ontological presuppositions, both are modes of representation of an external reality, asserting an unverifiable correspondence between our mental representations and an antecedent, external reality. To escape the quagmire of representationalism, Ihnji Jon turns to transitionalist pragmatism in a radical move that redirects attention from intellectual debates between contending theorists to charting a route to practical reconstruction. Jon's pragmatist turn transcends enduring dualisms that have hampered knowledge production since the Greeks while posing daunting challenges to the purpose and process of political practice and social inquiry.

Metaphorical representation of coronavirus in Spanish and Brazilian cartoons

The worldwide outbreak of Covid-19 epidemic has been profusely covered by the mass media in 2020. This research focuses on the metaphorical content of cartoons from prominent Spanish and Brazilian newspapers published online in March and April 2020. In these satirical drawings the virus is portrayed through two main modes of representation: pictorial and verbal. The conceptual metaphors conveyed in each cartoon were identified, analysed and classified into four source domain scenarios: arts and literature, conflicts, sports and games, and other. Mainly, two theories coming from Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Multimodal Metaphor Theory, have been used to approach this contrastive study in which the metaphorical representation of Covid-19 serves to offer a humorous and persuasive point of view about the impact of the pandemic in the Spanish and Brazilian society and the way the most important politicians of each country dealt with the sanitary crisis.&#x0D; &#x0D; Keywords: Spanish and Brazilian newspapers; cartoons; Covid-19; metaphorical representation; pictorial and multimodal metaphors.

Is the Universe Infinite? Characterising a Hierarchy of Reasoning in Student Conceptions of Cosmology Concepts Using Open-Ended Surveys

Cosmology presents students with ideas that stimulate their curiosity and brings together various concepts from STEM that call on a variety of reasoning types across multiple representational modes, involving subtleties of spacetime relations, a variety of models and evidence requiring multiple lines of high precision observations. This study investigated high school students’ levels and types of reasoning that frame their conceptions in different cosmology topics. An open-ended knowledge survey, the Cosmology Knowledge Survey (CosmoKS), was developed and implemented online to 286 high school students (aged 16–18 years) from Australia and Sweden. A modified version of the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy with four levels (pre-structural, uni-structural, multi-structural and relational) was used as a guide to analyse students’ open-ended and structured responses. This provided insights into the level and complexity of reasoning underpinning a variety of conceptions across the four dimensions of cosmology education: size and scale, spacetime location, composition of the universe and evolution of the universe. The study identified underlying patterns in student reasoning and conceptions in cosmology, summarised as (i) navigating spatial and temporal relations, (ii) counterintuitive concepts and (iii) language and everyday experience, especially intuition. The analysis led to the characterisation of a hierarchy of reasoning that helps identify sources of alternative conceptions and provided the basis for the development of a concept inventory and progression with broad implications.

Function and Transformation in the Design and Interpretive Inscription of Frontispieces to Thomson’s The Seasons, 1767–1825

ABSTRACT This article offers a book-historical study of text-interpretive frontispiece illustrations that accompanied eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions of James Thomson’s The Seasons. It discusses these editions as constituting a commodity group of its own and as separate from those that featured sets of multiple illustrations and argues that the cost-effectiveness of these editions ensured widespread consumption. The relative cheapness of these editions, once Andrew Millar’s copyright monopoly related to The Seasons had come to an end, stimulated formal experimentation and innovation that contrasted with older practices of reprinting and the opportunistic recycling of illustrations. The article traces not only the development of frontispiece formats but also how bookseller-publishers moved from allegorical to realist-sentimental modes of representation, in the process creating iconic lenses through which reader-viewers would apprehend Thomson’s work. Paying attention to the strategies of competitive marketing as part of which publishers sought to differentiate their own edition from others on the market, the article concentrates on small-format editions featuring frontispieces that were published from 1780 and studies the ways in which frontispieces in these editions functioned.

Le Tapis magique immobile: détail colonial et ambiguïté narrative dans le roman-fleuve de l’entre-deux-guerres

Abstract This article engages with the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological manifestations of the colonial illusion in French interwar serialized novels (romans-fleuves) while focusing on Jules Romains’s Les Hommes de bonne volonté (initially published in twenty-seven instalments or livres between 1932 and 1946). In discussing key narrative scenes and strategies of characterization as they relate to notions of empire, exoticism, colonial spaces and destinies, as well as critiques of colonialism, it contends that this overlooked corpus of French literature, which also includes authors such as Roger Martin du Gard and Romain Rolland, deserves closer scrutiny for both aesthetic and ideological reasons, and it invites reflection on the implicit criteria that exclude such work from the usual corpus of literary representations of colonialism. The study of these texts reveals both changes and continuities between the interwar period and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century modes of literary representation of key social and cultural issues, such as the universalist vocation of France, the (post-)colonial elsewhere, and the debate over national identity.

Understanding authority in small-group co-constructions of mathematical proof

Authority becomes shared in mathematics classrooms when perceived sources of valid mathematical knowledge extend beyond the teacher/textbook and allow both students and disciplinary modes of reasoning to hold authority. The goal of this research is to better understand classroom situations that are intended to facilitate shared authority over proof, namely small-group episodes where students are granted authority (Gerson & Bateman, 2010) to co-construct mathematical proofs. We sought to better understand the content of undergraduate students’ attention during group proving and the sources of legitimacy for students. Using Stylianides’ (2007) definition of proof as an analytical frame, we found that student discourse focused primarily upon the mode of argumentation, followed by the mode of argument representation, and then the set of accepted statements. We identified four themes with respect to the sources of authority students relied upon in their group proving: (1) the course rubric, (2) peers’ confidence, (3) form and symbols, and (4) logical structure. Implications for research and practice are presented.

Imaginaries of Abya Yala: Indigenous filmmaking in Latin America from a multimodal semiotic perspective

ABSTRACT This article argues that multimodal semiotics can provide an analytical lens to critically understand recent film and media production by Indigenous people and communities in southern and central Abya Yala (or Latin America). It suggests precise ways to analyse this film and media production as the emergence of alternative public or ‘counter-public’ spaces that allow for the expression of ‘emergent’ forms of Indigeneity that contest dominant modes of representation. The argument focuses not only on these Indigenous texts’ semiotic contents (their design and production) but also on their discursive features, distribution and reception. The article ends up revealing that a multimodal semiotic approach provides a very useful toolbox to make sense of the complex and multi-layered nature of the various emerging cinemas of Abya Yala. The article argues that this approach allows for a better appreciation of the diversity of Indigenous film production, while also facilitating a critical engagement with the issues this media production raises in terms of authorship and modes of representation, among other issues.

An electrophysiological exploration of modifiers embedded in different hierarchies: Insight from short passives in Mandarin

This event-related potentials study explored the processing of Mandarin short passives. We used a syntactic violation paradigm to compare the processing of two auxiliary phrases (i.e., a verb-modifier di-phrase and a noun-modifier de-phrase). In the control condition, the syntactic hierarchy of the di-phrase was lower than that of the de-phrase. In the violation condition, the low-level violation was created by replacing di with de in the auxiliary phrase, while the high-level violation was created by replacing de with di in the auxiliary phrase. The ERP data showed that the noun-modifier elicited the greater left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600 than the verb-modifier, in both the control condition and the violation condition. We also observed that the LAN induced by the verb-modifier phrase was greater in the control condition than that in the violation condition, while the LAN induced by the noun-modifier was greater in the violation condition than that in the control condition. These results suggested that the greater cortical LAN-P600 might differentiate the high-level hierarchy from the low-level hierarchy. In addition, we tentatively claimed that given the same predicate argument structure, long passives might be the default representational mode of short passives (generally, a constructional alternation might be activated during the processing of the target structure).

Indonesian EFL Students and Teachers Perceptions of Multimodal Teaching Approach in Writing Skills

Low motivation, poor writing techniques, and lack of vocabulary are a few things that effect how proficient a writer is. Multimodal approach in teaching writing allows for better communication and expression of personal identities through various modes of representation. This study adopts a mixed-method research design utilizing survey and interview as data collection method. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 25 for quantitative data Atlas.Ti for qualitative data. The research was conducted at Hamzanwadi University, the population of the research is all second year of English Language Study students consist of 92 students and 5 teachers. The study discovered positive effects of multimodal teaching approach on writing skills and perceptions of Hamzanwadi’s students and teachers. Then, from the finding suggested that the students who performed multimodal tasks significantly improved their critical writing skills. Furthermore, it can serve as a resource for Indonesian EFL teachers’ continuing professional development.

La rappresentazione della crisi all’epoca della crisi della rappresentazione

This article proposes a reflection on the meaning of the crisis event that is the war in Ukraine, based on the modes of representation through which it was constituted as an image. Starting from a short essay by Merleau-Ponty written at the end of the Second World War, in which the French philosopher reaffirms that the war took place, I intend to critically juxtapose Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to inherit the crisis as a political task and, above all, a philosophical one, with the processes of hyper-representation highlighted by Jean Baudrillard which, on the contrary, operates a subtraction of the event and the real. The proposal is therefore to analyze the non-taking place of events as the impossibility of inheriting a task and a meaning, by showing how such an impossibility manifests itself precisely in the phenomenal space of our contemporary screens.