This research examines the natural habitat dioramas created by Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton, in doing so it affects a remembering of a sense of place where a diorama reflects in Mieke Bal's view a three-dimensionality that draws on architectural space; it then considers the three dimensional representation of the landscape within the diorama itself; the two-dimensional illusion of a trompe l'oeil landscape painting; and the exterior space occupied by the viewer. The Powell-Cotton natural habitat dioramas exist behind large glass screens their purpose follows an aesthetic relationship with the emergence of the natural habitat diorama and the ability to transfix perception through the re-interpretation of an idyll. The potential for this practice-based research was to explore the possibility of developing an aesthetic for sculpture and architectural space. However in focussing on the Powell-Cotton dioramas the notion of aesthetic attitude would lose ground due to their idiosyncratic, artificial, and extraordinary nature, it then prepared the basis of interpretation in establishing 'theatres of landscape' as an open concept. With landscape, a sense of place anticipates various positions and numerous delays; it recollects the cognitive knowledge brought to the prospect that involves aspects in, of and about landscape. Regarding the studio-based project, the diorama was placed between the real and the unreal, challenging Bal's rationale of the cognitive relationship of a diorama to the concept of a discursive space. Where both artist and viewer 'activates' this space with their presence, they bring their own recollection of landscape and by assigning landscape with memory the potentiality is where cognition becomes accentuated. Whereas the unknown and uncharted can refute reality, memory is dependent on what is known both formally and informally, it places the natural habitat diorama in a visual system that is both constructive and destructive. Therefore the research methodology examines the historical context of the diorama through a doctoral thesis by Karen Wonders and an analysis of Louis Daguerre's diorama by Richard Altick. Following Bal's analysis of the diorama, this created a dilemma - in what ways are the perceptions of the observer determined, and how are they undermined? Jonathan Crary and Giuliana Bruno considered the diorama's position in relation to film and film archaeology, which ultimately the diorama and natural habitat diorama could not compete with. In asking what has Powell-Cotton's museum to offer in the 21st century, this thesis examines the concept of a diorama, its objectives and correspondingly its failings. As the dioramas in the Powell-Cotton Museum were undocumented, these dioramas and their written, visual and architectural relationship to Louis Daguerre offer a contribution to knowledge concurrent with the relationship of this practice based research project. Whereupon the research diary forms the basis of a contribution to new knowledge in the construction of small and large-scale dioramas, sculpture and installations. By challenging Bal's analysis this research practice would investigate natural and projected light and the visual language of transparency, translucency and opacity in the representation of landscape and landscape as motif, and progressing to the structural implications of 2D and 3D work.

This thesis presents research carried out for the visualisation of surface anatomy data stored as large range images such as those produced by stereo-photogrammetric, and other triangulation-based capture devices. As part of this research, I explored the use of points as a rendering primitive as opposed to polygons, and the use of range images as the native data representation. Using points as a display primitive as opposed to polygons required the creation of a pipeline that solved problems associated with point-based rendering. The problems inves tigated were scattered-data interpolation (a common problem with point-based rendering), multi-view rendering, multi-resolution representations, anti-aliasing, and hidden-point re- moval. In addition, an efficient real-time implementation on the GPU was carried out.

Situated at the intersection of Translation Studies, Sociolinguistics and Film Studies, this thesis provides an analysis of the subtitling into French of a corpus of films portraying speakers of African American Vernacular English (henceforth AAVE). By analysing the French subtitles, the thesis focuses on the possibility of using non-standard forms in the target language, on their potential impact on the reception of a film, and on the theoretical underpinnings of juxtaposing two linguistic varieties on screen. Chapter One examines the peculiar nature of interlingual subtitles in the polysemiotic context of films and the vulnerability of this form of translation. Chapter Two provides a description of the main linguistic and interactional features of AAVE, whilst Chapter Three analyses the way AAVE is represented in films, and studies how naturally occurring language is different from language used in films for the purpose of dialogue. Chapter Four provides an analysis of the subtitles of the films under study, and pays particular attention to how linguistic variation is conveyed – or not – in the subtitles. Chapter Five examines the use of verlan in French subtitles and its wider implications: through the juxtaposition of verlan and AAVE on screen, a cultural hybrid is created, and we investigate this hybridity in the light of Venuti’s concepts of domestication and foreignisation.

This thesis accompanies a practice as research doctoral project that investigates the perceptual mechanisms and conceptions of land as a site of constant change. It utilises photographic practice as a form of visual communication. The aim is to examine the roles of movement and memory in the perceptual experiences of the environment through a phenomenological framework that involves the consideration of the concepts of place and space from a temporal perspective. The principal theme is how the moving and changing environment can be interpreted through the stasis of photography and what this implies about the individual’s relationship to it. The research methodology is a Rhizomatic multi‐site and multi‐process approach, utilising various methods and investigating site types appropriately as an interwoven practice. This has resulted in five separate bodies of work that deal with different forms of movement. The work employs close range photogrammetry techniques liberated from the empirical traditions of archaeological photography and time‐lapse to investigate the human‐scaled aerial view and visually interpret embodiment in the environment. An exhibition, titled Continuum derived from this practice was also shown at Avenue Gallery, Northampton University, UK, from 27th October 2014 ‐ 7th November 2014. A catalogue of works, titled In Flux; Land, Photography and Temporality accompanies this thesis as a PDF on the disc provided (appendix # 1). The research concludes that a consideration of time and space as durational and flowing can be interpreted through the stasis of photography. Through this the changing nature of the environment can be investigated. This is achieved by extending the duration of photographic processes and making them evident in the resulting works. It is also enhanced through curatorial sequencing in a body of work that mimics environmental temporal experience as perceived by the mobile individual.

This thesis tackles a problem of recovering a high resolution image from a single compressed frame. A new image-prior that is devised based on Pearson type VII density is integrated with a Markov Random Field model which has desirable robustness properties. A fully automated hyper-parameter estimation procedure for this approach is developed, which makes it advantageous in comparison with alternatives. Although this recovery algorithm is very simple to implement, it achieves statistically significant improvements over previous results in under-determined problem settings, and it is able to recover images that contain texture. This advancement opens up the opportunities for several potential extensions, of which we pursue two: (i) Most of previous work does not consider any specific extra information to recover the signal. Thus, this thesis exploits the similarity between the signal of interest and a consecutive motionless frame to address this problem. Additional information of similarity that is available is incorporated into a probabilistic image-prior based on the Pearson type VII Markov Random Field model. Results on both synthetic and real data of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both compressed setting and classical super-resolution experiments. (ii) This thesis also presents a multi-task approach for signal recovery by sharing higher-level hyperparameters which do not relate directly to the actual content of the signals of interest but only to their statistical characteristics. Our approach leads to a very simple model and algorithm that can be used to simultaneously recover multiple

This thesis analyses the role of clinical photography in late nineteenth-century Glasgow. The photographs for this study occur in five interrelated contexts. Firstly I examine the clinical uses of popularised techniques such as the stereograph, carte-de-visite and the cabinet card. Secondly, I shall discuss a selection of clinical photographs that featured in the context of the Glasgow Medical Journal from the late 1870s onwards. The first published images were the work of professional studio photographers. Over the following two decades, however, one sees an increase in the number of photographs taken by medical men. These published photographs circulated in a number of contexts including M.D. theses, medical society lectures and individuals' collections. Thirdly, clinical photographs began to feature in the context of the surgical ward journals and pathology reports of the Glasgow Western Infirmary and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow from the mid-1880s onwards. These photographs were often the work of House Surgeons and Resident Assistants. During the early 1880s while surgeon to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Sir William Macewen (1848-1924) began to take clinical photographs for inclusion in his Private Journals, our fourth context. Macewen began to mount duplicate prints of some of these cases on to boards, and write brief case notes on the verso. This formed the basis of a collection of clinical photographs, which he used in surgical demonstration classes at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary Medical School. The fifth, and final, part of this study examines Macewen's collection of clinical photographs, which expanded over the next thirty years or so, to contain over eight hundred items. In 1892 Macewen moved from the Glasgow Royal Infirmary to become Regius Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Surgeon to the Glasgow Western Infirmary. Macewen used his collection of clinical photographs in conjunction with plaster casts, specimens and lanternslides in surgical demonstration classes held at the University of Glasgow. Many visual sources in the history of medicine are fragmentary by their very nature, disconnected from their origins and contexts of use. In this thesis I take an interdisciplinary and contextualised approach to the study of late nineteenth-century clinical photography. The aim is to understand and interpret photographs within their local contexts of production, circulation and use. Photographs can have intimate connections with other forms of images, texts and artefacts. These inter-relationships have important implications for understanding the role of clinical photography within late nineteenth-century Glasgow medicine. Moreover, I shall explore alternative ways of illustrating the results of this research through means of visual expression.

This thesis addresses how the photographic image contributed to the formation of the public and private identities of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. I propose that Bell and Grant primarily conceptualised photography as a medium of movement and it is this element that defines photographic images of them and their circle. Further, I suggest this definitive photographic element of their work situates them and the Bloomsbury Group in the development of English modernism in a new way. Chapter One explores the presence of movement in travel and tourism related photographic images from Bell and Grant's own generation and previous generations in their families. It compares images of alpine adventures, colonial life and first journeys to Europe alongside sections of personal correspondence by both generations offering a ‘verbal sketch' of the sights and sounds of the travel experience. Chapter Two considers how the photographic reproduction informs the development of public identity through an analysis of how Bell, Grant, Clive Bell and Julia Margaret Cameron used photographic images in the public arena and how contemporary media used photographs in assessments of their work. Chapter Three focuses on the nature of private physical and psychological photographic exchanges among both Julia Margaret Cameron's circle and the Bloomsbury Group and looks at paintings by Bell and Grant that were inspired by personal and private photographs in their possession. Chapter Four examines how the visual expression of monumentality and movement in photographs taken by Bell, Grant and their predecessors demonstrates a clear interest in making connections with past artistic and photographic traditions. The culmination of this discussion identifies defining features of the Bloomsbury photograph as created by Vanessa Bell and shows how it incorporates movement as a primary element of her photographic aesthetic.

This thesis examines aspects of photography and film in the selected work of Michael Ondaatje, specifically analysing their implementation and function within The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Running In The Family, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. Ondaatje's two films, Sons of Captain Poetry and The Clinton Special, as well as Anthony Minghella's film adaptation of The English Patient, are also examined. My critical approach is eclectic and driven by the demands of individual texts, focusing on some of the ways in which photography and film affect and help define the formal and thematic components of the prose works. My approach addresses photographic perspective and reader response with specific reference to the ontological nature of photographic stillness, as well as various components of filmic writing and the challenges of prose to screen transfer in cinematic adaptation. This study reveals how an exploration of the photographic and filmic aspects of the texts provides new insights into the way Ondaatje's work promotes indeterminacy of meaning and a blurring of the boundaries between genres.

This examination of photography in Thatcher's Britain explores the abject photographic responses to the discursive construction of ‘sick Britain' promoted by the Conservative Party during the years of crisis from the late 1970s onwards. Through close visual analyses of photojournalist, press, and social documentary photographs, this Ph.D. examines the visual responses to the Government's advocation of a ‘healthy' society and its programme of social and economic ‘waste-saving'. Drawing Imogen Tyler's interpretation of ‘social abjection' (the discursive mediation of subjects through exclusionary modes of ‘revolting aesthetics') into the visual field, this Ph.D explores photography's implication in bolstering the abject and exclusionary discourses of the era. Exploring the contexts in which photographs were created, utilised and disseminated to visually convey ‘waste' as an expression of social abjection, this Ph.D exposes how the Right's successful establishment of a neoliberal political economy was supported by an accelerated use and deployment of revolting photographic aesthetics. My substantial contribution to knowledge is in tracking the crises of Thatcher's Britain through reference to an ‘abject structure of feeling' in British photography by highlighting a photographic counter-narrative that emerged in response to the prevailing discourse of social sickness. By analysing the development and reframing the photographic languages of British documentary photographers such as Chris Killip, Tish Murtha, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington, I demonstrate how such photography was explicitly engaged in affirmative forms of social abjection and ‘grotesque realism'. This Ph.D examines how this renewed form of documentary embodied an insurgent photographic visual language which served to undercut the encompassing discourses of exclusionary social abjection so pervasive at the time.

The magnetization damping properties of square permalloy elements were characterized. These 20 nm-thick permalloy squares were deposited by the electron beam evaporation. Time resolved magneto-optic Kerr effect microscopy (TR-MOKE) was used to measure the magnetization evolution in the sample. By curve fitting in Matlab, I obtained the value of damping constant that is consistent with the reference paper. A Landau confi guration in the square permalloy sample leads to the different trends of the damping constant with external bias field. The damping constant in the bottom domain is found to decrease with increasing bias field while the damping constant in the top domain has been saturated into the minimum value. The decreasing tendency of magnetization precession frequencies is consistent with the Kittel equation modi fied with an anisotropic energy term. Additionally, FePt thin films and patterned CoFeB disks were investigated but neither yielded conclusive dynamic data. / Graduate / 0611 / 0607 / 0752 / leizhang.summer@gmail.com