Hölderlins Homburger Folioheft in diachroner Darstellung

Literary compositional drafts and working manuscripts preserve traces of the gradual process of writing and its different stages. In the static medium of print, genetic editions are confronted with the problem of depicting the dynamic evolution of texts. Presenting the variants in line-by-line synoptic display disregards the spatial arrangement on the manuscript pages. On the other hand, giving a topographic representation of the writing in diplomatic transcripts might stratify it into a few chronological layers but is unable to sufficiently reproduce the dynamic process to an elaborate degree. Consequently, the screen is better suited to visualise the writing process. The digital presentation of the ‘Homburg Folio’, the most important manuscript of Friedrich Hölderlin’s late work, offers not only the transcriptional record as known from print media but displays the process of writing and revision on each of the facsimile’s pages itself (https://homburgfolio.wlb-stuttgart.de). Thus, it is possible to visualise writing both as an act in time and its graphic result on the space of a page. It confines itself to the presentation of the genesis without any constitution of a text. The combination of these different operations has often led to errors. Decoupling the genetic analysis from the extrapolation of text reveals its potential.

The Fragmented Frame 1

The aesthetic of the fragment is examined in detailed analyses of the Hitchcockian frame. The frame is both the formal composition underpinning mise en scène and the opening into the infinite play of fragmented images within visual, aural, and narrative form. The frame is a site of formal “expressivity,” “abstraction,” “topographic representation,” and “schematization.” The fragmented frame is revealed in the modernist experimentation of form through color, line, and shape in North by Northwest, the topographic frame in The Birds, and the canting of the visual frame in Shadow of a Doubt. The chapter concludes that the representational image forming the diegesis is overwhelmed in Hitchcock’s experimental works by the formal potential of abstract shape and pattern.

Emergence of an adaptive command for orienting behavior in premotor brainstem neurons of barn owls

The midbrain map of auditory space commands sound-orienting responses in barn owls. Owls precisely localize sounds in frontal space but underestimate the direction of peripheral sound sources. This bias for central locations was proposed to be adaptive to the decreased reliability in the periphery of sensory cues used for sound localization by the owl. Understanding the neural pathway supporting this biased behavior provides a means to address how adaptive motor commands are implemented by neurons. Here we find that the sensory input for sound direction is weighted by its reliability in premotor neurons of the owl’s midbrain tegmentum such that the mean population firing rate approximates the head-orienting behavior. We provide evidence that this coding may emerge through convergence of upstream projections from the midbrain map of auditory space. We further show that manipulating the sensory input yields changes predicted by the convergent network in both premotor neural responses and behavior. This work demonstrates how a topographic sensory representation can be linearly read out to adjust behavioral responses by the reliability of the sensory input.Significance statementThis research shows how statistics of the sensory input can be integrated into a behavioral command by readout of a sensory representation. The firing rate of midbrain premotor neurons receiving sensory information from a topographic representation of auditory space is weighted by the reliability of sensory cues. We show that these premotor responses are consistent with a weighted convergence from the topographic sensory representation. This convergence was also tested behaviorally, where manipulation of stimulus properties led to bidirectional changes in sound localization errors. Thus a topographic representation of auditory space is translated into a premotor command for sound localization that is modulated by sensory reliability.