Transparency In Form Research Articles

Separating the territory from the map: The intersection of cartography, memory and identity in autobiographical comics

Alison Bechdel said in an interview with Lynn Emmert that both maps and comics ‘take a complex or confusing three-dimensional reality and iron it out into a much more manageable two-dimensional version’. Yet the way maps weave together space, place, history, tradition and personal experience through multiple levels of signification points to anything but transparency of form, especially when deployed within autographics. We often encounter maps in autobiographical comics, where their uses can be as different as the lives they help to illustrate. When the layers of historical, cultural and personal references that intersect on the map plane are embedded in the formalist structures of comics, the levels of signification become multiplied – panel borders and topographical borders intersect, the geography of space merges with the geography of the page, and the subjectivity of the illustrated line overlays the objectivity of cartography. While the semiotic structures of maps and comics are presentationally different, both derive narratorial power from the relationships they make explicit through the marks on the page, and how their boundaries carve up space and time. Mapping traditions may be referenced to signpost authentication strategies within graphic memoirs. The structures of the map may be utilized – or even disrupted – in order to illustrate dynamics that cannot be signified through text or representational mimesis. This article will critically examine mapping modalities used in a variety of autographic narratives, focusing on the link between representation and experience of place for both the author and reader. By analysing what is included and excluded in a map, as well as the relationships the maps create between signifier and signified, we can draw some conclusions about how the mapmaker is positioning themselves within such frameworks as cultural background, socio-economic structures and hierarchies of knowledge.

The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Message

In May of 2018, the strategy of law-making was utilized in the Kingdom of Denmark to respond to or, more to the point, respond against full-face garments along the lines of a democratic and secular society in which values like transparency inform and guide interaction, dialogue, and communication. The new legal norm and measure, law L 219, does not refer expressly to the veil, nor to women, or to Islam. Nevertheless, the national Parliament in the Kingdom of Denmark proceeded on the basis of premises that reveal, upon scrutiny, why the particular provision that prohibits full-face veils is widely known and referred to as the “burqa ban”.Like the niqab, the burqa is a full-face veil. Numerically speaking, between 50 and 200 Muslim women wear such a veil, a fact that enters them into a minority within a minority statistics of 0.1 or 0.2 percent. However, to trivialize the burqa ban would be an error. This point applies to all sides, including the stakeholders who assumed the responsibility of drafting the new norm and measure. As the Danish legislators see things, law 219 is not an instance of “shooting sparrows with a cannon”. After this, the need to legislate appears to be an instance of following a trend in Europe and, at the same time, sending a message about the prevailing (Danish) ideology in contradistinction to “political Islam” that gives rise to unwanted phenomena like gender inequality, religious extremism, and terrorism. The authors of The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Messageattempt to give an in-depth account of the burqa ban and the political context for this, as provided by the negotiations that led up to the ban’s final adoption. One objective is to identify the various variables in the legal equation and, as another objective, capture the wider prescriptively-proscriptive direction of the Danish case, thereby also establishing a platform for further discussion, reflection, and response. (This part of the project – an intended component and outcome since the formulation of the original research task, labor division, and methodology – is published in the concurrent but separate article, The Burqa Ban: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations.)

When transparency doesn't mean ease: learning the meaning of resultative verb compounds in Mandarin Chinese.

Children have to figure out the lexicalization of meaning components in learning verb semantics (e.g. Behrens, 1998; Gentner, 1982; Tomasello & Brooks, 1998). The meaning of an English state-change verb (e.g. break) is divided into two portions (i.e. cause and result), respectively encoded with a separate verb in a Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC). The majority of Mandarin monomorphemic verbs do not specify any realization of a state change (like hunt), or only imply it (like wash) (Talmy, 2000). This study examines the acquisition of the constructional meaning of RVCs and the semantic division of labor between the component verbs. Four groups of Mandarin-learning children (aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 6;1) participated in an elicitation experiment. The results reveal that, although transparency in form facilitates their learning of the state-change meanings of RVCs, Mandarin children have difficulties in unpacking the meanings of individual verbs, revealing language-specific learning issues.

Budget Transparency in Czech Local Government

Abstract The paper evaluates budget transparency in Czech local government. The Disclosure requirements specified in the legislation are fragmented: not all existing budget documents must be published and noncompliance only leads to sanctions in some cases. Analysis and comparison of disclosure practice in the 22 Prague districts revealed that districts comply with the disclosure requirements stipulated in the Budgetary rules but often fail to comply with the requirements stipulated by the freedom of information legislation. The commitment to transparency in form of a policy statement has no impact on the overall evaluation of the districts but it is positively associated with compilation of narratives accompanying both the draft budget and draft year-end report. The size of the district plays only a limited role.

Многокомпонентные термины в функции ключевых слов в информационной базе славянского языкознания iSybislaw

Multi-word terms as keywords in the iSybislaw databaseThis article is devoted to the problem of the criteria on which multi­-word terms should be selected and verified for the bibliographic database of Slavic linguistics publications iSybislaw. The text is based on Russian and Polish linguistic material. Such criteria as actuality, frequency, transparency of form are applied separately in each language and different sets and variability of terms in the each case are established. The authors examine also the reasons of formal and semantic asymmetry between Polish and Russian terminological units in the database.

To PPS or not to PPS? (Publiek-)private samenwerking rond groen gas

In policy practice sometimes organizational arrangements appear that at first glance manifest itself as cooperative relations between private organizations, but about which on second thoughts the question can be asked if after all there is an active input from the side of the government. This is for instance the case in the construction of biogas infrastructures. In this article the authors discuss if we can talk about PPC after all. In the debate on governance this question is important because in the design of PPC the public interest involved must be sufficiently guaranteed in terms of control and accountability. On the basis of a confrontation between the results of a literature review and an empirical study of the case of a Green Gas pipeline in North-East Friesland (‘Biogasleiding Noordoost Fryslân’) in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that public steering in practice can take a form in disguise. Using ‘intermediate’ civil law legal persons, governmental influence indeed can be and is exercised during the cooperation. Especially law poses specific demands on control and accountability to take care of public interests, like the promotion of the use of renewable energy. Likewise in this kind of projects, especially in comparison with pure private-private cooperation, the public and if possible even the public law regulation must be safeguarded, for instance by transparency of form and content of steering. Of course this has to be done with preservation of the cooperative nature that is typical of PPC.

La promenade architecturale de Mélite : initiation au libertinage ou démonstration de savoir-vivre dans la petite maison de Jean-François de Bastide

An analysis of Jean-François de Bastide' s La Petite Maison, this article investigates the way in which the correlation existing between architecture and decorum at the time of Louis XIV is both maintained and transformed in eighteenth-century libertine texts into a relationship between space and conve¬ nience, while the tension resulting from this opposition of continuity and change comes to characterize libertinage itself. Referring to the work that sociologist Norbert Elias wrote on Court Society in which, using Versailles as an example, he drew a parallel between architecture and etiquette as emanations of social order, Bastide' s text can be read as documenting a shift from courtly values toward bourgeois standards, although this shift remains paradoxically set in that most aristocratic of spaces — a petite maison. The pleasure pavilion, in this respect, is symbolic of a phase when a number of societal mandates still coincided — social mores and personal convenience, ostentation and consumption, corres¬ pondence between image and status, on the one hand, and transparency of form and function on the other.