I Cling to Virtue

Kular’s work centres on design as a means of engaging with social and cultural issues. Commissioned and exhibited by the V&A Museum, this was a mixed-media collection revealing the trajectories of the Lövy-Singh clan, a fictional East London family of mixed descent. It comprised 26 sculptures and two video pieces, developing the previous explorations of the MacGuffin in narrative (Kular REF Output 2). A catalogue with 28 fictional reminiscences, a genealogy and time line positioned the family’s experiences in geographical locations and historical events. Novel use of rapid-prototyping co-opted an industry process to confuse the experience of artefact and artifice. The design explored the historical, literary and cinematic traditions of the family saga and its relationship to memory and artefact. It presented an archive of objects derived from the flawed, biased memory of the (fictional) curator. A coherent story is replaced by one that is multiple and fragmentary. Kular and Toran (RCA) ‘produced’ the family by mixing their own genealogies with those of renowned 20th-century families, both real and fictional, such as the Magnificent Ambersons and the Rothschilds, positioning family members in everyday situations or key historical moments represented by an object and a ‘memory’ triggered by the object. Concept development was undertaken jointly by Kular and Toran. Kular’s archive research emphasised commonwealth immigrant histories and British 20th-century political events. His production contribution was in 3D modelling, rapid prototyping and display, leading production of the two films and development and editing of the narrative texts. The work was accompanied by a catalogue (2011), was reviewed in ICON Magazine (2010), discussed in an article by Hayward, Jones, Toran and Kular in Design and Culture (2013), and featured in The White Review (No. 2). It was re-exhibited in the group show ‘Politique Fiction’ at la Cité du design, Saint-Étienne, France (2013).

Can virtual environments enhance the learning of historical chronology?

Historical time and chronological sequence are usually conveyed to pupils via the presentation of semantic information on printed worksheets, events being rote-memorised according to date. We explored the use of virtual environments in which successive historical events were depicted as “places” in time–space, encountered sequentially in a fly-through. Testing was via “Which came first, X or Y?” questions and picture-ordering. University undergraduates experiencing the history of an imaginary planet performed better after a VE than after viewing a “washing line” of sequential images, or captions alone, especially for items in intermediate list positions. However, secondary children 11–14 years remembered no more about successive events in feudal England when they were presented virtually compared with either paper picture or 2-D computer graphic conditions. Primary children 7–9 years learned more about historical sequence after studying a series of paper images, compared with either VE or computer graphic conditions, remembering more in early/intermediate list positions. Reasons for the discrepant results are discussed and future possible uses of VEs in the teaching of chronology assessed. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Do challenge, task experience or computer familiarity influence the learning of historical chronology from virtual environments in 8–9 year old children?

Studies examined the potential use of Virtual Environments (VEs) in teaching historical chronology to 127 children of primary school age (8–9 years). The use of passive fly-through VEs had been found, in an earlier study, to be disadvantageous with this age group when tested for their subsequent ability to place displayed sequential events in correct chronological order. All VEs in the present studies included active challenge, previously shown to enhance learning in older participants. Primary school children in the UK (all frequent computer users) were tested using UK historical materials, but no significant effect was found between three conditions (Paper, PowerPoint and VE) with minimal pre-training. However, excellent (error free) learning occurred when children were allowed greater exploration prior to training in the VE. In Ukraine, with children having much less computer familiarity, training in a VE (depicting Ukrainian history) produced better learning compared to PowerPoint, but no better than in a Paper condition. The results confirmed the benefit of using challenge in a VE with primary age children, but only with adequate prior familiarisation with the medium. Familiarity may reduce working memory load and increase children’s spatial memory capacity for acquiring sequential temporal-spatial information from virtual displays. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Human-Centric Chronographics:Making Historical Time Memorable

A series of experiments is described, evaluating user recall of visualisations of historical chronology. Such visualisations are widely created but have not hitherto been evaluated. Users were tested on their ability to learn a sequence of historical events presented in a virtual environment (VE) fly-through visualisation, compared with the learning of equivalent material in other formats that are sequential but lack the 3D spatial aspect. Memorability is a particularly important function of visualisation in education. The measures used during evaluation are enumerated and discussed. The majority of the experiments reported compared three conditions, one using a virtual environment visualisation with a significant spatial element, one using a serial on-screen presentation in PowerPoint, and one using serial presentation on paper. Some aspects were trialled with groups having contrasting prior experience of computers, in the UK and Ukraine. Evidence suggests that a more complex environment including animations and sounds or music, intended to engage users and reinforce memorability, were in fact distracting. Findings are reported in relation to the age of the participants, suggesting that children at 11–14 years benefit less from, or are even disadvantaged by, VE visualisations when compared with 7–9 year olds or undergraduates. Finally, results suggest that VE visualisations offering a ‘landscape’ of information are more memorable than those based on a linear model. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

‘To see at one glance all the centuries that have passed’ - early visualisations of historical time

This chapter focuses on the visualisation of historical time, illustrated by key examples from the eighteenth century when the modern timeline was invented. We are fortunate in having not only surviving examples of printed timelines from the period but also explanations written by their makers, revealing the ambitions they had for visualisation. An important divergence is evident, between those who want to use rhetorical visual metaphors to tell a graphical story, and those who prefer to let the data ‘speak for itself’, allowing patterns to emerge from the distribution of data points across a surface. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Development and Progress as Historical Phenomena in Tanzania: “Maendeleo? We Had That in the Past”

Academic discussions of development continue to grow, yet critical engagements with communities affected by development interventions remain limited. Drawing from life history interviews conducted in southern Tanzania, this article details the varied experiences of development interventions among older people and how these affect broader understandings of progress. Many juxtapose their negative views of ujamaa villagization with more positive recollections of previous interventions (especially the Groundnut Scheme), which are infused with what is described here as “development nostalgia.” Perceptions of the past clearly inform the social, political, and economic aspirations forwarded today, with the richness of the constructed narratives adding further nuance to existing depictions of Tanzanian historiography.

What is poetic attention

Tese de doutoramento, Estudos de Literatura e de Cultura (Teoria da Literatura), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2014

How historical and present climat conditions affected the distribution of the mediterranean whter shrew?:a phylogeographical and ecological approach

Tese de doutoramento, Biologia (Biologia Evolutiva), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2014

Conceptualizing and Researching the Professionalization of Religious Education Teachers: Historical and International Perspectives

Current discussions on Religious Education (RE), both in Germany and England, focus on the quality of teaching and the professionality of teachers, but neglect the historical and institutional process of professionalization upon which conceptions of teaching quality and teacher professionality hinge. This article seeks to provide definitional clarity by differentiating between individual and collective professionalization; exploring teacher professionalization in general and in the special case of RE; and operationalizing the concept of RE teacher professionalization for the purposes of planned historical and international comparative research. A three-fold conceptualization of professionalization is proposed, consisting of the following inter-related levels: (1) initial and continuing professional development; (2) professional self-organization and professional politics; and (3) professional knowledge. The breadth, complexity and significance of the historical and institutional processes associated with the professionalization of RE teachers at each of these levels is described and discussed. It is argued that further historical and international comparative research on these lines would contribute a broader and deeper understanding of the presuppositions of RE teacher professionality beyond current debates.