Interpreting Map Art with a Perspective Learned from J.M. Blaut

2006 ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Varanka
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
Mapping Techniques

Map art has been mentioned only briefly in geographic or cartographic literature, and has been analyzed almost entirely at the interpretive level. This paper attempts to define and evaluate the cartographic value of contemporary map-like art by placing the body of work as a whole in the theoretical concepts proposed by J.M. Blaut and his colleagues about mapping as a cognitive and cultural universal. This paper discusses how map art resembles mapping characteristics similar to those observed empirically in very young children as described in the publications of Blaut and others. The theory proposes that these early mapping skills are later structured and refined by their social context and practice. Diverse cultural contexts account for the varieties, types, and degrees of mapping behavior documented with time and geographic place. The dynamics of early mapping are compared to mapping techniques employed by artists. The discipline of fine art serves as the context surrounding map artists and their work. My visual analysis, research about the art and the artists, and interviews with artists and curators form the basis of my interpretation of these works within varied and multiple contexts of late 20th century map art.

What Makes It Sound ’80s?

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Lavengood
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Music History ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Popular Music History ◽  
Cultural Positioning ◽  
The Web

Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent—heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986—but the timbre of E. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly ’80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking ’80s synthesizer; and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. This article analyzes the timbre of E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the “’80s sound” from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the 1980s.

The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

Colonial time in tension: Decolonizing temporal imaginaries

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1221-1238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adib ◽  
Paul Emiljanowicz
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Prison System ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Colonial Time ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Political Economic

This article argues that colonial time is fractured, uneven, and co-constituted by tension. Despite coercive violence and instruments of temporal control, non-internalized alternative conceptions of time can/do exist, hybridize, and transform autonomously. We explore these tensions through an examination of post-revolution Iran's attempt to project colonial time through the prison system, and the persistence of non-internalized temporal alternatives as articulated through prisoner memoirs and narratives. Prisons and imprisonment, by removing bodies from the body politic, functions to colonize time to erase, homogenize, and mediate past, present, and future – thereby reproducing ideational-material governance. Yet prisoner memoirs and narratives reveal this process to be incomplete as the agency of individuals to retain, create, and testify provide indications of non-internalized decolonial temporal imaginaries. In taking into consideration our case study and recent trends in anthropology, we inject into the field of International Relations an understanding of colonial time as tension, which can be applied to political-economic and cultural contexts in which time is actively being colonized.

The Ouroboros of Inflammatory Signaling to the Brain for the Control of Neuroendocrine Function

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgia E. Hodes
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Immune System ◽  
Immune Regulation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Immune Disorders ◽  
Inflammatory Signaling ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Immune Systems ◽  
Neuroendocrine Function ◽  
The Brain

In the late 20th century, the discovery that the immune system and central nervous system were not autonomous revolutionized exploration of the mechanisms by which stress contributes to immune disorders and immune regulation contributes to mental illness. There is increasing evidence of stress as integrated across the brain and body. The immune system acts in concert with the peripheral nervous system to shape the brain’s perception of the environment. The brain in turn communicates with the endocrine and immune systems to guide their responses to that environment. Examining the groundwork of mechanisms governing communication between the body and brain will hopefully provide a better understanding of the ontogeny and symptomology of some mood disorders.

Justus Liebig and the Rise of Nutritional Science

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
Tom Scott-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
Nutritional Science

This chapter explains how theories of gelatin and osmazome were eventually replaced by a more modern approach to the diet. It illustrates this change by comparing two very similar products that emerged over the space of just a decade: a substance called Osmazome Food, which was promoted by Alexis Soyer, and one known as Extractum Carnis, or “extract of meat,” which was promoted by the founder of modern biochemistry, Justus Liebig. These two products were essentially the same, but were marketed in radically different ways: the former framed by classical dietetics; the latter by modern nutritional science. The chapter shows how classical dietetic tradition, which had spread throughout Europe in the Renaissance, died away with modern biochemistry, and Liebig's science shifted attention inside the body. This had four main implications which profoundly changed how food was judged, how nutritional authority was conducted, how food was removed from its social context, and how food became a tool of progress.

Clinical Motor Mapping with Magnetoencephalography

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-224
Author(s):  
William Gaetz ◽  
Christos Papadelis ◽  
Tony W. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Source Localization ◽  
Magnetic Stimulation ◽  
Functional Mapping ◽  
The Body ◽  
Current Dipole ◽  
Spatial Filters ◽  
Motor Mapping ◽  
Cortical Oscillations ◽  
Mapping Techniques ◽  
Motor Representations

This chapter examines clinical motor mapping with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Motor cortex functional mapping procedures were first conducted by neurosurgeons who famously stimulated their patient’s exposed brain during surgery and then systematically documented the responses observed from the activated muscles of the body. Numerous neuroimaging-based functional mapping techniques followed, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), high-density electroencephalography (HD-EEG), and MEG, which are currently used to map the motor areas in relation to isolated volitional movements. The use of MEG for presurgical functional mapping has become a standard component of clinical MEG practice. Indeed, knowledge regarding the location of eloquent MEG motor representations is valuable for presurgical planning and can improve outcomes by limiting the production of postsurgical deficits of motor function. Meanwhile, source localization challenges using equivalent current dipole (ECD) models have given way to newer methods, such as beamformer spatial filters, which have been validated clinically using electrical stimulation. It should also be noted that it is becoming increasingly evident that motor cortical oscillations are changing consistently over the life span, and thus consideration of the patient’s age will likely aid the interpretation of results.

Responding to #yogabody on Instagram

Screen Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-125
Author(s):  
Bilge Gölge
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
New Era ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Modern

This article focuses on representations of the yoga body on social media, explaining what the female body in an asana pose stands for in consideration of the dichotomy between Foucault’s docile body controlled by the technology of power and Anita Seppä’s “aestheticization of the subject” as a means of resistance. While socio-technological changes have introduced a new context in the modern era, the dominance of seeing and visual culture has remained central in late-modern society. Through social media, we have entered a new era of constructing self-identity in relation to gender and the body. Looking into the relationship between asana practice and self-identity in postural yoga, I investigate the imaged bodies of yoginis that function under the control of power and as a technique for self-actualization. Drawing from a visual analysis of Instagram posts and interpreting the bodily practices of yoginis, I will search for what happened to modernity’s docile body in the context of this new media.

Visualizing the solution: An analysis of the images that accompany solutions-oriented news stories

Journalism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyser Lough ◽  
Karen McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
External Source ◽  
The Body ◽  
Internal Source ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
Analysis Of The Images ◽  
Solutions Journalism ◽  
Selection Of

This study adds visual analysis to the body of work on solutions journalism. Guided by visual theory focusing on the dominating nature of messages included in visual content versus text, we use content analysis to explore the use of photos in solutions-oriented news stories, specifically to see whether the photos published alongside solutions-based news stories also represent solutions or whether they portray an incongruent message. Among our results, we found photos reflect the solution depicted in the story only 63.5 percent of the time. Photos taken by an internal source (e.g. staff photographer) are more likely to depict the solution than if obtained by an external source (e.g. wire service). In addition, the higher the emotional appeal and positive emotion found in the photo, the higher the likelihood that the photo reflects a solution. A contradictory visual may complicate the message of the solutions in the story. Our findings suggest more emphasis must be placed on the study of visuals as they relate to solutions journalism, and on the selection of photos to accompany solutions-oriented stories.

#50+ fashion Instagram influencers: cognitive age and aesthetic digital labours

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-413
Author(s):  
Ashleigh McFarlane ◽  
Emma Samsioe
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Fashion Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Age ◽  
Critical Visual Analysis ◽  
Practical Implications

PurposeThis paper demonstrates how #50+ fashion Instagram influencers contribute to the social construction of cognitive age through their aesthetic digital labours.Design/methodology/approachNon-participative netnography was used in the form of visual and textual analysis of over 300 Instagram posts including images, captions and comments.FindingsFindings reveal how outfit selection, background choices and bodily poses redefine expressions of look age through forms of aesthetic labour. Post-construction, hashtag and emoji usage illustrates how influencers refrain from directly posting about the fashion brands that they endorse. Instead, image and personality work visually attracts followers to politically charged posts which directly impact upon the social and cultural contexts where influencers are active. This ties into present-day wider societal discourses.Practical implications50+ fashion influencers have high spending power. Fashion brands should refrain from using #brand and collaborate in more subtle ways and concentrate on challenging the negativity of the old-age cliché.Originality/valueThe study advances theory on the social construction of age in fashion studies by combining cognitive age with aesthetic labour to identify the characteristics of the social phenomenon of the 50+ Instagram influencer. It applies principles from critical visual analysis to digital context, thereby advancing the qualitative netnographic toolkit.

Karakalpak Family Ritualism: The Bes Kiyim Custom in the Transformation of Traditional Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 124-133
Author(s):  
Z. I. Kurbanova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Married Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Status Change ◽  
Patchy Distribution ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
The Republic

This study describes the bridal and funerary rite of exchanging clothes (Bes Kiyim – ‘Five Costumes’) in the context of the traditions and innovations in the Karakalpak culture. On the basis of fi eld data collected in 2014–2019 and earlier in places with a continuous or patchy distribution of the Karakalpak population (Chimbaysky, Karauzyaksky, Kegeyliysky, Nukussky, Khodzheyliysky, and the Takhiatashsky districts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Republic of Uzbekistan) and of earlier sources, changes in ritualism are analyzed. Bridal rites include exchanges of gifts, such as items of clothing. The comparison of sources shows that the Bes Kiyim rite originated in the mid-20th century in the context of socio-cultural changes. It has remained rather stable up to the present time, being an integral part of Karakalpak bridal ritualism. This indicates its importance in the normative culture of that ethnic group. In one district of Karakalpakstan, the term Bes Kiyim was transferred from the bridal to the funerary rituals. The origin of the rite relates to the transformation of the Iyis custom—the distribution of the deceased person’s clothing among those participating in the ablution of the body. In the late 20th century, specially purchased items of clothing began to be used for that purpose. Apparently, the fi ve items distributed among those participating in the rite symbolize the deceased person’s transition to the ancestors’ world. By the same token, the bride’s fi ve outfi ts allude to her passage to the category of married women and the beginning of her marital life. Therefore, the ritual innovations of the Karakalpaks, caused by socio-cultural and economic changes, mirror the logic and content of traditional family festivals whose complex symbolism relates to status change.

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