Talking across the fence : partners for art education

This presentation explores a model for building and sustaining secondary – tertiary partnerships in Arts education. It traces the evolution of partner relationships in a challenging educational landscape, assesses the value of dialogue between educators, design professionals and community stakeholders, and tells the story of a particular secondary – tertiary partnership exploring new pedagogy in Art and Design, between Kelvin Grove State College, the School of Design Creative Industries Faculty of QUT, and the Design Minds program of the State Library of Queensland. Among other benefits, tertiary and industry partners have brought a myriad of diverse voices into the classrooms, enabled the direct interaction of learners with tertiary student mentors, and with art and design practitioners. The working model has also now matured into formal and informal partner agreements that help guarantee its viability into the future. This presentation, which deals with the opening of new terrain between committed partners, is also the story of how design has gradually been integrated in the curriculum, enriching and expanding the repertoire of Art programs, and how one Visual Art Faculty in a large inner city Brisbane School has adopted design thinking and “metadesign” as a model for future innovation. From the process of interaction and dialogue among educators and practitioners over several years has emerged a conviction that both partnering and design pedagogy are key tools in developing forward thinking curriculum for the Arts. In addition, hammering out a model that works for students across different year levels and in diverse settings by putting ideas into practice and micro-managing this process in studios and workshops has challenged teachers to rethink their own Art pedagogy. Finally, in the ecosystem of Schools and in the wider systems that are now driving change in education, survival for the Arts may depend on the networking and affirmation derived from innovating partners. Our story, the story of committed individuals who have sustained a dialogue across boundaries, may provide a valuable model for other arts educators fighting to retain agency in their schools.

The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being

The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being is a digital video projection by Daniel McKewen. The work used digital visual effects and experimentation with time-based video synchronisation to manipulate images of celebrities plundered from the internet and television. The result was a sequence of images that served as both portrait of the constructed nature of screen-based imagery, as well as portrait of the pop culture audience that consumes such constructions.

I fucking love you

A solo show by Courtney Coombs held at MetroArts in Brisbane as part of the 2011 Allies Program. The exhibtion comprised a series of sculptural, photographic, text and video works that each employed motifs evocative of romantic love combined with the artist self-effacing and ambivalent relationship to the art world and its male canon. The resulting exhibition acted as a meditation of female authorship in the studio and the contradictory impulses of critique and adoration.

Practical linkages between cultural policy and education policy in promoting a creative workforce for youth in Tanzania

The broad aim of of this thesis is to contribute to understanding how the relationships between culture, employment and education can help Tanzania's young people secure jobs, and survive in the creative workforce so as to better their future. Based on a range of interviews and other data in Tanzania, the study considers how to integrate cultural expressions into arts education (education in art and education through art) as a tool for nurturing young people's creative talents for their future sustainable employment in Tanzania.

Erratum: Multicentric carpotarsal osteolysis is caused by mutations clustering in the amino-terminal transcriptional activation domain of MAFB

(The American Journal of Human Genetics, 90, 494–501; March 9, 2012) In the published version of this article, the amino acid alteration caused by c.161C>T should have been notated as p.Ser54Leu and not p.Pro54Leu. The wild-type amino acid is incorrectly notated in the main text, in Table 2, and in Figure 4. The authors regret this error. Additionally, The Journal regrets that this erratum, originally requested in 2012, was not published in a timely fashion.

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.

Lost in translation? : Translating allusions in two of Reginald Hill's Dalziel & Pascoe novels

This study examines strategies used to translate various thematic and character delineating allusions in two of Reginald Hill's detective novels, The Wood Beyond and On Beulah Height and their Swedish translations Det mörka arvet and Dalen som dränktes. In this study, thematic allusions and allusions used in character delineation are regarded as intertextual networks. Intertextual networks comprise all the texts that are in one way or another embedded into a text, all the texts referred to in it and even the texts somehow rejected from a text's own canon. Studying allusions as intertextual networks makes it warranted to pay minute attention to even the smallest of details. Seen together, these little details form extensive networks of meaning that readers use to interpret the text. Allusion can be defined as a reference, often covert or indirect, to another text in a way that brings into the text some of the associations of that other text. A text is here understood broadly, hence sources of allusions include all cultural texts from literature and history to cinema and televisions serials. Allusions are culture bound and each culture tends to allude to its own cultural products. The set of transcultural allusions is therefore fairly small. Translation strategies are translatorial ways of solving translation problems. Being culture-bound, allusions are potential translation problems. In order to transmit the thoughts evoked by the allusions in source text readers to the target text readers translators may add guidance to the translated text. Often guidance is not added, which may result in changes in handling of themes or character delineation, clear in the source text but confusing or incomprehensible in the target text. However, norms in target culture may not always allow the translators the possibility to make the text comprehensible. My analyses of translation strategies show that in the two translated novels studied minimum change is a very frequently used strategy. This results in themes and character delineation losing some of the effect they have in the source texts. Perhaps surprisingly, the result is very much the same even where it is possible to discern that the two translators have had differing translation principles. Keywords: allusions, intertextuality, literary translation, translation strategies, norms, crime fiction, Hill, Reginald

Kaukainen rakkaus : Saavuttamattomuuden semantiikka Kaija Saariahon oopperassa

L Amour de loin: The semantics of the unattainable in Kaija Saariaho s opera Kaija Saariaho (born 1952) is one of the most internationally successful Finnish composers there has ever been. Her first opera L Amour de loin (Love from afar, 1999-2000) has been staged all over the world and has won a number of important prizes. The libretto written for L Amour de loin by Amin Malouf (born 1949) sets the work firmly in the culture of courtly love and the troubadours, which flourished in Occitania in the South of France during the Middle Ages. The male lead in the opera is the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who lived in the twelfth century and is known to have taken part in the Second Crusade in 1147-1148. This doctoral thesis L Amour de loin: The semantics of the unattainable in Kaija Saariaho s opera, which comes within the field of musicology and opera research, examines the dimensions of meaning contained in Kaija Saariaho s opera L Amour de loin. This hermeneutic-semiotic study is the first doctoral thesis dealing with Saariaho to be completed at the University of Helsinki. It is also the first thesis-level study of Saariaho s opera to be completed anywhere in the world. The study focuses on the libretto and music of the opera, that is to say the dramatic text (L Amour de loin 1980), and examines on the one hand the dimensions of meaning produced by the dramatic text and on the other, the way in which they fix the dramatic text in a historical and cultural context. Thus the study helps to answer questions about the dimensions of meaning contained in the dramatic text of the opera and how they can be interpreted. The most important procedural viewpoint is Lawrence Kramer s hermeneutic window (1990), supplemented by Raymond Monelle s semiotic theory of musical topics (2000, 2006) and the philosophical concept of Emmanuel Levinas (1996, 2002) in which the latter acts as an instrument for semantic interpretation to build up an analysis. The analytical section of the study is built around the three characters in the opera, Jaufré Rudel, Clémence the Countess of Tripoli, and the Pilgrim. The study shows that the music of Saariaho, who belongs to the third generation of Finnish modernists, has become distanced from the post-serial aesthetic towards a more diatonic form of expression. There is diatonicity, for instance, in the sonorous individuality of the male lead, which is based on the actual melodies of the historical Jaufré Rudel. The use of outside material in this context is exceptional in the work of Saariaho. At the same time, Saariaho s opera contains a wealth of expressive devices she has used in her earlier work. It became apparent during the study that, as a piece of music, L Amour de loin is a many layered and multi-dimensional work that does not unambiguously represent any single stylistic trend or aesthetic. Despite the composer s post-serial background and its abrasive relationship with opera, L Amour de loin is firmly attached to the tradition of western opera. The analysis based on the theory of musical topics that was carried out in the study, shows that topics referring to death and resurrection, used in opera since the seventeenth century, appear in L Amour de loin. The troubadour topic, mainly identified with the harp, also emerges in the work. The study also shows that the work is firmly attached to the tradition of western opera in other aspects, too, such as the travesti or trouser role played by the Pilgrim, and the idea of deus ex machina derived from Ancient Greek theatre. The study shows that the concept of love based on the medieval practices of courtly love, and the associated longing for another defined by almost 1,000 years of western culture, are both manifested in the semantics of Kaija Saariaho s opera which takes its place in the contemporary music genre.

Methods for Answer Extraction in Textual Question Answering

In this thesis we present and evaluate two pattern matching based methods for answer extraction in textual question answering systems. A textual question answering system is a system that seeks answers to natural language questions from unstructured text. Textual question answering systems are an important research problem because as the amount of natural language text in digital format grows all the time, the need for novel methods for pinpointing important knowledge from the vast textual databases becomes more and more urgent. We concentrate on developing methods for the automatic creation of answer extraction patterns. A new type of extraction pattern is developed also. The pattern matching based approach chosen is interesting because of its language and application independence. The answer extraction methods are developed in the framework of our own question answering system. Publicly available datasets in English are used as training and evaluation data for the methods. The techniques developed are based on the well known methods of sequence alignment and hierarchical clustering. The similarity metric used is based on edit distance. The main conclusions of the research are that answer extraction patterns consisting of the most important words of the question and of the following information extracted from the answer context: plain words, part-of-speech tags, punctuation marks and capitalization patterns, can be used in the answer extraction module of a question answering system. This type of patterns and the two new methods for generating answer extraction patterns provide average results when compared to those produced by other systems using the same dataset. However, most answer extraction methods in the question answering systems tested with the same dataset are both hand crafted and based on a system-specific and fine-grained question classification. The the new methods developed in this thesis require no manual creation of answer extraction patterns. As a source of knowledge, they require a dataset of sample questions and answers, as well as a set of text documents that contain answers to most of the questions. The question classification used in the training data is a standard one and provided already in the publicly available data.

Fast forward to the end: Stories of the cassette magazine

Although they made up a significant share of the retail music market from the 60s to the 90s, and were often used as promotional and marketing tools, cassettes became re-configured in the 80s as an integral component of cassette magazines. Binding sound, music, talk, text, visual art and design, they were a truly innovative interdisciplinary form. This paper explores the history of these artefacts with particular emphasis on the Brisbane underground music scene of the late 70s and 80s, and discusses their significance in as a bridge between the music scene and art scenes of this period.

Transition to parenthood after assisted reproductive treatment: Follow-up study of singleton pregnancies

Infertility treatments are relatively easily available in most Western countries today, but the psychological consequences of these high-tech treatments have scarcely been addressed. The purpose of this controlled longitudinal study was to explore the early environment of the infant born by assisted reproductive treatment (ART). We focused on the parents mental well-being, marital relations and experience of parenting. In addition to this, we assessed parent child interaction and parents mental representations of their child after long-standing infertility and several unsuccessful ART attempts. The subjects were infertile couples who achieved a singleton pregnancy by in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The control group comprised of spontaneously conceiving couples with singleton pregnancies. ART women showed fewer depressive symptoms than controls during pregnancy and after delivery, but the difference vanished by the end of the child s first year. ART men consistently had lower levels of anxiety symptoms, sleeping difficulties, and social dysfunction than control men. Control women experienced a decrease in dyadic consensus during the child s first year, which did not happen among ART women. After the child was born, ART men reported a higher level of sexual affection compared with control men. Psychic symptoms and stressful life events were differently related to marital relations in ART and control groups. The parenting experiences of ART mothers were in general at a higher level, compared with controls, and they changed in a positive direction during the child s first year. Fathering experiences were at the same level in both groups, and they changed positively in both groups by the end of the child s first year. The parenting experiences of ART mothers and fathers were more resilient to certain child-related stressors than those of control group. Both mothers and fathers with long-term infertility showed more sensitive behaviour with their child in toddler-age than in infancy. Correspondingly, children s cooperation increased. Mothers often mentioned a fear of miscarriage and difficulty in creating representations of the child during pregnancy. Descriptions of the infants were mainly rich, vivid and loaded with positive features. In conclusion, ART parents in general seem to adapt well to the transition to parenthood. Former infertility and ART do not seem to constitute a risk for parents mental health, marital relations or experience of parenting. Even longstanding infertility with several unsuccessful treatment attempts did not create a risk as regards parenting behaviour or parents mental representations of their child. In this group, however, women were found to have fear for losing the child and difficulty in creating representations of the child during pregnancy, which in some cases may indicate need for psychosocial support. Even though our results are encouraging, infertility and infertility treatments are generally considered as a stressful experience. It is a challenge for health authorities to recognize those couples who need professional help to overcome the distressing experiences of infertility and ART.

Tiedostumaton nykytaiteessa : Katse, ääni ja aika vuosituhannen taitteen suomalaisessa nykytaiteessa

Leevi Haapala explores moving image works, sculptures and installations from a psychoanalytic perspective in his study The Unconscious in Contemporary Art. The Gaze, Voice and Time in Finnish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Millennium . The artists included in the study are Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Hans-Christian Berg, Markus Copper, Liisa Lounila and Salla Tykkä. The theoretical framework includes different psychoanalytic readings of the concepts of the gaze, voice and temporality. The installations are based on spatiality and temporality, and their detailed reading emphasizes the medium-specific features of the works as well as their fragmentary nature, heterogeneity and affectivity. The study is cross-disciplinary in that it connects perspectives from the visual culture, new art history and theory to the interpretation of contemporary art. The most important concepts from psychoanalysis, affect theory and trauma discourse used in the study include affect, object a (objet petit a) as articulated by Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud s uncanny (das Unheimliche) and trauma. Das Unheimliche has been translated as uncanny in art history under the influence of Rosalind Krauss. The object of the study, the unconscious in contemporary art, is approached through these concepts. The study focuses on Lacan s additions to the list of partial drives: the gaze and voice as scopic and invocative drives and their interpretations in the studies of the moving image. The texts by the American film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman are in crucial role. The study locates contemporary art as part of trauma culture, which has a tendency to define individual and historical experiences through trauma. Some of the art works point towards trauma, which may appear as a theoretic or fictitious construction. The study presents a comprehensive collection of different kinds of trauma discourse in the field of art research through the texts of Hal Foster, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys and Shoshana Felman. The study connects trauma theory with the theoretical analysis of the interference and discontinuity of the moving image in the readings by Susan Buck-Morss, Mary Ann Doane and Peter Osborn among others. The analysis emphasizes different ways of seeing and multisensoriality in the reception of contemporary art. With their reflections and inverse projections, the surprising mechanisms of Hans-Christian Berg s sculptures are connected with Lacan s views on the early mirroring and imitation attempts of the individual s body image. Salla Tykkä s film trilogy Cave invites one to contemplate the Lacanian theory of the gaze in relation to the experiences of being seen. The three oceanic sculpture installations by Markus Copper are studied through the vocality they create, often through an aggressive way of acting, as well as from the point of view of the functioning of an invocative drive. The study compares the work of fiction and Freud s texts on paranoia and psychosis to Eija-Liisa Ahtila s manuscripts and moving image installations about the same topic. The cinematic time in Liisa Lounila s time-slice video installations is approached through the theoretical study of the unconscious temporal structure. The viewer of the moving image is inside the work in an in-between state: in a space produced by the contents of the work and its technology. The installations of the moving image enable us to inhabit different kinds of virtual bodies or spaces, which do not correspond with our everyday experiences. Nevertheless, the works of art often try to deconstruct the identification to what has been shown on screen. This way, the viewer s attention can be fixed on his own unconscious experiences in parallel with the work s deconstructed nature as representation. The study shows that contemporary art is a central cultural practice, which allows us to discuss the unconscious in a meaningful way. The study suggests that the agency that is discursively diffuse and consists of several different praxes should be called the unconscious. The emergence of the unconscious can happen in two areas: in contemporary art through different senses and discursive elements, and in the study of contemporary art, which, being a linguistic activity is sensitive to the movements of the unconscious. One of the missions of art research is to build different kinds of articulated constructs and to open an interpretative space for the nature of art as an event.

Interruption and Uncooperativeness in Academic ELF Group Work : An Application of Linear Unit Grammar

This study addresses the challenge of analyzing interruption in spoken interaction. It begins with my observation of eight hours of academic group work among speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in a university course. Unlike the common findings of ELF research which underscore the cooperative orientation of ELF users, this particular group gave strong impressions of interruption and uncooperativeness as they prepared a scientific group presentation. In the effort to investigate these impressions, I found that no satisfactory method exists for systematically identifying and analyzing interruptions. A useful tool was found in Linear Unit Grammar or LUG (Sinclair & Mauranen 2006), which analyzes spoken interaction prospectively as linear text. In the course of transcribing one of the early group work meetings, I developed a model of LUG-based criteria for identifying individual instances of interruption. With this system in place, I was then able to evaluate the aggregate occurrences of interruption in the group work and identify co-occurring interactive features which further influenced the perception of uncooperativeness. Finally, these aggregate statistics directed a return to the data and a contextually sensitive, qualitative analysis. This research cycle illuminates the interactive features which contributed to my own impressions of uncooperativeness, as well as the group members orientations to their own interruptive practice.