Star Wars Research Articles

Disability in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Mythology of Villains, "Obsessive Avengers," and Complex Embodiments in Star Wars

This article analyzes the depictions disability embodies in the fantasy film series Star Wars. Fantasy as a genre is able to re-present our past and present values through visionary forms and can act as a mirror to the society that creates the image. Fantasy is powerful as it enables films the ability to conceptualize realistic viewpoints and current day culture in their images and themes. In terms of Disability Studies, fantasy plays a critical role in the analysis of disability representation since fantasy is known for exploiting and transforming disabilities into Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell's "narrative prostheses." Once transformed, disability is used for its representational power rather than its true nature. Utilizing Roland Barthes's research on myth-making and Martin F. Norden's established disability archetypes, I discuss the varying portrayals disabilities have throughout the disability-laden series Star Wars. I discuss how disability portrayals rely on archetypes such as Norden's "Obsessive Avenger," the myth formation of disability as related to a sliding scale for evil, and as a symbolic connection to themes pertaining to technology's dehumanizing effects on humans. However, I also discuss the standalone Star Wars film Rogue One which diverges in portrayals through its exploration of Tobin Siebers's theory of complex embodiment. These films can act as a larger metaphor for films with disabilities today: taking steps when it comes to the improvement of disability representations, yet still behaving as perpetrators of long-held stereotypes and archetypes.

"STAR WARS: The first Jedi" Gamification Program: Use of a Mobile App to Improve Body Composition in College Students.

Background: There is a need to promote initiatives toward reaching more active and healthier lifestyles. Gamification has emerged among teachers as a powerful teaching strategy that favors students' motivation and behavioral change by applying game elements in nongame contexts. Purpose: To examine the effects of a 14-week gamification-based teaching program, including the use of a game-based mobile app on body composition in college students. Materials and Methods: One hundred twelve college students (21.22 ± 2.55 years) were assigned to a gamification-based group or a control group. College students from the intervention group participated in a gamification program under the narrative of "STAR WARS" and had a mobile app with a countdown timer. They had to meet physical activity recommendations to gain lifetime (i.e., sum time to the countdown). A portable eight-polar bioelectrical impedance analysis was used to obtain body composition outcomes; height (cm) was measured with a stadiometer; and waist circumference (cm) was measured using a metric tape. Body mass index (BMI), muscle mass index, fat mass index, and body fat percentage were computed. Results: Participants from the gamification program reported a significantly lower BMI, waist circumference, fat mass index and body fat percentage after the intervention, in comparison with the control group, indicated by an effect size ranging from -0.23 to -0.11 (all P ≤ 0.043). Conclusion: Gamification and the use of interactive mobile app are powerful teaching strategies in higher education to motivate students toward healthier lifestyles that lead to body composition benefits.

Interpreting Star Wars. Miles Booy. Bloomsbury, 2021. 192 pp. $38.00 hardcover.

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 55, Issue 4 p. 962-965 Book Review Interpreting Star Wars. Miles Booy. Bloomsbury, 2021. 192 pp. $38.00 hardcover. — John Henry, Corresponding Author — John Henry john.henry@monash.edu Corresponding author e-mail address : john.henry@monash.eduSearch for more papers by this author — John Henry, Corresponding Author — John Henry john.henry@monash.edu Corresponding author e-mail address : john.henry@monash.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 September 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13150Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume55, Issue4August 2022Pages 962-965 RelatedInformation

RECOGNITION OF AIRCRAFT IN REMOTE SENSING IMAGES USING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK


 
 
 Picture processing is a stand-alone, non-human image comprehension system that is one of the major breakthroughs (IUS). When one tries to explain what comprehension is, the effort of comprehending images becomes massive. In addition to classical signal processing, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence are applied. The early phases of the picture comprehension process might be called scene analysis methods that use edge and texture segmentation. As a result, putting a man in a signal processing loop at particular sensors, such as remotely piloted vehicles, satellites, and spacecraft, is not acceptable. Smart sensors and semi- automated procedures are being created as a result. Another major use of image processing is land remote sensing. With the debut of shows like Star Wars, this application has taken on a new level of relevance in the military's eyes. This study gives an overview of digital image processing and investigates the reach of remote sensing and IUS technology from the military's perspective. To demonstrate the significance of IUSs, a detailed description of a current autonomous car project in the United States is provided.
 
 

Security politics and techno-securitisation in Star Wars: from the Fall of the Jedi to the Reign of the Empire

ABSTRACT The Star Wars franchise – and in particular the ‘in-universe’ period from the Fall of the Jedi to the Reign of the Empire – represents germane ground for the critical analysis of security in both everyday life and extraordinary circumstances. Although beginning with the films of the ‘prequel trilogy’ (1999, 2002, 2005) this period has most recently been covered in the animated television series Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021 –). Deepening the contribution of criminology towards a diverse and critical transdisciplinary field of security studies, this paper conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis of season one of The Bad Batch. In doing so it describes how, in its depiction of a newly established Imperial regime, the Star Wars franchise has continued to engage with the politics of security through its exploration of the processes and practices of techno-securitisation. The Bad Batch thus acts as an ideological critique of developments in the late-modern securityscape. The discussion section reflects upon how the persistence of politics in the ‘Disney era’ of Star Wars storytelling, and of security politics in particular, indicates the limits of ‘Disneyfication’. The paper concludes by emphasising the value in bridging divides between distinct disciplinary approaches in the study of security.

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Corpus Annotation and Analysis of Sarcasm in Twitter: #CatsMovie vs. #TheRiseOfSkywalker

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing task that has received increased attention in the last decade due to the vast amount of opinionated data on social media platforms such as Twitter. Although the methodologies employed have grown in number and sophistication, analysing irony and sarcasm still poses a severe problem. From the linguistic perspective, sarcasm has been studied in discourse analysis from several perspectives, but little attention has been given to specific metrics that measure its relevance. In this paper we describe the creation of a manually-annotated dataset where detailed text markers are included. This dataset is a sample from a larger corpus of tweets (n= 76,764) on two highly controversial films: Cats and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. We took two different samples for each film, one before and one after their release, to compare reception and presence of sarcasm. We then used a sentiment analysis tool to measure the impact of sarcasm in polarity detection and then manually classified the mechanisms of sarcasm generation. The resulting corpus will be useful for machine learning approaches to sarcasm detection as well as discourse analysis studies on irony and sarcasm.

ORGANIZATION OF ARCHITECTURAL SPACES IN GAME DESIGN ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE GAME "STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER"

Creating modern computer games is a complex process that consists of many components. Along with work on game mechanics or character design, an important aspect is the organization of the game space for its further use in the game process. The creation of such spaces is largely based on the experience of planning real buildings, spaces or even cities. The issues of such an organization are decided by the relevant departments in the studio that develops the game, but in addition to purely technical issues, an important visual and cultural aspect. The study of the possibilities of using historical examples of architectural art in the interpretation of the game world is a new issue and opens wide prospects for research in both historical and visual aspects. The work is based on research by both domestic and foreign authors on the history of architecture in a global and more specialized sense. Information about the features and characteristics of sacred architectural structures is correlated with the implementation of the game space on the example of the game "STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER". The paper analyzes both the spatial planning organization of buildings and their structural side, as well as decorative finishes. In addition, the paper investigates the relationship between game location planning and the organization of the game process in this area of ​​the game. The study revealed significant potential in the use of historical architectural models in terms of rethinking and using as prototypes of locations in game design. This applies to both the general external features of the building, its planning and construction, and the approach to the worldview of the game world. At the same time, this approach facilitates scenario-based gameplay modeling by providing the player with visual and semantic information about where he or she is and where he or she should go next.

What can we learn from Star Wars about the future of tourism? Absolutely everything!

PurposeThis viewpoint is a response to Yeoman's (2022) editorial on Sunderland AFC and the future of tourism. This viewpoint aims to outline the lessons one can learn from Star Wars about the future of tourism.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the live-action movies and series of the Star Wars franchise.FindingsThe paper derives specific conclusions in the following directions: the future technology in travel, tourism and hospitality; the tourists' motivation and behaviour; the management of travel, tourism and hospitality companies; destination management; economy and society and lessons from the franchise.Originality/valueThis is one of the first papers to elaborate on the lessons one can learn about the future of tourism from the Star Wars live-action movies and series.

Visual effects and their importance in the field of visual media creation

The paper presents visual effects and their importance in the creation of visual media and film industry. After defining the field and the term visual effects, the reader is introduced to the techniques and approaches used to create visual effects, i.e., computer-generated Imagery, 3D computer graphics, motion capture, matchmoving, chroma key, rotoscoping, matte painting, and digital compositing. This is followed by a presentation of the history of visual effects from its beginnings to the digital age, taking in the most successful examples of film production such as Terminator, Toy Story, The Matrix, and Star Wars. As an example of the most representative production, the paper includes a more detailed description of the techniques, methods, and approaches used in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, focusing on the creation of the visual appearance of the Gollum character, his movement, and facial expressions, the creation of crowds with autonomous agents and the introduction of digital duplicates. The review concludes with an overview of trends for the future of the field.

Camera Mortis: Mourning in the Thanatos Archive

Camera MortisMourning in the Thanatos Archive Lili Hamlyn (bio) sarah a. lawrence has a toy drum hanging around her neck. A drumstick is nestled in each tiny hand. She wears a paisley dress and a beaded necklace; the strap on her drum is made of the same ribbon that decorates the puffed sleeves of her dress. The girl's hair is styled into a single, coiffed curl atop her head. The image has been expertly tinted; her cheeks and lips are rosy, her dress is red and pink, the stripes on her drum crimson. But her open eyes don't meet our gaze; her stare is unfocused and blank. Sarah A. Lawrence is dead. Doubly dead. That is, not only is she dead the way anyone encountered in a very old photograph is; she was already dead by the time the image—a sixth-plate daguerreotype—was taken around 1847. This postmortem portrait is probably the only photograph ever taken of her. She is now twice memorialized: first by her parents shortly after her death and again in Stanley B. Burns's Sleeping Beauty II, a selection of postmortem [End Page 91] and mourning photographs from the Burns Archive, an extensive, private collection of early medical, postmortem, mourning, and other historic photographs, located in New York. Burns, an ophthalmologist and professor of medical humanities at NYU, founded the archive in 1977; he has published over fifty photo-historical texts, curated over a hundred exhibitions, and regularly consults as a medical, historical, and technical adviser on television and film projects, including Cinemax's The Knick and PBS's Mercy Street. My infatuation with postmortem photographs began in the months following my mother's death, when I was twenty-three years old. I found Stanley B. Burns's work by chance and was transfixed; I spent days in the British Library poring over the pages of his books. At the time, I didn't or couldn't understand that there was a relationship between my grief and the fact that I was spending hours looking at images of the dead. I was adjusting not only to loss but also to the fact that my days were no longer ordered by the duties of care. For months I had organized my life around hospital appointments, pain management, palliative care, and anticipatory grief. And then one day I no longer had to. I was exhausted, sad—and free. I didn't know what to do with myself. I had always imagined that my mother's death would cause some cathartic disintegration, or at least leave me profoundly altered, steeped in a grief so extreme I would be unable to function. In a way, I was looking forward to the deliverance of falling apart. But that deliverance never came. Instead, I planned a funeral and prepared elaborate meals I had little desire to eat. I bought scratch cards, watched cooking competitions on TV, and purchased a set of Star Wars novelty drinking straws as a gift for a visiting friend. Today I consider these my responses to grief, but at the time context was impossible. The sudden shift from caregiver to bereaved produced a kind of numb delirium: I had no idea how I really felt. Looking at postmortem photographs was my way, I now see, of keeping death close. Under the vague guise of research—what I thought I was researching I don't know—I could dwell on, luxuriate in, death. I could let it stay with me as those around me moved on. [End Page 92] Reading Sleeping Beauty II among the semi-suppressed coughs and frantic pencil scratches of fellow researchers in the British Library's capacious humanities reading room, I thought of Roland Barthes, for whom a photograph of the dead "certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing." Burns's books are a procession of such corpses. The longdead transform into the recently departed, preserved at a moment when their death was new. Though I try to linger over each image, give space to each death, the figures begin to overlap and blur; tendrils of connection...

“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it”: Autofiction at the Intersection of Self, Sociality, and Mediation

“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it”Autofiction at the Intersection of Self, Sociality, and Mediation Anna Poletti (bio) Like many other novels that work with lived experience, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This (2021) raises questions about the auto as much as it relies on the fiction of stable selfhood. What, exactly, does it mean to have an auto now? What use is the auto? (Or as Sheila Heti put it in her auto-fiction, How Should a Person Be?) In the aftermath of postmodern literary fiction’s often ironized engagement with these questions, and the rise of memoir as an influential literary genre, recent autofiction reinvigorates the novel as a genre for charting the fraught intersection of interiority and sociality. While novels can deal with almost any topic, they are still one of our most reliable means of reflecting on the perennial call and complex challenges of being with others. As Judith Butler argues in Giving an Account of Oneself (2003) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010), the knot many of us face in sociality is not a narcissistic attachment to the ego, but that humans are social animals who need to rely on knowledge of the other to organize collective living. A degree of consistent selfhood grounds sociality, politics, and ethics. In light of this, how do we develop, maintain, and communicate a sense of who we are? What can we take as reliable knowledge of others? And what roles can individuality play, and what values can we assign it, in the context of the social? These questions permeate many contemporary political and social events: from young people who cannot vote asserting their right to influence climate policy, to the position of the immunocompromised during the pandemic, to the fate of people in borderlands and detention centers seeking refuge. Identity labels such as youth, medically vulnerable, and refugee may appear to offer the stability people need to make claims on the community, but they also come with the risk of subsuming the individual into a category that misrecognizes who they are in ways that harm their dignity. No One Is Talking about This is presented in two distinct sections that explore this tension from a feminist angle. Moreover, it explores the terrain between individuality and collectivity as an explicitly mediated one. The novel examines sociality as entangled with mediation. The first part of the narrative [End Page 23] enacts and depicts the internet as a diffractive technology. The unnamed protagonist is something of an internet celebrity—living deep in “the portal”—engulfed in the fast tempo of its fluidity, where “attention is holy.” Presented to the reader in fragments, this is a chaotic, socially and affectively rich life in which the protagonist is constantly brought (too?) close to others, taking up their preoccupations as her own, merging her desires and fears with others’: “Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone.” The second section of the novel follows the protagonist into an experience that seems wholly resistant to the dynamic flow of mediation which characterizes the first section. It begins innocently enough: the protagonist will become an aunt. However, her sister’s child is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder (Proteus syndrome) in utero, a life-threatening condition for mother and child. Traveling to Ohio to be with her sister, the protagonist agonizes over the threat to her sister’s life and struggles with her sister’s transition from unique individual to “pregnant woman” in a conservative healthcare regime. Realizing that none of the healthcare professionals will even mention termination as an option while outlining the risks to her sister’s life, the protagonist is overcome with concern: What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive? Such...

Star War of Blood in Covid-19

Star War of Blood in Covid-19

How to maintain and expand the star wars film franchise in Indonesia

The objectives of this research are to find out the primary reasons Indonesian customers watch the movies. To advise a proper marketing strategy for future Star Wars films so the revenue of the film franchise will grow optimally. In other words, to increase the number of Star Wars films audience. To find out the optimal promotional channel for the Star Wars film franchise to expand its customer base in Indonesia. To develop an implementation plan for the proposed marketing strategy. This research used primary and secondary data. The primary data are from quantitative and qualitative research, whereas the secondary data are from various internet sources. The conclusion shows that the future of the Star Wars film franchise is deeply connected and dependent on its fanbase due to the nature of the Star Wars brand embedding nostalgia within its fans, young and old. Time and time again, the fans have been responsible for some of the best marketing ploys in the industry, like Star Wars Day, “May the fourth be with you,” which was organically created by the fans to appreciate and celebrate the Star Wars films. Star Wars fans continue to create demands for Star Wars films and merchandise. They also organically create new fans by spreading their joy and hobby in Star Wars. Indonesian customers watch movies to be entertained but a major reason is so that they are up to date with the current trend.

The droids in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett are not wild enough for the real world.

The mechanically complex robots in the latest Star Wars series are wildly creative, but not wild enough to match real robots.

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

A life cycle assessment of the environmental impact of children's toys

Quantifying product impact is one way to make the environmental consequences of purchases clear to consumers and retailers. This paper provides a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the environmental impacts of common children's toys. We compare 3 Lego™ sets, 1 Barbie™, 1 Jenga game, 1 plush dog, 1 plush dog with battery components, and 1 Marble Frenzy™ game, each representing a larger category of toy. After determining the materials in each toy, we built these toys in OpenLCA with existing materials data from LCA databases. Our results showed that a Lego Star Wars set had the highest eutrophication potential with the largest single contribution to impact from injection molding. This Lego set also had the highest GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions due to the use of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. Jenga had the highest acidification impact but the lowest GWP of all the toys despite having the highest mass. Our results indicate low GHG emissions and eutrophication potential of wood as a toy material. Wood's acidification potential, however, was the highest of all studied toy materials since impacts included land management for forestry though final wood processing. While plastic had a higher impact per mass than wood, the type of plastic used was important in determining the GHG emissions: ABS and polyvinylchloride (PVC) composition was lower impact than nylon granulate, and other plastics. Since our functional units determined impact per twenty hours of use over 2 years, increased toy longevity was one option to reduce toy impact, though even increased toy longevity should be combined with design for sustainability coupled with transparent environmental labeling to communicate the environmental value of low impact toys to consumers.

1960-1970’LERDE BİLİMKURGU SİNEMASINDA MOBİLYA

Cınema is a unique means of expression. Pictures and sounds are the elements of the language of cinema. One of the elements that support these elements is furniture, which is one of the working areas of the design concept. The cinema genre that is most intertwined with the design discipline is science fiction. In this research, the relationship between cinema and space is examined on the science fiction movies and series of 1960-70, when the theme of Space in the context of furniture was at its peak. Within the scope of the study, the effects of the furniture used on the spatial narratives in the science fiction movies and series in the 1960s and 1970s were examined by taking the Star Trek series and Star Wars movies into consideration. The aim of this study is to reveal how the concept of design, which is a multidimensional discipline, brings together different dimensions from cinema to product scale as a whole, and to create a resource for similar studies to be carried out.

Fans, play knowledge, and playful history management

Three empirical case studies with an interest in character toys—Barbie dolls, Star Wars action figures, and Forest Families figurines—provide insight into the practices of prime players of contemporary toy cultures focusing on their activities as fans and historians of particular toy brands. Adult toy fans preserve and produce new play knowledge as they remember, recreate, and replay historical narratives of the objects of their fandom. Play knowledge, a relevant resource in current toy fandoms, helps describe the diverse ways fans act as historians through playful history management, thus contributing to existing research on fans' strategies to preserve play.

"You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned": Or, How Yoda, Decolonization, and Indigenous Digital Media Fit Together

"You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned"Or, How Yoda, Decolonization, and Indigenous Digital Media Fit Together Alix Shield (bio) In Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Master Yoda explains to Luke Skywalker that in order to truly master the ways of "The Force," he must make space for other ways of thinking: "You must unlearn what you have learned," says Yoda. Almost forty years later and set after the fall of the Empire, Star Wars fans fell in love with the character of Baby Yoda (or Grogu) with the 2019 release of The Mandalorian. For many Indigenous artists and creators, Yoda and Baby Yoda represent the parallels between "The Force"—the universe's energy field—and Indigenous ways of knowing; in fact, over the past two years Baby Yoda has inspired Indigenous artists around the world, and has been reinterpreted through art, beadwork, and memes.1 If we consider Yoda's words in the context of conversations around decolonization, Star Wars becomes a surprising but effective entry-point into Indigenous digital media. In this essay, I speak to my experiences teaching INDG 222: Introduction to Indigenous Digital Media in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University, located in Burnaby, BC, on the unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh (səl'ilw'ətaʔɬ), Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ'əm), Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh), and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy'əm) Nations. In INDG 222,2 we cover topics including Indigenous data sovereignty, Traditional Knowledge labelling,3 digital repatriation,4 Indigenous video games and podcasts, and more; it's a course that integrates theory, hands-on digital humanities skills training and digital literacy, and critical thinking. The course provides a solid introduction to a range of topics related to Indigenous new media and the digital humanities, and also encourages students to question the colonial foundations and structures that undergird much of the technology and media we engage with on a daily basis. As a settler [End Page 75] scholar teaching New Media (NM) and the Digital Humanities (DH) from an Indigenous Studies perspective, I focus here on the central role of decolonization in this course—and refer to the wise words of Master Yoda as our decolonial Jedi master. introductory position As an English/Scottish-descended settler scholar teaching in Indigenous Studies, it's necessary for me to clearly state my self-positionality as an outsider to Indigenous knowledges, cultures, and ways of knowing. I must also acknowledge the deeply problematic settler histories from which I have personally benefitted, and that continue to negatively impact the lives of Indigenous peoples today. Though I was born and raised in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, it wasn't until I started my PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2014 that I began to understand the histories of genocide, dispossession, and assimilationist legislation that had contributed to my own comfortable upbringing. In my doctoral research, I attempted to engage in what Métis author Maria Campbell describes as kwaskastahsowin, or "putting things to right," to address the lasting impacts of colonial editorial interventions in Canada's publishing industry.5 My PhD combined elements of Indigenous Studies, English, and the Digital Humanities, and approached two key twentieth-century works of Indigenous women's writing in Canada (Legends of Vancouver and Halfbreed) with aims of acknowledging and ethically redressing their colonial histories of publication. In the classroom, I draw on the important lessons learned from my doctoral research, and also from teachings shared with me over the years from respected Indigenous faculty and mentors. I also look to the work of settler scholars like David Gaertner (UBC), who continue to model respectful, innovative approaches to teaching Indigenous Literatures and New Media. In my classes, we begin our work by acknowledging the Indigenous lands upon which we are gathered, and by positioning ourselves in relation to those lands. Anishinaabe scholar Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm argues that understanding one's position shows an awareness "of the colonial history that may come to bear upon the process and upon [one's] relationships with Indigenous writers" (32). As a settler scholar, [End Page 76] my position in relation to teaching Indigenous topics is...