• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.93-115
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• 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley's The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is "active, free, conscious and willful sovereign," which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.589-609
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• 2012

This research compares a future society described in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) to modern technopoly. The main protagonist of the novel, Guy Montag, is a fireman who burns books in a future society which does not allow people to read or own books. The future society which controls the expansion of knowledge is similar to technopoly which Neil Postman defines as a culture where people passively react to overflow of information. Bradbury compares Montag to several characters, such as his wife Mildred and Captain Beatty. With this comparison, Bradbury lets his readers look back themselves who live in a sea of information without being aware of the domination of technopoly. This research suggests that the reason people do not know that knowledge is controlled and limited is because they do not distinguish between knowledge and information. They misunderstand widely available information is knowledge as characters in Fahrenheit 451 feel stuffed with information. Since the 1990s, scholars and writers such as Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr have expressed problems with the excess of information, however Bradbury already predicted through Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 that the development of technology does not mean a higher level of knowledge. This research suggests what modern human beings have lost in vast amount of information rather than what they have gained.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.69-91
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• 2012

Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.... (1998) is the last play of the trilogy of "the midlands plays" which can be regarded as her re-writing of both Euripides' Medea and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by resetting the two plays in the midlands of contemporary Ireland. Carr intends to courageously explore into the dangerous liminal space, i.e., the middle between the past and the present, the high Greek and the Irish folk culture, dealing with the ghosts of the dead writers for her own Irish feminist theatre. Thus, in the middle Carr can build a new Irish theatre by minorating and abjecting the Greek tragedy and subverting and expanding Synge's theatre of grotesque realism. This paper attempts to read By the Bog of Cats... as Carr's final project of exploration into the midland of Ireland to establish a new Irish feminist theatre and at the same time a new Irish folk theatre. By focusing on her strategies of minoration and subversion through grotesque imagery and carnival rituals it argues that Carr put Hester's becoming-ghost in the middle, the bog of the cats as both grave and womb, waiting for the birth of a new Irish people. And it emphasizes that the ghost of Hester, merging with the ghosts of her mother and daughter by the bog of cats will haunt the official society as a threatening abjection, challenging the restoration of the social order.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.497-515
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• 2009

Culture as a source of identity, as Edward Said says, can be a battleground on which various political and ideological causes engage one another. It is not mere individual cultivation or private possession, but a program for social cohesion. Sensitively aware that a national culture should be independent from Europe, Walt Whitman enacts a new form of literature by placing different cultural values against Old World tradition. His interest in autochthonous culture originates from his deep concern about national consciousness. He believes that literary taste directed toward highly-ornamented elite culture is an obstacle to cultural unification of a nation. In order to represent American culture of the common people, Whitman incorporates a lot of cultural material into his poetry. Since he believes that America has many respectable writers at home, he urges people to adjust to their own taste instead of running after foreign authors. Whitman differentiated his poetry from previous literary models by disrupting the established literary norms and reconfiguring cultural values on the basis of American ways of life. In his comment on other poets, he concentrates on the originality and nativity of poetry. By claiming that words have characteristics of nativity, independence, and individuality, he envisions American literature to be distinguished from British literature in literary materials as well as in language. Whitman s language is composed of a vast number of words that can fully portray the nation. He works over language materials in two ways: reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Not only does his literary language become subversive of the established literary language, but also makes it possible to express strength and intensity in feeling.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.192-194
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• 2015

The growing size and complex process in construction project recently leads to increase risk and the losses as well. Even though researchers have identified the major risk indicators, there is lack of comprehensive and quantitative research for identifying the relationship between the risk indicators and economic losses associated with construction projects. To address this shortage of research, this study defines risk indicators and create a framework to assess the influence of economic losses from the indicators. An insurance company's claim payout record was accepted as the dependent variable to reflect the real economic losses. Based on the claims, we categorized the causes and results of accidents. To establish framework, built environment vulnerability indicators and geographical vulnerability indicators were employed as the risk indicators. A Pearson correlation analysis was adopted to validate the relationship with loss ratio and risk indicators. Consequently, this framework and its results may offer significant references for under writers of insurance companies and loss prevention activities.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.21-30
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• 2024

Purpose: This study explores the development of zakat distribution studies and the integration of existing studies. This study is expected to complement a systematic literature review in the field of zakat distribution to inspire further research directions. Research design, data, and methodology: This research method uses a systematic literature review assisted by the Nvivo application and the PRISMA system, which selects from 427 articles to 53 articles to be analyzed based on publication and classification of the theme of its findings. This study describes publications, authors, themes, cited articles, and research themes. Results: This study shows the dominance of Malaysian writers and significant developments in 2020. In addition, the study shows the most popular articles based on the most citations and word cloud analysis. The primary topics of zakat distribution publications are management strategy, development, the zakat institution, and the recipient. Conclusions: The study advises that Future research could focus on zakat distribution's asnaf characteristics. Next, a study on administration expenses and scalability concerns in zakat collection and distribution planning can avoid wasting cash. This topic hinders zakat institutions' distribution services.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.89-94
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• 2024

Indian subcontinent is a birthplace of multilingual people where documents such as job application form, passport, number plate identification, and so forth is composed of text contents written in different languages/scripts. These scripts may be in the form of different indic numerals in a single document page. Due to this reason, building a generic recognizer that is capable of recognizing handwritten indic digits written by diverse writers is needed. Also, a lot of work has been done for various non-Indic numerals particularly, in case of Roman, but, in case of Indic digits, the research is limited. Moreover, most of the research focuses with only on MNIST datasets or with only single datasets, either because of time restraints or because the model is tailored to a specific task. In this work, a hybrid model is proposed to recognize all available indic handwritten digit images using the existing benchmark datasets. The proposed method bridges the automatically learnt features of Capsule Network with hand crafted Bag of Feature (BoF) extraction method. Along the way, we analyze (1) the successes (2) explore whether this method will perform well on more difficult conditions i.e. noise, color, affine transformations, intra-class variation, natural scenes. Experimental results show that the hybrid method gives better accuracy in comparison with Capsule Network.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.648-659
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• 2024

Author verification is challenging because of the diversity in writing styles. We propose an enhanced handwriting verification method that combines handcrafted and automatically extracted features. The method uses a genetic algorithm to reduce the dimensionality of the feature set. We consider offline Bangla handwriting content and evaluate the proposed method using handcrafted features with a simple logistic regression, radial basis function network, and sequential minimal optimization as well as automatically extracted features using a convolutional neural network. The handcrafted features outperform the automatically extracted ones, achieving an average verification accuracy of 94.54% for 100 writers. The handcrafted features include Radon transform, histogram of oriented gradients, local phase quantization, and local binary patterns from interwriter and intrawriter content. The genetic algorithm reduces the feature dimensionality and selects salient features using a support vector machine. The top five experimental results are obtained from the optimal feature set selected using a consensus strategy. Comparisons with other methods and features confirm the satisfactory results.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.923-938
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• 2009

Since the end of 1960s, an era of internationalization, Interculturalism has been reflected in intercultural plays which borrow concepts of foreign-cultural aesthetics for the performance and create a new stage language. Among many writers and performers, Oh, Tae-seok created his own unique aesthetic performances through experimental and avant-garde methodologies connected with various areas of art. His plays are worth studying since they suggest us a point of view which helps us to get out of the ordinary, fixed thought and try to see variety of reality. Therefore, our study categorized Oh, Tae-seok's play into four areas according to grotesquery interculturalism : Evil sprit, Abhorrence, Exaggeration and distort, and Heterogeneity. Based on this category, we analyzed plastic artistic characteristics of his plays' stage costume, for example, shapes, materials, and color, and tried to enhance the aesthetic value of his plays. We made a conclusion that the play showed grotesquery features in stage costume, which represented death, tragedy, evil sprit of human negligence, surprising and grotesquery abhorrence by deformity of the body, exaggeration and distortion, ridiculousness, and heterogeneity, the mixture of abnormality and unstableness. Our study could help produce adequate stage costume matching the features of the performance, and be the cornerstone of grotesquery aesthetic interculturalism study reflected in stage costume.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.271-281
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• 2014

This study aimed to investigate the types that readers enjoying cartoons appreciated cartoons under the premise that cartoons enjoyed over the internet would expand their sensitivity through media such as monitors and mice. The sensitivity of readers enjoying digital cartoons can be stimulated through communication with carton writers or other readers as the interaction of the real-time response to the network. The choice and control are possible with a vertical scroll bar. Accordingly, readers can be absorbed in a work and focus on its story much more. As a result of extracting emotional stimulation factors to verify these assumptions, factors were able to classify the sensitivity that readers enjoying cartoons obtained from digital cartoons into two types, communication and story-focus type, based on the phases that emotional stimuli were strengthened. This study will be significant as a study to identify the relationship between media-technological factors and readers enjoying cartoons in relation to digital cartoons.