Notre recherche consiste à comprendre quels sont les effets des jeux vidéo de simulation d’animaux virtuels sur les conceptions du vivant, en particulier sur la distinction entre ce qui est vivant et ce qui ne l’est pas. Pour ce faire, il s’agit d’identifier les différences conceptuelles entre les populations de joueurs et de non-joueurs aux jeux vidéo de simulation d’animaux virtuels. Tout d'abord, nous avons fait une enquête exploratoire identifiant les pratiques vidéo ludiques des enfants. Cette enquête a permis de sélectionner les deux jeux les plus utilisés par les enfants de cet âge : Talking TOM et POU. Notre étude porte plus particulièrement sur ces deux jeux. Un questionnaire a été diffusé au Liban et en France pour étudier la façon dont les joueurs et les non-joueurs à ces deux jeux conçoivent le vivant. Au total 916 enfants âgés de 9 à 12 ans ont rempli ce questionnaire. Au Liban, le questionnaire a été suivi de 21 entretiens avec des élèves. Les questionnaires ont été traités statistiquement afin de faire émerger les différences et les similitudes entre les populations de joueurs et de non-joueurs en France et au Liban. Les entretiens ont été analysés par une analyse thématique de contenu suivie par une analyse lexicale et ont permis une exploitation plus qualitative des résultats. Les résultats montrent que les entretiens et les questionnaires convergent fortement vers l’hypothèse d’une influence des jeux sur la construction de la notion de vie chez les joueurs des deux pays. En effet, au Liban et en France les utilisateurs de TOM et POU ont des conceptions significativement plus anthropomorphiques, animistes et anthropocentriques que ceux qui n’y jouent pas. / Our research is to understand the effects of video games simulating virtual animals on the concepts of life, especially the distinction between what is alive and what is not. To do this, it is a question of identifying the conceptual differences between the populations of players and non-players in virtual animal simulation video games. First, we did an exploratory survey identifying children's playful video practices. This survey allowed selecting the two most used games by children of this age: Talking TOM and POU. Our study focuses on these two games. A questionnaire has been distributed in Lebanon and France to study how players and non-players in TOM and / or POU design the living. A total of 916 children aged 9 to 12 completed this questionnaire. In Lebanon, 21 interviews with students followed the questionnaire. The questionnaires were statistically analyzed to reveal the differences and similarities between the populations of players and non-players in France and Lebanon. The interviews had been analyzed by a thematic analysis of content followed by a lexical analysis and allowed a qualitative exploitation of the results. The results show that interviews and questionnaires strongly converge on the hypothesis of an influence of games on the construction of the notion of life among players of both countries. Indeed, in Lebanon and France users of TOM and POU have significantly more anthropomorphic, animistic and anthropocentric conceptions than those who do not play it.

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit einer ersten methodisch-systematischen Analyse der Biomorphisierung von Mensch-Maschine-Schnittstellen, also der Nutzung von biologischen Aktivitätsmustern für Signalkodierungen. Aufbauend auf Beispielen aus dem Alltag werden menschliche Eigenschaften, die sich zur Anthropomorphisierung und Biomorphisierung eignen, analysiert. Sodann werden geeignete Signalparameter zusammengestellt, die mit den technischen Ausgabemöglichkeiten und den dazugehörigen Signalen verbunden werden können. Beispielhaft wurde bei der Mensch-Maschine-Schnittstelle eines Geldautomaten eine Biomorphisierung deren Interaktionen vorgenommen. Ein Ausblick auf Folgeuntersuchungen, welche die Interaktionen evaluieren, schließt den Beitrag.

In our attempts to understand the world, wildlife films play a significant role. Wildlife films help us to see new places and learn about animals in remote locations, that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. Yet wildlife films have throughout history been criticized, mainly for the ambivalent relationship between science and storytelling. While the films give us a scientific impression and say something about the “reality”, they clearly have the intension to amuse, capture and entertain their audience. In doing this, the wildlife film shapes characters, plays dramatic music and creates narratives with beginnings and ends. In this essay I study the narrative structures in five chosen parts of the BBC production Life (2009). I attempt to show how the parts can be seen through the narrative scheme that Labov and Waletzky introduce in 1967. The results are leading to a discussion about the way in which the narrative structures affects the science in the film parts. Mainly through the narrative need of spectacular points and breach from normality, and the way in which narrative structures contribute to anthropomorphism. My intension is to show how the narrative structures are working in order to better, as a viewer, determine what´s fact and what´s fiction.

This exegesis traces a path through the production of an animated work, and discusses the evolution of an individual production workflow that refigures the industrial animation process of prototyping. By incorporating spontaneity within the animation workflow, the creative output of the project focusses on the development of a series of non-narrative, process-driven temporal constructions that fuse form and process. The creative work occupies 75% of this Masters project, and the exegesis 25% (7500 Words)

The aim of our work is to analyze 500 samples from the Spanish and Czech corpora. When analyzing the samples, we will focus on the occurrence of anthropomorphic metaphors. Due to the large amount we generated, we specified our search for a lexical unit head and la cabeza. The thesis is divided into two parts, theoretical and practical. The theoretical part includes the approximation of the terms of metaphors and metonymies from the literary and non-literary point of view and the practical part of the analysis and description of the found excerpts. After analyzing all the lexical units in the practical part, there is a chapter containing the comparison of the excerpts in both languages and a summary in the Spanish language.

L’étude s’interroge sur la notion de divinité dans l’Égypte et le Proche-Orient anciens, à l’aide des témoignages archéologiques et textuels qui la révèlent. Partant des premières représentations plausibles de puissances divines individualisées, vers la fin du IVe millénaire avant J.-C., l’enquête croise les données de la documentation iconographique et des sources écrites pour tenter d’identifier les spécificités des conceptions du divin dans chaque ensemble culturel, mais aussi leurs traits communs, au long des IIIe et IIe millénaires. Les religions du Proche-Orient et de l’Égypte se sont en effet, durant cette période, rejointes sur nombre de points, aussi bien dans la traduction formelle du divin que dans son expression conceptuelle. Aussi se pose la question de savoir si de telles similitudes sont le fruit de développements intrinsèques ou si des influences mutuelles en sont responsables. Les interactions dans le domaine de la religion, de plus en plus probables au cours du temps, sont avérées au IIe millénaire, au moins sur le plan de l’iconographie. Les contacts entre le Levant et la Vallée du Nil sont alors multiples, favorisant les imprégnations culturelles. Cependant, celles-ci ne se font pas au hasard : des priorités politiques ou enjeux idéologiques, que l’étude s’emploie à mettre en évidence, président aux emprunts réciproques. Certains décalages tiennent au statut même du corpus religieux au sein des sociétés, en particulier à celui de la littérature mythique. En dernière analyse, la démarche comparative touche aux fondements du polythéisme et aux mécanismes de « traduction », de « syncrétisme » et autres interprétations qu’il rend possibles. / This study aims at questioning the notion of divinity as conveyed by the ancient cultures of Egypt and the Near East, on the basis of archaeological and written evidence. Starting from the first plausible representations of divine powers pictured as individual beings, around the end of the 4th millennium B.C.E., the investigation confronts iconographical and textual data in order to identify, for both cultural areas under discussion, the peculiarities of their conceptions of the divine, as well as their common features, during the 3rd and 2nd millennia. At that time, indeed, the religion of the Near East and that of Egypt concurred in many respects, either in the formal depiction of the divine or in its conceptual expression. Hence the question arises whether such similarities were the outcome of intrinsic developments or resulted from mutual influences. Interactions in the realm of religion grow more and more likely in the course of time, and they can be ascertained for the 2nd millennium, at least as far as iconography is concerned. It is a period of intensive contact between the Levant and the Nile Valley, an incentive to cultural intermingling. However, those exchanges did not happen at random: the reciprocal borrowing depended on political priorities or ideological stakes, as the study seeks to highlight. Some discrepancies stem from the very status religious texts held within their own societies, especially mythical literature. Ultimately, the principles of polytheism and the processes of « translation », of « syncretism », and the other interpretations it allows, are the central issue of this comparative approach.

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This essay explores the application of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. The novel, rather than being a mere shipwreck-narrative or a miraculous tale with religious overtones, is also a story about the complicated and perhaps inevitably divided relationship between humans and animals. This essay introduces the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies and defines anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in the context of literary criticism. The essay goes on to discuss the layers of meaning behind the names and naming of the two main characters using Burke’s rhetoric of identification, analyses the anthropomorphism and religiosity in the novel’s two stories, and analyses the two accepted readings of the novel from a zoomorphic perspective. The essay looks at the human-animal divide and its problems in literature, going into Derrida’s animal philosophy to provide a counterpoint to a view derived from Cartesian dualism. In a straight reading of the novel, the first story is regarded as metaphoric while the second story is regarded as literal. There is an alternative reading where it is left to the reader to decide which story is true, but this essay argues that this reading negates a metaphoric interpretation of either story and therefore dismisses the straight reading. Instead, this essay proposes a third, zoomorphic reading, fully compatible with the straight reading, where anthropomorphism is employed to externalize human actions onto animals, but where zoomorphism is employed to project animals onto humans in order to externalize their cannibalism. In the zoomorphic reading, both stories are interpreted as vehicles of projection while avoiding the logical pitfall of the alternative reading.

Robots are constantly evolving, from Da Vinci's first robot to humanoids that exist today and are used in various industries. This study examines how a humanoid is perceived as service staff in a car dealership and this was done through a qualitative case study where semi-structured interviews and on-site observations were combined. These were carried out at Riddermark Bil, which is one of Sweden's largest car dealers for used cars. The theory part is based on the concept of anthropomorphism and the uncanny valley theory which are related and important to customers' acceptance of the robot. Anthropomorphism is about giving non-human objects, such as robots, human properties to make it easier to interact with them. Uncanny valley comes into the picture when these human qualities create an expectation in man that is not achieved by the robot and a feeling of discomfort arises in man. This feeling of discomfort is what characterizes the uncanny valley. The analysis showed that uncanny valley exists in the car dealership with the humanoid and customers, and how the degree of anthropomorphism affects the viewer and the interaction. What turned out overall was that most people, customers and staff, are positive about interacting with a humanoid, but present it does not really meet the expectations placed on it. Finally, it is discussed how uncanny valley affects customers in a car dealership and what the reasons for this are.

The aim of the thesis is to answer the question how differ the attitudes of zoologists and general public on suitability of various mammals kept in zoos. The theory of cultural stereotypes is theoretical starting point where i assume that evaluation is influenced on the basis of cultural stereotypes among general public (n = 100) versus expert evaluation of graduates of zoology (n = 60). Questionnaire with a scale enumeration concerning the assessment of the suitability of selected groups of mammals for breeding in zoos was used as the main data collection instrument. Results of the survey showed that experts evaluated the suitability of mamals for breeding in zoo more positive than laymens in general. According general public were equines and rodents rated as relatively unsuitable for breeding in zoos in comparison with expert evaluation. Elephant, orangutan, platypus, tiger, bear and cheetah were rated as relatively suitable for breeding in zoos by general public against expert evaluation. The possible interpretation might be that these mammals belong to the most popular and therefore respondents want to experience personal contact with them. Statistical testing found no gender differences in the rating. Key words: zoos, public attitudes, zoologists' attitudes, mammals, cultural stereotypes,...