Updatism: Pandemic and Historicities in the Never-Ending 2020

In this essay we demonstrate that the present and the future are also history and must be dimensions of historiography. For that, we return to episodes from our book Alamanac of COVID-19 and some of our readings of key moments of this year in order to reflect on what we have called updatist historicity. In some moments we use the retrospective as a tool. In others we choose to maintain the anachronistic effect of certain passages in order to highlight the contingent aspect of all representation of time. We divided the text into three main parts. The first presents the most recent shifts in the hypothesis about an updatist historicity. In the second, we gathered some episodes from 2020 as a way to elucidate what we are calling updatism in its relations with politics and history, and finally we point out preliminary paths for action with counter-updatist effects.

Le Véloce-Sport et l’invention de la culture cycliste

FR. Publié entre 1885 et 1897, Le Véloce-Sport de Bordeaux faisait figure de chef de proue parmi les revues vélocipédiques françaises de la fin du XIXe siècle. En tant que la voix de l’Union Vélocipédique Française (UVF), cet hebdomadaire en devint par la suite son organe national officiel. Alors que certaines analyses de l’histoire du sport en France se sont penchées sur ce rapport avec l’UVF pour mieux comprendre l’évolution de cette dernière, on a plutôt négligé l’analyse des pratiques journalistiques chez Le Véloce-Sport. Une lecture plus attentive de ce dernier offre le spectacle d’une culture sportive en voie de développement et illustre donc le rôle fondamental du journalisme sportif, ainsi que celui de ses lecteurs, dans la construction de cette culture. Notre analyse se portera sur la rubrique « À travers route » et sur les articles publiés sous celle-ci entre 1885 et 1889. À la différence de la plupart d’autres rubriques, « À travers route » encourage le lecteur-cycliste de devenir cycliste-écrivain en lui invitant de raconter ses périples à vélo ; elle permet donc de mieux comprendre la contribution du cycliste-écrivain à la conceptualisation et à la représentation de la vélocipédie ainsi qu’à une culture cycliste nationale en voie de développement. Notre analyse se portera sur deux aspects de ce phénomène qu’on trouve dans les récits des écrivains-cyclistes : la représentation du temps et de l’espace traversés à vélo et l’élaboration du personnage qui les traverse (le véloceman). Écrire le cyclisme devient ainsi une façon d’afficher son appartenance à cette culture cycliste émergeante en France de l’époque tout en contribuant à sa construction et à son élaboration. *** EN. Published between 1885 and 1897, the Bordeaux-based Le Véloce-Sport was a leading figure amongst French cycling reviews of the late nineteenth century. As the voice of the Union Vélocipédique Française (UVF), this weekly subsequently became its official national publication. While some sport historians have highlighted its relationship with the UVF in order to better understand the latter’s development, scholars have largely failed to analyse the journalistic practices of Le Véloce-Sport itself. A closer reading of the latter offers the spectacle of a developing sports culture and therefore illustrates the fundamental role of sports journalism, as well as the part played by its readers, in the construction of this culture. This study will focus on one section from the review (« À travers route » [Along the road]) and the articles published in it between 1885 and 1889. Unlike most other sections of Le Véloce-Sport, « À travers route » encourages the cyclist-reader to become a cyclist-writer by inviting the latter to recount his cycling adventures. It thus allows us to better understand the contribution of a broad range of cycling-writers to the conceptualisation and representation of cycling and to a developing national cycling culture. Our analysis will focus on two aspects of this phenomenon through the examination of the submissions by the readers of Le Véloce-Sport: the representation of time and space traversed whilst cycling and the elaboration of the character who traverses these (the véloceman). Writing about cycling thus becomes a means of signalling one’s adherence to the emerging cycling culture of the time whilst helping to build and elaborate it. *** PT. Publicada entre 1885 e 1897, Le Véloce-Sport de Bordeaux impôs-se como a principal revista velocipédica francesa do final do século XIX. Enquanto voz da União Velocipédica Francesa (UVF), o hebdomadário viria a se tornar, mais tarde, seu órgão nacional oficial. Enquanto alguns estudos da história do esporte na França se concentraram nessa relação com a UVF para apreender sua evolução, a análise das próprias práticas jornalísticas na Le Véloce-Sport tem sido negligenciada. Uma leitura mais atenta dessa revista revela o espetáculo de uma cultura esportiva em desenvolvimento, ilustrando o papel fundamental do jornalismo esportivo, e de seus leitores, na construção dessa cultura. Analisamos aqui a coluna “À travers route” e os artigos nela publicados entre 1885 e 1889. Ao contrário da maioria das outras colunas, “À travers route” incentiva o leitor-ciclista a se tornar um ciclista-escritor, convidando-o a contar suas aventuras de bicicleta, proporcionando uma melhor compreensão da contribuição do ciclista-escritor para a conceituação e representação da velocipédica e para uma cultura ciclística francesa em desenvolvimento. Nossa análise foca mais especificamente em dois aspectos desse fenômeno nas narrativas dos escritores-escritores: a representação do tempo e do espaço percorridos de bicicleta; e a elaboração do personagem que os atravessa (o véloceman ou “homem-velocidade”). Escrever sobre ciclismo torna-se assim uma forma de assumir e de manifestar seu pertencimento à cultura do ciclismo emergente na França da época, ao mesmo tempo em que contribui para sua construção e seu desenvolvimento. ***

The Topographic Representation of Time and its Link With Temporal Context and Perception

Neuronal tuning and topography are mechanisms widely used in the brain to represent sensory information and also abstract features like time. In humans, temporal topography has been shown in a wide circuit of brain regions. However, it is unclear whether chronotopic maps are specific to vision, whether they map time in an absolute or relative fashion, to what extent they reflect objective or subjective time and whether they are influenced by temporal context. Here we asked human participants to reproduce the durations of sounds in two, partially overlapping, temporal contexts while we record high-spatial resolution fMRI. Both model-based and data driven analyses show the presence of auditory chronomaps in the auditory parabelt, intraparietal sulcus, and in supplementary motor area. Most importantly, when the same physical duration is presented in different temporal contexts, and thus perceived differently, different neuronal units respond to it. Those units are also spatially shifted according to the relative position of the perceived duration within each context. Finally, the pattern of activity is more similar within rather than across contexts suggesting their pivotal role in shaping the maps. These results highlight two important properties of chronomaps: their flexibility of representation and their dependency on the context.

Time and Action Co-Training in Reinforcement Learning Agents

In formation control, a robot (or an agent) learns to align itself in a particular spatial alignment. However, in a few scenarios, it is also vital to learn temporal alignment along with spatial alignment. An effective control system encompasses flexibility, precision, and timeliness. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms excel at learning to select an action given a state. However, executing an optimal action at an appropriate time remains challenging. Building a reinforcement learning agent which can learn an optimal time to act along with an optimal action can address this challenge. Neural networks in which timing relies on dynamic changes in the activity of population neurons have been shown to be a more effective representation of time. In this work, we trained a reinforcement learning agent to create its representation of time using a neural network with a population of recurrently connected nonlinear firing rate neurons. Trained using a reward-based recursive least square algorithm, the agent learned to produce a neural trajectory that peaks at the “time-to-act”; thus, it learns “when” to act. A few control system applications also require the agent to temporally scale its action. We trained the agent so that it could temporally scale its action for different speed inputs. Furthermore, given one state, the agent could learn to plan multiple future actions, that is, multiple times to act without needing to observe a new state.

Eye tracking based dyslexia detection using a holistic approach

A new detection method for cognitive impairments is presented utilizing an eye tracking signals in a text reading test. This research enhances published articles that extract combination of various features. It does so by processing entire eye-tracking records either in time or frequency whereas applying only basic signal pre-processing. Such signals were classified as a whole by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that hierarchically extract substantial features scatter either in time or frequency and nonlinearly binds them using machine learning to minimize a detection error. In the experiments we used a 100 fold cross validation and a dataset containing signals of 185 subjects (88 subjects with low risk and 97 subjects with high risk of dyslexia). In a series of experiments it was found that magnitude spectrum based representation of time interpolated eye-tracking signals recorded the best results, i.e. an average accuracy of 96.6% was reached in comparison to 95.6% that is the best published result on the same database. These findings suggest that a holistic approach involving small but complex enough CNNs applied to properly pre-process and expressed signals provides even better results than a combination of meticulously selected well-known features.

The Topographic Representation of Time and its Link with Temporal Context and Perception

Neuronal tuning and topography are mechanisms widely used in the brain to represent not only sensory information but also abstract features like numerosity and time. In humans, temporal topography has been shown recently in a wide circuit of brain regions, from lateral occipital to inferior parietal and premotor regions. However, it remains unclear whether chronotopic maps are specific to vision, whether they map time in an absolute or relative fashion, and to what extent they reflect objective or subjective, perceived time and whether they are influenced by temporal context. Here we asked human participants to reproduce the durations of sounds in two, partially overlapping, temporal contexts while we recorded high-spatial resolution fMRI. Both model-based and data driven analysis approaches show the presence of auditory chronomaps in the auditory parabelt, intraparietal sulcus, and in the supplementary motor area (SMA). Most importantly, when the same physical duration is presented in different temporal contexts, and thus perceived differently, different neuronal units respond to it. Those units were also spatially shifted on the cortical surface according to the relative position of the perceived duration within each context. Finally, voxels did not change their preferences across contexts and their pattern of activity was more similar within rather than across them, suggesting a pivotal role of the context in shaping the maps. These results highlight two important properties of human chronomaps: their flexibility of representation due to perception and their dependency on temporal context.

Exploring narrative linearity between Twitter and the news: Echoes of the Arab Spring in Brazil

This article explores the use of narrative theory as an analytical framework to investigate the extent to which popular hashtags and the news can develop into intersecting stories. It juxtaposes the case of hashtag-based reports seen during the Arab Spring to understand the coverage of notorious political episodes in Brazil. Namely, the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. Here, narrative linearity emerges as a tool to observe the borrowing of Twitter hashtags in several journalistic pieces. It is contended that the linearity of authorship, narration and representation of time appears as a satisfactory pathway to trace the development of hashtags into popular news stories. Results suggested that hashtags can significantly follow narratives and agendas in journalism but differing from their original social media context.