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This thesis discusses the development of design history in Britain from the 1970s to 2012, arguing that it is a clear example of a network of relationships, intersections of ideas, approaches and intellectual influences that are representative of the complexity of current academic practice. This study engages with discourses and debates concerning attempts to define academic recognition in a subject area that resists drawing boundaries and is by its very nature multidisciplinary. The period with which this study is concerned is characterised by considerable change in society, the approach to education and academic endeavour, and the consumption of histories. All of these changes have significance for the formation and development of design history, in addition to its contribution to academic practice and its impact beyond narrow scholarly circles. This thesis acknowledges that the overlapping and interweaving of threads of knowledge, methodology, approaches and paradigms is a feature of contemporary academic practice, and applies the concept of communities of practice to discussion of the multiple types of scholarship that have constituted design history. In doing this no claim is made for design history as a distinct academic discipline but rather it is discussed as a much broader academic network. Additionally, the thesis offers an evaluation of the role of this network, including the Design History Society as a distinct community of practice, in the context of developments in education, academic changes, museums and publishing. This leads to a consideration of the various arenas in which the products of design history are consumed thus demonstrating the importance and impact of the network outside academia.

This thesis looks at design practice as a method of investigating the relationship between design and identity in interwar Britain; in particular it considers design from the perspective of practice, not solely as the final object or the story of the maker. For it is in the process of making that the varied aspects of design as it is practiced are configured to create the greatest impact on everyday life. This research proposes that the quest to construct one’s identity, in particular a feminine identity, can be demonstrated by the making of goods and objects through the traditionally feminine practice of sewing and needlework, specifically those made at home. It argues that home sewing, as an understudied everyday practice, was intrinsically bound up with ideas of who women were, how they imagined themselves, and how their feminine identities were represented. Between the wars, home-sewing was an integral daily practice for middle-class women that left indelible memories of not only the items made, but of specific types of sewing and design practice, who it was made for and how it was used. It also explores these specific practices during a period of enormous change- culturally, technologically and politically – and particularly important for this study are the themes of femininity and domesticity, as well as the boundaries of private and public life in relation to modernity. Methodologically it focuses on sewing practices by utilizing mass media, specific objects and oral histories to elucidate this. This thesis considers the breadth and extent of home sewing as an everyday practice aligning individual narratives, original source material and theoretical analysis.

Our daily online conversations with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers weave an intricate network of interactions. From these networked discussions emerge themes and topics that transcend the scope of any individual conversation. In turn, these themes direct the discourse of the network and continue to ebb and flow as the interactions between individuals shape the topics themselves. This rich loop between interpersonal conversations and overarching topics is a wonderful example of a complex system: the themes of a discussion are more than just the sum of its parts. Some of the most socially relevant topics emerging from these online conversations are those pertaining to racial justice issues. Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial shootings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other online users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Together these contentious hashtags each shape clashing narratives that echo previous civil rights battles and illustrate ongoing racial tension between police officers and Black Americans. These narratives have taken place on a massive scale with millions of online posts and articles debating the sentiments of "black lives matter" and "all lives matter." Since no one person could possibly read everything written in this debate, comprehensively understanding these conversations and their underlying networks requires us to leverage tools from data science, machine learning, and natural language processing. In Chapter 2, we utilize methodology from network science to measure to what extent #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter are "slacktivist" movements, and the effect this has on the diversity of topics discussed within these hashtags. In Chapter 3, we precisely quantify the ways in which the discourse of #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter diverge through the application of information-theoretic techniques, validating our results at the topic level from Chapter 2. These entropy-based approaches provide the foundation for powerful automated analysis of textual data, and we explore more generally how they can be used to construct a human-in-the-loop topic model in Chapter 4. Our work demonstrates that there is rich potential for weaving together social science domain knowledge with computational tools in the study of language, networks, and social movements.

This article considers emergence in the context of systems of systems, examining the earlier proposed tri-layered architecture in some depth. In contrast with healthcare reform, a social media phenomenon, the emergence of topics in the Twitter user community, is shown not to satisfy a critical condition of the architecture. Nevertheless, detection of topic emergence is shown to offer insights into the design of Emergence Behavior Observers.

Intellectual property has gained more attention in recent decades because innovations have become one of the most important resources. This paper implements a probabilistic topic model using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to discover some of the key elements in computer patent, as the industry grew from 1990 to 2009. This paper proposes a new “shrinking model” based on NMF and also performs a close examination of some variations of the base model. Note that rather than studying the strategy to pick the optimized number of topics (“rank”), this paper is particularly interested in which factorization (including different kinds of initiation) methods are able to construct “topics” with the best quality given the predetermined rank. Performing NMF to the description text of patent features, we observe key topics emerge such as “platform” and “display” with strong presence across all years but we also see other short-lived significant topics such as “power” and “heat” which signify the saturation of the industry.

Samuel Bourne (1834-1912), one of the most prestigious Victorian English commercial photographers to have worked in British India, is best known for his photographs of the Himalayas. Bourne's work features in general studies of photography of the period; his representations of the Indian landscape have been the object of studies and several exhibitions. Bourne was in India initially from 1863 to 1870 thereby establishing his career as a professional photographer. Soon after his arrival he started a business with the experienced photographer Charles Shepherd. Within a few years, the firm of Bourne & Shepherd became recognised as being a directing influence over British-Indian photography. The photographs were taken either in studio or on location, and included individual and group portraits of both the British and Indians, topographical images in which peoples were incidental, as well as a range of representations of Indian life, customs and types. These images were informed by, and in turn contributed to, an expanding body of photographic practice that mixed, to varying degrees, authenticity and aesthetic style. Whilst Bourne's work was significant and influential in the representation of Indian peoples, no substantial study has been undertaken until now. The aim of this thesis is to redress this imbalance. The central focus highlights the specific character of the images portraying Indian people. This specificity was determined by a combination of technical and 'authorial' factors, by the audience to which they were addressed — ranging from the general public in Britain to the family circle of wealthy Indians — by commercial considerations, and by current and evolving notions of authority, race and gender. The first two chapters seek to frame Bourne's work by first examining the political and cultural context of photography in India during the mid-nineteenth century, then by focusing on the context of the photographer's own production. The following three chapters are concerned with the study of the photographs themselves regarding what they depict and the questions they raise such as gender, racial identities and imperialism. The last chapter is an attempt to assess the significance of these photographs by comparing them with the work of Lala Deen Dayal, and highlighting different perspectives on Bourne's work regarding British India and Western societies. Placed in the context of the development of photography as a medium of record and representation, this thesis aims to show that Bourne's work is a significant historical source for understanding British cultural presence in post-Mutiny India.

Working within the field of nineteenth century transatlantic history this thesis takes as its starting point British attempts to engage with the American Civil War. It emphasizes the historiographical oversights within the current scholarship on this topic which have tended to downplay the significance of antebellum British commentators in constructing an image of the United States for their readers which was highly regionalized, and which have failed to recognize the antebellum heritage of the tropes deployed during the Civil War to describe the Union and Confederacy. Drawing on the accounts of over fifty British pre-war commentators and supplemented by the political press, monthly magazines and personal correspondence, in addition to significant amounts of Civil War propaganda this thesis contends that the understanding of the British literate classes of the conflict was part of a continuum. It equally emphasizes that by measuring the reception of texts among the literate public it is possible to ascertain the levels of British understanding of different aspects of the American nation and its sections in this period. It aims to demonstrate that any attempt to understand the conflict in a British context must adequately reflect the long-standing image of the United States as being characterized by discrete regions with particular social, cultural, economic and political identities. At the same time, it makes clear that pre-war discussions of the United States as a nation did not preclude the use of sectional identities; in fact the tropes of the pre-war United States themselves came to be highly sectionalized during the conflict. This thesis, therefore, places the American Civil War in both a transatlantic framework and emphasizes the extensive chronological span of British engagements with American sectionalism in order to explain the occasionally counter-intuitive and often confusing attitude of the British towards the conflict.

This work investigates the development of an environmental consciousness and environmental activism in Britain, 1945-1975. The 1970s have been described as ‘the decade of the environment’ and was the period when the modern environmental movement emerged. In this thesis, the environmental movement is considered to be a broad network of individuals and pressure groups engaging in collective action with shared environmental beliefs. Much of the work on the movement has ignored or played down the importance of the post-war period on its development. This project challenges that, dealing less with the movement itself and more with the developments which led to its emergence: through analysing events like the great London smog of 1952 and the Torrey Canyon oil spill of 1967, as well as through television programmes, this thesis traces the post-war influences of the movement and the growth of environmental awareness. Environmental pressure groups form part of the movement and a number of them are studied here, such as the Newcastle-based group Save Our City from Environmental Mess and the London-based group Commitment, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the National Smoke Abatement Society. From analysing the resources of these groups and the political processes within which they appear (resource mobilisation theory and political process theory) a better understanding is made about their successes, failures and how they fed into a growing environmental awareness. Television programmes from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – notably natural history programmes such as Look, Zoo Quest, Doctor Who and Doomwatch – also helped an environmental consciousness develop. In marrying together these different issues, this work provides an original contribution to knowledge, and assesses some of the influences which led to the environmental movement emerging in 1970s Britain.

The diploma thesis "The Influence of Agency News from the Czech News Agency on the Content of Foreign News Sections in Periodicals" is focused on the thematic a geopolitical focus of the foreign news sections of Czech national dailies in comparison with the agency service of the Czech Newa Agency (CTK). The thesis strives to answer the question, how similar they are. At the same time, work with sources is compared. The theoretical basis for this thesis lies in the theorie of gatekeeping, news values and agenda setting. Two month-long periods were analyzed in the thesis, with emphasis on the comparability of the work with sources. March 2012, a so-called usual month with no expected events of big importance, was compared to the period between 20 October and 20 November 2012, when presidential elections went on in the United States of America. Three hypotheses were determined; of them, two were confirmed and one partially disproved. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)