‘An act of wilful defiance’: Objection, Protest and Rebellion in the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Galleries

In spite of its purveyance of British stalwart tropes such as “the Tommies and the Officers”, the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) new First World War Galleries feature stories of conscientious objectors and Irish Republicans, whose resistance to the war transgressed prevailing norms. They also highlight poet/soldier Siegfried Sassoon’s Soldier’s Declaration, a widely-circulated critical letter he intended as “an act of wilful defiance”. However, though these stories are displayed, this chapter argues that both the curatorial apparatus surrounding them (e.g. texts, objects), and the IWM’s historicizing of the past by claiming to present the events as they unfolded at that time subsume transgression in normative orders. This chapter contextualizes close readings of these three portrayals of transgression within broader Museum and Memory Studies discourses. It also situates the IWM’s narratives of mythic togetherness and tacit imperialism as an expression of what Paul Gilroy has defined as “postcolonial melancholia” as it is found in wider conceptions of British identity throughout the WWI Centenary commemorations – a period that loosely corresponded with the Brexit campaign and its consequences.

Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

Prior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and ñ. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muñeca-type words (muneca-MUÑECA < museca-MUÑECA), but not for moneda-type words (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.

A2. British Former Senior Diplomats, Open Letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair on British Policy on the Arab-Israeli Problem and Iraq, London, April 2004.

The sharply critical letter from the fifty-two former British ambassadors and senior government officials was prompted by Prime Minister Blair's support for Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan and apparent backing of President Bush's new stance on the refugee right of return (see Special Doc. B in this issue). The letter, published in the Guardian of London on 27 April 2004, inspired a similar initiative by former U.S. diplomats (see Doc. B1 below). Among the fifty-two signatories are former ambassadors to Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; several former ambassadors to Iraq; and a former permanent representative to the United Nations.

Temporal Separation of Two Part-Letter Arrays and Size Changes in a Nonmasking Word-Superiority Effect

In two experiments subjects were asked to report the identity of a position-cued critical letter in an array of four letters. Four types of arrays were used: (i) unpronounceable nonwords; (ii) pronounceable nonwords (‘pseudowords’); (iii) words in which the critical letter was minimally constrained by the context letters; and (iv) words in which the critical letter was maximally constrained by the context letters. All four-letter stimuli were presented in two parts. A leading array in which the information from two quadrants of a vertical by horizontal division of each letter was presented, and, after intervals of 0, 20, 40, 80, 100, 120, 160, 320, and 480 ms and infinity (ie, no trailing array), a trailing array of the complementary letter parts. In experiment 1 a single group of eight subjects responded to the one hundred and sixty combinations of the four types of letter strings, the four serial positions, and the ten stimulus onset asynchrony values. In experiment 2 the stimulus onset asynchrony values were varied among subjects, with twelve subjects responding at each value. The results from these two studies were generally similar. Performance in the word conditions was consistently superior to performance in the nonword conditions, and the magnitude of this difference (ie, the word-superiority effect) increased with increasing stimulus onset asynchrony up to 120 ms, and then gradually declined. The fact that the magnitude of the word-superiority effect initially increased with the separation of leading and trailing arrays was interpreted as support for Johnston's suggestion that letters in words are represented during visual encoding both in the form of individual letter percepts and in a decay-resistant word percept, as opposed to letters in nonwords, which are represented only as decay-susceptible letter percepts. The experimental findings are discussed in relation to the ‘interactive activation’ model of word perception.

Letter Identification in Words and Non-Words, with Variation in Visual Angle and Delay of Position Cue

Two experiments are described in which subjects were required to report the name of a single position-cued ‘critical’ letter in a tachistoscopically displayed string of four letters. The stimulus characters were arranged to form three types of letter strings: (i) strings in which the letters did not form words; (ii) words in which contextual constraint of the critical letters was minimised; and (iii) words in which contextual constraint of the critical letters was maximised. The serial position of the letter to be identified in each string was cued at delays of −500, −100, and +500 ms, in experiment 1 and at delays of −510 and +510 ms in experiment 2, and in both experiments one group of subjects responded to letter strings which subtended a horizontal visual angle of 3·95 deg, while a second group responded to strings which subtended 1·02 deg. Correct identifications of critical letters showed that the presentation of words resulted in superior performance. This ‘word superiority effect’ is consistent with earlier findings implying that it has a perceptual locus. For the stimuli which subtended the large visual angle the word advantage was detrimentally affected only when the position of the critical letter to be identified was cued either 500 or 510 ms prior to the display of the letter string.

Some Boundary Conditions for a Word Superiority Effect

A word superiority effect was obtained using a fixed stimulus set, positional certainty of the critical letter, mixed trial type, and instructions to fixate the critical letter. Control experiments established that this effect was not due to lateral masking. Further experiments extended the finding of a fixed-set word superiority effect to other stimulus sets, and to lowercase and mixed-case stimuli. The mixed-case word superiority effect is inconsistent with supraletter feature models of word recognition and, instead, lends support to hierarchical codes models. It was demonstrated that an unusually wide spacing of letters can disrupt the formation of word-level codes, and that wide visual angles are not necessarily disruptive as long as normal spacing is maintained.