Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

Postmodernism is a complex concept to grasp, and although artists frequently create postmodernist work, a cognitive approach to it is difficult. This study is therefore unique in its aim to support creative writers in the formation (creation and representation) of postmodernist characters. Thus, this study contributes to the theory of creative writing, within the current zeitgeist and associated writing styles. A zeitgeist is the collective universal subconscious of the world within a specific epoch and is recognisable in the identity of the people that live during that zeitgeist, as well as in the art of the time. Postmodernism, as the contemporary zeitgeist, implies a postmodernist identity (or identities), which can creatively be represented in the artwork (literary text - prose). Through an integrated threefold study of Postmodernism (and postmodernist identity), "character" as covered in literary theory and the "creation and representation" of character as covered in the theory of creative writing, a paradigm is postulated to support the creative writer in the creation and representation of postmodernist characters. The paradigm manages postmodernist characters within three overlapping categories that approach characters as (1) icons that represent postmodernist people, as (2) literary motives that illustrate postmodernist themes and, as (3) containers of postmodernist discourses. Such a paradigm is not to be considered a model or recipe, but is instead to be viewed as an angle of approaching postmodernist characters and as a launch pad from where the creative writer must further rely on his or her own creativity, talent and dexterity. The paradigm therefore keeps in mind both the limitlessness of Postmodernism and the dynamism of the creative process. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006

The focus of this study is to suggest guidelines for the implementation of a character education program in high schools. It has become clearly evident, from the literature that character education is of cardinal importance for instruction and education. The breakdown of values in South Africa is leading to an increase in crime in the country, which will have far-reaching consequences if learner crime is not addressed. Character education could offer a possible solution and make learners realise the difference between "right" and "wrong" as well as to say "no" to drugs, alcohol, sex, gangs and other social problems. A literature study was done to highlight the nature and scope of behaviour problems in overseas schools as well as South African schools. There was also looked at the impact of violence on the culture of instruction and learning as well as the external and internal factors that can play a role in violence within schools. Furthermore, the concept of character education was investigated as well as character education as possible solution to behavioural problems in high schools. There was also looked at whether character education does indeed produce positive results. Different character education programs that have already been implemented successfully abroad were investigated. Smart & Good High Schools seem suitable for the South African situation and could easily be adapted to the circumstances of individual schools. This program ascribes to the view that the best high schools have two main objectives in common, namely: to help learners to become smart - in the multi-dimensional sense of intelligence - and to help them become good - in the multi-dimensional sense of moral maturity. It is, therefore, about excellence and ethics. Lickona and Davidson (2005) mention schools that are committed to both these objectives, Smart & Good High Schools. Guidelines for the implementation of a character education program arose from discussing the program. In order to determine in what areas character education are needed with learners; how parents evaluate the character education of the learners of the school; what teachers are presently doing to promote character education; and how the learners' values changed within the scope of six months, questionnaire surveys were used. Questionnaires were given to learners wherein they had to judge their own values and that of their fellow learners. Questionnaires were given to parents asking their opinions on the values currently displayed by learners of the relevant school; what parents would like see with the learners; the character traits of the learners; and which traits the school should promote. Questionnaires were also distributed to the teachers of the school to determine to what extent particular promising practices are being pursued to promote character education with learners. A test sample of Grade 8 to 12 learners also filled out a revised questionnaire to determine to what extent these practices were indeed being applied in the classroom. The primary objective of the survey was to determine the character education practices of a particular high school in the North-West Province and to suggest guidelines for the implementation of a character education program. The empirical survey aided in achieving this objective. Findings of some concern, within the scope of six months, related to the general deterioration in the behaviour/habits of the learners at the school, inter alia the number of learners who smoke, drink, are aware of those who use drugs as well an increase in learners who tested positive for HIV/AIDS. In addition, almost half the learners indicated that they find it difficult to say "no" to negative peer pressure. It has been concluded that character education in schools offer a definite solution and that such a program can be integrated effectively into the existing curriculum. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 103 p. : col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.

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The thesis caters to the demands of the creative industries for products and contents which can be utilized for convergent media usage and cross-marketing strategies. In this regard character design serves as an important element of entertainment franchises since it is a means to produce media content with high recognition value. However, numerous character adaptations in different media formats illustrate that characters who are successful in one medium are not necessarily as successful in another media format. The thesis takes a closer look at characters in the context of media convergence and discusses the main principles of character creation and development. By favoring a heuristic approach which analyzes the aesthetic phenomena of arts and entertainment by the means of theoretical research which is supported by practical examples, the thesis concludes that character development is based on three dimensions which have to be combined in order to create characters which can be utilized for different media formats. In this context the work discusses character creation in writing, visuals and interactive media by focusing on ways which secure the successful transfer of characters into different media formats without a loss of character depth and quality.

Background: To preserve valuable sources and cultural heritage, digitization of handwritten characters is crucial. For this, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems were introduced and most widely used to recognize digital characters. Incase of ancient or historical characters, automatic transcription is more challenging due to lack of data, high complexity and low quality of the resource. To solve these problems, multiple image based handwritten dataset were collected from historicaland modern document images. But these dataset also have some limitations. To overcome the limitations, we were inspired to create a new image-based historical handwritten character and word dataset and evaluate it’s performance using machine learning algorithms. Objectives: The main objective of this thesis is to create a first ever Swedish historical handwritten character and word dataset named CArDIS (Character Arkiv Digital Sweden) which will be publicly available for further research. In addition,verify the correctness of the dataset and perform a quantitative analysis using different machine learning methods. Methods: Initially we searched for existing character dataset to know how modern character dataset differs from the historical handwritten dataset. We have performed literature review to learn about most commonly used dataset for OCR. On the other hand, we have also studied different machine learning algorithms and their applica-tions. Finally, we have trained six different machine learning methods namely Support Vector Machine, k-Nearest Neighbor, Convolutional Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, Random Forest, SVM-HOG with existing dataset and newly created dataset to evaluate the performance and efficiency of recognizing ancient handwritten characters. Results: The performance/evaluation results show that the machine learning classifiers struggle to recognise the ancient handwritten characters with less recognition accuracy. Out of which CNN outperforms with highest recognition accuracy. Conclusions: The current thesis introduces first ever newly created historical hand-written character and word dataset in Swedish named CArDIS. The character dataset contains 1,01,500 Latin and Swedish character images belonging to 29 classes while the word dataset contains 10,000 word images containing ten popular Swedish names belonging to 10 classes in RGB color space. Also, the performance of six machine learning classifiers on CArDIS and existing datasets have been reported. The thesis concludes that classifiers when trained on existing dataset and tested on CArDIS dataset show low recognition accuracy proving that, the CArDIS dataset have unique characteristics and features over the existing handwritten datasets. Finally, this re-search provided a first Swedish character and word dataset, which is robust with a proven accuracy; also it is publicly available for further research.

This thesis examines the historical array of 'social' and 'technical' factors that have shaped the development and evolution of Korean national Coded Character Set (CCS) standards. CCS standards refer to a layer of compatibility standards which specify rules for digital representation of textual data at the most basic level of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The effective and efficient operation of information processing, storage, and exchange is thus dependent on the employment of technically sound, economically viable, and culturally adequate CCS standards at national, regional and international levels. Historicaily, the CCS standards had emerged around the cultural presumptions and practices of the US and Western Europe due to the economic and tcchnical dominance of the region from the formative stage of ICTs development. As the need for global information infrastructure and multilingual information processing has been growing, however, the international CCS standards regime has evolved (from 1SO 646, to ISO 2022, and JSO/IEC 10646-1) to incorporate various national scripts around the world, and the issues have arisen over the adequate representation of these scripts within the international standards regime. For example, the incorporation of East Asian scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, presents a formidable challenge with their exceptionally large repertoire. In particular, the design and implementation of Korean national CCS standards, normally a exclusive domain of experts and bureaucrats, had caused a series of heated public controversies during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the intensity of disputes and the breadth of participation in the controversies on Korean national CCS standards, the standardisation process had not been subject to a detailed socio-economic analysis, the lack of which allowed deterministic and simplistic speculations to appear, implying technological rationality, economic imperatives or corporate strategics alone have guided the CCS standards along a linear development path with increasingly larger and more powerful standards replacing previous ones. Drawing on the social shaping of technology perspective, the case study examines the evolution of Korean national CCS standards, focusing both on the process in which a standards emerges as a result of network building activities and alliance formation of various actors, and on the changes in immediate and broader contexts around the standardisation which directly and indirectly affect the interests alliances and evolution of standards. Contrary to the deterministic and simplistic perspectives, the case study suggests a structured but also dynamic social shaping process of the Korean national CCS standards. Four major themes forwarded in the case study are as below: First, the case identified a received view on the Korean controversy which can be characterised as 'technological fix on cultural problem' in a sense that technical challenge experienced in Korean character encoding was a product of distinctive local culture and the problem was fixed by the steady advances in the information technology. Without denying the importance of the state of technological capabilities, however, the case shows that social choices had been made both in international and national standards and had critical roles in shaping various controversy and whole national standards sdting process. Second, the case study identifies two contrasting modes of standardisation, 'technicisation' and 'politicisation,' and examines how the fluctuation between them has affected the development of Korean national standards setting process. In the discourse of technicised standardisation, technological knowledge is accepted as neutral, asocial 'hard fact.' Accordingly, the social choices are obscured and the standardisation process is to be dominated by the negotiation among disinterested experts over the relative technical merits of standards. Under the politicised mode of standardisation,' the political nature of CCS standards design - conflicting values and incongruent ascription of technological properties as a result - is brought forward. The standardisation is characterised by the formation of and competition among interests alliances. The outcome of standardislltion seems to be dependent on which mode is dominant as well as who prevails in each mode. Third, the case study raises a question about the relationship between the standards and interests embedded in them. The ascription of certain technological properties to standards and the interests alliances built around them proved unstable and dynamic. Both of them seem to be influenced by network building activities of llctors and their backdrop, a specific configuration of economic, social, cultural, political and technological factors, enabling and constraining the activities of actors involved in the standardisation process. As the makeup of the configuration changes for various reasons, - for example, globalised software market, social movements, surge of nationalism, political democratisation, advances in related technological field - the meanings attached by the actors to the standard also shifts, and the interests alliances based on them are unmade and replaced by new ones, producing a series of character set standards. Fourth, the study also draws attention to the complexity involved in the nlltional standardisation process and the challenge faced by the social research into those intricate social shaping process. The standardisation process involved many actors at different levels and across various geographical locales. Also there had been recurrent but unpredictable changes in the relationship among the actors and between the actors and artefacts. A recent trend in the social shaping approach - a call for a decentralised concept of actor and the transforming terrain of innovation - was found hrlpful to meet the challenge. In particular, the concept of 'development arena' was found useful to meet the challenge and to understand the case in balance between the actions of different 'modes of performance' and the contexts of varying 'configurations' of heterogeneous clements.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

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