Screening women’s complicity in the holocaust : the problems of judgement and representation

This essay analyses the representation of female perpetrators in Holocaust fiction films, particularly in relation to the persecution of prisoners in the Nazi camps. The screening of women in general, and female perpetrators in particular, is shown to be problematic due to their frequent marginalisation and the gendered, voyeuristic ways in which women's bodies are often objectified in Holocaust films. While the actions of female perpetrators and their depiction in films pose acute problems of judgement and representation that need to be acknowledged, it is argued that films have the potential to effectively explore the issue of women's complicity in the Holocaust.

Racialized urban America and Holocaust film : negotiating the limits of representation

Sidney Lumet’s influential film The Pawnbroker (1964) is one of the earliest films to consider the encounter between Holocaust narratives and low-income, urban American racial minorities. As much concerned with contemporary ‘race relations’ in the United States as it is with the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, the film intertwines the story of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman with the social tensions of 1960s America, represented in his relationship with the young Puerto Rican shop assistant Jesus Oritz. The film stylistically juxtaposes raw footage of concentration camp existence with dismal images of New York slum life. Against these backdrops, the protagonist’s climactic ‘silent scream’ emblematically merges the repressed trauma of the survivor with the filmmaker’s interest in race relations, a theme that has undergone various transformations in a number of films since. One film that contemporizes this encounter is Richard LaGravenese’s Freedom Writers (2007). As opposed to the tragic outcome of the pawnbroker’s induction into urban America, here the Holocaust is a redemptive tool that permits inner-city Black and Latino youth to contextualize their own suffering. After reading The Diary of Anne Frank, this group of ‘at-risk’ sophomores to inspired to collaborate on an ultimately successful effort to bring Miep Geis, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank, to speak at their high school. Foregrounded by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, gentiles teacher Erin Gruwell and savior Miep Geis transform the Holocaust from an amplified parallel of American slums into an event that permits the children of American postcoloniality to triumph in spite of their socio-economic circumstances. Underlining the tension between the Jewish specificity and unprecedented nature of the Holocaust, and the need to generate Holocaust narratives that intersect with intrinsically racialized American narratives, such films have significant implications for how collective memories of suffering are constructed and contested.

Sparse subspace representation for spectral document clustering

We present a novel method for document clustering using sparse representation of documents in conjunction with spectral clustering. An ℓ1-norm optimization formulation is posed to learn the sparse representation of each document, allowing us to characterize the affinity between documents by considering the overall information instead of traditional pair wise similarities. This document affinity is encoded through a graph on which spectral clustering is performed. The decomposition into multiple subspaces allows documents to be part of a sub-group that shares a smaller set of similar vocabulary, thus allowing for cleaner clusters. Extensive experimental evaluations on two real-world datasets from Reuters-21578 and 20Newsgroup corpora show that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. Significantly, the performance improvement over other methods is prominent for this datasets.

Object categorization via sparse representation of local features

Sparse representation has been introduced to address many recognition problems in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a new framework for object categorization based on sparse representation of local features. Unlike most of previous sparse coding based methods in object classification that only use sparse coding to extract high-level features, the proposed method incorporates sparse representation and classification into a unified framework. Therefore, it does not need a further classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved better or comparable accuracy than the well known bag-of-features representation with various classifiers.

The descent of Morgan in Australia: kinship representation from the Australian colonies

Morgan had two extraordinary disciples in Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt in Australia. They were inspired by Morgan’s kinship schedule and were profoundly engaged in the method and theory of the collection of kinship data and its interpretation. Fison began using the schedule in Fiji in 1869. Soon after his first contact with Howitt, in 1873, they changed the method of collection of kinship terminologies. This paper traces the shift from tabulated kinship lists to family trees and the use of sticks to represent relationships (nearly twenty years before Rivers’ celebrated ‘genealogical method’), as well as efforts to find new means of representing kinship through experimentation with ‘ graphic formulae’ inspired by chemical equations. These innovations first occurred through the gathering of kinship data about the Kŭnai of Gippsland, Victoria, and crucially involved close collaboration between Howitt and his Kŭnai consultant Tulaba. What was revealed in this process was an indigenous kinship system quite different from that found in other parts of colonial Australia known at the time. Fison and Howitt explained this system as transitional between two stages in terms of Morgan’s evolutionary scheme, but at the same time challenged the assumption that the general scheme could be applied to Australia. While the details of Morgan’s evolutionary stages have faded from view, the methods of collection, representation, transmission, comparison and interpretation of kinship data are still live issues in anthropology today. The kind of kinship system discovered in Gippsland involved neutralisation of the cross-parallel distinctions, distinctions that are otherwise typical of Australia. Such neutralisation can now be shown to occur elsewhere in Australia. There does indeed seem to have been a transition from a Dravidianate system with cross-parallel distinctions to ‘overlays’ of cross-parallel neutralisation, and finally a complete loss in some generations of such distinctions in the terminology. These discoveries open up possibilities of rebuilding a diachronic theory of kinship change and evolution, incorporating some of the insights of Fison and Howitt, though without their specific hypotheses, either of local developments in Gippsland or the grand scheme of Morgan.

Human identification from ECG signals via sparse representation of local segments

This work proposes a novel framework to extract compact and discriminative features from Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals for human identification based on sparse representation of local segments. Specifically, local segments extracted from an ECG signal are projected to a small number of basic elements in a dictionary, which is learned from training data. A final representation is extracted by performing a max pooling procedure over all the sparse coefficient vectors in the ECG signal. Unlike most of existing methods for human identification from ECG signals which require segmentation of individual heartbeats or extraction of fiducial points, the proposed method does not need to segment individual heartbeats or detect any fiducial points. The method achieves an 99.48% accuracy on a 100 subjects dataset constructed from a publicly available database, which demonstrates that both local and global structural information are well captured to characterize the ECG signals.

Film, representation and the exclusion of Aboriginal identity: examples from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century cinema has played a significant role in the shaping of the core narratives of Australia. Films express and implicitly shape national images and symbolic representations of cultural fictions in which ideas about Indigenous identity have been embedded. In this paper, exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analysed through examples of films representing Aboriginal identity. Through these filmic narratives the articulation, interrogation, and contestation of views about filmic representations of Aboriginal identity in Australia is illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which the films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

Tribes and political representation: the case of post-war Iraq

 Ten years have passed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the political scene in Iraq is still blurry. Iraq was promoted to be the democratic example in the Middle East. The US came to Iraq to “create” a democratic system that can be a model for other countries in the region. A major factor in creating such environment is by changing the radical centralised totalitarian regime with a weak state that can give more space to building the civil society in new Iraq (Looney, 2003). Nonetheless, the socio-economic and political indicators of the newly installed political “democratic” system point to notable failures. Apart from poor socio-economic factors, the new political elite has either misused democracy for personal, ethno-sectarian or partisan gains or abused the system to ensure their long lasting presence in the decision making arena. Corruption, disconnection from electorate, poor performance and carelessness of politicians and failing state service provisions have all made citizens question the feasibility of political participation in elections. The electorate seem to have lesser faith in the political parties and blocs whose legitimacy of representation  is at stake. Noticeably, tribes have stepped forward to mobilise people as a non-partisan and independent powerful social structure. They have been active in lobbying the state as well as encouraging their members for active participation. This paper discusses the extent to which Iraqi tribes are involved in political participation. It explores their roles in active citizenship and the way they represent and mobilise their  members. It also probes whether tribes have the influence on shaping the political trajectory in Iraq.

Learning sparse latent representation and distance metric for image retrieval

The performance of image retrieval depends critically on the semantic representation and the distance function used to estimate the similarity of two images. A good representation should integrate multiple visual and textual (e.g., tag) features and offer a step closer to the true semantics of interest (e.g., concepts). As the distance function operates on the representation, they are interdependent, and thus should be addressed at the same time. We propose a probabilistic solution to learn both the representation from multiple feature types and modalities and the distance metric from data. The learning is regularised so that the learned representation and information-theoretic metric will (i) preserve the regularities of the visual/textual spaces, (ii) enhance structured sparsity, (iii) encourage small intra-concept distances, and (iv) keep inter-concept images separated. We demonstrate the capacity of our method on the NUS-WIDE data. For the well-studied 13 animal subset, our method outperforms state-of-the-art rivals. On the subset of single-concept images, we gain 79:5% improvement over the standard nearest neighbours approach on the MAP score, and 45.7% on the NDCG.