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This research examines the relationship between the development of a portfolio of interactive digital techniques and compositions, and its impact on user experiences of time and place. It is designed to answer two research questions: (i) What are some effective methods and techniques for evoking an enhanced awareness of past time and place using interactive digital technologies (IDTs)? (ii) How can users play a role in improving the development and impact of interfaces made with IDTs? The principal creative and thematic element of the portfolio is the concept of the palimpsest, and its artistic potential to reveal visual and aural layers that lie behind the landscapes and soundscapes around us. This research thus contributes to an evolving cadre of creative interest in palimpsests, developing techniques and compositions in the context of testing, collating user experience feedback, and improving the ways in which IDTs enable an artistic exploration and realisation of hidden layers, both aural and visual, of the past of place. An iterative theory-composition-testing methodology is developed and applied to optimise techniques for enabling users to navigate multiple layers of content, as well as in finding methods that evoke an increased emotional connection with the past of place. This iterative realisation cycle comprises four stages - of content origination, pre-processing, mapping and user interaction. The user interaction stage of this cycle forms an integral element of the research methodology, involving the techniques being subjected to formalised user experience testing, both to assist with their further refinement and to assess their value in evoking an increased awareness of time and place. Online usability testing gathered 5,451 responses over three years of iterative cycles of composition development and refinement, with more detailed usability labs conducted involving eighteen participants. Usability lab response categories span efficiency, accuracy, recall and emotional response. The portfolio includes a variety of interactive techniques developed and improved during its testing and refinement. User experience feedback data plays an essential role in influencing the development and direction of the portfolio, helping refine techniques to evoke an enhanced awareness of the past of place by identifying those that worked most, and least, effectively for users. This includes an analysis of the role of synthetic and authentic content on user perception of various digital techniques and compositions. The contributions of this research include: • the composition portfolio and the associated IDT techniques originated, developed, tested and refined in its research and creation • the research methodology developed and applied, utilising iterative development of aspects of the portfolio informed by user feedback obtained both online and in usability labs • the findings from user experience testing, in particular the extent to which various visual and aural techniques help evoke a heightened sense of the past of place • an exploration of the extent to which the usability testing substantiates that user responses to the compositions have the potential to establish an evocative connection that communicates a sense close to that of Barthes' punctum (something that pierces the viewer) rather than solely that of the studium • the role of synthetic and authentic content on user perception and appreciation of the techniques and compositions • the emergence of an analytical framework with the potential for wider application to the development, analysis and design of IDT compositions

De nombreux édicules appelés Animitas, souvent modestes mais parfois monumentaux, se remarquent au Chili, dans les villes et le long des routes, souvent en position incongrue eu égard aux logiques rationalistes qui prévalent désormais dans la gestion des territoires. Ils commémorent des décès tragiques, naturels ou violents, intervenus sur l’espace public. Élevés sans autorisation, dépourvus de statut laïc ou religieux, ils n’en tiennent pas moins un rôle majeur dans la perception et les pratiques populaires de l’espace, qu’ils viennent sacraliser sous diverses formes, sans contrarier la vie quotidienne. Les rares tentatives pour les détruire ou les déplacer ont échoué ou se sont avérées d’authentiques traumatismes, tant les Animitas contribuent à l’appropriation des lieux et à l’instauration d’une relation avec l’invisible recherchée par une grande partie de la population. Dès lors, on est fondé à s’interroger sur la manière dont l’urbanisme peut traiter un tel phénomène. Peut-il intégrer ces édicules imprévus et les pratiques afférentes, en tirer des servitudes ou des directives ? Peut-il, dans un état laïc et dans un droit fondé sur la raison, contrevenir à la fonctionnalité pour instaurer une approche socio-spirituelle ? La recherche a d’abord consisté à inventorier largement les Animitas du Chili, puis à s’attarder spécialement sur celles de Valparaiso, qui ont fait l’objet d’un recensement exhaustif. Ce matériau a permis de construire des typologies qui ont été confrontées au contenu d’entretiens réalisés auprès de constructeurs d’Animitas et de pratiquants. Ce qui a conduit à préciser les conditions de leur édification, de leur élévation à certains statuts et de leur évolution. Cette partie du travail a mis en évidence le recyclage de certaines croyances et pratiques pré-hispaniques ; elle a également permis d’esquisser des catégories d’où ont été tirées quelques hypothèses sur la stabilité du phénomène et la nécessité de le prendre en considération dans la gestion des villes contemporaines et du territoire chiliens. / In Chile, Many aedicule called Animitas, often small but sometimes monumental, stand out in towns and along roads, often incongruous position with regard of the Rationalist logic that now prevail in the management of the territories. They commemorate tragic, natural or violent deaths occurred in public spaces. Built without permission, without secular or religious status, they did hold no less a major role in perception and popular practices of space, that they come to sanctify in various forms, without antagonizing the daily life. The few attempts to destroy them or move them have failed or proved authentic trauma, because the Animitas contribute to the ownership of the premises and the establishment of a relationship with the invisible sought by a large part of the population. Therefore, it is entitled to wonder about how town planning can treat such a phenomenon. Can integrate these unforeseen aedicule and related practices, to obtain easements or guidelines? Can, in a secular State and a right based on reason, contravening the functionality to create a socio-spiritually approach? Research has consisted firstly to be widely sampled the Animitas of Chile, then to focus specifically on those of Valparaiso, which were the subject of a comprehensive census. This material has allowed to build typologies that were confronted with the contents of interviews from manufacturers of Animitas and practitioners. What led to the conditions of their building, their elevation in some articles and their evolution. This part of the work highlighted the recycling of certain beliefs and pre-Hispanic practices; It also helped to outline categories were fired a few assumptions about the stability of the phenomenon and the need to take into account in the management of contemporary cities and the Chilean territory.

This dissertation explores a vital moment in the history of Japanese photography through a sustained monographic analysis of Kawada Kikuji’s 1965 photobook Chizu (The Map). Through this first full-length English-language study on Kawada’s early work, I argue that Chizu is a palimpsest, where Kawada mobilizes both the malleability and medium-specificity of photography to create a temporal atlas of postwar Japan. Chizu is not legible cartography, but instead is an archival universe where the atomic bomb and its victims, Japan’s past military aggressions, and national narratives of ruin and growth are interwoven in a state of temporal confusion and perpetual haunting. Chizu is also wedged chronologically and theoretically between two periods in the history of Japanese photography: the early 1950s hegemony of postwar “realism” and the avant-garde project of Provoke in the late 1960s and 1970s. My dissertation intersects a sociopolitical and psychological history of postwar Japan with visual and iconographic analysis, accompanied by comparative frameworks of contemporaneous publications that also dealt with the subjects of the atomic bomb, the Second World War, and the political unrest of the early 1960s. By structuring the dissertation around the three major thematic categories that I have identified within the visual language of the photobook—the “stains” of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the “memorial goods” of the Second World War, and the “signs of the present”—I dissect and contextualize the temporal layering and theoretical stakes at work within Chizu’s complex network of traces. Chizu’s enormous significance lies in its refusal to settle on a firm aesthetic or theoretical language of photography, preferring instead to alternatively mobilize and refute indexicality, to put forward a multisensory experience of the photograph, and to cast assumptions about photography’s legibility into deep suspicion. I argue that this is a singular gesture of the period, one born not from individual subjectivity as dogmatic artistic ideology, but instead from an existential state of questioning the foundations of photography's relationship to time, to index, and to legible narrative. Finally, I argue that Chizu stands as an important artistic illumination of the concept of a longue durée violence: In this case, a violence continuously and insidiously enacted on a body of citizenry well before and well after the zero hour event of the atomic bomb.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-179) and index.

Although a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, “translation” is not a straightforward explanation of this relationship. Furthermore, Swahili narrative poems on the prophets (manabii), mostly created at the end of the 19th century, have seldom been considered in textual relation to the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ literature or to the Qur’ān. Thus, important questions have not been asked: How did the Arabic stories of the prophets arrive on the Swahili coast? How did poets appropriate these stories and forge them into a new narrative discourse? In this paper, I focus on tafsiri as a form of appropriation and adaptation, applying Gérard Genette’s concept of “palimpsest” to analyse the textual relationship between Arabic Muslim and Swahili literary texts. This will allow me, through a close reading of these texts and consideration of both language and genre, to identify the palimpsestuous presence or rather copresence of Arabic source texts within Swahili works. Ultimately, this method offers a model for future philologies of world literature.

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This paper considers the symbiotic relationship between iconic visual representations of the Holocaust – specifically film and Holocaust sites – and processes of Holocaust memorialization. In conjunction, specific sites and objects related to the Holocaust have become icons. I suggest that specific Holocaust sites as well as Holocaust films can be perceived as elements of one and/or multiple translocal assemblage/s. My focus in this analysis is on the role of knowledge production and witness creation in Holocaust memorialization. It is not my intention to diminish the role of Holocaust memorialization; rather, I seek to look beyond representational aspects, and consider the processual relationships involved in the commemoration of the Holocaust in institutions, such as memorial sites and museums, as well as through elements of popular culture, such as films. Furthermore, I analyze the tangible and intangible layers of memories and meaning present in Holocaust films and sites through the lens of palimpsests. These conceptual frameworks allow me to consider how visual representations of the Holocaust, such as film, and site inform each other? How are specific representations of Holocaust sites and objects shaping and informing the commemoration of the Holocaust in the 21st century? / Graduate / 0326 / 0335 / 0751 / myriamt@uvic.ca