Idealizacja obrazu gór w polskiej piosence turystycznej

The article is devoted to songs which are rarely the subject of literature studies owing to the multi-code nature of their message and the fact that they are part of popular culture. Tourist songs are on the margin of scholars’ interest, because of their limited artistic value. They are commonly regarded as pieces about the beauty of nature, charms of hiking, sense of community and friendship. The simplicity of the text is matched by the simplicity of the melodic line, which facilitates memorisation and singing together. Polish tourist songs have attracted interest primarily of activists from the Polish Tourism and Sightseeing Society, scholars studying tourism or authors and performers of such songs. The origins of the songs should be placed in the context of song transformations and emergence of organisational forms of tourism at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning of the scouting movement in Poland as well as the development of tourism in the communist Poland period. The lineage of tourist songs brings together several song genres, popular songs, folk and patriotic songs, scouting and Gypsy songs; pieces from this repertoire accompanied hikers. An important stage in the development of tourist songs came in the late 1960s. This was the period of the first National Tourist Song Festival in Szklarska Poręba. Scholars studying student culture see mountain treks accompanied by songs as a manifestation of alternative student culture emerging as a result of dissatisfaction with forms of political and social life in communist Poland. The most outstanding representative of the movement is Wojciech Bellon, founder of the Wolna Grupa Bukowina band, whose poetic songs present an idea of existence based on a search for authentic values, especially a space of freedom and a sense of community, challenging the falsified reality of communist Poland. Bellon and the performers collaborating with him created in the songs an aesthetic of “the land of gentleness” located in the mountains modelled on the landscape and history of the Bieszczady and Beskid Niski ranges. Despite transformations of tourist songs, analysed together with poetic songs or sung poetry, this “land of gentleness” aesthetic is still present, in a niche form, represented by numerous groups or soloists. Its main features when it comes to the thematic layer include idealisation of mountain landscape, presented as a natural environment for human beings, as a home space, marked by both signs of the tragedy of the Lemkos and sings of transcendence. The mountains make it possible to fulfil dreams of freedom, of an ideal community of wanderers, and provide an authentic experience of the world.

Video or perish? An analysis of video abstract author guidelines

This article reports on an analysis of author guidelines to examine the influence of academic publishers and journals over the video abstract as an emerging genre. The data consist of author guidelines from a Spanish journal index and were analyzed based on a two-layered multimodal analysis adapted from the Genre and Multimodality model. The layout layer concerns the organizational features of author guidelines, while the thematic layer focuses on the content themes. The analysis shows that the selected author guidelines do not share many commonalities as expected; rather, they display miscellaneous features, even in technological specifications where standardization should be the norm. The analysis indicates that academic publishers and other stakeholders should shoulder greater responsibilities such as quality assurance in transitioning to multimodal spaces.

The Boarder Text in Andrey Bitov’s works

At first glance, the border text in Andrey Bitov’s works is connected with the topic of traveling. Not only does the travelogue genre play an important role in his works, his stories reveal an underlying structure of traveling: protagonists cross borders both literally and metaphorically. Yet the notion of the border is important beyond the thematic layer. In his essay “The borders of the genre,” the author problematizes the notion of the genre. His masterpiece, a novel The Pushkin House is full of border crossings, for example, generic, social, ethical, and epistemological. In his last phase, Bitov more and more thematises the (im)possibility of crossing state borders, which was a crucial question for Bitov during the Soviet “Empire”, as he was allowed to travel abroad only in the late 1980s. This lead to the invention of an autobiographical myth about “the one who is not allowed to go abroad”, concerning not only himself but also Pushkin. The manifold aspects of the border in Bitov’s works thus establish a certain poetics of the border.

A webGIS Application to Assess Seawater Quality: A Case Study in a Coastal Area in the Northern Aegean Sea

The assessment of seawater quality in coastal areas is an important issue as it is related to the welfare of coastal ecosystems, a prerequisite for the provision of the related ecosystem services. During the last decades, marine eutrophication has become an important problem in coastal waters as a result of nutrient inputs increase. Consequently, there is need for appropriate methods and tools to assess the eutrophication status of seawater which should be user-friendly to coastal managers and support the adoption of effective plans for the protection and sustainable development of the coastal environment. In this framework, a user-friendly webGIS application has been developed and the Strait of Mytilene at the southeastern part of the Island of Lesvos in the NE Aegean Sea, Greece, was used as a case study. The methodology includes, as a first step, the evaluation of the accuracy of spatial interpolators widely applied in oceanographic studies for assessing the spatial distribution of relevant variables. The most appropriate interpolator revealed for each variable is subsequently applied for the production of the representative thematic layer. The second step involves the integration of the information from the optimal thematic layers representing the spatial distributions of the variables under study; as a result, a new thematic layer illustrating the eutrophication status of the study area is produced. The webGIS application is fully available via a web browser and provides a number of geoprocessing modules developed in Python which implement the user interface, the application of the interpolation analytical tasks, the statistical evaluation toolset and the integration of the optimal interpolated layers. Suggestions for further improvement of the proposed webGIS application are discussed.

Karachay-Balkar poetry of the modern time: the problem of national artistic traditions

This article is the first to consider a diverse thematic layer of the latest Karachay-Balkarian poetry of the late XX - early XXI centuries. The study was based on an analysis of the writers of the 90-ies: Arthur Bakkuev, Luba Akhmatova, Aishat Kushcheterova, and the latest generation of poets of the XXI century: Shamil Uzdenov, Amina Gazaeva, Nauruz Bayramkulov, Diana Rakhaeva, Ismail Baytuganova. The author proves the point of view on the revival of consciousness relics of archaic forms of worldview in the artistic culture of the region, as well as the priority of established fundamental values and stereotypes in the poetic consciousness of the young generation of poets. At the same time, the influence of Islamic ideas on modern national literature is growing. This is evidenced by the nature of their poetic self-expression regarding topics and problems, which is ontological in nature. Poets actively operate with traditional archetypes and symbols (stone, water, wood), as well as religious vocabulary (Allah, fate, destiny, prayer, etc.). As a result of the study, the main trends, key aspects in the development of creative consciousness were identified, the dominants of value-orientational unity in the content and problems of the works were identified.

Producing the digital soil fertility map of Karelia

Recent advancements in soil digital mapping have opened new opportunities for handling the scientific and applied problems of ecological soil monitoring, inventory of land and soil resources, and are generally helpful in optimizing the management of natural resources. For Karelia the development of forest soil assessment techniques is essential, considering that 95% of the republic’s land is forest soils. This paper tells about the process of creating an updated digital map of forest soils fertility in Karelia, scale 1 : 500 000. To this end, the archival soil productivity map of the republic, produced in paper version by R.M. Morozova in 2000, was scanned and converted into a vector layer with the use of the MapInfo Professional 8.5 software package. The resultant layer was aligned with the existing digitalized soil map of Karelia, which served as the basis for constructing the thematic layer according to the data on the fertility of each soil type. As a result of this study, the soil fertility assessment scale was specified and the percentage ratio of soils of different productivity in Karelia was calculated. The digital soil fertility map is an important information source of archival and modern data, and also is a part of the GIS for soils of Karelia.

Geocartographic thinking in modern science

The purpose of the study is to show how the features of geocartographic way of thinking are manifested in the meta-theory of knowledge based on mathematical formalisms. General cartographic concepts and regularities are considered in the view of metatheoretic analysis using cognitive procedures of fiber bundle from differential geometry. On levels of metainformation generalization, the geocartographic metatheoretic approach to the study of reality is higher than the system-theoretical one. It regulates the type of equations, models, and methods of each intertheory expressed in its own system terms. There is a balance between the state of any system and its geographical environment; therefore the observed phenomena are only explained theoretically in a metatheoretic projection on the corresponding system-thematic layer of the knowledge map. Metatheoretic research enables passing from the systematization of already known patterns to the formation of new knowledge through the scientific stratification of reality. General methods of metatheoretic analysis are mathematically distinguished

Site Suitability Analysis for Solid Waste Disposal of Bolpur Municipality, Birbhum District of West Bengal (India): Remote Sensing and AHP Approach

The aim of present study is to find out suitable sites for solid waste disposal (SWD) in the tropical moist sub-humid region of Bolpur municipality, Birbhum district, West Bengal, India using Remote Sensing (RS), Geographic Information System (GIS) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques. Saaty’s AHP technique was used to delineate the suitable sites for SWD using thematic layers such as land use/land cover, geology, slopes and soils. The ranks were assigned for each individual sub-criterion of thematic layers and weights assigned to each thematic layer for selection of suitable sites for SWD using Arc-GIS environment. Possible landfill sites were categorized into five classes as highly suitable, suitable, moderately suitable and unsuitable. About 16.43% (1.97 km2) and 28 % (3.42 km2) area in the region show as highly suitable and suitable sites for SWD, respectively. On the other hand, 39.13 % (4.69 km2), 9.49 % (1.14 km2) and 6.38% (0.77km2) area show moderately suitable, less suitable and unsuitable for solid waste dumping.

On the Seriousness of Things: Pirandello’s Ma non è una cosa seria from Page to Screen

A study of Mario Camerini’s Ma non è una cosa seria (But It’s Nothing Serious [1936]), a film based on Luigi Pirandello’s eponymous 1918 play and typical of the 1930s Italian romantic comedy genre, elucidates the transformations that a literary conception undergoes when adapted for the screen, especially as those reflect the historical context of the film’s making. The challenge for the filmmaker when working on a literary adaptation for popular consumption is to identify the cinematic strategies most suitable to render a psychologically and philosophically nuanced discourse, such as Pirandello’s, appealing to a mass audience in search of diversion. Camerini’s film also exemplifies that unique moment in Italian culture when the Fascist government took decisive measures to strengthen the film industry, promoting the expansion of popular genres in the style of classical Hollywood cinema. Camerini, therefore, works on three fronts: to convey literariness, to apply a sophisticated system of popular filmic representation, and to sustain, if subtly, some Fascist cultural ideals. A reading of the 1918 play with respect to Pirandello’s theory of umorismo questions the seriousness of the legal status of marriage, which in Pirandellian terms we may describe as an ideal construct or “fiction.” While this notion informs also the film’s fundamental thematic layer, Camerini modifies parts of the plot and deftly applies the techniques of classical cinema to convey Pirandellian humour specifically through cinematic means, placing emphasis on the identity of the male protagonist, which here takes the form of a visually vibrant array of diverse identity constructs. At the same time, through a graceful coordination of camera work and mise-en-scène, Camerini communicates the Fascist ideal of Italy as a modern and affluent nation but also one that preserves its traditional values.