Temporal Qualities Research Articles

A Visualisation of Cavite, Philippines’ Peri-urban Landscape Transformations through Morphogenetic Montage Clusters

Abstract The use of landscape character area-morphogenetic montage clusters (LCAr-MMCs) is part of the landscape character system for the PhD research project entitled, “Capturing the Dynamic Character of the Philippine Peri-urban Landscape: A Landscape Character System Approach for the Region of Cavite.” These LCAr-MMCs are visualisation clusters created to suggest a localised approach in characterisation that can fully utilize the attributes of the landscape as potential references for planning and management of landscape in the rural-urban interface. The LCAr-MMCs, as a visualisation tool, addressed the need to uncover interpretations of the intangible and temporal morphogenetic qualities of Cavite’s current peri-urban landscape. Finding a visualisation method that can express the landscape’s adaptation to changes caused by peri-urbanisation was important in future planning initiatives, and the LCAr-MMCs provided that by showcasing the changes and patterns of development in Cavite through an assemblage of written texts, images, and cartographic maps. Cavite’s LCAr-MMCs became sources of evidence of the waves of landscape change in this landscape region. LCAr-MMCs supplied a collage of anecdotes and images depicting the evolution of Cavite’s landscape throughout time. The four (4) landscape clusters resulting from this project also created manageable sets of information known as periods of landscape influences, which were organised in phases of landscape evolution. The LCAr-MMCs asserted the adaptive qualities of the peri-urban landscape as well as the temporality of its natural and cultural environment. These clusters eventually exhibited an evolutionary landscape character that gave rise to the peri-urban landscape we know today.

SPATIO-TEMPORAL EVALUATION OF FERORO STREAM WATER QUALITY, CHIKUN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA

Aquatic environment is faced with pollution problems most of which are anthropogenic in nature. Feroro stream water was evaluated for its quality and suitability for the growth of organisms. The temporal and spatial qualities of the water was observed to be deteriorating. Water sampling was done once monthly for twenty-four months from five stations along the stream. The water samples were put into 2-litre sterilized plastic bottles. Some physical and chemical parameters were determined using HANNA meter, Dissolved oxygen meter, titration and colorimeter methods. All the parameters tested ranged within Federal Ministry of Environment standard limits. Turbidity and Total Hardness are above the standard limits. There was significant difference temporally P<0.05. Electrical Conductivity was significant different in all the stations P<0.05, lowest at Station 1(137.55µS/cm) and high at Station 5 (235.21µS/cm). Across the wet and dry seasons, the parameters significantly varied except in Temperature (25.79±0.12 and 25.57±0.26) and Total Hardness (119.68±6.13 and 109.50±3.38) P<0.05.

‘Plastic stays beautiful’: Attributing temporal and moral qualities in Ghanaian Ewe funerary contexts

Plastics are as positively durable as they are easily breakable, almost impossible to mend and hard to get rid of. They promise eternal life, but their immortality may quickly turn them into the undead. This paper discusses the use and role of plastics in Ghanaian funerary contexts, specifically in a small-town community in the Ghanaian Volta Region. It investigates plastics’ agency as materials that may potentially either contain death successfully or become uncontained matter out of place, just as the dead may become contained or left wandering among the living. Different perspectives on plastics are brought into focus, highlighting how attributed qualities and meanings play into the making of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ death. The paper shows that plastics and persons jointly become subject to moral and temporal assessments in the realm between good and bad, finitude and durability. Beyond the ethnographic case study, the paper discusses the political potential of death and plastics within the larger global context of a cultural economy that reflects the ongoing effect of colonialism.

Using speculative methods to challenge the invisibility and inevitability of data in education

Speculation is a resource for critical analysis of data-driven postdigital education. In particular, speculative methods help researchers challenge the invisibility of data-driven educational practices, and thereby unsettle the apparent inevitability of data futures. Working against these tendencies towards invisibility and inevitability requires critical imagination, and speculative methods help foster this for researchers and participants. This paper introduces speculative methods and explores their enactment in a research project that examined the social and ethical implications of datafication in higher education. Speculative methods are characterised by their non-representational, complexity-informed and inventive character and their temporal, epistemological and performative qualities. They have a complex relationship with time and temporality, attending to ‘not-yetness’; are epistemologically complex, producing problems and engaging with ambiguity; and act to create futures or realities they represent, in part through engaging publics at different scales and in different contexts. Methods inspired variously by speculative fiction and speculative design approaches have been used by digital education researchers to investigate and intervene in data futures and to challenge predictive, closed forms of data-driven future-making. The methodological value of speculation is explored here through discussion of a research project that involved ethnographic and speculative engagement with students at a research intensive university in Scotland. The research attempted to understand participants’ experiences of and perspectives on emerging data-driven technologies and practices, and what this meant for their relationship with the university. In this paper we analyse the design of and data generated through two particular speculative methods: data walking, and thinking otherwise. We focus on participants’ reflections on the methods used and show how speculation was central to efforts to prompt ethical reflection on data-driven practices. In the case of data walking, this involved sensitising participants to datafication processes, thereby making hidden practices visible to participants. A simple prompt to think otherwise, meanwhile, generated data regarding participants’ experiences and problems in the present while at the same time opening up possibilities of thinking otherwise about data futures. We close by relating these findings to wider considerations for speculative methods, focusing on the role of speculative objects as both instrument and output of research and exploring the significance of discursive closures in participatory research.

“What is the Orbit of Our Dreaming?”: Hale County This Morning , This Evening and Black Time Studies

Abstract: This article delves into the profound connection between Black life in Alabama, the temporal qualities of Southern geographies, and emerging formulations of time from the interdisciplinary field of Black Time Studies. The paper positions RaMell Ross’ 2019 experimental documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening , within an emerging field that examines radical representations of time in experimental Black art, aesthetics, and everyday life. Black Time Studies underscores the critical role of time in the ordering of Black life and labor, acknowledges modes of resistance, and envisions forms of liberation within the unique temporal landscape of the South, inviting this discussion of abstraction, framing practices, waiting, and patience. Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores and enacts an intricate interplay between time, place, and Black aesthetics, offering a generative contribution to theories of time in the South. Situating the film within this particular interdisciplinary discourse enables us in turn to draw from the methods, traditions, and analytical tools of poetry, experimental prose, sound, and music—fundamental elements of Black Time Studies, to create an expanded reading of the film. It is through this lens that we will ponder the film’s central question: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”

Exploring urban co-presence and migrant integration on Beirut’s seafront

Abstract This article focuses on investigating how uses and users of Beirut’s seafront spaces reflect city demographics and how these may offer specific affordances to migrant communities. The article documents co-presence and experiences of recreation and interactions to explore whether these can be meaningfully described as integrated leisure spaces. Beirut is a post-conflict, high migration city, and the country of Lebanon hosts the highest number of Syrian refugees per capita globally. The fieldwork and data capture took a multi-scalar approach linking spatial, temporal, and social qualities of using these public spaces through empirical work including a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, both conducted on site. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods supported a fuller understanding of integration both in terms of physical co-presence and the experiential qualities of spaces used by diverse communities. Our findings demonstrate that though each of the four seafront spaces was used by people from a range of national backgrounds, there were important differences. Income level and gender were important intersecting factors. Time of day and week also shaped who was present in each space. The qualitative data informed better understandings of the experience of the seafront spaces by visitors from migrant backgrounds, finding that time by the sea was highly valued by many, but was not necessarily an escape from some of the prejudices and social inequalities found in Lebanon.

Probing the Neurophysiology of Temporal Sensitivity in the Somatosensory System Using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) Sensory Memory Paradigm

Duration is an amodal feature common to all sensory experiences, but low-level processing of the temporal qualities of somatosensation remains poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to evaluate electrophysiological discrimination of parametric somatosensory stimuli to better understand how the brain processes the duration of tactile information. This research used a somatosensory mismatch negativity (sMMN) paradigm to evaluate electrophysiological sensitivity to differences in the duration of vibrotactile stimuli in healthy young adults. Specifically, a 100 ms standard vibration was presented 80% of the time while the remaining 20% of presentations were made up of deviant stimuli with one of the following durations: 115, 130, 145, or 160 ms. When a deviation from the anticipated tactile input is detected, the distinct electrophysiological signature of the sMMN is present. A companion behavioral task assessed individual thresholds for cognizant awareness of the standard and deviant vibrotactile stimuli. The results of the present study demonstrated a sMMN response when deviant stimuli were 130, 145, and 160 ms, but not when they were 115 ms. This suggests that on average the participants did not electrophysiologically discriminate between the 100 and 115 ms. Future work may apply this paradigm to better understand atypical tactile sensitivity in various clinical conditions.

Setting Fires with Hawthorne

Daniel Diez Couch, “Setting Fires with Hawthorne: ‘Earth’s Holocaust’ and Book Burning in Nineteenth-Century America” (pp. 87–113) Nathaniel Hawthorne burned pages and pages of his own writing over the course of his life and investigated the topic in two tales, “The Devil in Manuscript” (1835) and “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844). While the former borrows from his own life experiences, the latter presents a cataclysmic vision of the destruction of all literature. Yet Hawthorne does not offer a typical lament—based in liberal ideologies of the progress of knowledge and the sanctity of the written word—for the all-consuming holocaust. Rather, he argues that the pyre yields a transformative and unexpected effect on the aesthetic and temporal qualities of the texts. Drawing on contemporary accounts of book burnings, Hawthorne generates a productive vision of the act by which the fire transforms texts into a visible spectacle of beauty. “Earth’s Holocaust” thus offers an aesthetic avenue for understanding literary bonfires. Moreover, Hawthorne rejects the premise that such events end the temporal lifecycle of texts. Throughout the tale, he contends that even though book burnings will occur time and again regardless of human reformation, books can surpass the effects of the flames even if such a process only occurs imaginatively. In the dematerialization of books—in turning them from a complete, bounded whole into embers and particles of dust—Hawthorne finds a redemptive energy.

Dance Emotion Characteristic Parameters Based on Deep Learning Model

Abstract In this paper, the emotions of dancers are identified in combination with the integrated deep-learning model. Firstly, four initial value features with important emotional states are extracted from the time, frequency, and time-frequency domains, respectively. It was isolated using a deep belief network enhanced by neuro colloidal chains. Finally, the finite Boltzmann criterion integrates the features of higher abstractions and predicts the emotional states. The results of DEAP data show that the correlation between EEG channels can be discovered and applied by glial chains. The fused deep learning model combines EEG emotional features with temporal, frequency, and expressive qualities.

Quantifying Path Smoothness in Video Object Tracking by Detection

Object detection and tracking are important areas of research in computer vision. Computer vision solutions to object detection are typically single-frame solutions. To perform tracking by detection, these solutions typically do object detection on a perframe basis, thus losing any temporal information from previous frames. Many multiobject tracking solutions report the average precision performance on video datasets, but they do not evaluate the temporal qualities of these solutions. In video, not only the detection of objects is important but the temporal motion attributes of an object’s path, such as its velocity, acceleration, and jerk, are important as well. Many implementations of Object Tracking by Detection systems have run into the problem of motion smoothing for bounding box paths. This paper focuses on quantifying the smoothness of detected object paths within some temporal window. We propose using two smoothness metrics from the field of biokinematics and adapt them for use with detections. Finally, using these metrics, we evaluate the ground truth and two popular object detectors, at the time of experimentation (YOLOv3 and Retinanet), on the entire MOT17 dataset. The results show that the metrics are useful in determining object smoothness, and provide us with an additional approach to evaluate an algorithm’s performance in object tracking. The experiments also demonstrate that YOLOv3 produces smoother bounding boxes than Retinanet. All supplemental graphs and data are shown in our appendix

WLARS: Workload-Aware Recharge Scheduling Mechanism for Improving Surveillance Quality in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

With radio frequency (RF), the mobile charger (MC) can wirelessly transmit energy to the sensor nodes in the network. The wireless energy transfer enhances the lifetime of sensor nodes in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). Most of the studies improved the efficiency of MC or perpetuated the lifetime of WRSNs. At the same time, none of the studies focused on considering the spatial and temporal surveillance qualities (STSQ) of each sensor recharged. Therefore, this paper proposed an efficient energy recharge scheduling for MC, aiming to maximize the STSQ of the given network. Initially, sensor routing load (RL) is considered to partition the network to distribute the charging load of the MCs evenly. Second, the busy level of the MC is considered to send the recharging requests to the MC. Based on the busy level of MC, the sensors adjust the sensing rate frequency to manage their energy. Finally, cooperation between the neighboring MCs is proposed to reduce the waiting time for recharging requested sensors. The simulation results present that the proposed work yields the literature in terms of STSQ, traveling distance, average waiting time and energy usage efficiency.

The reappropriation of time in television: How traditional qualities of broadcast media are being adopted by their video-on-demand services

Abstract As on-demand media claim an increasing amount of the time we spend on digital media, traditional broadcasters have adopted video on-demand (VoD) services as a means of presenting their programmes. This article analyses two Danish VoD services offered by legacy broadcasters – that is, BVoD services. It argues that the traditional features of broadcast television, to communicate liveness and immediacy, are reappropriated in the publishing practices of the BVoD services. With an analytical focus on the use of temporal paratexts, the article finds that whereas both services emphasise liveness and immediacy in their publishing practices, they apply different means of expressing the temporal qualities. These differences can be attributed to organisational differences. Finally, the article concludes that competitiveness, distinctiveness, and the public service identity of the broadcasters are explanatory factors for the reappropriation of time-structured publishing in the two Danish BVoD services DRTV and TV 2 Play.

Making Animal Materials in Time

This special issue, “Making Animal Materials in Time,” delves into the history of animal materials used in craft and scientific endeavors since the eighteenth century. We regard animal materials as dynamic elements with particular properties granted context-specific and culturally fluid meanings by those who work with them—often to the point of dissolving their original animal materiality. Focusing on this multi-dynamic at the intersection of history of science and the anthropology of techniques permits a reformulation of the concept of affordance, as material affordances, to create the theoretical capacity for a discussion of the diverse processes of rendering animal bodies into new substances, materials, and things. Six case studies illustrate how human historical actors distinguished animal materials as they observed, envisioned, extracted, processed, and changed animal bodies and tissues into new elements. Collectively, these papers present a strategy for examining connections between the spatial and temporal qualities of animal materials situated in human-scale material practices. The animal materials featured in this special issue serve as boundary objects across practical settings, contexts, regions, and cultural world settings that instrumentally link the history of science to anthropologies of craft knowledges.

Hearing Durational Process in A Huli Song

Hearing Durational Process in A Huli Song

Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan

War has defined Azerbaijan for more than three decades. The unresolved conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has not only structured the sociopolitical climate of the nation but also everyday relations and the very manner in which both the private home and the homeland is imagined. Increasingly, the line has blurred between housing policy and military strategy, with desires for greater securitization and armament seeping into proprietary arrangements, construction plans, and mainstream narratives surrounding the domestic. I examine three sites where inhabitation has seemingly become inextricable from the military apparatus — a state-sponsored apartment block for the families of martyrs (şəhid ailəsi) and those disabled by war (müharibə əlillərinə), a newly built housing complex for servicemen (yüksək rütbəli hərbçilər), and, finally, a makeshift settlement for internally displaced people (məcburi köçkünlər). In these spaces, both temporal and material qualities of war seep into the quotidian, informing the ways in which individuals negotiate the intimate aftermaths of violence, injury, and severed relation. Whilst the article begins by examining state-sponsored settlement forged along lines of allegiance, masculinized duty, and capacity, it concludes by attending to moments that upend oppressive forms of homemaking.

Meaningful Improvements in Rett Syndrome: A Qualitative Study of Caregivers.

Rett syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder primarily affecting females. This syndrome is associated with many comorbidities and impairments related to motor function, breathing, sleep, expressive language, and repetitive hand movements. The Rett Syndrome Behaviour Questionnaire (RSBQ) is one measure used to assess changes in Rett syndrome-related manifestations or core symptoms. Little is known about how caregivers think about meaningful changes in the items that make up the RSBQ scale. This qualitative study explored how caregivers of individuals with Rett syndrome viewed changes in the symptoms covered in the RSBQ. We conducted semistructured interviews with 40 caregivers and employed thematic analysis, identifying themes using an iterative process. Two factors characterized caregivers' thoughts about meaningful changes in Rett syndrome manifestations. First, general features of these symptoms rendered them bothersome: the extent of bother compared to other symptoms, if or how they prevented desirable behaviors and their temporal qualities. Second, caregivers evaluated the meaning of improvements by considering the decrease in bother and the potential benefits of change. Improvements had social and psychological consequences for individuals with Rett syndrome and caregivers. In addition, implications for health, fine and gross motor skills, and communication were also substantial.

Beyond simultaneity: Temporal interdependence of behavior is key to affiliative effects of interpersonal synchrony in children

Interpersonal synchrony (IPS) is the temporal coordination of behavior during social interactions. IPS acts as a social cue signifying affiliation both when children witness IPS between others and when they experience it themselves. However, it is unclear which temporal qualities of IPS produce these effects and why. We hypothesized that both the simultaneity and temporal regularity of partners’ actions would influence affiliation judgments and that subjective perceptions of IPS (“togetherness”) would play a role in mediating these relations. In two online tasks, children aged 4 to 11 years listened to a pair of children tapping (witnessed IPS; n = 68) or themselves tapped with another child (experienced IPS; n = 63). Tapping partners were presented as real, but the sounds attributed to them were computer generated so that their temporal relations could be experimentally manipulated. The simultaneity and regularity of their tapping was systematically manipulated across trials. For witnessed IPS, both the simultaneity and regularity of partners’ tapping significantly positively affected the perceived degree of affiliation between them. These effects were mediated by the perceived togetherness of the tapping. No affiliative effects of IPS were found in the experienced IPS condition. Our findings suggest that both the simultaneity and regularity of partners’ actions influence children’s affiliation judgments when witnessing IPS via elicited perceptions of togetherness. We conclude that temporal interdependence—which includes but is not limited to simultaneity of action—is responsible for inducing perceptions of affiliation during witnessed IPS.

DynamicSDM: An R package for species geographical distribution and abundance modelling at high spatiotemporal resolution

Abstract Species distribution models (SDM) are widely applied to understand changing species geographical distribution and abundance patterns. However, existing SDM tools are inherently static and inadequate for modelling species distributions that are driven by dynamic environmental conditions. dynamicSDM provides novel tools that explicitly consider the temporal dimension at key SDM stages, including functions for: (a) Cleaning and filtering species occurrence records by spatial and temporal qualities; (b) Generating pseudo‐absence records through space and time; (c) Extracting spatiotemporally buffered explanatory variables; (d) Fitting SDMs whilst accounting for temporal biases and autocorrelation and (e) Projecting intra‐ and inter‐ annual geographical distributions and abundances at high spatiotemporal resolution. Package functions have been designed to be: flexible for targeting specific study species; compatible with other SDM tools; and, by utilising Google Earth Engine and Google Drive, to have low computing power and storage needs. We illustrate dynamicSDM functions with an example of a nomadic bird in southern Africa, the red‐billed quelea Quelea quelea. As dynamicSDM functions are flexible and easily applied, we suggest that these tools could be readily applied to other taxa and systems globally.

Explaining Visual Shape–Taste Crossmodal Correspondences

A growing body of experimental research now demonstrates that neurologically normal individuals associate different taste qualities with design features such as curvature, symmetry, orientation, texture and movement. The form of everything from the food itself through to the curvature of the plateware on which it happens to be served, and from glassware to typeface, not to mention the shapes of/on food product packaging have all been shown to influence people's taste expectations, and, on occasion, also their taste/food experiences. Although the origins of shape-taste and other form-taste crossmodal correspondences have yet to be fully worked out, it would appear that shape qualities are occasionally elicited directly. However, more often, there may be a metaphorical attempt to translate the temporal qualities of taste sensations into a spatial analogue. At the same time, emotional mediation may sometimes also play a role in the affinity people experience between shape properties and taste. And finally, it should be acknowledged that associative learning of the relation between packaging shapes, glassware shapes, logos, labels and iconic food forms that commonly co-occur with specific taste properties (i.e., in the case of branded food products) may also play an important role in determining the nature of shape-taste correspondences. Ultimately, however, any attempt to use such shape-taste correspondences to nudge people's behaviour/perception in the real world is made challenging due to the fact that shape properties are associated with multiple qualities, and not just taste.

Handstitched in Space and Time: The Story of a Vintage Patchwork Cloak.

This article explores the spatial and temporal qualities of a vintage hand-sewn patchwork cloak, discovered by the author on eBay. Using Shim’s three-stage consumption process of ‘acquisition, possession and disposal’ of things (1995), the cloak is followed on a journey through multiple transitions, paths and diversions, including ‘connoisseurship’, ‘keeping’ and ‘passing on’ to others. At each consumption stage, (acquisition, possession and disposal), the spatial and temporal aspects of the cloak’s biography are investigated, such as the online sites, the shops and the domestic spaces it occupies, the time taken to find such original pieces, and the time they last through multiple circular lifecycle iterations. The practices of second-hand and craft consumption are found to be complex, involving multiple sites, and travelling through the past, present and future of the imagination and of actual spaces. It is found that self-identity, relationships and knowledge are fundamental to every life stage of the biography of this cloak as it transitions through multiple lives.