Sounding Out!

SO! Reads: Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s Personal Stereo

In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s eminently readable history of the Walkman and its kind, it is telling to learn that Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita were prone to conversing in ‘something akin to a private shared language’ or idioglossia. “They would sit there,” recounts Morita’s eldest son, “and we would listen but we had no idea what they were saying” (21).  In later life, following strokes, both lost the ability to speak; Ibuka’s son characterises their subsequent relationship as “communicating without words’.” Even the name Sony itself, notes Tuhus-Dubrow, with its origins in the Latin sonus and the English slang “sonny,” was ultimately “a word in no language’” (13).  It is as though aural perception, delivered on an intimate scale, is somehow revelatory in a way that transcends the typical organising principles of language. The incorporation of the sonic into everyday life forever approaches a kind of affective intensity.

Personal Stereo tunes into this frequency and – by virtue of its array of research and skilful marshalling of social and cultural history – offers a compelling map of its coordinates. If, as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, one of its central tasks is to apprehend the affective resonance of the inanimate, it is testament to Tuhus-Dubrow’s work that she is able to manage the breadth of her material into an adroit and concise narrative while at the same time allowing space for her writing to approach these contained moments of intensity. “When I think of [the Walkman] now, I think of joy,” she writes in the introduction (1). While acknowledging that undue celebration of the past can stymie the present, she offers a quietly persuasive case for an examination of nostalgia amid the anxiety of contemporary life, which almost serves as a rallying cry for a generation pinioned between the two: ‘The past, whatever its shortcomings, has the virtue of having already happened. And we survived it.’

The story of the Walkman begins in the bombed-out ruins of 1940s Tokyo, as Ibuka and Morita establish the foundations of the company that would become a consumer electronics giant as part of Japan’s ill-fated post-war boom. It is striking how much of the Walkman’s development was shaped by the ravages of warfare: Tuhus-Dubrow notes how its antecedent, the tape recorder, was first used in the German military, and early headphones were issued to fighter pilots. It is possible to read the subsequent commercial adoption of personal listening devices as an attempted refashioning of the domestic interior, transgressed so violently in acts of conflict. One of Ibuka’s founding principles for Sony was to “apply highly advanced technologies…developed in various sectors during the war to common households” (12).  Tuhus-Dubrow also recounts the case of Andreas Pavel, a native of post-war Berlin, who emigrated with his family to São Paulo and developed what we might term a “counter-prototype” to the Walkman, partly inspired by the internal acoustics of his mother’s home – “a mecca of sound” – in Cidade Jardim. Object lessons are formed through disintegration and salvaged materials. Morita compares his formative partnership with the older Ibuka to a newly-established familial unit: “It was almost as though an adoption were taking place” (13).

Akio Morita (left) and Masaru Ibuka (right), 1961. Courtesy of Sony

This elides neatly with Tuhus-Dubrow’s central chapter, which is also the strongest. Here, she discusses the reception of private listening within the public domain, and how existing societal norms apprehended this new sonic phenomenon. It is intriguing, and at times hilarious, how much of the reaction operates as moral critique: from a 1923 article comparing the very act of solo listening to alcohol abuse or a drug habit, to rather more recent takes that foreshadow the current intergenerational culture wars. “The personal stereo,” harrumphs A.N. Wilson, ‘became the archetypal accessory of the me-generation” (68).

Tuhus-Dubrow’s research is smart and on point, not least because it leads to a productive consideration of how the cathartic element of the private soundtrack becomes something that society struggles to assimilate. She takes to time to weave in personal testimonies and reminiscences that are effective and somehow touching: “the Walkman,” she admits, “was a source of elation and comfort” (85). A friend recalls how “[my] inner world was enriched by the freedom to explore music on my own” (84).  Pavel describes how the first use of his prototype, in the snows of St Moritz, evoked “a state of ecstasy,” in which life temporarily assumed a cinematic quality. “Suddenly,” he remembers, curiously switching to the present tense, “I’m inside a film” (27).

Darryl with a new Walkman, December 25, 1982, Image by Flickr User Kent Kanouse

Others speak of how musical accompaniment aids a more immersive interaction with the world around them, and it is here that perhaps the real strength of Tuhus-Dubrow’s work emerges: the generosity of an approach that permits mutual recognition; the summoning of an experiential quality that is elusive in its definition but vivid and immediate in its resonance. It is a mode of writing – and indeed a mode of listening – that is resolutely contemporary, formed in a firestorm of technological innovation that was both oppressive and liberatory, attuning us to new ways of being at the same time as it degrades and erodes old certainties.

It bears resemblance to what Tuhus-Dubrow recognises as “the logic of our own bodies, with organs and limbs whose motions are connected to their functions, and which are susceptible to injury and gradual breakdown” (102).  Earlier she writes, “as one song neared its end, I would begin to hear the opening chords of the next in my head.”

What is it, this sense of auditory anticipation?

It is the forming of new waves. We have blood in our ears.

—

Featured Image: “Walkman through the cassette” by Flicker User Narisa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

—

Lewis Jones  just completed an MA in Literature & Theory at the University of Sussex, UK, with a particular interest in the affective quality of certain technological modes of representation and their repercussions within social consciousness. He is currently researching and writing on the impact of cinema on urban space.

—

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Hiromu Nagahara’s Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents–Shawn Higgins

SO! Reads: Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed For Hi Fi Living–Gina Arnold

SO! Reads: Susan Schmidt Horning’s Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP— Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Sounding Out!

SO! Reads: Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s Personal Stereo

In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s eminently readable history of the Walkman and its kind, it is telling to learn that Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita were prone to conversing in ‘something akin to a private shared language’ or idioglossia. “They would sit there,” recounts Morita’s eldest son, “and we would listen but we had no idea what they were saying” (21).  In later life, following strokes, both lost the ability to speak; Ibuka’s son characterises their subsequent relationship as “communicating without words’.” Even the name Sony itself, notes Tuhus-Dubrow, with its origins in the Latin sonus and the English slang “sonny,” was ultimately “a word in no language’” (13).  It is as though aural perception, delivered on an intimate scale, is somehow revelatory in a way that transcends the typical organising principles of language. The incorporation of the sonic into everyday life forever approaches a kind of affective intensity.

Personal Stereo tunes into this frequency and – by virtue of its array of research and skilful marshalling of social and cultural history – offers a compelling map of its coordinates. If, as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, one of its central tasks is to apprehend the affective resonance of the inanimate, it is testament to Tuhus-Dubrow’s work that she is able to manage the breadth of her material into an adroit and concise narrative while at the same time allowing space for her writing to approach these contained moments of intensity. “When I think of [the Walkman] now, I think of joy,” she writes in the introduction (1). While acknowledging that undue celebration of the past can stymie the present, she offers a quietly persuasive case for an examination of nostalgia amid the anxiety of contemporary life, which almost serves as a rallying cry for a generation pinioned between the two: ‘The past, whatever its shortcomings, has the virtue of having already happened. And we survived it.’

The story of the Walkman begins in the bombed-out ruins of 1940s Tokyo, as Ibuka and Morita establish the foundations of the company that would become a consumer electronics giant as part of Japan’s ill-fated post-war boom. It is striking how much of the Walkman’s development was shaped by the ravages of warfare: Tuhus-Dubrow notes how its antecedent, the tape recorder, was first used in the German military, and early headphones were issued to fighter pilots. It is possible to read the subsequent commercial adoption of personal listening devices as an attempted refashioning of the domestic interior, transgressed so violently in acts of conflict. One of Ibuka’s founding principles for Sony was to “apply highly advanced technologies…developed in various sectors during the war to common households” (12).  Tuhus-Dubrow also recounts the case of Andreas Pavel, a native of post-war Berlin, who emigrated with his family to São Paulo and developed what we might term a “counter-prototype” to the Walkman, partly inspired by the internal acoustics of his mother’s home – “a mecca of sound” – in Cidade Jardim. Object lessons are formed through disintegration and salvaged materials. Morita compares his formative partnership with the older Ibuka to a newly-established familial unit: “It was almost as though an adoption were taking place” (13).

Akio Morita (left) and Masaru Ibuka (right), 1961. Courtesy of Sony

This elides neatly with Tuhus-Dubrow’s central chapter, which is also the strongest. Here, she discusses the reception of private listening within the public domain, and how existing societal norms apprehended this new sonic phenomenon. It is intriguing, and at times hilarious, how much of the reaction operates as moral critique: from a 1923 article comparing the very act of solo listening to alcohol abuse or a drug habit, to rather more recent takes that foreshadow the current intergenerational culture wars. “The personal stereo,” harrumphs A.N. Wilson, ‘became the archetypal accessory of the me-generation” (68).

Tuhus-Dubrow’s research is smart and on point, not least because it leads to a productive consideration of how the cathartic element of the private soundtrack becomes something that society struggles to assimilate. She takes to time to weave in personal testimonies and reminiscences that are effective and somehow touching: “the Walkman,” she admits, “was a source of elation and comfort” (85). A friend recalls how “[my] inner world was enriched by the freedom to explore music on my own” (84).  Pavel describes how the first use of his prototype, in the snows of St Moritz, evoked “a state of ecstasy,” in which life temporarily assumed a cinematic quality. “Suddenly,” he remembers, curiously switching to the present tense, “I’m inside a film” (27).

Darryl with a new Walkman, December 25, 1982, Image by Flickr User Kent Kanouse

Others speak of how musical accompaniment aids a more immersive interaction with the world around them, and it is here that perhaps the real strength of Tuhus-Dubrow’s work emerges: the generosity of an approach that permits mutual recognition; the summoning of an experiential quality that is elusive in its definition but vivid and immediate in its resonance. It is a mode of writing – and indeed a mode of listening – that is resolutely contemporary, formed in a firestorm of technological innovation that was both oppressive and liberatory, attuning us to new ways of being at the same time as it degrades and erodes old certainties.

It bears resemblance to what Tuhus-Dubrow recognises as “the logic of our own bodies, with organs and limbs whose motions are connected to their functions, and which are susceptible to injury and gradual breakdown” (102).  Earlier she writes, “as one song neared its end, I would begin to hear the opening chords of the next in my head.”

What is it, this sense of auditory anticipation?

It is the forming of new waves. We have blood in our ears.

—

Featured Image: “Walkman through the cassette” by Flicker User Narisa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

—

Lewis Jones  just completed an MA in Literature & Theory at the University of Sussex, UK, with a particular interest in the affective quality of certain technological modes of representation and their repercussions within social consciousness. He is currently researching and writing on the impact of cinema on urban space.

—

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Hiromu Nagahara’s Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents–Shawn Higgins

SO! Reads: Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed For Hi Fi Living–Gina Arnold

SO! Reads: Susan Schmidt Horning’s Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP— Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Sounding Out!

SO! Reads: Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s Personal Stereo

In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s eminently readable history of the Walkman and its kind, it is telling to learn that Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita were prone to conversing in ‘something akin to a private shared language’ or idioglossia. “They would sit there,” recounts Morita’s eldest son, “and we would listen but we had no idea what they were saying” (21).  In later life, following strokes, both lost the ability to speak; Ibuka’s son characterises their subsequent relationship as “communicating without words’.” Even the name Sony itself, notes Tuhus-Dubrow, with its origins in the Latin sonus and the English slang “sonny,” was ultimately “a word in no language’” (13).  It is as though aural perception, delivered on an intimate scale, is somehow revelatory in a way that transcends the typical organising principles of language. The incorporation of the sonic into everyday life forever approaches a kind of affective intensity.

Personal Stereo tunes into this frequency and – by virtue of its array of research and skilful marshalling of social and cultural history – offers a compelling map of its coordinates. If, as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, one of its central tasks is to apprehend the affective resonance of the inanimate, it is testament to Tuhus-Dubrow’s work that she is able to manage the breadth of her material into an adroit and concise narrative while at the same time allowing space for her writing to approach these contained moments of intensity. “When I think of [the Walkman] now, I think of joy,” she writes in the introduction (1). While acknowledging that undue celebration of the past can stymie the present, she offers a quietly persuasive case for an examination of nostalgia amid the anxiety of contemporary life, which almost serves as a rallying cry for a generation pinioned between the two: ‘The past, whatever its shortcomings, has the virtue of having already happened. And we survived it.’

The story of the Walkman begins in the bombed-out ruins of 1940s Tokyo, as Ibuka and Morita establish the foundations of the company that would become a consumer electronics giant as part of Japan’s ill-fated post-war boom. It is striking how much of the Walkman’s development was shaped by the ravages of warfare: Tuhus-Dubrow notes how its antecedent, the tape recorder, was first used in the German military, and early headphones were issued to fighter pilots. It is possible to read the subsequent commercial adoption of personal listening devices as an attempted refashioning of the domestic interior, transgressed so violently in acts of conflict. One of Ibuka’s founding principles for Sony was to “apply highly advanced technologies…developed in various sectors during the war to common households” (12).  Tuhus-Dubrow also recounts the case of Andreas Pavel, a native of post-war Berlin, who emigrated with his family to São Paulo and developed what we might term a “counter-prototype” to the Walkman, partly inspired by the internal acoustics of his mother’s home – “a mecca of sound” – in Cidade Jardim. Object lessons are formed through disintegration and salvaged materials. Morita compares his formative partnership with the older Ibuka to a newly-established familial unit: “It was almost as though an adoption were taking place” (13).

Akio Morita (left) and Masaru Ibuka (right), 1961. Courtesy of Sony

This elides neatly with Tuhus-Dubrow’s central chapter, which is also the strongest. Here, she discusses the reception of private listening within the public domain, and how existing societal norms apprehended this new sonic phenomenon. It is intriguing, and at times hilarious, how much of the reaction operates as moral critique: from a 1923 article comparing the very act of solo listening to alcohol abuse or a drug habit, to rather more recent takes that foreshadow the current intergenerational culture wars. “The personal stereo,” harrumphs A.N. Wilson, ‘became the archetypal accessory of the me-generation” (68).

Tuhus-Dubrow’s research is smart and on point, not least because it leads to a productive consideration of how the cathartic element of the private soundtrack becomes something that society struggles to assimilate. She takes to time to weave in personal testimonies and reminiscences that are effective and somehow touching: “the Walkman,” she admits, “was a source of elation and comfort” (85). A friend recalls how “[my] inner world was enriched by the freedom to explore music on my own” (84).  Pavel describes how the first use of his prototype, in the snows of St Moritz, evoked “a state of ecstasy,” in which life temporarily assumed a cinematic quality. “Suddenly,” he remembers, curiously switching to the present tense, “I’m inside a film” (27).

Darryl with a new Walkman, December 25, 1982, Image by Flickr User Kent Kanouse

Others speak of how musical accompaniment aids a more immersive interaction with the world around them, and it is here that perhaps the real strength of Tuhus-Dubrow’s work emerges: the generosity of an approach that permits mutual recognition; the summoning of an experiential quality that is elusive in its definition but vivid and immediate in its resonance. It is a mode of writing – and indeed a mode of listening – that is resolutely contemporary, formed in a firestorm of technological innovation that was both oppressive and liberatory, attuning us to new ways of being at the same time as it degrades and erodes old certainties.

It bears resemblance to what Tuhus-Dubrow recognises as “the logic of our own bodies, with organs and limbs whose motions are connected to their functions, and which are susceptible to injury and gradual breakdown” (102).  Earlier she writes, “as one song neared its end, I would begin to hear the opening chords of the next in my head.”

What is it, this sense of auditory anticipation?

It is the forming of new waves. We have blood in our ears.

—

Featured Image: “Walkman through the cassette” by Flicker User Narisa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

—

Lewis Jones  just completed an MA in Literature & Theory at the University of Sussex, UK, with a particular interest in the affective quality of certain technological modes of representation and their repercussions within social consciousness. He is currently researching and writing on the impact of cinema on urban space.

—

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Hiromu Nagahara’s Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents–Shawn Higgins

SO! Reads: Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed For Hi Fi Living–Gina Arnold

SO! Reads: Susan Schmidt Horning’s Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP— Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Janneke Adema

NECS – Statement on Open Science and Scholarship

At the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) conference in Gdańsk, the publication committee organizes a workshop on open access/open scholarship on Friday, June 14th, 2019, 13:45-15:30.

After a short introduction to the topic by Jeroen Sondervan and some reflective notes by Catherine Grant, we will collectively work on a NECS statement on Open Scholarship during the rest of the session by using a Google Doc for collective writing. The document (click here) is now open for commenting prior to the workshop.

Our aims for are:
1) To share with participants NECS´s draft statement on Open Science and Scholarship and invite views on a number of pre-selected points (this document will be opened for commenting prior to the conference);

2) To engage in a conversation about the nature and implications of Open Science and Scholarship for researchers, educators, practitioners and archivists in the area of Media Studies.

Spread the word, come join the conversation, participate (in person or virtually), and keep an eye out for more when the conference approaches.

Janneke Adema

Évaluation des interventions de santé mondiale. Méthodes avancées.

Sous la direction de Valéry Ridde et Christian Dagenais

Acheter un livre, c’est nous soutenir et permettre à ceux et celles qui ne peuvent l’acheter de le lire en libre accès.

Une couverture universelle des soins de santé en 2030 pour tous les êtres humains, du Nord au Sud? Réaliser cet objectif de développement durable aussi ambitieux que nécessaire exigera une exceptionnelle volonté politique, mais aussi de solides données probantes sur les moyens d’y arriver, notamment sur les interventions de santé mondiale les plus efficaces. Savoir les évaluer est donc un enjeu majeur. On ne peut plus se contenter de mesurer leur efficacité : il nous faut comprendre pourquoi elles l’ont été (ou pas), comment et dans quelles conditions. Cet ouvrage collectif réunissant 27 auteurs et 12 autrices de différents pays et de disciplines variées a pour but de présenter de manière claire et accessible, en français, un florilège d’approches et de méthodes avancées en évaluation d’interventions : quantitatives, qualitatives, mixtes, permettant d’étudier l’évaluabilité, la pérennité, les processus, la fidélité, l’efficience, l’équité et l’efficacité d’interventions complexes. Chaque méthode est présentée dans un chapitre à travers un cas réel pour faciliter la transmission de ces savoirs précieux.

Une co-édition des Éditions science et bien commun et des Éditions IRD.

ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-60-4
ISBN pour l’impression au Canada : 978-2-924661-58-1
ISBN pour l’impression en France : 978-2-7099-2766-6
483 pages
Date de publication : juillet 2019

Utilisez le bouton Paypal au bas de la page pour commander le livre imprimé au Canada ou en Europe ou l’obtenir en format ePub (prêtable) ou télécharger le bon de commande  Le livre sera bientôt disponible dans nos librairies dépositaires : la Librairie du Quartier à Québec, Zone libre à Montréal, à venir pour Paris, Genève et l’Afrique.

Table des matières

Partie I. La phase pré-évaluative et la pérennité

L’étude d’évaluabilité
Une intervention de prévention de l’usage de drogues à l’école au Québec
Biessé Diakaridja Soura, Jean-Sébastien Fallu, Robert Bastien et Frédéric N. Brière

L’évaluation de la pérennité
Une intervention de financement basé sur les résultats au Mali
Mathieu Seppey et Valéry Ridde

Partie II. Les approches qualitatives et participatives

L’évaluation qualitative, informatisée, participative et inter-organisationnelle (EQUIPO)
Exemple d’un programme en faveur des femmes victimes de violences en Bolivie
Mathieu Bujold et Jean-Alexandre Fortin

La méthode photovoix
Une intervention auprès de populations marginalisées sur l’accès à l’eau potable, l’hygiène et l’assainissement au Mexique
Lynda Rey, Wilfried Affodégon, Isabelle Viens, Hind Fathallah et Maria José Arauz

L’analyse d’une recherche-action
Combinaison d’approches dans le domaine de la santé au Burkina Faso
Aka Bony Roger Sylvestre, Valéry Ridde et Ludovic Queuille

Partie III. Les méthodes mixtes

Les revues systématiques mixtes
Un exemple à propos du financement basé sur les résultats
Quan Nha Hong, Anne-Marie Turcotte-Tremblay et Pierre Pluye

L’intégration en méthodes mixtes
Cadre conceptuel pour l’intégration des phases, résultats et données qualitatifs et quantitatifs
Pierre Pluye

La pratique de l’intégration en méthodes mixtes
Les multiples combinaisons des stratégies d’intégration
Pierre Pluye, Enrique García Bengoechea, David Li Tang, Vera Granikov

Partie IV. L’évaluation de l’efficacité et de l’efficience

Les méthodes quasi-expérimentales
L’effet de l’âge légal minimum sur la consommation d’alcool chez les jeunes aux États-Unis
Tarik Benmarhnia et Daniel Fuller

Les essais randomisés en grappe
Un exemple en santé maternelle et infantile
Alexandre Dumont

La mesure de l’équité
Un exemple d’intervention de gratuité des soins obstétricaux
Tarik Benmarhnia et Britt McKinnon

L’analyse coût-efficacité
Une intervention de décentralisation des soins VIH/SIDA à Shiselweni, Swaziland
Guillaume Jouquet

L’analyse spatiale
Un cas d’intervention communautaire de lutte contre le moustique Aedes aegypti au Burkina Faso
Emmanuel Bonnet, France Samiratou Ouédraogo et Diane Saré

Partie V. L’évaluation des processus et de la fidélité d’implantation

L’analyse des processus de mise en œuvre
Une intervention complexe au Burkina Faso : le financement basé sur les résultats
Valéry Ridde et Anne-Marie Turcotte-Tremblay

L’évaluation de la fidélité d’implantation
Un projet de distribution d’omble chevalier aux femmes enceintes du Nunavik
Lara Gautier, Catherine M. Pirkle, Christopher Furgal et Michel Lucas

L’évaluation de la fidélité et de l’adaptation
Un exemple de mise en œuvre des interventions en santé mondiale
Dennis Pérez, Marta Castro et Pierre Lefèvre

L’évaluation réaliste
L’exemple de l’adoption d’une politique publique de santé au Bénin
Jean-Paul Dossou et Bruno Marchal

Pour commander le livre :


Evaluation sante mondiale



 

Eileen Joy

The Enclosure of Scholarly Infrastructures, Open Access Books & the Necessity of Community

Figure 1. Tianjin Binhai Library, Tianjin, China In June 2018, punctum and 4 other open-access book publishers in Europe (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and Open Humanities Press) formed the ScholarLed collective: The aim of the collective is to explore the potential of working together. This includes developing systems and practices that allow presses[...]
Janneke Adema

Évaluation des interventions en santé mondiale. Méthodes avancées

Sous la direction de Valéry Ridde et Christian Dagenais

Une couverture universelle des soins de santé en 2030 pour tous les êtres humains, du Nord au Sud? Réaliser cet objectif de développement durable aussi ambitieux que nécessaire exigera une exceptionnelle volonté politique, mais aussi de solides données probantes sur les moyens d’y arriver, notamment sur les interventions de santé mondiale les plus efficaces. Savoir les évaluer est donc un enjeu majeur. On ne peut plus se contenter de mesurer leur efficacité : il nous faut comprendre pourquoi elles l’ont été (ou pas), comment et dans quelles conditions. Cet ouvrage collectif réunissant 27 auteurs et 12 autrices de différents pays et de disciplines variées a pour but de présenter de manière claire et accessible, en français, un florilège d’approches et de méthodes avancées en évaluation d’interventions : quantitatives, qualitatives, mixtes, permettant d’étudier l’évaluabilité, la pérennité, les processus, la fidélité, l’efficience, l’équité et l’efficacité d’interventions complexes. Chaque méthode est présentée dans un chapitre à travers un cas réel pour faciliter la transmission de ces savoirs précieux.

Sounding Out!

SO! Podcast #76: F*** U Pay Us @ UC Riverside PunkCon

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: F*** U Pay Us @ UC Riverside PunkCon

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES

ADD OUR PODCASTS TO YOUR STITCHER FAVORITES PLAYLIST

Sounding Out! was naturally curious about the amazing UC Riverside Punk Con–organized by Marlen Rios-Hernandez and Susana Sepulveda–and so we asked if we could listen in on some of the amazing conversations happening there. Fortunately the wonderful Mikaela Elson volunteered to be our ears on the ground and recorded this excellent keynote presentation by femme and them punk band FUPU (Fuck U Pay Us).

Mikaela chose to feature this keynote because of how they discuss how the voice can be used as a tool to undermine the white male patriarchy. In this talk they discuss how their music is used to cure the sting of a society that is anti-black and which thrives off of using power to suppress black folk, people of color, lgbtq+, disabled, and otherwise marginalized folk. BOOM!!!!

—

Featured image of FUPU borrowed from the UCR PunkCon site.

—
Mikaela Elson is a media and culture scholar from the University of California, Riverside. She also has an associates degree in art. She creates and documents underground media that stands in opposition to the mass media. Her work focuses on helping to facilitate representation for folks from marginalized communities. She is the personal assistant for graphic novelist and artist John Jennings and host of “Hybrid Virtue” a college radio show on KUCR 88.3fm. To learn more about Mikaela follow her on Instagram @thisismik_
—
INC

Lecture Creative Industries in China: From Catch-Up to Cold War 2.0 – Justin O’Connor

Friday 7 June 2019, 16.00 – 18.00
Master Institute of Visual Cultures, Parallelweg 21-23, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Entrance is free.
Drinks afterwards

Performative Defiance Lecture Series #2 – Justin O’Connor

This talk responds to China’s creative industries strategy and the implications for the European model of creative industries, essentially asking the question whether there is anything that Europe could learn from the Chinese model.

The UK Government’s 1998 rebranding of ‘cultural industries’ as ‘creative industries’, and the wider embrace of a ‘creative economy’, was meant to establish the competitive advantage of post-industrial in the face of East Asian manufacturing prowess. However, within a few years many East Asian countries had, to varying degrees, adopted this agenda, China doing so in 2006. China presented both deficit and opportunity. Deficit, because an authoritarian state was anathema to the liberal ideas underpinning the creative economy model. Opportunity because the ‘West’ – UK especially – was well-positioned to supply the know – how China would inevitably require to implement such a model. What this narrative ignores is the fact that Chinese creative industries strategy no longer attempts to follow the liberal model of entrepreneurial subjects, working in fluid networks, nurtured by an innovative urban milieu (or ‘hubs’). Instead it looks to ‘developmental state’ models exemplified by Korea and adapted from its own framework of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. China’s is an industrial not a creativity strategy, and in this sense is a challenge to the normative settings of the ‘creative economy’ in Europe.

Biography Justin O’Connor

Justin O’Connor is Professor at the School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia and visiting Professor in the School of Media and Design, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Previously he was Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University. He was part of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity. Professor O’Connor is the author of the 2016 Platform Paper “After the Creative Industries: Why we need a Cultural Economy”, and a forthcoming book on Culture and Modernity in Contemporary China. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries (with Kate Oakley, 2015) and Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City (with Rong Yueming, 2018).

Lecture series

The Performative Defiance Lecture Series is an initiative of the Autonomy Research Chair at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), organized in collaboration with and hosted by the Master Institute of Visual Cultures. Its aim is to provide within Avans University an open, public forum where some of the foremost national and international voices challenge us to think about and discuss the role of art and design for the creation of a different future, to imagine another kind of world, the kind of world we wish to live in.

The notion performative defiance refers to creative practices that depart from the idea of the future as a mere update of the present, and calls for a recharge of aesthetic practice that turns complicity into defiance. What is required of art and design is an aesthetic mobilization to unsettle and then create the conditions that will ensure our survival and enhance our capacity to create and resist in the future. Performative defiance is therefore an articulation of a creative longing for a desirable future that lends itself to a counter position set against the deadlock of the present and against the symbolic misery of our time.

INC

Say It Ain’t So: A simple Speech-To-Text experiment with serious implications

Photo taken during the workshop 'Say it Ain't So' during the Urgent Publishing conference

Photo taken by INC Amsterdam

by Simon Browne

On the final day of the Urgent Publishing conference is “Say It Ain’t So”, a workshop organised by artist Amy Pickles and designer and researcher Cristina Cochior. The topic is speech to text processing, including technical aspects of speech recognition software such as the open source engine PocketSphinx, and issues of visibility and invisibility.

The workshop is in response to an urgent need to raise awareness to digital discrimination arising from voice technology developments. This is illustrated in a mock application interview phone call between Amy and, as it turns out, all of us, collectively reading out lines from a script. It doesn’t go well for Amy; she is rejected due to data drawn from not just what she said, but also how she said it. Her fate is sealed by low percentages of the things that matter, such as confident delivery and use of predetermined key words.

In contrast with the perception that discrete parts of language are mostly stable, speech recordings contain more dynamic, complex elements than we imagine. Speech to text uses a ‘bag of words‘ model; utterances are sliced into basic units of language and indexed by frequency. More frequent combinations are matched with corresponding equivalents from sourced dictionaries; speech to text and vice-versa. This is illustrated in a quick demonstration of PocketSphinx transcription with mixed results; either rendering (relatively) faithfully or producing comical phrases that barely resemble natural language, especially when confronted with accents.

Writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” suggests that the first tool was a bag (rather than a weapon), with contents that allowed us to form narratives through powerful relational qualities. In this workshop, spread out on a carpet, are a collection of plastic bags filled with printed texts. We are invited to record ourselves reading from them in groups, either obscuring or emphasising elements. Most adopt tactics of sabotage and subterfuge, such as broken syllables, speaking continuously, using languages other than English, etcetera. Some aim for clarity; text to speech, exploiting acoustics or carefully pronouncing certain words.

The workshop wraps up with listening to recordings from the morning, and reading printed transcriptions. Each transcription contains a list of phonemes next to eerily accurate but semantically unrelated matches. We record parts of the transcriptions and assign them as phone ringtones to play during the plenary session, with comedic effect. It’s easy to laugh at the mess made of what comes so naturally to us; language. But there are more serious implications, as we see in a screening of a video of academic Halcyon Lawrence, who maintains that homophony is engrained, and confronting accent bias is a crucial part of ensuring access to technology.

The hallmark of algorithmic natural language applications is invisibility, relying on a participant’s lack of awareness of the process. However, invisibility is also a result of these applications, in their ability to discriminate between the contents of the bags of words they employ, and so hide differences; discarding what is considered to be indistinct.