Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-80).

Some research has been done on this subject, although sparsely. The purpose of this study is to determine how, why, and to what extent representation in fiction matters, in regard to socially stigmatized groups of people, focusing on mental health, sexuality, and gender roles. The main focus is on bonding with fictional characters, how it relates to representation and its importance. Eleven (cis)female participants shared their own experiences with this. Each written reply was condensed, eventually narrowed down to three main components considered central to this phenomenon; (1) a sense of isolation, (2) an inability to cope, and (3) relatability in characters. These components can all be connected to loneliness, which suggests that loneliness plays a large part in one's sense of self-worth. Thus, representation can be argued to be vital, due to its function of including and speaking for stigmatized groups of people, granting a sense of belonging and support.

Mass destruction imagery within the science fiction film genre is not a new cinematic development. However, a swell of destruction-centred films has emerged since the proliferation of digital technologies and computer-generated imagery that reflect concerns that extend beyond notions of spectacle. Through illusionistic realism techniques, the aesthetics of mass destruction imagery within science fiction cinema can be seen as appropriating the implied veracity of other film traditions in order to create a baseline of visual credibility, even to the extent of associating its own fantastical fictions with recent historic destruction events. This thesis investigates the representation of mass destruction across the spectrum of contemporary science fiction films emerging from around the world by examining the various methods employed to affect the spectator. The study is divided into four sections: realism, spectacle, sublimity, and correlation. It is structured so as to escalate from the establishment of a baseline of vraisemblance of the spectator’s empirical understanding of the world, to new representations of death and destruction, whereby visual aesthetic correlations emerge between science fiction and historical fact. My study attempts to contribute to the current discourse on science fiction cinema by focusing on the relationship between the aesthetics of realism and spectacle and their impact on spectatorial affect. By re-defining notions of film realism and the cinematic sublime, and through close textual analyses of a number of contemporary science fiction films, the intent of this paper is to present a greater understanding of the complicated inherencies borne by mass destruction spectacle.

Querying a database to retrieve an answer, telling a robot to perform an action, or teaching a computer to play a game are tasks requiring communication with machines in a language interpretable by them. Semantic parsing is the task of converting human language to a machine interpretable language. While human languages are sequential in nature with latent structures, machine interpretable languages are formal with explicit structures. The computational linguistics community have created several treebanks to understand the formal syntactic structures of human languages. In this thesis, we use these to obtain formal meaning representations of languages, and learn computational models to convert these meaning representations to the target machine representation. Our goal is to evaluate if existing treebank syntactic representations are useful for semantic parsing. Existing semantic parsing methods mainly learn domain-specific grammars which can parse human languages to machine representation directly. We deviate from this trend and make use of general-purpose syntactic grammar to help in semantic parsing. We use two syntactic representations: Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) and dependency syntax. CCG has a well established theory on deriving meaning representations from its syntactic derivations. But there are no CCG treebanks for many languages since these are difficult to annotate. In contrast, dependencies are easy to annotate and have many treebanks. However, dependencies do not have a well established theory for deriving meaning representations. In this thesis, we propose novel theories for deriving meaning representations from dependencies. Our evaluation task is question answering on a knowledge base. Given a question, our goal is to answer it on the knowledge base by converting the question to an executable query. We use Freebase, the knowledge source behind Google’s search engine, as our knowledge base. Freebase contains millions of real world facts represented in a graphical format. Inspired from the Freebase structure, we formulate semantic parsing as a graph matching problem, i.e., given a natural language sentence, we convert it into a graph structure from the meaning representation obtained from syntax, and find the subgraph of Freebase that best matches the natural language graph. Our experiments on Free917, WebQuestions and GraphQuestions semantic parsing datasets conclude that general-purpose syntax is more useful for semantic parsing than induced task-specific syntax and syntax-agnostic representations.

This thesis examines representations of identities that are specific to Francophone West Africa, as depicted in the films produced in the region since the 1990s. The films are set in the countries of Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, among the ethnic groups that form the diverse demographic landscape of the region, and they portray stories and characters that strongly relate these films to the local ways of belonging. While existing research in the field of African film studies focuses on how films from Francophone West Africa portray postcolonial or national identities, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the depiction of identities that are linked to the region’s ethnic cultures. This thesis demonstrates that the local ways of belonging and the practices, rituals and beliefs which these identities rely on continue to have vital significance for representation in Francophone West African cinemas. Using textual analysis as a base for its arguments, this thesis is underpinned by an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that combines extensive contextual research into various West African practices, rituals and beliefs with the philosophical works on cinema by Gilles Deleuze. A number of the concepts Deleuze defines help significantly in the understanding of time and identity in the films, and the interpretative nature of Deleuze’s work offers the opportunity to bridge the gap in film theory application in studies of Francophone African cinema. By applying this diverse theoretical approach to its investigation of the intertwining local identities, the thesis highlights the necessity of an intersectional approach to analysing identity representation in Francophone African cinemas. It is the first study of representations of ethnically-linked identities in the field of African film studies.

The relationship between the representative and the reapportioned district is the central feature of the present study as it attempts to assess selected facets of the 13th Congressional District in transition.

This study reveals the complexity of relationships inherent in a system of theatre governance shaped by exclusive rights. Royal patents granted in 1662 entrusted sole guardianship of the ‘national’ or ‘regular’ drama to two ‘patent’ or ‘legitimate’ theatres (ultimately, established as The Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden). These held privileged access to the traditional canon of serious, literary drama, including Shakespeare. The monopoly regime’s power, re-affirmed in The Theatre Licensing Act 1737, prevented all other playhouses, labelled ‘minor’, from producing the national corpus of plays, and from employing ‘the spoken word’: continuous speech unaccompanied by music. ‘Minor’ theatres were restricted to exhibitions of movement, music, and rhyme, commonly termed ‘burletta’. By the early 1800s a consensus held the ‘patent’ regime responsible for degrading rather than preserving dramatic standards. Actor/manager Robert William Elliston purchased his first London ‘minor’ theatre in February 1809. From that moment he began a largely self-interested campaign to overthrow the monopoly. Seeking an equitable footing, Elliston made a series of formal challenges, but when they failed he abandoned official channels. Thereafter, while remaining within the law, he adopted subversive means to gain his goal of a free stage. The Times’s review of Elliston’s first circumvention of the law in August 1809, an innovative ‘burletta’-ized Macbeth, lauded his ‘irregular’ production, while recognizing this novel version as a landmark incursion into the ‘legitimate’ canon. Elliston’s pioneering role in the struggle for reform, recorded in 1926, has been little researched since. The thesis re-evaluates Elliston’s agency in the ‘patent’ cartel’s demise, so contributing to a re-assessment of the narrative of the monopoly regime, and the ideological and social significance of its abolition. Once free competition was achieved, the theatre became a space in which the ‘legitimate’ canon could be accessed by every class of theatre-goer.

The musical language of popular music theatre continues to gain a growing academic scrutiny. Our understanding of the possibilities of the genre can be enriched by innovative work that experiments with a variety of musical techniques. Moreover developing fresh insights into this musical potential has an aesthetic importance: it could contribute to a revitalisation of the creative ambition of the musical language of the genre, which is generally one of highly derivative stock. This submission consists of a composition folio that includes one work of substantial proportions (the stage-work Stationcery) and five satellite pieces. Stutioncery uses a diverse range of jazz cultures (including numerous improvised sections) in a single large scale staged narrative, which it could be argued has not been attempted in this way or to this degree before. Stationery, and the other pieces, also develop other experimental musical techniques that are rarely used in popular music theatre: nonchronological story-telling, collage construction, and the extreme use of diverse parody and quotations. In addition there is a written element of fifteen thousand words which discusses semantic, aesthetic and technical issues prompted by the works and the genre in general. The submission has been organised into four volumes: VOLUME ONE: Stationery A three act jazz stage-work: Full Score in C. VOLUME TWO: Stationcery Piano/ Vocal Score. VOLUME THREE: Satellite pieces: That Baling Feeling - A three act musical: Piano/ Vocal Score. Mart - A theatre of the absurd mis-en-scene: Full Score in C. Descendit De Celis - A third-stream work for small orchestra: Full Score in C. Napoleon On St Helena - Four scena for actor and piano. Rain - A film score extract for small chamber group. VOLUME FOUR: Written Element, Libretti and Lyrics.

The paper identifies the lack of representation of the international student experience on screen and examines how Xin Yi is a film script that explores this subject matter. The analysis provides a survey of film and television that addresses similar topics and uses the theoretical framework of exilic filmmaking by Hamid Naficy. Xin Yi revolves around a Chinese mother-daughter relationship. The mother visits her daughter who studies in the U.S during Chinese New Year and reveals her divorce before she departs.

Nos travaux visent à mettre en tension d'une part l'usage privilégié, voire excessif, qui est fait des représentations chiffrées dans les organisations, et d'autre part une forme de déresponsabilisation constatée des managers, dans le cadre d'un contexte de crise, consécutif à un certain nombre de scandales financiers. Ce lien n'est pas documenté dans la littérature, mais chacun des termes de notre problématique l'est. Nous avons défini le concept de responsabilité à partir de la définition de Ricœur, le manager, comme étant un individu, dont les décisions orientent les organisations, et la représentation chiffrée, comme étant tout chiffre, tableau ou assemblage de chiffres quel qu'il soit, à partir du concept de représentation de Fourez. Par usage privilégié, nous entendons un usage prioritaire sans qu'il y ait questionnement quant à sa construction. Notre recherche théorique nous a permis en effet de souligner le fait que les managers sont peu enclins à interroger les chiffres qu'ils utilisent massivement, et que leur formation ne les y encourage guère. Notre revue de la littérature nous a également amenée à envisager cinq variables explicatives du lien étudié, déclinées en sous-éclairages, qui nous ont permis de construire notre dispositif empirique.Sur le terrain, nous nous sommes orientée vers la collecte de données primaires dans le cadre d'une démarche exploratoire. Le recueil des données s'est effectué auprès de managers aux profils variés, ayant une expérience professionnelle minimale, par le biais d'entretiens semi-directifs, visant à encourager le récit. Le matériau recueilli est constitué d'opinions, de narrations, de situations vécues, d'anecdotes… Nous avons choisi pour l'analyser, une méthode d'analyse qualitative de discours, en essayant toutefois de multiplier les clés d'entrée, avec notamment une analyse de contenu, grâce à l'outil NVivo. Ceci nous a permis de coder nos trente entretiens, par déduction à partir des éclairages issus de notre recherche théorique, mais aussi et surtout, par induction, en faisant émerger du matériau, de nouveaux éclairages sur le lien étudié.Nos résultats empiriques confirment ce que nous avions induit de nos lectures mais ils révèlent également quatre éclairages ou variables complémentaires. Nous avons pu en outre clarifier et parfois redéfinir chacun des éclairages retenus, mettre en évidence des pratiques et des représentations intériorisées corroborant notre thèse, mais aussi observer quelques signes d'évolution et de distance au chiffre, ainsi qu'un réel intérêt du monde des pratiques pour notre questionnement, nous permettant de souligner la pertinence et le bien fondé de notre problématique et de notre projet de recherche. / This work contrasts the favoured and sometimes excessive use of figures in organisations with the diminishing sense of responsibility observed in managers in the crisis context following on from the different financial scandals that have occurred in recent years. The literature does not document this link, but it does document each of the terms included in my research problem. I base my definition of the concept of responsibility on that of Ricœur. I define the manager as a person whose decisions orient the organisation, and, based on Fourez' concept of representation, I define figures as any figure, table or grouping of figures. I define favoured use as use that is given priority, whose construction is not questioned. My theoretical research revealed that managers are ill-inclined to question the figures that they use extensively, and that their training hardly encourages them to do so. From my literature review, I identified five variables to explain the link being studied, which I divide into sub-variables; I used these variables to construct my empirical research.In my exploratory fieldwork, I collected primary data from a range of managers with different levels of experience, using semi-structured interviews to encourage narratives. The material I collected is made up of opinions, accounts of personal experiences, anecdotes and so on. I then performed a qualitative discourse analysis, trying to identify as many key topics as possible using, among other tools, NVivo software to perform a content analysis. I used this analysis to code the thirty interviews, by deduction from the insights gained from my theoretical research, but also, and above all, by induction, gaining new insights from the material I had collected into the link under study.My empirical results confirm what I had induced from my review of the literature, but they also reveal four additional insights or variables. They also enabled me to redefine or clarify each of these insights, and to highlight practices and internalised representations that confirm my thesis. They also reveal some signs of change: practitioners showed great interest in my questions, some are beginning to question the predominance of figures, and even the figures themselves. These facts highlight the relevance and solid basis of my research problem.