When the body is observed through a certain combination of technologies, there can be subversive politics to doing anything at all. The nature of media and biopolitics has permitted for a set of systems aimed at total control of the human body; a power which can permeate all facets of life. This thesis is a collection of essays which argues that speculative fiction contains multitudes of approaches to biopolitical discourse, permitting the reader of the text to approach politics from their own set of experiences, but not allowing the political to be ignored. These chapters contain three separate but interrelated arguments regarding the nature of power: “Law, Technology, and the Body,” “Weaponized Media,” and “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All.” This thesis creates working definitions of critical or political concepts which the chapters engage, defining terms such as speculative fiction, formalism, and biopolitics. The texts which these chapters primarily rely upon to convey examples of the visibility of these concepts—the work of Margaret Atwood and David Foster Wallace—will also be explored in these pages, prescribing specific interpretations of their plots and suggesting possible readings of the way the narratives describe technologies. The first chapter, “Law, Technology, and the Body,” posits that computational metaphors for humans are used to enforce power, particularly through the construction of law, which is prominent in works of speculative fiction. This chapter will use biopolitical theory as well as formalist readings to approach the texts: it begins by explaining the biopolitical approach to the texts which permits for such readings, then elaborates upon law, power structures, and technology which affect the body within Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. It ultimately concludes by suggesting that these structures will be visible within all narratives, but particularly prominent in speculative fiction due to the way speculative fiction engages with and responds to the technologies of the real world. The second chapter, “Weaponized Media,” shows that the trope of weaponized media is a compelling lens through which to approach text and an apt metaphor for the relationship between art and power, elucidating its prominence within speculative fiction. This argument relies primarily upon structuralism, linguistic theory, Russian formalism, and conflict theory to explain the highly-politicized use of weapons in these texts. Beginning with a survey of examples of this trope in speculative fiction, particularly within David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the biopolitical structures which contribute to and are reflected by this trope. The final chapter, “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All,” is a cumulation of the prior arguments. Supporting the chapter’s titular thesis, Russian formalism, media theory, and the surveillance and race theory of Simone Browne are used as central tenets to support this argument’s progression. This chapter argues that media propagates norms, that all things are now media. The consequences that follow from the nature of media entail that due to a hyper-connected world and the conflation of fear and terrorism, almost all things can be considered outside the norm—that doing almost anything at all is viewed as subversive by some, particularly by normative structures and governments. Speculative fiction questions these structures, specifically asking the reader to consider the political structures inherent in every action that they might commit to.

In this dissertation I propose the use of a new media composition of narrative hypertext, performances in a virtual world, and a dialogic process of writing to provide a continuum of learning opportunities in social work education. I suggest that the structure of the hypertext narrative, embedded with hypermedia, mirrors the dissociative aspects of traumatic memory. I argue that work with the multivocality and multisequentiality of narrative hypertext emulates the process of discovery in the clinical interview. The immersive component of work in a virtual world deepens the realism and affective impact of simulations and creates opportunities to practice and demonstrate engagement, assessment, and intervention skills. The writing component of the new media composition actively engages students in a dialogic process that hones the development of self-reflexive practice and a professional social work identity. In developing the project, I enlisted the input of two groups of key informants. Content experts provided background that informed the narrative and scripts. A second group of faculty, students, and practitioners provided input on project design and identified potential barriers to success and anticipated outcomes. Informants suggest that the continuum of media engages students with a variety of learning styles, offers safe ways to practice skills as a precursor to interviews with actual clients, and allows for exploration of diverse identities as an avatar. Potential barriers include the time and resources required to learn new technologies and the potential for students to be triggered by trauma content. Informants offered recommendations to address the barriers. Three changes were immediately incorporated into the structure and content of the project to address these concerns.

In this thesis I attempt to model, that is, computationally reproduce, the natural transmission (i.e. inflectional regularities) of twenty present tense Amharic verbs (i.e. triradicals beginning with consonants) as used by the language’s speakers. I root my approach in the linguistic theory of network morphology (NM) and model it using the DATR evaluator. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of Amharic and discuss the fidel as an abugida, the verb system’s root-and-pattern morphology, and how radicals of each lexeme interacts with prefixes and suffixes. I offer an overview of NM in Chapter 2 and DATR in Chapter 3. In both chapters I draw attention to and help interpret key terms used among scholars doing work in both fields. In Chapter 4 I set forth my full theory, along with notation, for generating the paradigms of twenty present tense Amharic verbs that follow four different patterns. Chapter 5, the final chapter, contains a summary and offers several conclusions. I provide the DATR output in the Appendix. In writing, my main hope is that this project will make a contribution, however minimal or sizeable, that might advance the field of Amharic studies in particular and (computational) linguistics in general.

The humanities have for a long time been a collection of fields that have not gained from the advancements in computational power, as predicted by Moore´s law.  Fields like medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, geology and economics have all developed quantitative tools that take advantage of the exponential increase of processing power over time.  Recent advances in computerized pattern recognition, in combination with a rapid digitization of historical document collections around the world, is about to change this. The first part of this dissertation focuses on constructing a full system for finding handwritten words in historical manuscripts. A novel segmentation algorithm is presented, capable of finding and separating text lines in pre-modern manuscripts.  Text recognition is performed by translating the image data of the text lines into sequences of numbers, called features. Commonly used features are analysed and evaluated on manuscript sources from the Uppsala University library Carolina Rediviva and the US Library of Congress.  Decoding the text in the vast number of photographed manuscripts from our libraries makes computational linguistics and social network analysis directly applicable to historical sources. Hence, text recognition is considered a key technology for the future of computerized research methods in the humanities. The second part of this thesis addresses digital palaeography, using a computers superior capacity for endlessly performing measurements on ink stroke shapes. Objective criteria of character shapes only partly catches what a palaeographer use for assessing similarity. The palaeographer often gets a feel for the scribe's style.  This is, however, hard to quantify.  A method for identifying the scribal hands of a pre-modern copy of the revelations of saint Bridget of Sweden, using semi-supervised learning, is presented.  Methods for production year estimation are presented and evaluated on a collection with close to 11000 medieval charters.  The production dates are estimated using a Gaussian process, where the uncertainty is inferred together with the most likely production year. In summary, this dissertation presents several novel methods related to image analysis and machine learning. In combination with recent advances of the field, they enable efficient computational analysis of very large collections of historical documents. / q2b

En Mésopotamie, l’écriture fut inventée et longtemps maîtrisée par un groupe restreint d’individus au service du temple ou du palais. Après l’effondrement de la troisième dynastie d’Ur, en 2002 av. J.-C., les données archéologiques et épigraphiques témoignent d’une intensification et d’une généralisation du recours à l’écrit. Ce phénomène, connu sous le nom de « révolution de l’écrit paléo-babylonienne » (« Old Babylonian writing revolution »), se traduisit plus précisément par l’abandon du sumérien au profit de l’akkadien, la multiplication des archives privées, le remaniement du système éducatif et l’apparition de nouveaux genres de texte, du format tabulaire et de l’écriture cursive. L’enjeu de notre recherche a été d’étudier les répercussions qu’eut cette révolution culturelle spécifiquement sur la pratique épistolaire de l’époque amorrite (2002-1595 av. J.-C.). Nous avons d’abord cherché à définir la place des échanges épistolaires dans les interactions sociales des Mésopotamiens. En dressant le portrait des épistoliers et en étudiant leurs voies d’accès à la pratique épistolaire, nous avons évalué l’implantation de la communication par lettres dans la société. Écrire et lire une lettre requérait l’apprentissage d’un savoir et d’une technique. Nous avons donc cherché, parmi les exercices étudiés par les élèves pendant leur formation à l’écrit, ceux qui pouvaient leur servir à rédiger et lire des lettres, et avons étudié dans quelle mesure ces exercices les préparaient à écrire des lettres plus ou moins complexes et variées. Nous avons aussi voulu voir si les changements introduits dans le système éducatif ont bouleversé l’enseignement du genre épistolaire et s’ils ont une part dans le développement de la littéracie et de la communication par lettres. La diffusion de l’écrit bouleversa également le rapport des Mésopotamiens au texte écrit : une lecture empirique, « naïve » des lettres a permis aux chercheurs de se rendre compte que les lettres de l’époque amorrite sont plus précises et plus longues que celles des siècles antérieurs. Nous avons voulu objectiver, rationaliser cette impression en étudiant la qualité et la quantité des informations communiquées par écrit. Qu’est-ce qui, dans les lettres, a évolué ? Est-ce le degré d’implicite et d’ambiguïté ? Les lettres pouvaient-elles être comprises sans l’intervention du messager qui les transportait ? Ou est-ce le contenu, devenu plus détaillé et varié ? Ces recherches s’appuient notamment sur la pragmatique, qui offre un cadre conceptuel pour travailler sur la notion d’implicite et analyser la possibilité pour le destinataire d’une lettre d’interpréter le message dans le contexte spécifique de l’écrit. L’éclatement de l’administration centrale, en 2002 av. J.-C., fit naître de nombreux royaumes rivaux. Ces derniers n’utilisèrent pas les mêmes graphèmes ni les mêmes formes graphiques pour écrire leurs lettres, mais peu de comparaisons systématiques ont été effectuées jusqu’à présent. Nous avons étudié comment se sont constituées et ont circulé certaines conventions graphiques. La comparaison des formes graphiques nous a ensuite permis de travailler sur la standardisation des lettres et la notion d’ « orthographe ». Nous avons finalement cherché à évaluer le niveau de maîtrise du système d’écriture requis pour lire et écrire des lettres. Nos recherches apportent un éclairage nouveau sur un corpus qui n’avait jamais été exploité dans son ensemble (environ 7000 lettres) et constituent une première tentative pour analyser les répercussions de l’intensification du recours à l’écrit sur l’ensemble d’une activité, à savoir la pratique épistolaire. Au-delà des assyriologues, ces recherches s’adressent à tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’histoire de l’écrit et du genre épistolaire. / In Mesopotamia, writing was invented, and for a long time mastered, by a small group of individuals working for the temple or the palace. After the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur, in 2002 BC, archaeological and epigraphic evidence reveals an intensification in the use of writing. This phenomenon, known as the “Old Babylonian writing revolution”, resulted more precisely in the abandonment of Sumerian for the benefit of Akkadian, in the multiplication of private archives, in the reorganisation of the educational system and in the emergence of new genres, of the tabular format and of the cursive writing. The aim of our research is to study the consequences that this cultural revolution had specifically on the epistolary practice during the Amorite period (2002-1595 BC). We first sought to define the place of epistolary exchanges in the Mesopotamian social interactions. By portraying the letter-senders and studying how they had access to the epistolary practice, we have been able to estimate the establishment of letter communication in the society. Writing and reading a letter also required a certain knowledge and technique. Among the exercises studied during the training in writing, we looked for those which could be used to write and read letters. We then examined to which extent the scribal training prepared individuals to write more or less intricate and varied letters. Finally, we looked to see if the changes introduced in the educational system altered the way the epistolary genre was taught and if these changes were involved in the development of literacy and letter communication. The diffusion of writing also changed how Mesopotamians related to written text: an empirical, “naive” reading of the letters made the researchers realize that letters from the Amorite period are more precise and longer than those written during the previous centuries. We wanted to objectify and rationalise this impression by studying the quality and quantity of the information communicated in writing. What evolved in the letters? Is it the degree of implicitness and ambiguity? Could the letters be understood without the intervention of the messenger who carried them? Or is it the content, which became more detailed and varied? This research is based in particular on pragmatics, which offers a conceptual framework for working on the notion of implicitness and analysing the possibility for the addressee of a letter to interpret the message in the specific context of writing. The fall of the central administration in 2002 BC gave rise to many rival kingdoms. These kingdoms did not use the same graphemes nor the same spellings to write their letters, but very few systematic comparisons have been made so far. We studied how some graphical norms were created and circulated. The comparison of spellings then allowed us to work on the standardisation of letters and on the notion of “orthography”. We finally sought to assess the level of mastery of the writing system required to read and write letters. Our research sheds new light on a corpus of texts that had never been studied as a whole (about 7,000 letters) and is a first attempt to analyse the impact of the intensification of the use of writing on an entire activity, namely the epistolary practice. Besides Assyriologists, our research is aimed at all those who are interested in the history of writing and the epistolary genre.

Avec les progrès des technologies numériques et des réseaux, les archéologues sont appelés à réfléchir à la grande diversité des supports pour la consultation des connaissances archéologiques. L’objectif de cette recherche est de comprendre les caractéristiques de la publication scientifique en ligne et les solutions qu’elle apporte au travail de l’archéologue.La première partie de cette étude, dédiée à l’histoire de la recherche d’information et de la publication en archéologie, dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle en France, examine les expériences des précurseurs des bases de données, puis des pionniers du traitement des textes des publications, dans la mesure où ils furent des observateurs avisés des problèmes de lecture des publications archéologiques et de l’utilisation des informations contenues. Dans la seconde partie, l’étude aborde les questions de l’élaboration de la publication scientifique en ligne, de l’apparition de l’internet à aujourd’hui, dans le contexte d’une diffusion qui tend à mettre à la disposition de chacun une large partie de l'information (Libre accès). Elle définit le processus de l’édition scientifique en ligne pour l’archéologie, à partir d’une enquête sur les fréquents supports de diffusion en ligne des ouvrages et des revues scientifiques imprimés et sur la formation de publications numériques natives, suivie d’une analyse de conceptions au sein de l’UMR 7041 Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité avec différents partenaires. Les résultats permettent de mieux comprendre les besoins fondamentaux de la communauté archéologique et de l’aider à organiser ces entreprises éditoriales. / The nature of publishing in archaeology is changing with the advancement of digital media, and archaeologists are deeply involved in the evolution of print and digital publication. This research aims to understanding the characteristics of digital publication and the solutions it offers to archaeological research.The first part of this study concerns the history of information retrieval and publication in the second half of the twentieth century in France. It examines the foundations of archaeological computing and the start of automatic documentation in the discipline (later becoming database applications and data processing), and how other past experiences have contributed to formalizing archaeological reflection and writing.The second part of the study surveys the development of digital publishing in archaeology through time and within the context of Open Access. Through an evaluation of websites that disseminate printed books and journals as well as those publishing only in digital form, the process of online dissemination is defined (and with reference to experiences from the Unit of “Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité” with key publishing stakeholders). The results provide a key to better understand the needs of the archaeological community and assist in developing current approaches to archaeological publishing.

In “Patria Mia,” his 1913 series of essays in New Age magazine, Ezra Pound uses a metaphor for modernist cultural production that informs and structures this dissertation. “If it lie within your desire to promote the arts,” he writes, “you must not only subsidize the man with work still in him, but you must gather such dynamic particles together; you must set them where they will interact, and stimulate each other.” Salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Movers and Shakers, announces a similar transformation in interpersonal relations: “Looking back on it now, it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913 . . . there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications.” I argue that these new forms of communication and interaction described by Pound and Dodge not only characterize the early twentieth century but also empower transnational experiments in literature, art, and politics that we now call “modernism.” Because of dramatic and wide-ranging developments in communications and travel technologies, modernists in the early years of the twentieth century cooperated and communicated regarding their experiments in new dynamic ways that make modernism an especially collaborative project. Before the Great War casts a dark shadow over the promises of modernity, editors, writers, artists, political radicals, hostesses, and intellectuals met in small private salons, published in alternative periodicals, and joined avant-garde movements. Reading these collaborative events illuminates the interactivity that crystallizes modernism as a cultural mode of production. To analyze collaborations in the development of modernism, I construct network graphs that visualize the webs of interaction I study. Rather than rely solely on diachronic readings of modernist texts, these visualizations provide a synchronic model for modernist cultural production as simultaneous connections, constituting a modernist totality. To analyze these network graphs, I apply concepts from network theory and sociology, two disciplines that begin in the modernist moment. Thus, this dissertation is both a theory of cultural production and an effect of that cultural production. The network is itself a modernist concept.

Cette thèse souhaite cerner la formation de la critique littéraire française, dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, comme discours autonome et légitimé, en la restituant dans le riche dialogue qu’elle noue avec les sciences exactes, humaines et sociales de son époque. Notre intérêt se porte plus précisément sur l’étude des savoirs en circulation, des transferts lexicaux, notionnels et structurels, des emprunts de modèles et des influences au travers desquels la critique littéraire sonde son propre champ. Ces questionnements ne permettent pas seulement d’introduire la science et la littérature au sein d’un même système culturel en identifiant leurs interactions, mais mettent également en avant l’émergence d’une nouvelle idée de littérature autour de la logique du vivant. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuyons sur les apports méthodologiques du numérique. Le recours à un ensemble d’outils informatiques offre, d’une part, la possibilité d’échapper au cloisonnement disciplinaire, et, d’autre part, de traiter des corpus textuels de taille considérable en synchronie. / In this work we aim at defining the formation of the French literary criticism, during the second half of the 19th century, becoming an autonomous and legitimate discourse. To do so, we shall take into consideration the rich dialogue held between the French literary criticism and natural, human and social sciences of the time. We will especially concentrate on the circulation of knowledge, notional and structural lexical transfers, model reproductions and imitations, and influences that help the literary criticism build its own field of knowledge. These questions allow us to locate both science and literature in the same cultural field by identifying their interactions, but also to establish the emergence of a new perception of literature, seen through the logic of the living. Thus we will rely, for most of our results, on digital methods of investigation. By using digital tools, we shall not be confined to a determined disciplinary field, and may be able to work synchronically on large corpora.

abstract: Understanding changes and trends in biomedical knowledge is crucial for individuals, groups, and institutions as biomedicine improves people’s lives, supports national economies, and facilitates innovation. However, as knowledge changes what evidence illustrates knowledge changes? In the case of microbiome, a multi-dimensional concept from biomedicine, there are significant increases in publications, citations, funding, collaborations, and other explanatory variables or contextual factors. What is observed in the microbiome, or any historical evolution of a scientific field or scientific knowledge, is that these changes are related to changes in knowledge, but what is not understood is how to measure and track changes in knowledge. This investigation highlights how contextual factors from the language and social context of the microbiome are related to changes in the usage, meaning, and scientific knowledge on the microbiome. Two interconnected studies integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence examine the variation and change of the microbiome evidence are presented. First, the concepts microbiome, metagenome, and metabolome are compared to determine the boundaries of the microbiome concept in relation to other concepts where the conceptual boundaries have been cited as overlapping. A collection of publications for each concept or corpus is presented, with a focus on how to create, collect, curate, and analyze large data collections. This study concludes with suggestions on how to analyze biomedical concepts using a hybrid approach that combines results from the larger language context and individual words. Second, the results of a systematic review that describes the variation and change of microbiome research, funding, and knowledge are examined. A corpus of approximately 28,000 articles on the microbiome are characterized, and a spectrum of microbiome interpretations are suggested based on differences related to context. The collective results suggest the microbiome is a separate concept from the metagenome and metabolome, and the variation and change to the microbiome concept was influenced by contextual factors. These results provide insight into how concepts with extensive resources behave within biomedicine and suggest the microbiome is possibly representative of conceptual change or a preview of new dynamics within science that are expected in the future. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Biology 2018

Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases. After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.