• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.229-246
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• 2022

Gabriel García Márquez's short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" ["El ahogado más hermoso del mundo," 1968] and the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981] and Merlinda Bobis's novel Fish-Hair Woman (2012) and short story "O Beautiful Co-Spirit" (2021) feature unusual scenarios of death: the arrival of a drowned man's corpse at an island; the inaction of the community to stop the foretold death of a supposedly-innocent man; a woman with long hair that can fetch dead bodies at the bottom of the village river; and a Filipino Catholic and a Malaysian Muslim working together to prepare an Italian Catholic's corpse for a funeral. These narratives demand critical attention as all deaths make the community's existence meaningful as they alter its social reality. Looking into the works of the aforementioned Colombian writer and Filipino writer and unveiling how death affects the community, this paper relies on Jean-Luc Nancy's theory on death and inoperative community.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2022

As the discourse on Anthropocene grows, this exploratory research investigates the interrelationship and interconnectivity between humanity and technology by analyzing a sound art installation created by the author. Crying Sea is a sound installation that uses plastic wastes collected from the shore to create symbolic narratives and artistic experience connecting humans, objects, and nature through interactive digital technology. In this installation, the audiences are guided to walk over the wastes, and the sounds created by the footsteps are recorded in real-time, which then are distorted and amplified into disturbing sounds through speakers filling up the room. In analyzing this artwork, three theories from technological, philosophical, and ecological backgrounds were used; specifically, Bernard Stiegler's pharmakon theory, Dona Haraway's cyborg manifesto, and Timothy Morton's dark ecology theory. A common factor revealed from all three theories by analyzing the Crying Sea is that humans, technologies, and all other entities within nature are interconnected and resonated. The awareness of this recursive relationship allows us to consider sustainable balancing.

• Journal of Korean Medical classics
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.11-23
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• 2022

Objectives : Recently in the field of medical education, the study of narrative has been gaining much attention. This study examines the Huangdineijing in terms of narrative studies. Methods : The chapter Shanggutianzhenlun, which is narratively sound in its composition, and the chapter Siqidiaoshendalun, whose narrative structure is simple but composed in a way that is difficult to understand were studied. Results : The narrative structure of Shanggutianzhenlun is interrogatory with a main character, making it appropriate for narrative study. However, the Siqidiaoshendalun arranges its content rather simply. Conclusions : The Shanggutianzhenlun needs to be converted into appropriate narrative terminology, while the Siqidiaoshendalun needs narrative supplementation using methods such as visual thinking and mind mapping.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.182-189
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• 2023

This study investigates the psychological effects of positive/negative valence order in repeated exposure to a suspenseful text. Specifically, the study seeks to understand how the order in which positive and negative elements are presented in a narrative impacts the experience of suspense, arousal, and enjoyment in readers or listeners. Using a suspenseful short story, participants were exposed to narratives with varying valence orders in a repeated-measures design. The study employed self-report questionnaires and psychophysiological measurements to capture participants' psychological responses. The results supported the hypothesis that repeated exposure impacts suspense, with negative valence enhancing suspense and arousal. Moreover, the order of valence influenced participants' psychological responses, indicating that positive valence can mitigate the impact of repeated exposure. However, the influence on enjoyment was not significant. Psychophysiological measures, specifically skin conductance level (SCL), revealed trends of habituation over repeated exposure. The findings underscore the significance of negative valence in heightening suspense and suggest directions for future research in exploring diverse factors that contribute to suspense in both fictional and real-life contexts.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.135-146
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• 2023

Psychological support is crucial in navigating one's academic and professional lives, especially for students living abroad and pursuing higher education. This study aims to explore the narratives of social support seeking in a group of Korean international graduate students in an urban university setting in the United States. Qualitative research method of narrative approach was used to examine how three Korean graduate students exchanged psychological support. Analysis of interviews, observations, and documents found that four types of social support (informational, instrumental, appraisal, and emotional) were being exchanged and that emotional support was accessible predominantly in individual meetings than in group gatherings. Additionally, the reasons for abstaining from initiating group gatherings are discussed in relation to the Korean culture where participants were mindful of not infringing on each other's time. These findings inform theory on socio psychological support seeking and its relation to cultural values and offer practical insights into psychological support in international students in higher education settings.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.55-70
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• 2023

Carpets are a useful tool for highlighting the cultural uniqueness of a region because their characteristic usage often reveals distinctive natural features of the place or the unique cultural identity of a group. Investigating anecdotes and associated patterns found in three medieval trans-Eurasian travelogues, this paper focuses on observations made by the Chinese Buddhist monk, Faxian, the Sunni pilgrim and scholar, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant examining their thoughts, observations, and perspectives on carpet-related customs in their experienced contexts. In particular, this manuscript touches on the controversies, impacts, and narratives associated with carpet practices observed in each travel writer's context respectively, concluding that each traveler shows several things in common rather than showing different patterns depending on the characteristics of their religion. Overall, they observed the uses of carpets according to their jobs and travel purposes and appropriately detailed related episodes if the intended purpose and context matched the uses.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.205-227
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• 2023

This study seeks to examine how the West, particularly United States (US), influences the narratives about terrorism, radicalism, and combating violent extremism (CVE) in Muslim majority nations such as Malaysia. We contend that some local institutions and researchers in Malaysia may have assumed the Faustian bargain by agreeing with the Western narrative that Islam's teachings promote violence and extremism in order to meet the demands of survival, whether it be funding for everyday operations or meeting the demands of universities or research institutions to sustain themselves and meet their performance indicators. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) from 2001 to 2021 and used Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand the role of the US in purposefully supporting workshops and research activities of particular institutions with the intent to influence national discourse on securitization and prospective policy implications. More importantly, we wish to alert Malaysian policymakers to pay particular attention and scrutinize ongoing programs such as the "Building Community Resilience" as these may inadvertently foster Islamophobia.

• Trans-
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• v.14
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• pp.65-92
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• 2023

The knowledge of the narrative agent not only constitutes the content and meaning of the narrative itself, but is also closely related to the emotional response of the recipient. Also, the disparity of knowledge between narrative agents is an important factor in making a narrative richer and more interesting. But It tends to be treated as a sub-topic of narration theory or genre/style studies rather than an independent subject of narrative studies or criticism. In this paper, I propose a model that can systematically and quantitatively analyze the knowledge of narrative agents. The proposed model consists of the knowledge structure that represents a narrative, the knowledge state that expresses the knowledge of narrative agent as a degree of belief, and the knowledge flow that means changes in the knowledge state according to the development of events. In addition, the formal notation of the knowledge structure and a probabilistic inference model that could obtain the state of knowledge were proposed, and the knowledge structure and knowledge flow were analyzed by applying the model to the actual narrative. It is expected that the proposed model will be of practical help in the creation and evaluation of narratives.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.95-119
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• 2016

From the migrant care-workers arriving in Japan from the Philippines and Indonesia to support the depleted social support system for the large population of the elderly (Ogawa 2012) to the increasing number of retiring Japanese embarking on long-stay tourism in Malaysia (Ono 2015), the Japanese image of Southeast Asia as an exotic destination offering cheap labor in return for official development assistance seems to be fading away. Yet these changes are not necessarily reflected in the way contemporary Japanese, especially those who belong to the global, "spiritual-but not-religious" (Fuller 2001) population, think of and "consume" Southeast Asia in their daily lives. Using three case-studies, spiritual tours, Thai massage, and an NGO founded by a Japanese spiritual therapist, this paper argues that in Japan's large spiritual market, which targets people seeking alternative ways to express their religiosity, the old-fashioned colonial exoticism of Southeast Asian narratives were integrated in a totalizing discourse, in which Japan remains the exceptional outlier (Tanaka 1993), a country still claimed to be "advanced" both spiritually and economically.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.96-105
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• 2024

We propose a method to automatically predict Alzheimer's disease from speech data using the ChatGPT large language model. Alzheimer's disease patients often exhibit distinctive characteristics when describing images, such as difficulties in recalling words, grammar errors, repetitive language, and incoherent narratives. For prediction, we initially employ a speech recognition system to transcribe participants' speech into text. We then gather opinions by inputting the transcribed text into ChatGPT as well as a prompt designed to solicit fluency evaluations. Subsequently, we extract embeddings from the speech, text, and opinions by the pretrained models. Finally, we use a classifier consisting of transformer blocks and linear layers to identify participants with this type of dementia. Experiments are conducted using the extensively used ADReSSo dataset. The results yield a maximum accuracy of 87.3% when speech, text, and opinions are used in conjunction. This finding suggests the potential of leveraging evaluation feedback from language models to address challenges in Alzheimer's disease recognition.