scholarly journals Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rosina Hickman
Keyword(s):  
Original Form ◽  
Online Video ◽  
The Public ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Home Movies ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Image Archives ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exhibition Strategies

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences?  Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

scholarly journals Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rosina Hickman
Keyword(s):  
Original Form ◽  
Online Video ◽  
The Public ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Home Movies ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Image Archives ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exhibition Strategies

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences?  Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print

2019 ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Impact

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

Political Parties and Public Participation in Constitution Making: Legitimation, Distraction, or Real Influence?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Hudson
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Party Strength ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Constitution Making

Over the past three decades, participatory methods of constitution making have gained increasing acceptance and are now an indispensable part of any constitution-making process. Despite this, we know little about how much public participation actually affects the constitution. This article investigates the impact of participation in two groundbreaking cases: Brazil (1988) and South Africa (1996). This analysis demonstrates that public participation has relatively small effects on the text, but that it varies in systematic ways. The theory advanced here posits that party strength (especially in terms of discipline and programmatic commitments) is the key determinant of the effectiveness of public participation. Strong parties may be more effective in many ways, but they are less likely to act on input from the public in constitution-making processes.

scholarly journals Mobilizing Data from Taxonomic Literature for an Iconic Species (Dinosauria, Theropoda, Tyrannosaurus rex)

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Miller ◽  
Yanell Braumuller ◽  
Puneet Kishor ◽  
David Shorthouse ◽  
Mariya Dimitrova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biodiversity Knowledge ◽  
Informatics Infrastructure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Occurrence Records

A vast amount of biodiversity data is reported in the primary taxonomic literature. In the past, we have demonstrated the use of semantic enhancement to extract data from taxonomic literature and make it available to a network of databases (Miller et al. 2015). For technical reasons, semantic enhancement of taxonomic literature is most efficient when customized according to the format of a particular journal. This journal-based approach captures and disseminates data on whatever taxa happen to be published therein. But if we want to extract all treatments on a particular taxon of interest, these are likely to be spread across multiple journals. Fortunately, the GoldenGATE Imagine document editor (Sautter 2019) is flexible enough to parse most taxonomic literature. Tyrannosaurus rex is an iconic dinosaur with broad public appeal, as well as the subject of more than a century of scholarship. The Naturalis Biodiversity Center recently acquired a specimen that has become a major attraction in the public exhibit space. For most species on earth, the primary taxonomic literature contains nearly everything that is known about it. Every described species on earth is the subject of one or more taxonomic treatments. A taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can mobilize all this knowledge using the network of databases and resources that comprise the modern biodiversity informatics infrastructure. When a particular species is of special interest, a taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can be a powerful tool for scholarship and communication. In light of this, we resolved to semantically enhance all taxonomic treatments on T. rex. Our objective was to make these treatments and associated data available for the broad range of stakeholders who might have an interest in this animal, including professional paleontologists, the curious public, and museum exhibits and public communications personnel. Among the routine parsing and data sharing activities in the Plazi workflow (Agosti and Egloff 2009), taxonomic treatments, as well as cited figures, are deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), and occurrence records are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Treatment citations were enhanced with hyperlinks to the cited treatment on TreatmentBank, and specimen citations were linked to their entries on public facing collections databases. We used the OpenBiodiv biodiversity knowledge graph (Senderov et al. 2017) to discover other taxa mentioned together with T. rex, and to create a timeline of T. rex research to evaluate the impact of individual researchers and specimen repositories to T. rex research. We contributed treatment links to WikiData, and queried WikiData to discover identifiers to different platforms holding data about T. rex. We used bloodhound-tracker.net to disambiguate human agents, like collectors, identifiers, and authors. We evaluate the adequacy of the fields currently available to extract data from taxonomic treatments, and make recommendations for future standards.

scholarly journals Eyewitnesses of History

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Paolo Simoni
Keyword(s):  
National Policy ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
Home Movies ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Amateur Film

The role of amateur cinema as archival material in Italian media productions has only recently been discovered. Italy, as opposed to other European countries, lacked a local, regional and national policy for the collection and preservation of private audiovisual documents, which led, as a result, to the inaccessibility of the sources. In 2002 the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia (Italy’s Amateur Film Archive), founded in Bologna by the Home Movies Association, became the reference repository of home movies and amateur cinema, promoting the availability of a cultural heritage that had previously been neglected. Today, it preserves about 5,000 hours of footage, contributes to documentary film productions and acts as a cultural and production center. The impact factor of the Home Movies Archive on the Italian audiovisual scenario and the sustainable perspectives strengthen the awareness that amateur film offers new opportunities to discover and represent the past from a different perspective, the one of an eyewitness “from below”. The article overviews the European and Italian discovery of amateur cinema as historical source from the seventies, and some cases from the Italian panorama during the last fifteen years, which powerfully raised the attention on home movies and amateur archive material.

scholarly journals Tradition in Transition: Technology and Change in Archaeological Visualisation Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1685-1708
Author(s):  
Loes Opgenhaffen
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Ceramic Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Technology Changes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Underlying Processes

Abstract Archaeologists are the mediators between fragmented, and often contested, pasts and the momentary present. To record, organise, interpret, and reconstruct complex narratives of the past and to communicate these to present-day peers and the public, they use a wide range of visualisation methods. As such, visualisation methods form an intrinsic part of the representation of practical and intellectual findings, being crucial to knowledge production in archaeology. The adoption and adaptation of digital visualisation technology changes the way archaeologists shape new knowledge. However, for a discipline that is particularly concerned with how technology had an effect on past societies, for example, the impact of the potter’s wheel on local ceramic production strategies, archaeologists have a remarkably limited awareness of how current (digital) technology has an impact on their own visualisation practice and the subsequent knowledge production. This study presents the conceptual framework “tradition in transition,” which integrates technological and visualisation methodologies, and aims to provide a framework to analyse the underlying processes and mechanisms that shape and change the practice of creating visualisations.

scholarly journals The Austrian Act on the Protection against Domestic Violence

Temida ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albin Dearing
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
General Public ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Impact

The past few years have seen a fundamental and broadly based change in the response to domestic violence perpetrated by men against women. The Act on Protection against Domestic Violence which entered into force on May 1st, 1997 reflects this new orientation, or rather this shift in paradigm, which has led to a new understanding of the phenomenon of domestic violence and defines appropriate response by the state by it. The impact of this shift in paradigm is considerable: not only have public authorities and private women?s institutions changed their attitudes towards domestic violence, but the general public now responds to this phenomenon in a manner that is entirely different from what it was prior to the approach. Reports on cases of violence no longer merely state the facts indifferently, but now invariably end with the question whether the authorities had been informed and whether they had taken any action to prevent the crime. Thus the public authorities have come to assume responsibility for combating domestic violence as a result of societal developments.

scholarly journals IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON EVENT INDUSTRY: EVENT AUDIENCE READINESS TOWARDS EVENT DIGITIZATION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marry Tracy Pawan ◽  
◽  
Juliana Langgat ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Method ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Good Service ◽  
The Public ◽  
Tourist Destinations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Virtual Events ◽  
Industry Needs ◽  
The Impact

For the event organiser, Sabah is one of the states that becomes a focal point. As Sabah is one of the most popular tourist destinations, several large events such as the Sabah Jazz Festival, Pesta Lepa-lepa, Pesta Kaamatan, Pesta Kalimaran, and other festivals have been held. However, COVID 19’s disruptive impacts have had such a significant impact on the event sector. Most of the events are getting cancelled or postponed all over the world. Over the past several months, a significant number of meetings and conferences have been redesigned as virtual events. However, the event industry needs to know the readiness of the public towards the shifting from the physical to the digital. Therefore, the objective of this research is to determine the event audience readiness for digital events. It is important for the event industry to know the readiness and a good online platform in providing a good service to their audience. A quantitative method was used to conduct this study. The main finding will see how far our communities is ready to adapt the new norm. Based on the finding it shows that event audience are willing to adopt the event digitisation, and this is due to the impact of the COVID 19pandemic which was accelerating changes in event audience behaviour. This research will benefit the event organisers and help them prepare strategic plana to cater to the audience needs.

Private Equity Demystified

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gilligan ◽  
Mike Wright
Keyword(s):  
Economic Performance ◽  
Private Equity ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Adverse Consequence ◽  
Risk Capital ◽  
Performance Impact ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Established Firms ◽  
The Impact

This book deals with risk capital provided for established firms outside the stock market, private equity. It has grown rapidly over the last three decades, yet it is largely poorly understood. Although private equity has often been criticised in the public mind as being short-termist and having adverse consequence for employment, in reality this is far from the case. Dispelling some of the biggest myths and misconceptions about private equity, the book explains in detail what private equity involves and provides a review of the systematic evidence of what the impact of private equity has been. Written in a highly accessible style, it takes the reader through what private equity means, the different actors involved, and issues concerning sourcing, checking out, valuing, and structuring deals. The book contains summary tables of the academic research carried out over the past three decades across the private equity landscape, including the returns to investors, economic performance, impact on R&D and employees, and the longevity and life-cycle of private equity backed deal.

A Trademark Approach to the Past: Ken Burns, the Historical Profession, and Assessing Popular Presentations of the Past

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Ellen Rose ◽  
Julie Corley
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Historical Profession

A review of Not for Ourselves Alone, a historical documentary film by Ken Burns about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's leadership of the nineteenthcentury women's rights movement, indicates serious concerns about the impact of historical documentary filmmaking on public understanding of the past. New ways to engage the public in the process of historical analysis and understanding are suggested.

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