Typified rhetorical situations are often a result of normalized ideologies within cultures; however, they also have the capability to produce new ideology. Within these discursive sites, identities are constructed among these normalized social acts. More importantly, these identities are constructed across many layers, not limited to one social act, but many that overlap and influence each other. In this paper, I focus on the identities that are constructed in marginalized spaces within sites of interacting discourse. Focusing on the rhetoric of abjection posited by Julia Kristeva, along with McKenzie Wark’s exploration of gamespace, a liminal theoretical space that encompasses the sites of analysis and ideology formation from the perspective of gamers, I analyze disruptions of normalized social practices in the gaming genre in order to implement the use of abjection as a method of understanding how sites of difference produce meaning for minoritarian subjects.

Prominent within various scientific journals, news media outlets, and online publications are conversations surrounding what is dubbed “climate anxiety.” This wide-stemmed social unrest is caused, in large part, by the unrelenting, consistent data from the scientific community reporting rising sea levels, species extinction, and “record-breaking” heatwaves as well as an increasing average of global temperatures, that seem to top the next every year for the past decade. However, an underlying thread to these reports remains largely consistent. Unless serious regard is given to our natural surroundings and how we have come to interact within it, regions of the Earth considered desirable for human life will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable to humans and other species. When addressed so simply and plainly, it seems that the response to such life-altering implications ought to be simple: do whatever it takes to ensure that a diversity of life, including that of humankind, can continue on the planet Earth. Voices of the scientific community have decreed that a driving force behind the lackadaisical approach to deterring such dire climatological circumstances, is the inability to grasp the immense scope of climate change issues. This thesis, then, aims at proposing a directive to correct this problematic mentality, and a specific generation to combat this nature. Using the lens of ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment, combined with cutting-edge theoretical findings in the field, I will focus on the literary portrayal of climate change within young-adult dystopian fiction. While regarding the scholarship on the recent increase of YA fiction that takes a critical approach to human ethics and the portrayal of the demise of the natural environment in those texts, I will examine how this trend responds to my ideas of young-adult fiction functioning within Ecocriticism. Moreover, you will see a pattern charting how literature can revolutionize and evolve the mind frame of human ethics on a planetary scale, starting with the young adult readers. Further, I will highlight how these ideologies could and ought to be incorporated into a composition classroom. Composition already has a strong history of grounding itself in the notion of identity, and how contingent factors (social, political, economic, ecological, etc.) are integrated into the construction of that identity. This thesis poses that if we can introduce a sense of how those factors affect our ability to act in the natural world and potential consequences of these actions by way of pop culture outlets like YA Climate Fiction, readers can begin to re-shape our identities and actions, individually and collectively, towards Ecocritical ethics and awareness.

This thesis examines two works from different mediums, the short story “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien and the video game Battlefield 1, to compare how each constructs empathy using virtual reality and mimetic communication between audience and the work. The thesis draws from both digital media studies and affect theory to construct a nuanced view of how empathy functions in the works. The body responds to empathy physically. As social creatures, humans feel the emotions of those around them, even if those around them are virtually constructed. In other words, the thesis will explore how video games have been used historically and what their effects are on gamers, especially gamers’ bodies and emotional responses to the constructed virtual reality. This work aims to show how the lines of fiction and reality become blurred to establish empathy within a narrative and virtual reality space.

Den här studien undersöker hur förutsättningar för lärande förändras genom digital humanities.Utgångspunkt för lärande hämtas ur designteoretiskt multimodalt perspektiv. Teoretiskutgångspunkt för att uppnå förståelse inom digital humanities är hermeneutisk teori. Studien hargenomförts med den öppna metoden litteraturanalys och analyserar antologin DigitalHumanities Pedagogy: Principles, Practices, Politics. Studien belyser digital humanities utifrånolika kunskapsskapande aktiviteter inom lärande och hur lärande kan främjas genom digitalaverktyg och inlärningsmiljöer. Studien belyser exempel på hur digital humanities ställer nyakrav på undervisning och den lärande samt att digitala öppna universitet med fri tillgång tillmaterial och undervisning, förändrar förutsättningarna för institutioner. / New digital open universitites with free access to knowledge change the conditions of how learning occurs. This is a study into the new conditions of learning through the digital humanities. A designtheoretical multimodal perspective as well as hermeneutic thoery have been deployed to problematize the digital humanities. The study has been performed with the open method of literature analyses and the anthology Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Principles, Practices, Politics has been the object of study. The study questions the digital humanities from knowledge creating activities within learning and, at the same time, how learning may benefit from interacting with the digital. The study concludes what the effects of the digital humanities may be on theories of learning, on the student and on the institutions

In 2K Games’ Bioshock (2007) the player, as the protagonist Jack, is thrown into a dystopian, futuristic alternate history of America. Rapture is an underwater city saturated in music: popular songs from the mid twentieth century; classical-style soundtrack pieces composed by Garry Schyman; characters humming, singing, whistling or playing instruments; musical vending machines; and even the sounds of whales and other creatures all participate in forming a textured soundscape. The songs from the 1930s - 50s used throughout Bioshock recall a real-world cultural environment—a popular music culture that is both comfortably recognizable yet strangely unfamiliar. They occur within the game world and are heard by the player and game characters, and thus the songs are diegetic or “screen music.” In Bioshock, such music is an explicit component of narrative production, game environment creation, and player immersion. Significantly, diegetic music participates in the construction of narrative through a constant interplay or negotiation with the video game’s other elements—visual, textual, ludic—and ultimately functions as a distinct discourse able to mediate for Jack/the player between contesting factors, via established conventional codes of musical, cultural, film, and now video game signification. Bioshock’s use of music initiates a pre-game discourse during installation and prior to every game session in the disc-loading scenes, and this musical discourse is continued throughout the narrative. The story’s opening and descent into Rapture further establishes and “naturalizes” the presence of diegetic music as part of the story being told, and as a vital component of the audio-visual environment enhances player immersion. At the same time, these opening instances and subsequent occurrences of diegetic music at significant points in the story demonstrate that music’s culturally encoded emotive potential produces ironic and poignant effects, while its lyrical intertextuality generates narratological and ludic commentary in various song/scene pairings.

This study of James Joyce's transmodal techniques explores, first, Joyce's implementation of non-language based media into his works and, second, how digital technologies might assist in identifying and studying these implementations. The first chapter introduces the technique of re-rendering, the artistic practice of drawing out certain characteristics of one medium and, by then depicting those characteristics in a new medium, calling attention to both media and their limitations and potentials. Re-rendering can be content-based or form-based. Joyce employs content-based re-rendering when he alludes to a piece of art in another medium and form-based re-rendering when he superimposes the form of another medium onto his text. The second chapter explores Dubliners as a panoramic catalog of the various aspects involved in re-rendering media. The collection of stories, or the fragmented novel, shows synaesthetic characters, characters engaged in repetition and revision, and characters translating art across media by superimposing the forms, materials, and conventions of one medium onto another. Dubliners culminates in the use of coda, a musical structure that commonly finalizes a multi-movement work. The third chapter analyzes of A Portrait of the artist as a young man, focusing on its protagonist who exhibits synaesthetic qualities and a penchant for repeating phrases. With each repetition he also revises, a practice that foreshadows the form-based re-rendering Joyce employs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The fourth chapter explores the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. In this episode, Joyce isolates the structure of the musical medium and transfers it to a literary medium. This technique shows his advanced exploration of the effects of one artistic medium on another and exemplifies his innovative technique of re-rendering art forms. Finally, the fifth chapter explores how we might use digital technologies to visualize Joyce's techniques of re-rendering. Based on these visualizations, we might identify further connections Joyce makes across his works. / text

I argue that current descriptions of the ways that language and computer code effect change (are “performative”) oversimplify the effects that utterances made in and through virtual spaces have on the real world. Building on J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin’s notion of performative language, I develop the theory of cyber-performativity. Though Katherine Hayles argues that “code” is more strongly performative than the utterances Austin focused on, Hayles’ analysis is founded on her problematic distinction between the logical computational worldview and the slippery natural-languages worldview. Cyber-performative theory builds on Hayles’ argument by showing that computational processes are as uncertain as natural languages: like human languages, “code” might always signify more and other than is intended. I argue that the social, economic, and political status of language changes as utterances made in virtual worlds such as Second Life simultaneously effect change in both real and virtual spaces.

Discovering relevant knowledge out of unstructured text in not a trivial task. Search engines relying on full-text indexing of content reach their limits when confronted to poor quality, ambiguity, or multiple languages. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed by information extraction and related natural language processing techniques, but it still falls short of adequate knowledge representation. In this thesis, we defend a generic approach striving to be as language-independent, domain-independent, and content-independent as possible. To reach this goal, we offer to disambiguate terms with their corresponding identifiers in Linked Data knowledge bases, paving the way for full-scale semantic enrichment of textual content. The added value of our approach is illustrated with a comprehensive case study based on a trilingual historical archive, addressing constraints of data quality, multilingualism, and language evolution. A proof-of-concept implementation is also proposed in the form of a Multilingual Entity/Resource Combiner & Knowledge eXtractor (MERCKX), demonstrating to a certain extent the general applicability of our methodology to any language, domain, and type of content. / Découvrir de nouveaux savoirs dans du texte non-structuré n'est pas une tâche aisée. Les moteurs de recherche basés sur l'indexation complète des contenus montrent leur limites quand ils se voient confrontés à des textes de mauvaise qualité, ambigus et/ou multilingues. L'extraction d'information et d'autres techniques issues du traitement automatique des langues permettent de répondre partiellement à cette problématique, mais sans pour autant atteindre l'idéal d'une représentation adéquate de la connaissance. Dans cette thèse, nous défendons une approche générique qui se veut la plus indépendante possible des langues, domaines et types de contenus traités. Pour ce faire, nous proposons de désambiguïser les termes à l'aide d'identifiants issus de bases de connaissances du Web des données, facilitant ainsi l'enrichissement sémantique des contenus. La valeur ajoutée de cette approche est illustrée par une étude de cas basée sur une archive historique trilingue, en mettant un accent particulier sur les contraintes de qualité, de multilinguisme et d'évolution dans le temps. Un prototype d'outil est également développé sous le nom de Multilingual Entity/Resource Combiner & Knowledge eXtractor (MERCKX), démontrant ainsi le caractère généralisable de notre approche, dans un certaine mesure, à n'importe quelle langue, domaine ou type de contenu. / Doctorat en Information et communication / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In certain Germanic languages, there is a group of verbs called preterite-present verbs that are often viewed as irregular, but in fact behave very predictably. They exhibit a morphological phenomenon called deponency, often in conjunction with another morphological phenomenon called heteroclisis. I examine the preterite-present verbs of three different languages: Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, and Modern German. Initially, I approach them from a historical perspective and then seek to reconcile their morphology with the modern perspective. A criteria is established for a canonical preterite-present verb, and then using a lexical programming language called DATR, I create code that generates the appropriate paradigms while also illustrating the morphological relationships between verb tenses and inflection classes, among other things. DATR is a programming language used specifically for language models.

Letting the Body Lead is an exhibition and workshop series that focuses on embodiment in social context and invites attendees to engage with the work, both as viewers and active participants. Embodiment in social context refers to the understanding of lived experiences in the body. Within my creative practice, I explore the body's creativity, knowledge, and agency while bridging and brining together the fields of fine arts, movement-based and socially just art making. I believe in the transformative potential of how movement and contemplative practices can support a more liberated way of being both within an individual and, by extension, within broader communities and social movements.