Leading Through Art: An Interview With Vicki Heywood CBE, Chair, Royal Society of Arts

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-76
Author(s):  
Gareth Edwards ◽  
Nicholas O’Regan
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Leadership Practice ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Society Today

A recent interview with Vicki Heywood, Chair of the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), highlights the role that arts can play in dealing with complex problems in society today and particularly from an international perspective. The message from this interview resonates with recent literature on leadership that also recognizes the importance of the arts in leading successfully through wicked problems. The importance of linking arts interpretations of leadership with culture and place is also taken into consideration within the analysis of the interview. The article concludes by suggesting that leadership practice into the future should promote leading through art to uncover the multiple identities and belonging that shape global society. More specifically, the article proposes that by leading through art, artists can help uncover and discover complex intricacies within context and culture which may help to problematize large scale generalizations which have become the epitome of serious global issues.

Evaluating Large-Scale STEM Outreach Efficacy with a Consistent Theme: Thermodynamics for Elementary School Students

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph DeWilde ◽  
Esha Rangnekar ◽  
Jeffrey Ting ◽  
Joseph Franek ◽  
Frank S. Bates ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Elementary School Students ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
College Education ◽  
School Students ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Specific Goal ◽  
Survey System ◽  
Society Today

A biannual chemistry demonstration-based show named “Energy and U” was created to extend the general outreach themes of STEM fields and a college education with a specific goal: to teach the First Law of Thermodynamics to elementary school students. Energy is a central concept in chemical education, most STEM disciplines, and it is the concept at the foundation of many of the greatest challenges faced by society today. The effectiveness of the program was analyzed using a clicker survey system. This study provides one of the first examples of incorporating real-time feedback into large- scale chemistry-based outreach events for elementary school students in order to quantify and better understand the broader impact and learning outcomes.

scholarly journals Cultural Diplomacy and Europe's Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Benjamin G. Martin ◽  
Elisabeth Piller
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Arts ◽  
International Exposition ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
Industrial Designers

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic – in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that were cultural – in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or ‘culture’, of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).

Hooke recommemorated

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-140
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
History Of

Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.

Understanding Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Babette Hellemans
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Duration Analysis ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Long Duration ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

This pioneering textbook explores the theoretical background of cultural variety, both in past and present. How is it possible to study 'culture' when the topic covers the arts, literature, movies, history, sociology, anthropology and gender studies? Understanding Culture examines the evolution of a concept with varying meanings depending on changing norms. Offering a long-duration analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, this book looks at the origins of studying culture from an international perspective. Using examples from the several scholarly traditions in the practice of studying culture, Understanding Culture is a key introduction to the area. It identifies the history of interpreting culture as a meeting point between the long-standing historical investigation of 'humanism' and 'postmodernism' and is a comprehensive resource for those who wish to further their engagement with culture as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon.

scholarly journals Curriculum Learning for Natural Answer Generation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cao Liu ◽  
Shizhu He ◽  
Kang Liu ◽  
Jun Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Full Advantage ◽  
Real World ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Basic Model ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Learning Data

By reason of being able to obtain natural language responses, natural answers are more favored in real-world Question Answering (QA) systems. Generative models learn to automatically generate natural answers from large-scale question answer pairs (QA-pairs). However, they are suffering from the uncontrollable and uneven quality of QA-pairs crawled from the Internet. To address this problem, we propose a curriculum learning based framework for natural answer generation (CL-NAG), which is able to take full advantage of the valuable learning data from a noisy and uneven-quality corpus. Specifically, we employ two practical measures to automatically measure the quality (complexity) of QA-pairs. Based on the measurements, CL-NAG firstly utilizes simple and low-quality QA-pairs to learn a basic model, and then gradually learns to produce better answers with richer contents and more complete syntaxes based on more complex and higher-quality QA-pairs. In this way, all valuable information in the noisy and uneven-quality corpus could be fully exploited. Experiments demonstrate that CL-NAG outperforms the state-of-the-arts, which increases 6.8% and 8.7% in the accuracy for simple and complex questions, respectively.

Resources, Environment, and Development

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-141
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Color Line ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Underdeveloped Countries ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
New States ◽  
East West

This chapter studies how the linkage between state power and large-scale projects that ruled during the modernization years entered a crisis in the 1970s, when modernity ceased to be an end in itself and new sensibilities replaced what in 1958 Nehru called the “disease of giganticism.” While development struggled to keep its promise to quickly grant underdeveloped countries wealth and well-being, problems related to industrialization appeared in the form of ecological imbalances. At the turn of the decade, development was considered a failure as a Cold War weapon, and there was widespread doubt about planning. Though ideology was still unyielding in the periphery, where international crises and civil wars stemming from decolonization and the failure of new states continued to fuel Cold War dynamics, in international organizations the East–West conflict rarely challenged the fundamental underlying agreement on global issues. Instead, a major cleavage ran along the old color line—between a rich, white, developed North and a colored, poor, underdeveloped South.

scholarly journals ‘A Portrait of Lower Silesia’: Researching identity through collodion photography and memory narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 205979911989078
Author(s):  
Ewa Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Work Place ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
Performance Arts ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Lower Silesia

In this article, I discuss a performance arts–based visual methodology based on the use of the archaic wet collodion photography. The collaboration between Street Collodion Art photography collective and myself, as a researcher, had two aims: to generate a large scale photographic and narrative portrait of Lower Silesia in Poland, and to explore identities in the region where nearly all of its inhabitants represent recent migrant populations. Data generated through this project include collodion portraits, their interpretations and narratives collected through unstructured interviews. Initial data analysis has generated identity narratives linked to work, place and belonging and ethnicity/nationality. In addition, in 2016 and 2017, three exhibitions of the portraits and a selection of edited stories took place in Lubin, Legnica and Wrocław attended by local inhabitants, including project participants. The examination of the arts-based methodology finds that the ritual character of the wet collodion photographic encounter has acted as a form of artistic intervention which, in generating memory narratives, enabled an articulation of social identities in the climate dominated by nationalist discourses. Such symbolic work emerging out of the project reveals a critical potential in the collaboration between the arts and social research. Furthermore, the project has shown that despite different traditions of practice, a collaboration between the artists and social researchers can yield rich data and access participants in ways that conventional methodologies cannot.

scholarly journals It’s All in the Reading

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Déirdre Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

It seems inherent in the nature of contemporary artist’s book production to continue to question the context for the genre in contemporary art practice, notwithstanding the medium’s potential for dissemination via mass production and an unquestionable advantage of portability for distribution. Artists, curators and editors operating in this sector look to create contexts for books in a variety of imaginative ways, through exhibition, commission, installations, performance and, of course as documentation. Broadening the discussion of the idea of the book within contemporary art practice, this paper examines the presence and role of book works within the context of the art biennale, in particular the Venice Art Biennale of which the 58th iteration (2019) is entitled ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ and curated by Ralph Rugoff, with an overview of the independent International cultural offerings and the function of the ‘Book Pavilion’. Venetian museums and institutions continue to present vibrant diverse works within the arena of large-scale exhibitions, recognising the position that the book occupies in the history of the city. This year, the appearance for the first time, of ‘Book Biennale’, opens up a new and interesting dialogue, taking the measure of how the book is being promoted and its particular function for visual communication within the arts in Venice and beyond.

Discovering Semantics from Visual Information

2011 ◽  
pp. 116-145
Author(s):  
Zhiyong Wang ◽  
Dagan Feng
Keyword(s):  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Semantic Concept ◽  
Visual Content ◽  
Concept Detection ◽  
Semantic Level ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Visual Domain

Visual information has been immensely used in various domains such as web, education, health, and digital libraries, due to the advancements of computing technologies. Meanwhile, users realize that it has been more and more difficult to find desired visual content such as images. Though traditional content-based retrieval (CBR) systems allow users to access visual information through query-by-example with low level visual features (e.g. color, shape, and texture), the semantic gap is widely recognized as a hurdle for practical adoption of CBR systems. Wealthy visual information (e.g. user generated visual content) enables us to derive new knowledge at a large scale, which will significantly facilitate visual information management. Besides semantic concept detection, semantic relationship among concepts can also be explored in visual domain, other than traditional textual domain. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-arts on discovering semantics in visual domain from two aspects, semantic concept detection and knowledge discovery from visual information at semantic level. For the first aspect, various aspects of visual information annotation are discussed, including content representation, machine learning based annotation methodologies, and widely used datasets. For the second aspect, a novel data driven based approach is introduced to discover semantic relevance among concepts in visual domain. Future research topics are also outlined.

The Arts and Humanities in Climate Change Engagement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia B. Corbett ◽  
Brett Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts

The communication strategy of simply sharing more scientific information has not effectively engaged and connected people to climate change in ways that facilitate understanding and encourage action. In part, this is because climate change is a so-called wicked problem, given that it is socially complex, has many interdependencies, and lacks simple solutions. For many people, climate change is generally seen as something abstract and distant—something that they know about, but do not “feel.” The arts and humanities can play an important role in disrupting the social and cultural worldviews that filter climate information and separate the public from the reality of climate change. Whether it is the visual arts, dance, theater, literature, comedy, or film, the arts and humanities present engaging stories, corporally sensed and felt experiences, awareness of interdependency with the world, emotional meanings, and connection with place. Climate stories, especially those based on lived experiences, offer distinct ways to engage a variety of senses. They allow the “invisibility” of climate change to be seen, felt, and imagined in the past, present, and future. They connect global issues to conditions close to home and create space to grieve and experience loss. They encourage critical reflection of existing social structures and cultural and moral norms, thus facilitating engagement beyond the individual level. The arts and humanities hold great potential to help spur necessary social and cultural change, but research is needed on their reach and efficacy.

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