University Of Exeter Research Articles

Female doctors should form personal relationships with senior role models, researchers say

Female doctors must be given opportunities to develop close personal relationships with senior colleagues who can act as role models, Exeter University researchers have argued. A study carried out by Kim Peters and Michelle Ryan from the university, in partnership with the Medical Women’s Federation, examined whether female doctors benefited from having role models. The researchers found that female doctors benefited from role models with whom they had formed close personal relationships. However, other, more standard, interventions designed to support women in their careers, such as increasing the …

Improving representation of leaf respiration in large‐scale predictive climate–vegetation models

Improving representation of leaf respiration in large‐scale predictive climate–vegetation models

Synthetic rope responses in the context of load history: Operational performance

The utilisation of synthetic mooring ropes for marine renewable energy (MRE) devices is a recent occurrence. Despite current use in the offshore industry, MRE mooring components are typically subjected to highly dynamic loads, necessitating the detailed characterisation of operational and long-term component performance for lifecycle analysis and operations management. To address the uncertainties associated with synthetic mooring components in this application, tension experiments have been conducted on nylon 6 parallel-stranded rope samples at IFREMER, France and the University of Exeter, UK under the consortium MERiFIC (Marine Energy in Far Peripheral and Island Communities). Measurements are reported from harmonic loading tests with different initial bedding-in levels used to investigate the influence of load history on the immediate dynamic properties of the rope. Two irregular load regimes were also applied based on mooring tensions recorded by the South West Mooring Test Facility (SWMTF). Datasets are provided to facilitate the development of rope modelling tools. For the load regimes studied it was found that the operational performance of the rope is strongly influenced by the instantaneous load-strain characteristic. This study provides unique insight into the stiffness and damping properties of synthetic rope in the context of loading regimes relevant to MRE devices.

Supporting international students with careers provision: A review of UK higher education careers service provision and a case study based on the University of Exeter

As part of my role as a Careers Consultant at the University of Exeter I decided to undertake some research in to the careers provision offered to international students. I wanted to review provision across the UK higher education sector and then focus on the University of Exeter, my employer, which has a growing international student body of over 4000 students and ambitious growth plans. With growing numbers of international students, from a variety of different countries, come different needs and expectations along with increasing pressure on University support services as a whole. Through surveying a number of universities, this report explores how UK universities have been dealing with this challenge and looks at the expectations international students have of careers services. Itbecame clear that this was a topic high on the agenda of a number of institutions, and whilst this report focuses in detail on Exeter, the information obtained and recommendations made may provide useful insights for other universities.

Time Trails: presencing digital heritage within our everyday lives

ABSTRACT The Time Trails project is a collaboration between the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, 1010 Media, and Exeter City Football Club Supporters Trust (2013). It is a mobile web app to allow users to follow, annotate and create trails using text, images and videos, and to respond to them via social media. Two trails narrating the history of Exeter City Football Club and its Supporters Trust, used for mobile learning and as part of sport and cultural tourism experiences are presented. We show how Time Trails can be used as a presencing tool to establish new ways of encountering and learning on digital heritage within our daily lives.

Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious Identity during the English Reformation by David J. Davis (review)

Reviewed by: Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious Identity during the English Reformation by David J. Davis Ian Green Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious Identity during the English Reformation. By David J. Davis. [Library of the Written Word, Vol. 25; The Handpress Word, Vol. 19.] (Boston: Brill. 2013. Pp. xvi, 243 pages. $146.00. ISBN 978-90-04-236010-1.) This study of religious images printed as woodcuts and engravings in English publications from 1535 to 1603 is based on the author’s doctoral research under the supervision of Alexandra Walsham at the University of Exeter. Setting the scene in the first two chapters, David Davis reviews the rapidly expanding literature on the print trade in sixteenth-century England and on contemporary attitudes toward the use of images. This literature has already done much to discredit older assumptions of a sharp divide between Catholic and Protestant positions, and to tease out the relationships between images and text in various contexts, but the author feels these ideas can be taken further. In the remaining chapters he analyzes the meaning and deployment of a wide range of images and symbols—the Virgin, the Holy Monogram, the Crucifixion, the Agnus Dei, the Good Shepherd, visions of God, and the tetragrammaton—and concludes that developments in England should not be “graphed along strict confessional or ideological lines” (p. 7), but seen as producing “religious identities” (p. 9) that, although remaining aware of the differences between Catholic and Protestant, were able to embrace the common ground between them as well. The monograph is well written and throws numerous shafts of light on specific cases and on wider issues such as the debate on “iconophobia.” It is also moderately well illustrated, given the indifferent quality of many surviving images. With caveats, it can be recommended to scholars and students interested in this subject. Although the author is adept at identifying occasions when highly educated and theologically sophisticated Protestant clergy gave limited and conditional approval for the use of selected images inside the church or outside, there remains a dearth of solid evidence to show how far these views were known to or shared by the authors or editors, or more usually the printers and publishers, who opted to insert a particular woodcut or engraving in a particular place in a particular work. Time and again, the gap between theory and practice is filled by a presumption that [End Page 148] the placement was deliberate and enlightened—an act of informed recontextualization, to strengthen the sense of Protestant identity—even if that same image had been borrowed from a Catholic source, or was subsequently recycled several times within the same volume or in other works in a variety of genres. Indeed, the more images were used in early-modern publications, the more they became generic or decorative rather than helping to support or explain a particular text, so that contemporary readers received mixed signals from the printer’s habit of recycling images. Furthermore, we know little of English readers’ reactions to the texts, let alone the accompanying images, of the works they encountered. Many of the works in which Davis’s images appeared were not at the cheap end of the spectrum, indicating an educated but limited market. However, when these images appeared in a best-selling title, they could be hard to interpret. Did those who bought—or were lent—one of the many copies of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins’s metrical psalms that had on its title-page a copy of Hans Holbein’s image of Christ triumphing over evil and death use it as a point of reference for meditation or recognize it as a symbol of the divine? Or, if they noticed it at all, did they wonder what an image of Christ surrounded by four scripture texts with Latin incipits was doing on a work that did not mention him by name in the psalms they were singing? Ian Green University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Dispatches

Dispatches

Understanding The Reputation Of Further Education (FE): Some Historical Comparisons

The website ‘FE histories and time line’ was developed from a research study entitled The reputation of English FE – understanding the evolution of the sector (1944-1996) supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the University of Exeter. This paper is an opportunity to elaborate further on the phenomenon of reputation with respect to FE colleges during the 1950s and 1960s. Reputation is considered to be a dynamic concept that emerges from the everyday images that individuals form, based on their experiences with an organisation as well as the communications and symbolic messages from the organisation itself (Gosti and Wilson, 2001). Narratives gathered from former college staff members and archival evidence are deployed to show that the reputation of FE colleges was far more firmly and widely established in this previous era than in subsequent decades. This shift is discussed in the light of significant challenges to the connectivity of colleges within local constituencies.

Navigated Spaces, Connected Places: Proceedings of Red Sea Project V held at the University of Exeter, 16-19 September 2010 BAR International Series 2346 & BFSA Monograph 12 edited by Dionisus A.Agius, John P.Cooper, AthenaTrakadas and ChiaraZazzaro (Eds)

Navigated Spaces, Connected Places: Proceedings of Red Sea Project V held at the University of Exeter, 16-19 September 2010 BAR International Series 2346 & BFSA Monograph 12 edited by Dionisus A.Agius, John P.Cooper, AthenaTrakadas and ChiaraZazzaro (Eds)

Intellectual property and 3D printing: a case study on 3D chocolate printing

The emergence of 3D printing technology as a ‘disruptive technology’ challenges the existing intellectual property framework. Our paper considers one part of that framework—copyright—in the light of 3D printing, with a special focus on issues involving artistic works and liability for authorization of infringement of copyright. We consider a scenario concerning consumer co-creation arising from 3D chocolate printing technology developed at Exeter University. We discuss the production of two-dimensional artistic works into three dimensions; ownership; originality and substantial copying; and authorship, term of protection and authorization of infringement. We consider different business models for co-creation of 3D printing technology. We conclude that by resorting to collective bargaining mechanisms and collective licensing schemes akin to those developed in the UK and in Europe, the co-creators could be rewarded through mechanisms akin to benefit sharing.

Memory, the Nakba, and Lieux de Memoire

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVIII, No.1, Fall 2014 Memory, the Nakba, and Lieux de Memoire Samantha A. Borders* When considering the elements that make up a cultural identity, a keen sense of the personal is vital. In looking back at the events that have tied a people together, memory plays an essential role in preserving a history. In the case of the Palestinian Nakba, or the “catastrophe”, that consisted of the ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Arabs from the region of British Mandate Palestine, its commemoration acts as more than a point of reference for these people. Whether in diaspora or on the land itself, the corporate suffering caused by this instance has become a pivot in modern Palestinian identity. This essay seeks to demonstrate the viability of the Nakba as a Lieu de Memoire (site of memory) as outlined by Pierre Nora through its maintenance via storytelling. The works of Ahmad Sa’adi will be foundational in this study, and stand as points of reference. By exploring the connections between memory, storytelling, and ultimately identity, it will be illustrated that remembrance itself is an indispensable tool for a dispossessed and scattered people to remain united under a single unit of affiliation. To understand the connection between the Nakba and its commemoration , a definition of sites of memory is required. Primarily, “the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of thing, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial”1 , and to act as a point of cultural reference to a time past. Sites of memory differ from history in the sense that this act as “a bond tying us to the eternal present” while the latter “is a representation 71 *Samantha Borders is an honors graduate program at the University of Exeter in the UK, Borders focuses her research on Palestinian Christian identity and construction of knowledge , and is a contributing writer to various media outlets such as e-IR, Comment Middle East, and Future Voices of America. Currently, she is resuming her studies at the PhD level at the University of Exeter. 1 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 19. of the past”2 and is by nature more sterile. Also unlike history, these tend to be rooted in nationalism and can be based on myths surrounding the aura of a particular nation. A lieu can represent a fictitious or actual past, depending on its ability to harness the imaginations of a people and unite them under a single identity. However, the validity of the memory is normally not called into question. Rather, its potency and ability to evoke emotion are deemed of far greater importance. To fall under Nora’s sense of the phrase, the site itself must be a place of universal connection for a people. In this sense, the Nakba is an ideal lieu, since all Palestinians were affected by the Nakba in some way, and share in the corporate sense of dispossession and homelessness. Because of this universal experience, “its timeless, multifaceted, and complex nature”3 are ideally suited for creating a site of memory for Palestinians, regardless of their location. The potency of this recollection, recalling the loss of the familiar and placement into the unknown, stands as a uniting front for Palestinians worldwide. Therefore, while the on-going Judaisation of Palestine transforms the conditions on the ground, the Nakba remains as a defining moment beyond the reach of alteration. Although it may seem to be a natural tendency to look to history when bolstering a sense of identity, this is not necessarily the case. Whereas history and physical objects can be universal points of cultural reference, memory is far more intimately tied to the people themselves. It has the ability act as a bonding agent between people on a level that history will never touch, due to its specificity and requirement of participation in one form or another. For many Palestinians, the Nakba represents one of the major sites of memory for the modern Palestinian people, whether residing within the confines of historic...

Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Flood Risk Management in Urban Environments

Urban flooding is estimated to cause £270 million pounds worth of damage each year in England and Wales alone. There has, therefore, been a clear need to develop improved methods of identifying intervention strategies to reduce flood risk in urban environments. This paper describes ground-work performed towards evaluating the relative suitability of several algorithms applied to multi-objective optimisation of flood risk intervention strategies in an urban drainage network. An effective methodology is described for reducing an array of return period/duration rainfall files to a minimum, and it is described how this methodology makes possible comparisons of optimisation algorithms. This work has been undertaken as part of a STREAM-IDC EngD project which is a collaborative effort between the University of Exeter, and HR Wallingford.

Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives ed. by Giulino Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley (review)

Reviewed by: Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives ed. by Giulino Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley Katherine McLoone Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, vol. 2, ed. Giulino Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2013) x + 259 pp. Like its companion volume, 2011’s Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Text, Music, and Image from Machaut to Ariosto (University of Exeter Press), this collection of essays stems from two workshops (on citation in French lyrics and songs) and a conference on “Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages” at the University of Exeter. [End Page 223] With such a thorough pedigree, it is no surprise that this volume continues the strong tradition of presenting numerous case studies that, taken together, illuminate the nuances of the “complex transitions between memorial and literate negotiations” of citation, quotation, and intertextuality in medieval and Renaissance literature, art, and music (2). The first essay in the collection, Jenny Benham’s “Walter Map and Ralph Glaber: Intertextuality and the Construction of Memories of Peacemaking,” sets the pattern followed, for the most part, by the following essays: case studies that explore a particular aspect of memory and intertextuality, followed by a section that examines the larger ramifications of those case studies. As Benham explains, even two accounts of a historical meeting might not lead the modern scholar to an accurate understanding of what happens—instead, “it may only confirm the authors’ use of citation, allusion, and intertextuality” (16). The theme of the instability of memory-studies continues in Sjoerd Levelt’s sprightly essay “Citation and Misappropriation in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie and the Anglo-Latin Historiographical Tradition. Levelt addresse the tradition of Latinate British histories from Bede to Gerald of Wales to argue that each text in that tradition rewrites, with cheeky emendation, its predecessors in order to exploit gaps and, ultimately, speak to a divided audience of the unwitting public and the expert historiographer. As those essays indicate, we are left with textual artifacts of citation, quotation, and intertextuality from which we must reconstruct mental processes and the representation of those processes. The three essays on musical citation explore precisely that theme, beginning with Anna Maria Busse Berger’s “Orality, Literacy and Quotation in Medieval Polyphony.” Berger examines how medieval musicians (specifically, Perotinus and Oswald von Wolkenstein) engaged their “memorial archive[s]” to conclude that orality and literacy—which we might call two forms of memory—affect medieval polyphonic composition (31). Helen Deeming’s “Music, Memory, and Mobility: Citation and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertories” explores contrafactum, the practice of “substituting a new text to an existing song-melody,” which has the effect of associating the original text with the new one, creating a “virtual polyphony” in which both songs exist “simultaneously … in the mind … of the musician” (68, 69). Memory, citation, and identity are further explored in Jennifer Saltzstein’s “Intertextuality and Authorial Self-Representation in the Music of Adam de la Halle”; Adam’s self-citation—unusual in medieval musical refrains—creates an intertextual identity for the author. But is an intertextual, constructed identity stable? Both R. Barton Palmer (“Centrifugal Allusion and the Centripetal Text: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut”) and Emma Cayley (“Coming Apart at the Seams? Citation as Transvestism in Fifteenth-Century Debate Poetry”) emphasize the instability of citation and memory, and how that instability can affect subjectivity. Cayley examines debate poetry and accompanying illustrations to argue that “citation in the Derridean sense and Butlerian gender performance trouble the reader through their erosion of any stable identity or subject position in the text” (66), while Palmer explores the “discontents of authorship and the drama of the self” in Machaut emphasize on the subjectivity of poetic existence (161). [End Page 224] Of course, to speak of memory and subjectivity without recourse to passion omits a vital component of existence. Both Lina Bolzoni (“The Impassioned Memory in Dante’s Divine Comedy”) and Naomi Howell (“Sepulchral Citations in Twelfth-Century Romance”) address the emotional effect of memory and intertextuality. Bolzoni links Dante’s engagement with mnemotechniques to the...

1. An Unidentified Version of Achard of Saint-Victor’s De discretione animae, spiritus et mentis in Oxford, Exeter College Library, Ms. 23

Oxford, Exeter College Library, Ms. 23, ff. 195va-198ra, transmits a miscellany of psychological texts, divided into various sections. This article shows that the first sections of the miscellany (ff. 195va-196vb, called OxDASM in the article) reproduce most of Achard of Saint-Victor's De discretione animae, spiritus et mentis (DASM), but arrange its material in a different order from DASM and express similar ideas with different wording or word-order. OxDASM would seem to be, or derive from, an unknown version of DASM. The text in Oxford, Exeter College Library, Ms. 23 certainly must be added to the medieval dissemination of DASM, of which before now only four manuscripts-and no indirect tradition-were known. This article has four parts. In the first part, I give an outline of Achard's works and their dissemination. Secondly, I discuss the content of DASM and some of choices made by the editor of the text, Nikolaus Häring. Thirdly, I present the Oxford manuscript, with particular reference to the relationship between OxDASM and DASM. The appendix contains an edition of OxDASM, in which all parallel paragraphs in DASM are indicated.

The times they are a‐changin’: evolution and revolution in animal ecology publishing

The times they are a-changin’: evolution and revolution in animal ecology publishing Kenneth Wilson*, Tim Coulson, Mike Boots, Liz Baker and Peter Livermore Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK; Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Exeter, UK; and British Ecological Society, London, UK

Looking is an Art: An interview with Mike Weaver

This interview was conducted with Dr. Mike Weaver after his talk on “Paul Strand, Art and Politics” for the visual arts research seminar of the Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA) on October 2, 2012. We were curious in asking Mike Weaver more questions in regard to his work on Strand and more generally about his own way of looking at photographic images. Mike Weaver, born in Cornwall in 1937, taught poetry, film, and photography at the universities of Exeter ...

Book Review: Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy and Culture, by John Downey and Sabina Mihelj

Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy and Culture. John Downey and Sabina Mihelj, eds. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. 199 pp. $95 hbk.Reviewed by: Anthony Moretti, Robert Morris University, Moon Township, PA, USA DOI: 10.1177/1077699013506348This book demands the attention of scholars or anyone interested in understanding the ongoing development of print and television media in Russia and multiple nations in the region. In short, it challenges assumptions that people in the West (might) have about the operation of privately owned and public-sector media in Central and Eastern Europe. Perhaps the worst assumption is that all Central and Eastern European media are homogeneous, no matter the country in which they disseminate news, entertain- ment, and other programming. Such thinking could be a relic of the Cold War in which a monolithic image of the region was ingrained in the minds of Americans and others who lived in the West.The text is edited by John Downey, a reader in comparative media in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, and Sabina Mihelj, a senior lecturer in media, communication, and culture at Loughborough University. It includes seven essays examining the political, economic, and cultural forces that influence the content, ownership, and audience preferences in this part of the world.When examining politics, the book argues that as more pressure is applied by domestic political agencies, the less likely the media system will be free (based on the Western interpretation of that word as it relates to media). No surprise there; Russia is the most obvious example of this. But what the book also demonstrates is that while the European Union (EU)-an external agency-succeeded in some cases in institut- ing media policies in many of these former Soviet bloc states consistent with EU practices, the United also has been successful in guiding nations toward its media practices. The EU attempted to link mimicking of its media policies (i.e., strong public-service broadcasters and subsidies for independent and national production, p. 152) to interested in gaining EU membership. But that linkage often has not held. Alison Harcourt, of the University of Exeter, writes, States in the region adopted European policy models on paper but they have not worked well in practice. Hence, although the European model seems to have prevailed over the US model, in practice, a more liberal market has emerged (p. 145).Karol Jakubowicz, a former journalist and educator and now the chairman of the National Broadcasting Council in his native Poland, divides the in the region into democratic (Croatia is among them), semidemocratic to semiauthoritarian (Russia is among them), and authoritarian (Belarus is among them). He states, Indeed, media freedom and independence is higher in the democratic and progressively lower in semi-democratic and semi-authoritarian and authoritarian countries (p. …

Report from Doctoral Students Study Day UCL, London

This report provides details of seven promising PhD projects presented by doctoral students working in the domain of freemasonry and fraternalism, with commentaries by Professor Cécile Révauger from Université de Bordeaux III, who is perhaps the leading European scholar of eighteenth-century freemasonry, and by Miguel Hernandez, doctoral student from University of Exeter. The students’ research covered colonial freemasonry in India, Belgian reactions to fascist prohibition of freemasonry in Italy, masonic pottery, the Ku Klux Klan and freemasonry in the US, the creation of a Belgian national identity, female masonic rituals, and an introduction to the life of nineteenth-century Egyptologist and social climber Thomas Pettigrew. This impressive range demonstrates the excellent health of research into freemasonry in our universities.

Integrating technologies into ‘‘authentic’’ assessment design: an affordances approach

Current pressures in higher education around student employability are driving new initiatives for change. Assessment is also a topic of debate, as it is a key driver of student behaviour, yet often falls behind other metrics in national surveys. In addition, increasing focus on digital literacies is catalysing new appreciations of what emerging digital culture might mean for both students and staff. These three highly topical challenges were jointly explored by the University of Exeter’s Collaborate project, which aimed to create employability-focused assessments enhanced by technology. By combining existing research on assessment with grounded data derived from local stakeholders, the project has developed a model for assessment design which embeds employability directly into the curriculum. Digital technologies have been aligned with this model using a “top trump” metaphor, where key affordances of technologies are highlighted in the context of the model. This paper explores the design-based research approach taken to develop this model and associated “top trumps”, along with results from the first practical iteration. Results suggest that the model is effective in supporting the design of an “authentic” assessment and that a targeted affordances approach can support the alignment of specific technologies with a particular pedagogic design.Keywords: employability; assessment; authentic; affordance; evaluation(Published: 6 September 2013)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2013, 21: 21986 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21i0.21986

Integrating technologies into “authentic” assessment design: an affordances approach

Current pressures in higher education around student employability are driving new initiatives for change. Assessment is also a topic of debate, as it is a key driver of student behaviour, yet often falls behind other metrics in national surveys. In addition, increasing focus on digital literacies is catalysing new appreciations of what emerging digital culture might mean for both students and staff. These three highly topical challenges were jointly explored by the University of Exeter’s Collaborate project, which aimed to create employability-focused assessments enhanced by technology. By combining existing research on assessment with grounded data derived from local stakeholders, the project has developed a model for assessment design which embeds employability directly into the curriculum. Digital technologies have been aligned with this model using a “top trump” metaphor, where key affordances of technologies are highlighted in the context of the model. This paper explores the design-based research approach taken to develop this model and associated “top trumps”, along with results from the first practical iteration. Results suggest that the model is effective in supporting the design of an “authentic” assessment and that a targeted affordances approach can support the alignment of specific technologies with a particular pedagogic design.Keywords: employability; assessment; authentic; affordance; evaluation(Published: 6 September 2013)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2013, 21: 21986 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21i0.21986