Hasil untuk "Biography"

E. Wilson, Terry Gilliam, Derek Jarman et al.

Jean-Luc Godard wrote that ‘The cinema is not an art which films life; the cinema is something between art and life’ (Roud, 2010: 6), an observation particularly true of stop-motion animation. The filmmakers discussed in this essay, Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay, share a fascination with the latent content of found objects; they believe that forgotten toys, discarded tools, and other such objects contain echoes of past experiences. Extrapolating Švankmajer’s belief that memories are imparted to the objects we touch, the manipulation of his found objects as puppets in his films becomes a means of evoking and repurposing their latent content, just as the Quays develop their dreamlike films from the psychic content they perceive in their armatures. Making a case study of a selection of these animators’ short films, this essay examines the practice of stop-motion animation against that of kinetic sculpture, unpicking the complexities of the relationship between the inherently static mediums of sculpture and photography – symbolic of a fixed moment in time and that of stop-motion animation, a temporal pocket in which these fossilized moments are revived once more.

Nennius Ninnius, David E. Thornton

Nennius [Ninnius, Nemniuus] (fl. c. 770–c. 810), scholar, is commonly, but most certainly incorrectly, regarded as the author of the early ninth-century Cambro-Latin historical compilation Historia Brittonum. The ascription to Nennius occurs in just one of the numerous recensions of the text, the so-called ‘Nennian recension’, which survives in five medieval manuscripts. The earliest and primary recension (the Harleian) offers no identity for the author, while most others attribute the text, equally erroneously, to Gildas. No original copy of the Nennian recension survives, but between 1164 and 1166, at the Cistercian abbey of Sawley, Yorkshire, three different scribes collated the same (now lost) copy of the recension with the Gildasian recension which is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, manuscript 139. The Nennian material was accordingly added to this manuscript as a series of interlinear and marginal annotations plus the prologue and this composite text is the archetype of all other copies of this recension. The Nennian recension seems to have been created in north Wales (possibly Anglesey) in the first half of the eleventh century, probably by a scribe called Euben (Owain) under the direction of his clerical magister, Beulan; and it was probably at this stage that the prologue attributing the Historia to Nennius was composed. This prologue describes him as (Ninnius Eluodugi discipulus (‘Ninnius disciple of Elfoddw’)). If Elfoddw is the bishop of Bangor of that name who in 768 was responsible for bringing the Welsh church into conformity in the Paschal question and who died in 809, and assuming the connection with Ninnius is reliable, then Nennius would have lived at some time between about 770 and 810. Furthermore, Nennius may be identified with the Nemniuus said to have composed an alphabet based on Old English runic ‘futhorc’, but adapted to Old Welsh orthography, which is preserved in a manscript written in 817. This would suggest that the historical Nennius was a Welsh scholar with linguistic interests and specifically with a familiarity with things English, perhaps explaining in part why the creators of the Nennian recension believed him to have been the author of the Historia.

Igor Kopytoff

C. Sorin

R. Lebret, David Grangier, Michael Auli

This paper introduces a neural model for concept-to-text generation that scales to large, rich domains. We experiment with a new dataset of biographies from Wikipedia that is an order of magnitude larger than existing resources with over 700k samples. The dataset is also vastly more diverse with a 400k vocabulary, compared to a few hundred words for Weathergov or Robocup. Our model builds upon recent work on conditional neural language model for text generation. To deal with the large vocabulary, we extend these models to mix a fixed vocabulary with copy actions that transfer sample-specific words from the input database to the generated output sentence. Our neural model significantly out-performs a classical Kneser-Ney language model adapted to this task by nearly 15 BLEU.

Yifei Zhu, Songpo Yang, Jiangnan Zhu et al.

The production of large-scale political datasets typically demands extracting structured facts from vast piles of unstructured documents or web sources, a task that traditionally relies on expensive human experts and remains prohibitively difficult to automate at scale. In this paper, we leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the extraction of multi-dimensional elite biographies, addressing a long-standing bottleneck in political science research. We propose a two-stage ``Synthesis-Coding'' framework for complex extraction task: an upstream synthesis stage that uses recursive agentic LLMs to search, filter, and curate biography from heterogeneous web sources, followed by a downstream coding stage that maps curated biography into structured dataframes. We validate this framework through three primary results. First, we demonstrate that, when given curated contexts, LLM coders match or outperform human experts in extraction accuracy. Second, we show that in web environments, the agentic system synthesizes more information from web resources than human collective intelligence (Wikipedia). Finally, we diagnosed that directly coding from long and multi-language corpora introduces bias that the synthesis stage can alleviate by curating evidence into signal-dense representations. By comprehensive evaluation, We provide a generalizable, scalable framework for building transparent and expansible large scale database in political science.

Krzysztof J. Szajowski

We discuss the significance of some interesting results by Barbara Rokowska about combinatorial constructions. Her interest in finite mathematics and number theory began with an embellishment and detailing of some work by Erdos. Rokowska and Schinzel then solved the problem posed by Paul Erdos concerning the existence of prime numbers of a certain kind. Her subsequent work highlighted the difficulty in constructing Steiner systems with certain properties and showed the importance of rigorous proof techniques in this area of mathematics. This is the first such summary of the main results obtained by Rokowska, her collaborators and PhD students. A biography of Barbara Rokowska has been added as an appendix.

Sayantan Adak, Pauras Mangesh Meher, Paramita Das et al.

Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for factual information about a wide range of entities. However, the quality of articles on less-known entities often lags behind that of the well-known ones. This study proposes a novel approach to enhancing Wikipedia's B and C category biography articles by leveraging personal narratives such as autobiographies and biographies. By utilizing a multi-staged retrieval-augmented generation technique -- REVerSum -- we aim to enrich the informational content of these lesser-known articles. Our study reveals that personal narratives can significantly improve the quality of Wikipedia articles, providing a rich source of reliable information that has been underutilized in previous studies. Based on crowd-based evaluation, REVerSum generated content outperforms the best performing baseline by 17% in terms of integrability to the original Wikipedia article and 28.5\% in terms of informativeness. Code and Data are available at: https://github.com/sayantan11995/wikipedia_enrichment

Martina Del Popolo

V. N. Krishnachandran

This paper presents an updated biography of Samgamagrāma Mādhava incorporating viewpoints expounded by scholars in the recent past and collecting together in one place more details about his works culled from recent researches into his contributions to mathematics and astronomy. One major updation is with regard to the geographical location in Kerala where Mādhava flourished. Other updations include observations on Mādhava's algorithm to compute the numerical values of the sine and cosine functions and on his value of the mathematical constant $π$.

Ganna Pletnyova

The article suggest to identify the principal types of descriptions of gender violence and their role in shaping the female characters of the historical novel «Man eaters» by the Ukrainian writer Zinaida Tulub, as well as to trace the influence of social and gender issues on the stylistic structure of the novel. Attention is drawn to the reflection of the theme of violence and its evolution in the history of Ukrainian literature. Attention is focused on the writer’s critical view of women’s fate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the Tsardom of Muscovy of the 17th century. The following types of gender-based violence are systematized: rape, murder and abduction of children, human trafficking, everyday violence, religious control over women, etc. The author has recorded the main stylistic means used by Zinaida Tulub when depicting gender violence in the novel (landscapes, symbolic images, similes, etc.). The article offers a comparative analysis of two central female characters in the novel who are victims of these forms of gender violence: the Ukrainian peasant Horpyna Korzh, who finds herself in captivity in a Tatar village, and the Tatar peasant Medzhe, who is kidnapped by Ukrainian Cossacks. The parallel development of these female characters in the novel allows us to draw conclusions about the universality of this violence. An attempt is made to consider Zinaida Tulub’s works in the context of women’s prose in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries. Delving into the inner state of female characters experiencing deep emotional catastrophes is one of the characteristics of this prose. The appeal to the facts of the writer’s biography makes it possible to offer a feminist understanding of the work’s issues from the point of view of modern humanities. The article emphasizes the relevance of the study of gender violence in contemporary literary studies.

Vern L. Glaser, N. Pollock, Luciana D'Adderio

Algorithms are ubiquitous in modern organizations. Typically, researchers have viewed algorithms as self-contained computational tools that either magnify organizational capabilities or generate unintended negative consequences. To overcome this limited understanding of algorithms as stable entities, we propose two moves. The first entails building on a performative perspective to theorize algorithms as entangled, relational, emergent, and nested assemblages that use theories—and the sociomaterial networks they invoke—to automate decisions, enact roles and expertise, and perform calculations. The second move entails building on our dynamic perspective on algorithms to theorize how algorithms evolve as they move across contexts and over time. To this end, we introduce a biographical perspective on algorithms which traces their evolution by focusing on key “biographical moments.” We conclude by discussing how our performativity-inspired biographical perspective on algorithms can help management and organization scholars better understand organizational decision-making, the spread of technologies and their logics, and the dynamics of practices and routines.

Carsten Busch

Author's Note: The legacy passed on from Margaret Benston is clear-4 critique of Present-science that reinforces with its inertia the myths of progress, objectivity, linearity (field independence), adversarial learning, and the rightful dominion of technocracy; and a call for change to Future-science by finding alternatives and doing them. In particular, the exclusion of women, and attributed female characteristics, from Presentscience has impoverished it. Future-science will be richer for its recognition of subjectivity, of holism and of co-operation. The following is a morality play that deals with these issues.

Abdullah Abuhussein, Willie H. Brown

K. O. Gusarova

The article examines the tension between the individual and the collective in current mainstream photographic practice, which is considered within the long-term historical context of commercial portraiture. The individualizing tendencies of this representational tradition as well as its status as (auto)biographical fiction were astutely analyzed by the Russian avant-garde thinkers Alexander Rodchenko and Osip Brik. Criticizing the persistence of “painterly” clichés in studio photography of their time, they saw these conventional elements as something that obscures and distorts reality, substituting for it a beautiful picture. For these leftist theorists, reality was primarily defined by the interplay of social forces, and isolating the subject within the picture frame was sufficient grounds for their disapproval. Taking up their notion of cliché applied particularly to posing, this article proposes to view it, instead, as an entry point into the usually invisible collective dimension of each individual portrait. The first section of the article discusses historical precedents to current mainstream photographic portraiture in terms of class- and gender-specific pressures on the sitters which have contributed to the homogenization of the genre’s visual canon. The suggestion to view stylistically similar images of individuals as expressing a latent collectivity is developed in the second part of the article, which analyzes Jana Romanova’s photographic series W through the theoretical framework borrowed from Lauren Berlant (“intimate public”, “female complaint”) and Gayle Letherby (“auto/biography”).

Tessel M. Bauduin

In the 1920s and '30s the fourteenth-century Italian artist Paolo Uccello was appropriated as a precursor of Surrealism in the French surrealist discourse. Pivotal were two texts, a mini-play and an essay, that the playwright Antonin Artaud, then in his surrealist phase, dedicated to Uccello between 1924 and 1926. This article analyses both texts and shows the construction, by Artaud, of Uccello as his potential double, and especially as someone dedicated to mind over matter, a key facet of Uccello’s reception as a fellow traveler of Surrealism. It identifies an artwork ascribed to Uccello, discussed by Artaud and thought imaginary, as a panel currently in the Louvre. Finally, it shows that an imagined biography of the artist by the symbolist writer Marcel Schwob forms the key hypotext for Artaud and other surrealists, with strong echoes of Vasari’s vita of Uccello, which was in turn Schwob’s hypotext.

Minna Tamper, Petri Leskinen, E. Hyvönen et al.

Biographical collections are available on the Web for close reading. However, the underlying texts can also be used for data analysis and distant reading, if the documents are available as data. Such data is usable for creating intelligent user interfaces to biographical data, including Digital Humanities tooling for visualizations, data analysis, and knowledge discovery in biographical and prosopographical research. In this paper, we re-use biographical collection data from a historiographical perspective for analyzing the underlying collection. For example: What kind of people have been included in the collection? Does the language used for describing female biographees differ from that for men? As a case study, the Finnish National Biography, available as part of the Linked Open Data service and semantic portal BiographySampo – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web is used. The analyses show interesting results related to, e.g., how specific prosopographical groups, such as women or professional groups are represented and portrayed. Various novel statistics and network analyses of the biographees are presented. Our analyses give new insights to the editors of the National Biography as well as to researchers in biography, prosopography, and historiography. The presented approach can be applied also to similar biography collections in other countries.

Daniel Krcmaric, S. Nelson, A. Roberts

The last two decades have seen a revival in work that takes the role of individual leaders and elites seriously. This article surveys new research that explores how biographical factors influence t...

J. Burgess, N. Baym

Angela Fan, Claire Gardent

Generating factual, long-form text such as Wikipedia articles raises three key challenges: how to gather relevant evidence, how to structure information into well-formed text, and how to ensure that the generated text is factually correct. We address these by developing a model for English text that uses a retrieval mechanism to identify relevant supporting information on the web and a cache-based pre-trained encoder-decoder to generate long-form biographies section by section, including citation information. To assess the impact of available web evidence on the output text, we compare the performance of our approach when generating biographies about women (for which less information is available on the web) vs. biographies generally. To this end, we curate a dataset of 1,500 biographies about women. We analyze our generated text to understand how differences in available web evidence data affect generation. We evaluate the factuality, fluency, and quality of the generated texts using automatic metrics and human evaluation. We hope that these techniques can be used as a starting point for human writers, to aid in reducing the complexity inherent in the creation of long-form, factual text.