The civilian's visual security paradox: how open source intelligence practices create insecurity for civilians in warzones

ABSTRACT

Images taken by civilians and shared online have become an important source of conflict intelligence. This article explores issues around how states and non-state actors appropriate civilians’ images to produce intelligence about conflict, critically scrutinizing a practice often called open source or social media intelligence. It argues that image appropriation for open-source intelligence production creates a new kind of visual security paradox in which civilians can be endangered by their everyday visual practices because their digital images can be appropriated by outside actors as conflict intelligence. The transformation of everyday images into conflict evidence relies on what Barthes termed the photographic paradox, the paradox that while a photograph is clearly not the reality it depicts, the photograph is casually interpreted as a copy of that reality. When images are appropriated as conflict intelligence this photographic paradox translates into a security paradox. A visual security argument can be made without the intention or knowledge of the image producer, who then comes to perform the role on an intelligence agent. Yet civilians in warzones can hardly refrain from producing any images when they need to call attention to their plight, and to stay in contact with friends and relatives. The paradox, then, is that such vital visual signs of life can rapidly become sources of danger for the civilian. This civilian visual security paradox, it is argued, demands that intelligence actors respect the protected status of civilians in their online collection practices. So far, however, there is little sign of such respect.     

Religion,globalization and commodification in online world news slideshows: the dis/connection of images and texts

Lately, possibilities of producing and spreading news pictures have increased explosively through online media. Concurrently, religion has become increasingly salient in politics and news. Both processes are connected to globalization. This study encompasses globalization, religion and online images and aims to convey how online world news slideshows represent religion, and more particularly how linguistic and visual parts of picture paragraphs are interrelated, as well as related to representations of different religions. Methodologically multimodal analysis and discourse analysis are combined, focusing on composition of images and (dis-)connection of images and texts. Theories on globalization and possibilities and particularities of online news (pictures) and slideshows, frame the analysis. Tendencies to templates for different religions are found. Many religions appear as aesthetic commodities in images, whereas Islam in texts “sells” images of violence/destruction. Image–text relations are thus crucial both in the creation of meaning and of commodities in online news image culture. Two main image–text types are identified: “Religion in text, (potential) violence/destruction/despair in picture” (Islam) and “Spirituality/worshipping/aestheticism” (other religions). The world news slideshows have crucial roles as containers for these polarized image–text types, where they are related to and defined by each other in the genre's (cl)aim to cover the whole world.     

Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.     

时代剧变推动下近代史学演进大势(下)

三、封建帝制崩溃前后"新史学"的倡导和推进戊戌维新虽然被顽固派扼杀了,但戊戌运动由此开启的思想解放的潮流是阻挡不了的。至20世纪初年,由于空前民族危机的刺激以及逐步形成的共和革命思想的推动,中国思想界出现了急剧变化的局面,掀起了输入西方新思想、新学理,用以分析中国历史与现实问题,寻找救国道路的进步潮流。十年之间,雨后春笋般地刊行了大量译著、杂志和报纸。梁启超对当时情况有过生动的概括:"戊戌政变,继以庚子‘拳祸’,清室衰微益暴露,青年学子,相率求学海外。     

How to humiliate and shame: a reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society.     

Digitizing Peircean semiotics to analyze students’ peer-review comments: classroom use of an application in open-source R

ABSTRACT

Statistical software applications are increasingly used to measure student engagement in the classroom. However, more work remains to be done to clarify how meaning is created and measured in classroom settings. With the growing use of technology in the classroom, students’ peer review has become a standard practice to improve students’ writing skills. This article examines the use of an open-source R software application based on Peirce’s sign theory to analyze students’ peer-review comments. Peer review is the assessment of student or professional work by others. The importance of open-source R as a platform lies in the fact that users can extend its code without having to ask permission. The results suggest a new approach, based on computational and social semiotics, to the assessment of students’ peer-review comments in higher education.     

Representation in Local Politics: a Reconsideration and some New Evidence

The concept of 'representation', and the tensions within it, have exercised writers throughout the history of political theory. There is little consensus beyond the agreement that the meaning of representation should be made clear, and consistency sought, in any particular application. This paper takes as its starting point some key components of the concept of representation, and in the light of them examines the changing attitudes of both representatives and electors in British local government. Survey data accumulated over a 30-year period provides the basis for this analysis, enabling attention to be given to trends over the period. Changing expectations of representativeness—a component of representation that stresses 'resemblance' or 'symbolic identification'—prompt a questioning of its appropriateness for the understanding of local politics today. The evidence indicates that the contemporary demand for responsive and responsible local government has now displaced the historic concern with representativeness.     

The Rituals of Public Meetings

Public meetings are often referred to as “rituals” to denote a largely symbolic activity with little concrete meaning. This essay explores how public meeting rituals may produce very real impacts on participants and pragmatic outcomes. Whereas tangible outputs of rituals are not always evident, ritual theory suggests that participants can derive latent meaning and significant comfort from their application. Although rituals serve to reify certain norms or control behaviors, they may also reaffirm civic values and encourage group cohesion. A deeper appreciation of public meeting rituals will enable participants and officials to respond more effectively to restructured or nontraditional formats as well as better deal with the challenges of maintaining participation when rituals lose their meaning.     

Image Politics

Abstract

This essay focuses on the ongoing references made to the ban on graven images for the foundation of political aesthetics. In this tradition the image itself plays a significant role in the creation of a dichotomy in which the image becomes either “icon” or false appearance. The image in this tradition is a powerful agent and gains as such performative power. From the Bible to Kant and German idealism to Adorno and Deleuze, the prohibition of the image signals its power and turns it into a strong magnet in political aesthetics, may it be affirmative or negative.     

汉字部首与英文词根比较

汉字是表意文字,形声字在汉字中占有很大一部分的比例,它们是由表音部件和表意部件构成,表意部件也可叫做部首,通过部首我们能知道一个汉字的意思或所属。英语是表音文字,词根是一个词的核心部分,表现了该词的主要意思。通常,词根的意思加上词缀的意思基本上就是整个词的意思。汉字中的部首和英语单词中的词根有着不同的构字或构词模式,这反映了不同的文化背景和思维模式。     

Rationality,Power, Management and Symbols: Four Images of Regulatory Impact Assessment

Impact assessment is the pivotal instrument in the recent wave of regulatory reforms labeled ‘better regulation’. Although the economics of impact assessment has been the subject of a vast literature, less is known about its political properties. Within a comparative framework, this article provides conjectures on four images of impact assessment – that is, rational policy making, political control of the bureaucracy, public management reform, and symbolic action. Looking at six countries with a long experience of impact assessment and the European Union, the article first builds expectations about the diffusion of the images across countries, and then proceeds to measurement by using both objective and interpretative/subjective indicators. The findings seem to support the public management reform image – a conclusion that suggests further specifications about administrative traditions and change. Sweden and Denmark are not using impact assessment to foster instrumental rationality or increase the political control of bureaucracies and, together with the Netherlands, rank high on the symbolic action scale. The United States – and to a lesser extent Canada and the United Kingdom – have a multi‐purpose approach to impact assessment. The case of the European Union defies prior expectations, showing much more usage than anticipated.     

警察公关礼仪与警察形象的塑造

在现代社会中,任何一个社会组织都要处理好与自身发展密切相关的内外公众关系,树立良好的组织形象。充分重视和发挥公关礼仪的功能和作用是警察组织的形象塑造的一个重要方面。本文对警察公共关系工作中礼仪的功能、原则、意义和养成等方面进行了探讨。认为公共关系是一门塑造形象的艺术,人民警察外在的行为、举止等表现,在人民群众心目中形成的形象、地位、信任和支持程度构成了人民警察的形象。而公关礼仪正是塑造形象这一艺术的起点。     

Voices on Paper: Multimodal Texts and Indigenous Literacy in Brazil

This paper focuses on the recent production of multimodal writing in an indigenous community in Brazil, resulting from the equally recent introduction of literacy. Seeing this form of writing as part of the process of intercultural semiosis and cultural translation, the paper discusses how concepts of local indigenous oral culture and received wisdom interact with the Western concept of writing as the ‘record’ or ‘representation’ of speech, bringing to writing the indigenous notion of cultural ‘enactment’ or ‘performativity’. In an effort to overcome a view of alphabetic writing as semantically only propositional, mimetic and decontextualized, the Kashinawa´ community, by adding visual components to alphabetic texts, appear to transform writing into contextualized performative ‘poiesis’, which simul taneously inaugurates a complex process of semiosis inseparable and only comprehensible from their local cultural perspective.     

The role of the state in enabling private sector development: an assessment methodology

There are many ideas about how the state can and should enable private sector development. However, most of these ideas are not derived from the private sector itself. Participatory policy research has so far been confined to public sector development contexts. This article provides some background information about the garment and textile industry in Zimbabwe. It then describes one pioneering attempt to develop and assess an enabling state assessment methodology in this context, for possible use in the private sector more generally. The methodology described consists of a series of participant‐developed checklists, around the predetermined themes of the policy, agency and enterprise environments. These checklists were explored through the use of semi‐structured dialogue, using visual methods such as impact diagramming, Venn diagramming, master charts and problem trees, in the context of enterprise‐based meetings and two subsequent workshops. The article summarizes the main constraints and recommended actions identified by the participants. The participants, the researchers and the author also assess each step of the methodology.These steps include: developing an agenda; designing the process; identifying a target population and research team; developing and applying the methodology; analysing the results and documenting the process. Lessons are also drawn from this assessment for each stage of the methodology. This article concludes with a discussion about the transferability of the methodology and the need to experiment with other methodologies. The final section also draws out the differences and similarities between this and other types of participatory policy research. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interdependence,interaction and metaphor in multisemiotic texts

Systemic frameworks for discourse analysis of visual/verbal and mathematics texts are used to examine the functionality of language? visual display and mathematical symbolism, and the meaning arising from interaction and interdependence between these semiotic codes in joint constructions. The nature of the interaction between options, classified as unmarked or marked, determines the meaning made in that instance and, more generally, provides an impetus for the expansion of the meaning potential of each semiotic. The phenomenon where semantic shifts occur when functional elements are reconstrued in another semiotic is called semiotic metaphor. Rather than the notion of an overlay of meaning typically associated with grammatical metaphor, the potential exists here for more dramatic forms of semantic shift. Examples of semiotic metaphor categorised as ‘parallel semiotic metaphor’ and ‘divergent semiotic metaphor’ are given in the text analysis.     

自我评估在大学英语写作评价体系的应用

学习评价是教学过程的一个重要环节。传统的评价方式是以教师出题考学生的方式进行,以教师的打分作为评价依据。随着"以学生为中心"的教学模式的开展,自我评估的模式受到许多专家学者的推崇,但是对于大学英语写作中指导学生进行自我评估的研究较少,试图通过实证研究分析自我评估对于大学英语写作的促进作用。     

E‐Participation,Transparency, and Trust in Local Government

This article examines the relationship between electronic participation (e‐participation) and trust in local government by focusing on five dimensions of the e‐participationprocess: (1) satisfaction with e‐participation applications, (2) satisfaction with government responsiveness to e‐participants, (3) e‐participants’ development through the participation, (4) perceived influence on decision making, and (5) assessment of government transparency. Using data from the 2009 E‐Participation Survey in Seoul Metropolitan Government, this article finds that e‐participants’ satisfaction with e‐participation applications is directly associated with their development and their assessment of government transparency. The findings reveal that e‐participants’ satisfaction with government responsiveness is positively associated with their perceptions of influencing government decision making. Furthermore, there is a positive association between e‐participants’ perception of influencing government decision making and their assessment of government transparency. Finally, the article finds that there is a positive association between e‐participants’ assessment of government transparency and their trust in the local government providing the e‐participation program.