Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

LEGACY OF PATRIARCHAL GOD AND THE POLITICS OF MYTH-MAKING: LOCATING THE GENDERED POSITION IN RELIGIOUS VISUAL ART

This essay discusses how the imagination of women in India is framed up by the gender-biased mythical representations. By looking at the mythical representations that are circulated through centuries in many popular mages, paintings and calendar-portraits, a discursive pattern can be found that has positioned women in a secondary level, belonging to men. The family itself becomes a political site in the process of normalizing women’s submissiveness to men by comparing their actions with the Goddesses. By interrogating the gendered position of Goddess like Lakshmi and her male counterpart Lord Vishnu, this essay attempts to problematize with the mode of representation in religious visual images. I conclude by arguing that these religious representations in visual images have negative impact on the Hindu women, especially, in rural areas and thus keep the unhealthy gender role intact in Indian society.

Obstacle type recognition in visual images via dilated convolutional neural network for unmanned surface vehicles

Recognition of obstacle type based on visual sensors is important for navigation by unmanned surface vehicles (USV), including path planning, obstacle avoidance, and reactive control. Conventional detection techniques may fail to distinguish obstacles that are similar in visual appearance in a cluttered environment. This work proposes a novel obstacle type recognition approach that combines a dilated operator with the deep-level features map of ResNet50 for autonomous navigation. First, visual images are collected and annotated from various different scenarios for USV test navigation. Second, the deep learning model, based on a dilated convolutional neural network, is set and trained. Dilated convolution allows the whole network to learn deep features with increased receptive field and further improves the performance of obstacle type recognition. Third, a series of evaluation parameters are utilised to evaluate the obtained model, such as the mean average precision (mAP), missing rate and detection speed. Finally, some experiments are designed to verify the accuracy of the proposed approach using visual images in a cluttered environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the dilated convolutional neural network obtains better recognition performance than the other methods, with an mAP of 88%.

Communicating Photograph Content Through Tactile Images to People With Visual Impairments

Millions of people with a visual impairment across the world are denied access to visual images. They are unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of viewing family photographs, those in textbooks or tourist brochures and the pictorial embellishment of news stories etc. We propose a simple, inexpensive but effective approach, to make content accessible via touch. We use state-of-the-art algorithms to automatically process an input photograph into a collage of icons, that depict the most important semantic aspects of a scene. This collage is then printed onto swell paper. Our experiments show that people can recognise content with an accuracy exceeding 70% and create plausible narratives to explain it. This means that people can understand image content via touch. Communicating scene foreground is a step forward, but there are many other steps needed to provide the visually impaired with the fullest possible access to visual content.

Text-image complementarity and genre in English as foreign language textbooks

Relating visual images to textual messages may have great potential in facilitating students’ reading comprehension. The inevitable and important presence of visuals in textbooks obliges language teachers to exploit all semiotic resources to deepen students’ understanding. However, analysis of how images interact with text in textbooks has been rare, and among the efforts it has generally been found that visuals and text often fail to achieve coherence. This study investigates whether and how text and image complement each other ideationally (i.e., the “what”) by six sense relations (e.g., synonymy and hyponymy) and interpersonally (i.e., reader engagement) by the Mood system in ninth-grade English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks to reach intersemiotic complementarity (IC). The results revealed that ideational rather than interpersonal IC is more frequent, where many more Participants (i.e., the nominal groups) than Processes (i.e., the verbal groups) in the texts find their visual complements. Ideational IC is particularly high in Information Reports while Recounts generally mark higher percentages of interpersonal IC. To accomplish ideational IC, repetition is most frequent, followed by hyponymy (i.e., general-specific relation) and collocation (i.e., relations that naturally co-occur). Distinct IC patterns also characterize the different editions of textbooks investigated, which may suggest their different potentials in catering to students of varying proficiencies.

Sistem Keamanan Gedung Menggunakan Kinect Xbox 360 Dengan Metode Skeletal Tracking

The incidence of fire and theft is very threatening and causes disruption to people's lifestyles, both due to natural and human factors resulting in loss of life, damage to the environment, loss of property and property, and psychological impacts. The purpose of this study is to create a building security system using Kinect Xbox 360 which can be used to detect fires and loss of valuable objects. The data transmission method uses the Internet of Things (IoT) and skeletal tracking. Skeletal detection uses Arduino Uno which is connected to a fire sensor and Kinect to detect suspicious movements connected to a PC. Kinect uses biometric authentication to automatically enter user data by recognizing objects and detecting skeletons including height, facial features and shoulder length. The ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) value of the fire sensor reading has a range between 200-300. The fire sensor detects the presence of fire through optical data analysis containing ultraviolet, infrared or visual images of fire. The data generated by Kinect by detecting the recognition of the skeleton of the main point of the human body known as the skeleton, where the reading point is authenticated by Kinect from a range of 1.5-3 meters which is declared the optimal measurement, and if a fire occurs, the pump motor will spray water randomly. to extinguish the fire that is connected to the internet via the wifi module. The data displayed is in the form of a graph on the Thingspeak cloud server service. Notification of fire and theft information using the delivery system from input to database

‘Can We See It?’: Contextualizing ‘Deforestation’ from an English-Medium Science Textbook for a Primary School Level

Understanding an English-medium science textbook is possibly challenging for some students. It is, for example, due to the language used. To deal with this issue, construing the use of the other mode, such as visual images, along with the verbal text is regarded useful. Thereby, the construal of multimodality in an English-medium science textbook becomes crucial. Albeit a myriad of inspections on multimodality exists, but to the best of the writer’s knowledge, such investigation with respect to an English-medium science textbook, particularly at a primary school level, was found to be limited. Therefore, this study aimed to scrutinize the verbal text and visual image presented in a science textbook used for a primary school level which is presented in English. To that end, a descriptive research design was employed. In this regard, a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) within the trinocular metafunctions encompassing ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions was utilized. The systemic functional linguistics theory, the grammar of visual design, intersemiotic complementarity, and logico-semantics were the frameworks employed to analyze the artefact, the English-medium science textbook. The findings revealed that the visual image and verbal text interact with one another within the three metafunctions. Given the interaction between the two modes, the present study suggests that both teachers and students are required to take into considerations and be aware of the potential or roles of images along with the verbal text, i.e. the images are not merely accessories, but instead, these are able to assist the comprehension of the science materials learned.

The View of Yakutsk Town in art from the collection of the National Art Museum of The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

Визуальные образы, сохраненные в виде рисунков, гравюр, фотодокументальных материалов, являются важной частью реконструкции исторического прошлого народа. Раннее конструирование образа г. Якутска нашло отражение в рисунках и гравюрах российских и зарубежных исследователей и художников XVII–XVIII веков. Так, Вторая Камчатская экспедиция, работавшая в 1733–1743 годах по государственному заказу, одним из направлений своей работы избрала визуальную фиксацию и точную информацию по географии, этнографии коренного населения региона, проспектов городов. Цель представленного в статье исследования — выявление и комплексный анализ ранних изображений города Якутска в графических произведениях XVII–XVIII веков. На основе гравюры художника Гравировальной палаты Академии наук А.Г. Рудакова с рисунка И.В. Люрсениуса, рисовальщика академического отряда Второй Камчатской экспедиции, и графической работы французского пейзажиста Л.Н. Леспинасса из собрания Национального художественного музея Республики Саха (Якутия) показано значение видовых проспектов г. Якутска как ранних художественных репрезентаций города Якутска. Сделан вывод о том, что эти материалы способствовали накоплению сведений о Якутске, одном из старинных городов Сибири. Visual images that were preserved in the forms of drawings, engravings, and photographic documentations are an important part of the reconstruction of the historical past of the people. The early reconstruction of the image of Yakutsk was reflected in drawings and engravings by Russian and foreign researchers and artists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, the Second Kamchatka expedition, which worked under the state order in 1733 to 1743, was aimed at visual fixation and accurate information on geography, ethnography of the indigenous population of the region, city avenues. The purpose of the study is to identify and comprehensively analyze the early images of Yakutsk in the graphic pictures of the 17th – 18th centuries. Based on the works of the draftsman of the academic detachment of the Second Kamchatka Expedition I.V. Lursenius, the artist of the Engraving Chamber of the Academy of Sciences A.G. Rudakov, the French landscape painter L.N. Lespinass from the collection of the National Art Museum of The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the significance of the view avenues of Yakutsk as early artistic representations of Yakutsk is shown. It is concluded that these materials contributed to the accumulation of information about Yakutsk, one of the ancient towns of Siberia.