abstract: The popularity of social media has generated abundant large-scale social networks, which advances research on network analytics. Good representations of nodes in a network can facilitate many network mining tasks. The goal of network representation learning (network embedding) is to learn low-dimensional vector representations of social network nodes that capture certain properties of the networks. With the learned node representations, machine learning and data mining algorithms can be applied for network mining tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Because of its ability to learn good node representations, network representation learning is attracting increasing attention and various network embedding algorithms are proposed. Despite the success of these network embedding methods, the majority of them are dedicated to static plain networks, i.e., networks with fixed nodes and links only; while in social media, networks can present in various formats, such as attributed networks, signed networks, dynamic networks and heterogeneous networks. These social networks contain abundant rich information to alleviate the network sparsity problem and can help learn a better network representation; while plain network embedding approaches cannot tackle such networks. For example, signed social networks can have both positive and negative links. Recent study on signed networks shows that negative links have added value in addition to positive links for many tasks such as link prediction and node classification. However, the existence of negative links challenges the principles used for plain network embedding. Thus, it is important to study signed network embedding. Furthermore, social networks can be dynamic, where new nodes and links can be introduced anytime. Dynamic networks can reveal the concept drift of a user and require efficiently updating the representation when new links or users are introduced. However, static network embedding algorithms cannot deal with dynamic networks. Therefore, it is important and challenging to propose novel algorithms for tackling different types of social networks. In this dissertation, we investigate network representation learning in social media. In particular, we study representative social networks, which includes attributed network, signed networks, dynamic networks and document networks. We propose novel frameworks to tackle the challenges of these networks and learn representations that not only capture the network structure but also the unique properties of these social networks. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2018

M.Tech. / This research investigates how private, urban gardens in Johannesburg can be regarded as self representations under the ambit of visual culture. Based on the premise that private, urban gardens represent sites where subjective and cultural realms intersect, I employ discourse analysis based on a qualitative, interpretative paradigm to formulate a frame useful to an investigation of gardens. The frame is applied to two private, urban gardens in Johannesburg created by Jean Patchitt and Karel Nel. They are drawn from a single socio-economic class in order to reveal differences in the culturally constructed identities of the gardeners. I use the frame to examine artworks by artist and gardener Nel and artworks comprising my practical research, where gardens form the subject matter, to a similar end. Utilising a phenomenological approach, I argue that since gardens and artworks rely on sensory-perceptual experiences, an aesthetic that negotiates differences in value and pleasure informed by culture plays a determining role. By exploring the link between gardens and artworks as part of a larger signifying practice, my research contributes to the discourse of visual culture in general and to a South African context in particular.

This thesis investigates theatregoing and class, using as a locus the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool. The Royal Court is unusually successful in attracting and retaining first time theatregoers and others from some of the most deprived postcodes in the UK. The study’s original contribution to knowledge is threefold: its focus on the relationship between theatre and audience that encompasses the whole theatregoing event; its focus on theatre audiences and social class; and its use of Bourdieu’s conceptual triad not only as an underpinning theory and a framework, but also as a method. The findings have important implications for cultural policy, which has been over reliant on ticket pricing as a mechanism which has failed to widen cultural attendance. The thesis uses a single case to examine the phenomenon of theatregoing. The primary method of investigation is a series of field visits of a theatre season and subsequent thick description of observations. This is supported by ethnographic methods in order to understand phenomena from the perspective of audience members; these are focus groups, interviews, and an analysis of user generated content (TripAdvisor). The thesis finds that the history of the Royal Court Theatre has not only shaped its position in the field, but is key to its perception by audiences today, the building having a particular place in the imaginary of a working class culture. Inside the auditorium, innovative seating arrangements contribute to a playful social space that can be ‘owned’ by audiences. The Theatre’s repertoire is distinctive, in that it employs tropes, such as comedy and participation, that are bound up with the concept of ‘Scouse’, itself a classed construct. These elements combine to form a physical and social space that is congruent to a working class habitus. The implications of the findings are in two fields, sociology and cultural policy. From a sociological perspective, the thesis concludes that Bourdieu’s conceptual triad is not only useful as a concept but also as a method by which to understand theatregoing and other phenomena in the twenty-first century. The application of Bourdieu’s conceptual triad to the empirical phenomenon of twenty-first century British theatregoing results in a more nuanced understanding of a working class aesthetic and working class values. For cultural policy, the thesis finds that using pricing as a mechanism to widen cultural attendance is to miss the point of the real issues facing working class people in the theatre which are around symbolic violence. If we really wish to widen theatre attendance, we need to offer working class people a theatre model that speaks to their values.

Debates about the use of torture in order to protect democracy have become increasingly prevalent in the wake of September 11, 2001 and the war on terror. This thesis examines pro-torture arguments based on considerations of national security. Recently these arguments have had the most traction when advanced within the republican mode of democratic theory. I argue that torture undermines democratic legitimacy because of the secrecy it involves when used for interrogational purposes. Publicity about acts committed in the name of the demos is an essential aspect of democratic legitimacy. For interrogational torture to be effective, major features of its use must be kept secret. This secrecy is incompatible with classical republicanism and the theory of collective responsibility it entails because it interferes with the ability of the people to participate meaningfully in democracy, which is an essential feature of republicanism. / Graduate

L’unité économique et sociale, communément appelée « UES » est une pure création jurisprudentielle. Elle est apparue au début des années 1970 afin de mettre fin à la fraude de certains employeurs qui entendaient scinder leur société en de petites sociétés pour éviter la mise en place des institutions représentatives du personnel. Ces petites structures étaient alors considérées par le juge comme formant une seule et même entreprise pour la représentation du personnel puisque la même personne dirigeait une communauté de travail laquelle travaillait autour de la même activité. Utilisée rapidement en dehors des seules hypothèses de fraude, l’UES s’est également émancipée du droit de la représentation salariale. Ce travail d’émancipation est essentiellement le fruit de la jurisprudence, le législateur ayant très peu légiféré sur l’UES. Les relations collectives de travail essentiellement et les relations individuelles de travail dans une moindre mesure sont ainsi devenues accessibles à l’UES. Jusqu’au début des années 2000, la doctrine était très enthousiaste sur la notion d’UES et estimait même que l’UES devait être considérée comme l’entreprise en droit du travail. Aujourd’hui, cet élan est quelque peu retombé. L’UES est constituée de plusieurs personnes juridiques, lesquelles gardent leurs caractéristiques propres malgré la reconnaissance de l’UES. L’application de l’UES dans l’ensemble des domaines du droit du travail apparaît alors aujourd’hui inenvisageable. Mais, pour autant, l’UES constitue l’un des périmètres sociaux de l’entreprise en droit du travail. Il s’agira alors de savoir quelle place doit être conférée à l’UES en droit du travail. / The social and economic union commonly called ‘SEU’ is a case law creation. This union appeared at the beginning of the 1970s to end the tax evasion of some employers who wanted to divide their firms into smaller ones in order to avoid the creation of work force representative unions. These small firms were then considered as one and only firm for labour representation by the judge because the same person leads a work force which deals with the same business. Quickly used over tax evasion hypotheses, the ‘SEU’ also became liberated from wage policies. This liberation is mostly the work of the jurisprudence, the legislator having hardly legislated on the ‘SEU’. The individual work force relations, and the collective ones in a greater part, opened to the ‘SEU’ that way. Until the beginning of the years 2000, the doctrine was very enthusiastic about the ‘SEU’, and even thought that it should be considered as the Labour law representation. Today this momentum has fallen off. The ‘SEU’ is made of several judicial persons who keep their own characteristics despite the ‘SEU’ recognition. The launching of the ‘SEU’ in the whole labour field seems now unconceivable, even if the ‘SEU’ is one of the firm’s social representation in Labour laws. What we want to know is the importance that should be given to the ‘SEU’ in Labour laws.

Stage management is a professional, technical craft which is essential to the product of the professional British theatre. Yet with no dedicated academic study into its development and no published resources chronicling its history, stage managers of the present age have no means of accessing their professional heritage. As a profession committed to practising and preserving theatrical traditions within their daily activities, it is anomalous that its practitioners have not the means to explore and understand the roots of many aspects of their daily practice, and regrettable that scholarship has not access to an academic study of its evolution or the contextual catalysts for its development in order to inform the wider body of research into British theatre history. This study aims to address this complete absence of scholarship in the field by providing the first dedicated academic research into the development of professional stage management in Britain. It will draw upon the primary evidence of stage management documents such as prompt manuscripts and interpret them from the perspective of a professional practitioner, tracing the development of stage management from the support offered to the early modern companies of the Elizabethan age to the professionalisation and unionisation of stage management which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. By so doing, this thesis constitutes an entirely original contribution to knowledge in relation to this important yet neglected aspect of the history of the British theatre, and will enable professional practitioners to access their professional heritage for the first time.

In this thesis, I explore the ongoing development of symbol use in three domains: pretend play, speech and gestures. In chapter 1, the specific behavioural manifestations of symbol use in these domains are identified and previous literature that has explored the cognitive underpinnings of these abilities is discussed, with a particular focus on children's social cognition. In chapter 2, I review previous research that has sought pairwise relations between these abilities and the theoretical perspectives that have been utilised to explain these relations. In chapter 3, I introduce the four pertinent research questions that emerged from the previous review of the current literature, and provide an overview as to the methods adopted to address these issues. Chapters 4 to 6 constitute three papers designed to explore and evaluate children's symbol production in a sample of preschool children in pretend play speech and gestures. For the first paper, 38-40 month old children were given a battery of standardised measures to assess their symbolic capacities while controlling for non-verbal abilities. These data were analysed for concurrent relations between symbolic capacities. The second paper extends these concurrent relations longitudinally, by giving the children the same battery of measures six and twelve months after initial testing. Correlational and multiple regression analyses were used to assess the potential predictive relations between these measures, and whether there is a changing relation between these symbolic domains over developmental time. The third paper investigates children's iconic gesture production in further detail, by evaluating whether children aged 44-46 months incorporate the iconic gestures they observe an adult perform into their own descriptions of a novel object.Taken together, the results indicate a changing relation between the three symbolic measures of interest during the preschool years. The present findings suggest that both pretend play and gesture production are mediated by speech, but in different ways. It was also found that children appear to incorporate the gestures they observe into their own descriptions of objects but this uptake is dependent on the properties of the gesture itself. In the final chapter, these findings are discussed in relation to previous theoretical notions that place pretend play, speech and gestures as manifestations of an underlying symbolic system. I also discuss the enduring relation between these three abilities and how the pattern of predictive relations found in the present thesis can be explained. Furthermore, I discuss the ontogenesis of symbolic gesture production in children, specifically how children may use the gestures of others as a guide to their own gesture production. Finally I outline some limitations of the present research, and indicate potential avenues for future study.

A software developer explores a software system by asking and answering a series of questions. To answer these questions, a developer may need to consult various sources providing information about the program, such as the static relationships expressed directly in the source code, the run-time behaviour of a program recorded in a dynamic trace, or evolution history as recorded in a source management system. Despite the support afforded by software exploration tools, developers often struggle to find the necessary information to answer their questions and may even become disoriented, where they feel mentally lost and are uncertain of what they were trying to accomplish. This dissertation advances a thesis that a developer's questions, which we refer to as conceptual queries, can be better supported through a model to represent and compose different sources of information about a program. The basis of this model is the sphere, which serves as a simple abstraction of a source of information about a program. Many of the software exploration tools used by a developer can be represented as a sphere. Spheres can be composed in a principled fashion such that information from a sphere may replace or supplement information from a different sphere. Using our sphere model, for example, a developer can use dynamic runtime information from an execution trace to replace information from the static source code to see what actually occurred. We have implemented this model in a configurable tool, called Ferret. We have used the facilities provided by the model to implement 36 conceptual queries identified from the literature, blogs, and our own experience, and to support the integration of four different sources of program information. Establishing correspondences between similar elements from different spheres allows a query to bridge across different spheres in addition to allowing a tool's user interface to drive queries from other sources of information. Through this effort we show that sphere model broadens the set of possible conceptual queries answerable by software exploration tools. Through a small diary study and a controlled experiment, both involving professional software developers, we found the developers used the conceptual queries that were available to them and reported finding Ferret useful. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

This thesis investigates the significance of rhythm to the actor, examining the ways it is approached, understood and embodied within a range of training practices. In what ways does rhythm facilitate and transform the practices of individual performers and ensembles, affecting their use of attention, physical coordination, qualities of connectivity, states of consciousness and emotions? The psychophysical mechanisms through which rhythm informs these key aspects of actor training are analysed here via a range of contemporary and historical psychophysical and cultural frameworks. Drawing on this body of research this thesis argues the case for a greater understanding of the pedagogy of rhythm within actor training, indicating a number of areas for further investigation and potential developments within this field. Beginning with Stanislavski’s use of “Tempo-rhythm” and progressing through the practices of Meyerhold and Grotowski, a number of key rhythmic principles will be discussed. This will lead on to a series of case studies on the contemporary training practices of John Britton, Nicolás Núñez, and Reinhard Flatischler. Following this will be an examination of simultaneity in acting practices and an analysis of the author’s own practical research into the use of polyrhythm as a tool for cultivating modes of simultaneous attention and action in actor training.

With the rise of First Nations owned and created television content at the turn of the century, came a demand to see an accurate representation of Aboriginality that could look at Aboriginals as both here and modern. From 2003-2006, the first Aboriginal made and produced television series entitled Moccasin Flats, I argue, used modern day hip-hop discourse to both engage and dissect a host of complex issues facing modern day urban Aboriginal society. This research project mobilizes multiple methodologies; including: 1.) Eco’s code and sign function semiotic analysis, which operates to identify various hip-hop codes in the text; 2.)Hall’s method of articulation to look at how meaning is fixed in the discourse surrounding the show; and finally 3) Deleuze’s rhizomic approach to identity to see how the shows main characters are constructed in a way to highlight the paradoxical and undercut certain flirtations with essentialization. This three-tiered methodological process paints a picture of a new complex use of discourse to accentuate different facets of aboriginality that had previously been the sole product of dominant hegemonic institutions which relied on racist stereotypes. By dissecting how identity is formed on Moccasin Flats, I will show how aboriginal filmmakers construct a self-reflexive space where the character is perpetually in the process of ‘becoming’ and identity is always a site of negotiation.