Search results

We develop a four-factor conceptual framework to explain how information presented in comics differs from other media and therefore is processed differently. The unique ability of sequential art to manipulate time, prompt the reader for closure, utilize abstractions, and combine words and pictures to deliver a multimodal message mages comics an especially effected medium for marketing communications. The influence of these four factors is illustrated through the use of the comic medium in lieu of traditional text throughout this chapter. As a result, processing complex information is facilitated.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: in what sense does experimentation as improvisation lead to methodological innovation? What are the implications of artistic experimentation as improvisation for education and learning?

The paper tracks the known concept within research of “experimentation” with a view to revealing how practice-led research in art works distinctively with experimentation. It proposes experimentation as improvisation drawing on a research project Sounding Drawing 2012 as an example. The paper situates art experimentation as improvisation in art (Cage, 1995) anthropology (Hallam and Ingold, 2007; Bateson, 1989) and the theoretical work of Arnheim (1986) on forms of cognition.

Arts research as improvisation is participatory, relational and performative retaining the research subject in its life context. The artist as researcher starts with open-ended critical questions for which there are no known methods or immediate answer. By setting up boundary conditions from the outset and understanding the situatedness and contingencies of those conditions, the artist as improviser seeks ways of not only avoiding chaos and the arbitrary but also being trapped by what is already known.

This approach is important within and beyond the arts because it consciously draws together different forms of cognition – intuition and relational knowledge and also sequential knowledge. It is also significant because it offers a different epistemology in which new knowledge emerges in the relationship between participants in the research taking form in co-creation. These qualities all position improvisation as a research paradigm and a counterpoint to positivism.

This paper aims to address the following issues: (1) most existing methods are based on recurrent network, which is time-consuming to train long sequences due to not allowing for full parallelism; (2) personalized preference generally are not considered reasonably; (3) existing methods rarely systematically studied how to efficiently utilize various auxiliary information (e.g. user ID and time stamp) in trajectory data and the spatiotemporal relations among nonconsecutive locations.

The authors propose a novel self-attention network–based model named SanMove to predict the next location via capturing the long- and short-term mobility patterns of users. Specifically, SanMove uses a self-attention module to capture each user's long-term preference, which can represent her personalized location preference. Meanwhile, the authors use a spatial-temporal guided noninvasive self-attention (STNOVA) module to exploit auxiliary information in the trajectory data to learn the user's short-term preference.

The authors evaluate SanMove on two real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that SanMove is not only faster than the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) based predict model but also outperforms the baselines for next location prediction.

The authors propose a self-attention-based sequential model named SanMove to predict the user's trajectory, which comprised long-term and short-term preference learning modules. SanMove allows full parallel processing of trajectories to improve processing efficiency. They propose an STNOVA module to capture the sequential transitions of current trajectories. Moreover, the self-attention module is used to process historical trajectory sequences in order to capture the personalized location preference of each user. The authors conduct extensive experiments on two check-in datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the model has a fast training speed and excellent performance compared with the existing RNN-based methods for next location prediction.

Wings Academy is a charter school¹ in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that opened in August of 2002. It is located in the basement of an enormous, beautifully decorated and well maintained convent which houses several social service agencies, retired School Sisters who live there and another charter school. This school was envisioned and created by the authors (Co-Directors), two special education teachers (one is also a parent of a child with Asperger’s Syndrome) who believed the local districts were not providing an appropriate education for students with special education needs, and those with a label of “learning disabled” in particular. Prior to meeting, the Co-Directors had thoughts of creating their own Utopian school in which all students were taught with appropriate methodologies. By the time they had met, they both knew what their school would look like. Eventually, they combined their ideas and opened a school three years later. In this chapter, they describe the rationale for this school and programmatic realities that they have adapted to achieve their vision.

This paper aims to investigate the productivity behavior of Indian banks in the presence of non-performing assets (NPAs) over the period 1999 to 2017. The study examines whether Indian banks withstand the shocks of the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009 and sustain their total factor productivity (TFP) levels in the post-crisis economic turbulent period or not.

The robust estimates of TFP and its components: efficiency change and technical change are obtained using the state-of-the-art and innovative sequential Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index (SMLPI) approach. The key advantages of this approach are that it explicitly allows the joint production of undesirable output (NPAs in our case) along with desirable inputs and outputs in the production process and precludes the possibility of spurious technical regress.

The empirical results of the study reveal that the Indian banking system has experienced a (−1) percent TFP regress, contributed solely by efficiency loss during the period under investigation. The GFC has slowed down the growth trajectory of TFP growth in the Indian banking industry. Among ownership groups, the effect of the GFC was pronounced on the public sector banks.

The practical implication drawn from the study is that the Indian banks have not been able to successfully transmit the use of installed technology in a way to generate early warning signals and mitigate the risk of defaults so as to maximize their productivity gains in the banking industry.

This study is perhaps the first one to understand the productivity dynamics of the Indian banks in response to both endogenous (i.e. NPA crisis) and exogenous (i.e. global financial and economic stress) crises. Moreover, the authors obtain the robust estimates of TFP growth of Indian banks by explicitly accounting for NPAs as an undesirable output and equity as a quasi-fixed input in the bank production process.

Comic books are finally being recognized as a scholarly medium in literature, art, history, popular culture, and many other fields of study. Blanket disapproval of comic books, however, continues in all but a few academic libraries. Librarians do face philosophical and practical challenges to acquiring comic books, but it is both possible and desirable to do so. Valuable selection tools and Internet resources are examined, along with annotations of significant comic book creators.

This chapter reflectively explores the idea of doing art-based research (ABR) through poetic methods for studying the experience of learning in higher education. Taking some literature on faculty development to exemplify different ways of experiencing learning, this chapter serves as a counterpoint to researching experiences of learning from a phenomenological approach. The fundamental reasoning for this is that the basic epistemological assumptions in phenomenology would limit our understanding of experiences of learning and thus, other methodological options would be worth exploring. To that end, this chapter elaborates on the relationship between knowledge production, speech and experience, all circling around the notions of research method and construction. Here, the aim is to reflect upon an understanding of research that is aligned with a dialogical and relational conceptualization of the experience of learning. Finally, an argument will be outlined that suggests conducting research as an experience. Taking from Dewey, Kvale, Law, Scheurich, Talmy and others, this exploration will present the idea of studying the experiences of learning by way of producing/devising experiences through arts. With the notion of art as experience from Dewey, the argument goes to ABR in a general sense, and poetry in particular, as a sound and coherent alternative way of researching learning as an experience. Thus, this chapter explores the possible theoretical-methodological contributions of thinking about and doing research understood as an experience through art.

In analysing the beancounter image's trajectory, from its birth to its persistence, in European French language comics between 1945 and 2016, this paper explores why artists continue beancounter image usage in popular culture.

Beancounter characters have been studied in an application of Iconology (Panofsky, 1955) in order to unravel how individuals make sense of cultural artefacts and how, in turn, the visuals shape cultural belief systems at a given time.

This study reveals that comics artists usage of the beancounter image results from their critical reactions to management and capitalism whilst at other times the usage is an indication of authenticity. Motivation for the usage is not constant over time nor is the impact of the beancounter image. Both appear dependant of the level of artistic freedom experienced by the artist.

Based on a single media (comics) with a unique characters (European French language) this study deepens exploration of the ways in which accounting becomes entwined with the everyday and implies that further research is needed.

Extends the work of Smith and Jacobs (2011) and Jacobs and Evans (2012) by focusing on a genre of popular culture over a long period, and by adopting a critical viewpoint. Also expands the possible applications of Panofsky's (1955) Iconology in accounting studies.