Negotiating ‘Asianness’ at the Tokyo International Film Festival Local, Regional and International Dynamics Through Programming Practices and Film Markets

In this paper I will trace a brief history of major Asian film festivals to understand how the notion of ‘Asianness’ evolved over time and how it is expressed nowadays through programming practices and film markets. Then I will focus on the case study of the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as a problematic site where cultural and economic dynamics converge. As an A-category festival, TIFF has to balance its international status with regional relevance, negotiating ‘Asianness’ in a complex relationship involving the local film industry, since questions on ‘Asian cinema’ are deeply linked to the national. Finally, I will draw some conclusions, discussing how TIFF relates to other major film festivals in Asia, where ‘Asianness’ has been used as a shared effort to distinguish themselves from the paradigm set by European film festivals. However, this is an ongoing process, TIFF struggles to use ‘Asianness’ as a unifying element and the specific interests of each festival obstruct the possibility to create a more systematic trans-Asian model.

Acceptance and Assessment in Student Pair-Programming: A Case Study

This study analyzes pair programming's acceptance and assessment in the university setting considering participants' gender, previous programming ex-perience, and programming enjoyment. The sample included 80 students from three different sections enrolled in a basic programming course. We used a questionnaire to collect data after the pair programming practices. For data analysis, we used SPSS 24, and Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, and Jonckheere-Terpstra statistical techniques. Descriptive and comparative re-sults showed a significant increasing monotonic trend in the acceptance of pair programming as students' preference toward programming increased (standardized statistic = 3.20, p = 0.00, Kendall's τb = 0.30, p = 0.001). Also, pair programming was positively accepted and assessed even by students who reported a low level of programming enjoyment. There were no other statistically significant results.

BoneJ2 - refactoring established research software

Research software is often developed with expedience as a core development objective because experimental results, but not the software, are specified and resourced as a project output. While such code can help find answers to specific research questions, it may lack longevity and flexibility to make it reusable. We reimplemented BoneJ, our software for skeletal biology image analysis, to address design limitations that put it at risk of becoming unusable. We improved the quality of BoneJ code by following contemporary best programming practices. These include separation of concerns, dependency management, thorough testing, continuous integration and deployment, source code management, code reviews, issue and task ticketing, and user and developer documentation. The resulting BoneJ2 represents a generational shift in development technology and integrates with the ImageJ2 plugin ecosystem.

BoneJ2 - refactoring established research software

Research software is often developed with expedience as a core development objective because experimental results, but not the software, are specified and resourced as a project output. While such code can help find answers to specific research questions, it may lack longevity and flexibility to make it reusable. We reimplemented BoneJ, our software for skeletal biology image analysis, to address design limitations that put it at risk of becoming unusable. We improved the quality of BoneJ code by following contemporary best programming practices. These include separation of concerns, dependency management, thorough testing, continuous integration and deployment, source code management, code reviews, issue and task ticketing, and user and developer documentation. The resulting BoneJ2 represents a generational shift in development technology and integrates with the ImageJ2 plugin ecosystem.

The many lives of the messy museum: Site, memory and voice

A number of North American artist project spaces established in 2003 activated alternatives to display and programming practices found in mainstream museums, giving voice to artists who did not fit existing durational, disciplinary and authorial parameters. One such site was Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina, an artist residency and living museum set within a 1930s Depression-era thrift store. Here, an archival approach emerged from the mess of thrift store Americana that considered what an artist project space could be if nothing was sold, altered beyond repair or thrown away. Central to the artist organizing practices that emerged on-site are archival principles that enable empathetic connections to form in relation to object meanings, lost subjectivities and neighbourhood relationships. Elsewhere, as a site, offered a means for hidden voices to be heard and alternative archiving practices to be tested as a form of community memory, with their museological presentation indebted to the implications of mess and its endless reordering. This article builds on the idea of empathy as a capacity to be engendered in museum audiences by seeing it also as a structuring principle to invoke organizational difference at every turn. Such structural empathy became tellingly significant in 2020 as racial justice protests and the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the inequities of American life. For Elsewhere, the principles of practice that enabled them to become a platform for imagining and securing hyper-local change are bound to successive reformulations of both the site since 2003 and the resulting archive.