Capturing complex, non-linear team behaviours during competitive football performance

This study investigated changes in the complexity (magnitude and structure of variability) of the collective behaviours of association football teams during competitive performance. Raw positional data from an entire competitive match between two professional teams were obtained with the ProZone® tracking system. Five compound positional variables were used to investigate the collective patterns of performance of each team including: surface area, stretch index, team length, team width, and geometrical centre. Analyses involve the coefficient of variation (%CV) and approximate entropy (ApEn), as well as the linear association between both parameters. Collective measures successfully captured the idiosyncratic behaviours of each team and their variations across the six time periods of the match. Key events such as goals scored and game breaks (such as half time and full time) seemed to influence the collective patterns of performance. While ApEn values significantly decreased during each half, the %CV increased. Teams seem to become more regular and predictable, but with increased magnitudes of variation in their organisational shape over the natural course of a match.

To be continued... fan fiction and the constructing of identity

This chapter contributes to the existing body of knowledge on fan fiction by reporting the findings from a quantitative and qualitative study on fan fiction in a Swedish context. The authors contextualize the fan fiction phenomenon as a part of a larger transformation of the media sphere and the society in general where media consumers’ role as collaborative cultural producers grows ever stronger. They explore what kind of stories inspire the writers and conclude that as in many other parts of the entertainment industry, fan fiction is dominated by a small number of international media brands. The authors show how fan fiction can play an important role in the development of adolescents’ literacies and identities and how their pastime works as a vehicle for personal growth.

Literacies on the Web : Co-Production of Literary Texts on Fan Fiction Sites

In this chapter the authors discuss and informal learning settings such as fan fiction sites and their relations to teaching and learning within formal learning settings. Young people today spend a lot of time with social media built on user generated content. These media are often characterized by participatory culture which offers a good environment for developing skills and identity work. In this chapter the authors problematize fan fiction sites as informal learning settings where the possibilities to learn are powerful and significant. They also discuss the learning processes connected to the development of literacies. Here the rhetoric principle of “imitatio” plays a vital part as well as the co-production of texts on the sites, strongly supported by the beta reader and the power of positive feedback. They also display that some fans, through the online publication of fan fiction, are able to develop their craft in a way which previously have been impossible.

Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity : the Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction

The last fifty years have witnessed the growing pervasiveness of the figure of the map in critical, theoretical, and fictional discourse. References to mapping and cartography are endemic in poststructuralist theory, and, similarly, geographically and culturally diverse authors of twentieth-century fiction seem fixated upon mapping. While the map metaphor has been employed for centuries to highlight issues of textual representation and epistemology, the map metaphor itself has undergone a transformation in the postmodern era. This metamorphosis draws together poststructuralist conceptualizations of epistemology, textuality, cartography, and metaphor, and signals a shift away from modernist preoccupations with temporality and objectivity to a postmodern pragmatics of spatiality and subjectivity. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity charts this metamorphosis of cartographic metaphor, and argues that the ongoing reworking of the map metaphor renders it a formative and performative metaphor of postmodernity.

Journalism, gender, feminist theory and news reporting on the Australian Football League

This article reports on a review of selected theory and practice in sports journalism to determine if the prominence of female journalists reporting the news of a major sporting movement, and industry, the Australian Football League (AFL) could be attributed to a feminist response to the traditional domination of male values in the sports media complex. The article reviews selected literature to establish that, on the evidence presented, male values have traditionally dominated the news. It then considers feminist theory and alternative feminist responses to the domination of male values in the newsroom. Consideration is also given to Australian research on the ‘seriousness’ of sports news and its coverage (or lack thereof) of more ‘feminine’ news values including human interest stories, stories about culture and those on serious social issues. Interviews with a select group of female journalists who write about the AFL for The Age newspaper in Melbourne are recounted, with a focus on the journalists’ work experiences. The article concludes by drawing together the research findings to demonstrate that, although feminine news values are represented in only a small proportion of AFL news stories, there is evidence to suggest they are afforded a high degree of presentational prominence which reflects the needs and expectations of a female audience. It shows that female journalists do play a meaningful role in the AFL media and that, given the evidence presented, a feminist response to the traditional domination of male values in the sports media complex could indeed be applicable, and taking place.

David Williamson's The Club : football politic, a dirty story

Watching David Williamson’s The Club (Bruce Beresford, 1980) now, as a scandal over performance‐enhancing drugs threatens to destroy at least one AFL club and permanently taint the League’s credibility, while in another form of football a player is bought and sold for a world record fee of almost $150 million, the indignant outrage of the film’s coach and players over the $120,000 fee paid for a pot‐smoking raw recruit appears quaint and comic in unintended ways. Were it ever true, it seems harder than ever now to agree with Nick Parson’s assertion that ‘in Australia the only sphere of endeavour that is considered morally pure is sport.

Feminist crime fiction : an examination of embodied feminist intentions in Denise Mina’s The Field of Blood (2005)

The writing of award winning tartan noir author, Denise Mina, “crime queen of Glasgow” has been identified with “explicitly feminist politics,” and Mina herself claims, as a feminist, she wants to use crime fiction to present a “narrative about very disempowered people becoming empowered.” This paper explores how Mina’s avowed stance on feminism plays out in her novel, The Field of Blood (2005), and examines whether her concerns are reflected in the embodied actions of her young protagonist, would-be investigative journalist, Paddy Meehan. It asks whether Mina has succeeded in working against entrenched patriarchal codes of crime fiction’s dominant narrative construction or whether her feminist intentions have been undermined by traditional stereotypical conventions of the genre.

Everything you do : young adult fiction and surveillance in an age of security

Espionage, surveillance and clandestine operations by secret agencies and governments were something of an East–West obsession in the second half of the twentieth century, a fact reflected in literature and film. In the twenty-first century, concerns of the Cold War and the threat of Communism have been rearticulated in the wake of 9/11. Under the rubric of ‘terror’ attacks, the discourses of security and surveillance are now framed within an increasingly global context. As this article illustrates, surveillance fiction written for young people engages with the cultural and political tropes that reflect a new social order that is different from the Cold War era, with its emphasis on spies, counter espionage, brainwashing and psychological warfare. While these tropes are still evident in much recent literature, advances in technology have transformed the means of tracking, profiling and accumulating data on individuals’ daily activities. Little Brother, The Hunger Games and Article 5 reflect the complex relationship between the real and the imaginary in the world of surveillance and, as this paper discusses, raise moral and ethical issues that are important questions for young people in our age of security.

Practice and Procedures - Cross v Queensland Rugby Football Union Ltd [2001] QSC 173

The decision of Chesterman J in Cross v Queensland Rugby Football Union Ltd [2001] QSC 173 (Supreme Court of Queensland, No 3426 of 1997), Chesterman J, 30.5.2001) opens the possibilities for delivering interrogatories, particularly in the context of interrogatories relating to an opponent's version of events.

The importance of science fiction and other STEM-related mass media in young people’s decisions to enrol in university STEM courses

This paper presents Australian results from the Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) study with respect to the influence of STEM-related mass media, including science fiction, on students’ decisions to enrol in university STEM courses. The study found that across the full cohort (N=2999), students tended to attribute far greater influence to science-related documentaries/channels such as Life on Earth and the Discovery Channel, etc. than to science-fiction movies or STEM-related TV dramas. Males were more inclined than females to consider science fiction/fantasy books and films and popular science books/magazines as having been important in their decisions. Students taking physics/astronomy tended to rate the importance of science fiction/fantasy books and films higher than students in other courses. The implications of these results for our understanding of influences on STEM enrolments are discussed.

Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 2 : A golden era begins : Football in 'Marvellous Melbourne', 1877 to 1885

This is the second volume of a five volume series that describes, assesses, and analyses football in Victoria during the nineteenth century. This volume looks at the cultural contexts of the sport in the late 1870s and early 1880s, describes the important matches played, and provides a full statistical account of this time period. This book is the first comprehensive discussion of the early period in Australian football's development.

Dirt Circus League : power and belonging in posthuman young adult fiction

This creative practice-led thesis consists of a creative work titled Dirt Circus League, which tells of a female teenaged medical intuitive who follows an enigmatic cult leader to his isolated home in Cape York, and an exegesis. The exegesis explores the representations and complexities of neuroscience and posthumanism in contemporary young adult fiction. The exegesis also discusses how the mechanics of storytelling changed the novel's original focus from one of neuroscience in relation to impacts and effects on teenage brains to the broader social concerns of posthumanism.

Surviving the electronic panopticon: New lessons in democracy, surveillance, and community in young adult fiction

The ability of new information and communication technologies to pierce previously impenetrable physical, personal, and social boundaries has particular relevance to contemporary society and young people as there is now more information that can be collected, accessed, and distributed about individuals and groups. The ability to know about each other has become a central feature of many young people’s lives. The need to know is further complicated by other questions – Who knows? What do they know? What are the implications of this knowledge?. These questions are a consequence of society having become more mobile and networked enabling increased surveillance, tracking, and spreading of dis/information. With the acceleration of new pervasive and immersive technologies, these questions have taken on a new urgency and significance that go beyond an Orwellian Big Brother scenario. This chapter extends Foucault’s notion of the panopticon to take account of the challenges of an AmI environment of smart networked devices. By drawing on examples of recent young adult fiction, I examine some of the ways in which these texts invite their readers to reflect and speculate on the uneasy relationship between surveillance and democracy and what this means for individual rights and freedom, and a sense of place and belonging.

Literary Studies : The Author Cat - Clemens's Life in Fiction

A review of The Author Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction by Forrest G. Robinson (Fordham UP, 2007). Even at its most basic, guilt forms a counterweight to the hesitancy and unpleasantness of authorship, forcing writers back to the desk when they have come to despise their work. Guilt as task-master is familiar to most, even those to whom more elevated feelings, such as inspiration, make occasional visits. It seems that guilt is effective because writing is so seldom an organic or natural activity - rather, good writing emerges out of unhappy pressures that eventually overwhelm the writer's evasive strategies, from visits to the fridge door to the most sophisticated forms they take, such as when the author creates a narrative persona that claims to have owned up...