scholarly journals Making “The Beast”: An Interview with Patrick McCurdy

MediaTropes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-119
Author(s):  
Patrick McCurdy ◽  
Jordan Kinder

In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 544-557
Author(s):  
Thusha Rani Rajendra

This article investigates the application of Halliday’s theory of transitivity to analyse the verbal structures of an abridged text in the form of a graphic novel. Having been condensed from the original classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth (JttCotE) by Jules Verne, the present study examines the link between these structures and how they represent the original text. The focus of the analysis concentrates on the verbal text contained in speech bubbles and caption boxes; common characteristics of the comics medium.  Based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework of the ideational metafunction, this article discusses how linguistic formations are constructed and construed through transitivity in an abridged text. In addition, the analysis also looks into how the authors have adapted the original text into a graphic novel through the adoption of a few specific Processes. As such an exploration is limited, the current study fills the gap in this area.  The analysis of data indicates that careful employment of linguistic choices forms the core of the novel which inherently is also supported through its visual representations. The results reveal that Material Processes are the most prominent in this adapted version of the novel, followed by Relational and Behavioural Processes respectively. This study highlights how linguistic choices support the original text, though an abridged version, specifically in the panels of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The findings can serve to understand how authors construct their versions of abridged texts to adhere to the original text.


2021 ◽  
pp. 117014
Author(s):  
Narumol Jariyasopit ◽  
Tom Harner ◽  
Cecilia Shin ◽  
Richard Park

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 427
Author(s):  
Jingyi Wang ◽  
Ian Gates

To extract viscous bitumen from oil sands reservoirs, steam is injected into the formation to lower the bitumen’s viscosity enabling sufficient mobility for its production to the surface. Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) is the preferred process for Athabasca oil sands reservoirs but its performance suffers in heterogeneous reservoirs leading to an elevated steam-to-oil ratio (SOR) above that which would be observed in a clean oil sands reservoir. This implies that the SOR could be used as a signature to understand the nature of heterogeneities or other features in reservoirs. In the research reported here, the use of the SOR as a signal to provide information on the heterogeneity of the reservoir is explored. The analysis conducted on prototypical reservoirs reveals that the instantaneous SOR (iSOR) can be used to identify reservoir features. The results show that the iSOR profile exhibits specific signatures that can be used to identify when the steam chamber reaches the top of the formation, a lean zone, a top gas zone, and shale layers.


Surfactants ◽  
2000 ◽  
pp. 365-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurier L. Schramm ◽  
Elaine N. Stasiuk ◽  
Mike MacKinnon

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Broughton

Salt dissolution collapse-subsidence is proposed as the dominant tectono-stratigraphic control on the deposition of major sand trends across the northern Athabasca Oil Sands Deposit. Salt removal along linear dissolution trends 200 m below in the Prairie Evaporite (Middle Devonian) halite beds resulted in the collapse of the overlying Upper Devonian strata. The collapse-induced differential subsidence of the fault blocks formed the floor underlying the McMurray deposits in the 50 km long V-shaped Bitumount Trough extending across the northern area of the Athabasca Oil Sands Deposit. The lower and middle-upper McMurray sand trends filled the accommodation created by collapses of a linear chain of Upper Devonian fault blocks along the northern margin of the western Trough. A pair of tens-of-metres thick and 20–30 km long sand trends developed parallel in overlying accumulations of the lower and middle-upper McMurray Formation (Aptian). This half-graben tilted northward as the dissolution trend in the underlying Prairie Evaporite salt scarp widened, and the scarp margin was deeply embayed. Salt dissolution-induced structures were the principal control that located the large sand complexes exploited by bitumen mining projects. Earlier models of McMurray architecture interpreted the underlying karst collapse to have been largely pre-Cretaceous. This new architectural model reinterprets the spatio-temporal balance between erosion at the pre-Cretaceous surface and within the buried salt beds. Extensive salt removal resulted in collapse of the underlying hypogene karst during the late Aptian age. This resulted in the over-thickened multi-kilometres long McMurray sand trends. The underlying karst collapse resulted in unstable deposition surfaces along the sub-Cretaceous trough floors. This tectono-stratigraphic architecture, called the syndepositional model in this study, is proposed as an alternative to two other models, one of which proposes that deeply incised channel valleys and fills resulted from multiple significant sea-level fluctuations, while the other proposes that stacked parasequences accumulated along overlying shallow channels that meandered across a stable fluvio-estuarine coast.


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