New Techno-Humanities最新文献

The following review is a discussion of Jenna Ng's latest book, titled The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie. The main goal of Ng's study is to define the post-screen, as she aptly names it, as a contemporary “re-placed” screen that is characterized by blurry or undetectable boundaries. Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences as well as holographic and light projections are practices that constitute examples of the post-screen's emergence and consolidation in our present-day media culture.

This book calls upon theories on media, corporeality, death and the self, incorporating them in a timely and absorbing manner, locating links where one may only find boundaries. Through the post-screen, Ng contemplates on the complex relations between virtual and actual reality, truth and falsehood, and our own connection with our bodies, selves, and lives. As such, this research does not remain confined within the boundaries of media studies, but also addresses artists, developers and audiences who share a common interest for contemporary media and their social, political and philosophical dimensions.

Following the advent of the novel Coronavirus, the governments and authorities introduced various mobile applications in the fight against COVID-19. However, these are either restricted by the developer country or not comprised of certain key features, due to which, a vast population from the low- or middle-income country, remains underprivileged from associated benefits. The purpose of this study is to explore and demonstrate how to build a comprehensive and easy-to-use application for mobile health service delivery especially fabricated to fight communicable diseases like COVID-19. Mostly open-source technologies are used to build a distributed scalable client-server application. Then the application is evaluated with the stress-test and usability-test. Besides COVID-19 advisories and guidelines, the study demonstrates complete conceptualization and development of an IoT-based mobile application. It comprises three key features that bring comprehensiveness. One is the ‘contact logger & tracer’ that enables users to maintain a list of contacts who get notified if any of them reported COVID-19 positive in the last 14 days. Two is the ‘self-assessment' which helps users to predict the chances of COVID-19 infection using a scientific rationale. Three is the ‘infection tracker’ that guides users to identify infected hotspots to plan the route accordingly. The usability-test affirmed that the application is easy-to-use. Further, this study demonstrates how to construct such an easy-to-use application mostly with open-source resources. It can help the needy authorities or groups from resource-constrained countries to adopt and develop such applications quickly. Further research on the post-implementation effect will add value to this study.

In Greek myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the two figures of promêtheia and êpimêtheia represent the “temporalization” of “advance” and “withdrawal” and reveal a double movement in human temporality: the forward movement of protective prostheticity, and the backward movement of reflective consciousness. The issue of memory and prostheticity in the originary knowledge in the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus reminds us of what David Chalmers called “qualia,” which represents the hard problem of the phenomena qualities of a conscious mental state. When Stieglerian “originary prostheticity” is brought together with David Chalmer's hard question of “consciousness,” the coupling of knowledge and non-knowledge of promêtheia and êpimetheia will lay bare its double mobile dynamic qualities of forgetting and remembering. We are recently witnessing this epochal breakthrough, which promises to open onto pathways toward a new age of artificial intelligence. What most of today's theories of human cognitive enhancement fail to see is the technogenic and epiphylogenetic origin of human consciousness. Hence, in an era of pandemics and precarity, humans need to materialize new ways of coupling humanities and technology beyond artificial intelligence and critical posthumanism.

Execution of a well-defined program of research targeting the commercial agriculture sector could be considered as a strategic change towards keeping a country on the track of achieving the second sustainable development goal (SDG), i.e. ‘zero hunger by 2030’. To make this a reality, analyzing of drawbacks of the present research environment and finding solutions through digital interventions is warranted. This paper elaborates on those issues faced by researchers who are isolated from human-to-human physical contact in carrying out research in commercial agriculture, especially in COVID-19. Further, a conceptual model to connect and practice research beyond physical presence by digital transformations of organization design of research institutes under these circumstances is suggested. The framework proposed characterizes a connected lab complex – designated as the “Smart Lab Bubble”, to examine its potential in meeting the real needs of a researcher in a disconnected society to produce impactful research for the agriculture sector. It emphasizes the fact that this kind of model shall resiliently be adopted in technological sciences, with the backing from those non-technological sciences like economics, humanities, and management, to make the concept of a “society-friendly innovative research culture” a reality. In light of this, it would expect to leverage technologies to create new services and values for various stakeholders including the agriculture community during this pandemic. The digitally endorsed performance management envisaged under this framework, along with relevant policy measures, is supposed to be building an agile architecture that would not incur technical debt in a newly formed cultural position.

Humans are meta-level beings - meta-interpretative, meta-ethical and meta-technological.

In many respects they are able to use abstract concepts, symbols conceived on and for higher (meta-)levels. This is apparently an epistemological necessity for generalizing in any cognitive, ethical, practical, scientific and technological area. Here the humanities come in: indispensably they are interpretative disciplines dependent on signs, object- and meta-language as well as (meta-)theories. All that is true also for technologies and industry where notorious problems of responsibility are to be met - an all-too-human focus of moral(s) and meta-ethics - The article presents a tour d'horizon of the author's methodological “scheme interpretationist” from “going meta-level” as a hallmark of humanity through humanitarian ethics towards applied responsibility problems in technology and a techno-humanistically interpreted society.

Overall, the development of digital humanities (DH) in Asia is slower than that in Europe and North America, while within East Asia, specifically China, Japan, and South Korea, there are differences in DH's acceptance and progress. This paper reviews the history and current situation of DH in China, Japan, and South Korea. In comparison to Japan and South Korea, the paper also analyzes the characteristics, problems, and possible causes of the problems presented by Chinese DH. Such a retrospective process demonstrates not only the integration and cooperation between humanities and technology, but also the transformation of humanities in the perspective of new technologies. The transformation, whether active or passive, has led many Chinese humanities scholars to worry and reflect, which is one of the focuses of this paper.

Current business statistics and extant academic research stress the importance of influencer marketing. In 2019, the YouTube beauty community witnessed the largest product launch in ecommerce history, in which controversial YouTubers, Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star, published a 7-episode series documenting the process of creating a makeup product. The series garnered more than 152 million views, and led to the breakdown of e-retailer websites and resulted in 2 million people waiting in an online queue to purchase products on www.jeffreestarcosmetics.com. In our experiment, we examine the effects of emotions generated by the series on viewers’ attitudes and purchasing behavior. We observe the development of tester perceptions of the two YouTubers and the presented products post three days of media cultivation using the FaceReader software for facial expression recognition, eye-tracking, Emotional Expressivity Scale (EES), and Personality Inventory Scale.

Digital humanities has become a heatedly discussed and even debated topic among humanities scholars. It is true that it has made a revolutionary impact on the teaching and academic research of humanities scholars, which has also raised a severe challenge to traditional humanities scholars who are not ready for the impact of this trend. But in any event, it indicates a shift of paradigm of research, which marks the rise of a new academic paradigm and reading method in humanities studies. It at least bridges the gap between science and technology and the humanities and makes humanities scholars more efficiently digitizing their research results. This is especially true in literary studies, or more specifically, comparative and world literature studies. The so-called “distant reading” is a new way of researching world literature. Comparatists could use such a distant reading method to have a general picture of the historical development and evolution of world literature. But at the same time, close reading is also important which could for literary scholars to have a deep-going research and analysis of individual literary works. Thus it is necessary for comparatists to combine the two different reading methods in comparative and world literature studies.

This article aims to demonstrate the usefulness of text-technological research for book-historically informed literary and textual studies by examining a “multitechnological hybrid” – the illustrated edition featuring copper- and subsequently wood-engraved illustrative plates – and the role it played in mediating William Falconer's maritime georgic, The Shipwreck (Falconer, 1762), from 1762 to 1808. By focusing on the multi-technological hybridity of the visual apparatuses of these editions, issues related to readership and readability, as well as publishing formats and strategies, can be addressed that will facilitate insight into the intermedial reception of Falconer's production. The adoption of different substrates – ranging from copperplates to woodblocks – reflects not only technological innovations but economic factors, including the simplification of production processes as well as the rise of the cheaply produced printed image that would, in the Victorian period, culminate in the 1858 Edinburgh edition of The Shipwreck featuring more than 30 illustrations, as well as numerous decorative devices, by Birket Foster. Above all, it will be demonstrated that publishers utilised specialist bibliographical discourses of materiality that helped potential purchasers to develop a material literacy with which they were able to understand the text-technological encoding of each illustrated edition, including its particular cultural and symbolic value.