• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• Research softwareclose
• 2019-2023close
• GB close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

The ‘Dona’ field is located in the shallow offshore Coastal Swamp depobelt, western Niger Delta. The field contains multiple, stacked shallow-marine reservoir intervals of Miocene to early Pliocene age in the Agbada Formation. The area surrounding the field is characterised by a series of synthetic, listric normal faults that strike north-northwest to south-southeast and dip southwest. These faults show stratigraphic thickening in their hangingwalls, indicating growth, and are associated with the development of rollover anticlines, which define the trap configuration of the ‘Dona’ field. Spatio-temporal variations in stratigraphic expansion indicate that growth faulting started in more landward (northeasterly) locations and migrated progressively basinward (southwestward). These variations are consistent with growth faulting due to gravity-induced shale diapirism, potentially driven by overall progradation of the Niger Delta. Core and wireline-logs from a representative reservoir interval contain a facies assemblage and stratigraphic architecture developed under a mixed-influence depositional process regime, which was dominated by wave processes but influenced by tidal processes. Wave-dominated shoreface deposits occur in a series of coarsening- and shallowing-upward parasequences that are laterally continuous over the reservoir but are locally erosionally truncated by fining-upward tidal channel-fill deposits. The mixed-influence process regime may reflect spatial variations in the dominance of wave, tide and fluvial processes, as in the modern Niger Delta, and/or temporal variations between a regressive, wave-dominated regime and a transgressive, tide-dominated regime. Sedimentological heterogeneities are present across a range of scales, and their distribution reflects the mixed-influence depositional process regime.

This research focuses on the mythological bird Sīmurgh and her representations in literature and art in the Persianate world from 1010 to 1650. Sīmurgh is generally overlooked in both art and literature, and she has not been the subject of monographic study. This dissertation proposes a combination of approaches from literary and art historical analyses to offer a complete picture of the importance of this bird for the arts and culture of the Persianate world. The results of the research show that Sīmurgh is a multifaceted subject: she is a narrative character, a mystical symbol, and a decorative motif. There is no division between these aspects; rather, they coexist. The dissertation is divided in two parts. The first five chapters are dedicated to the study of the role of Sīmurgh in literature. The chapters are divided by genre: epic poetry, encyclopaedic works, and Sufi-mystical poetry. The following four chapters that form the second part of this dissertation analyse the iconography of Sīmurgh. They first investigate the possible origins of her visual representation up until c. 1300s. Following, a chapter is dedicated to the critical stage in which text and image became related and a recognisable iconography was established for the literary character of Sīmurgh. The dissertation ends with a chapter that discusses a following stage in which the iconography of Sīmurgh detached itself from the narrative text and started to function as decoration.

Does living in communities with others from the same racialized minority background help or hinder political engagement? What role does social interaction with members of the same racialized minority group (intragroup contact) play? This paper addresses these questions with a systematic empirical investigation of political engagement in a large sample of racialized Canadians. Prior research assumes greater residential concentration of racialized group members leads to intragroup contact, but there is disagreement about whether the consequence is higher or lower levels of political engagement among members of racialized minority groups. We find no evidence that the residential concentration of Canadians from racialized groups has any independent effect on the political attitudes of racialized Canadians from the same groups. However, there is strong evidence of a more complex, conditional dynamic: if racialized minorities exhibit substantial intragroup social ties, then higher local concentrations of people from the same racial background leads to greater levels of political engagement among racialized minorities; however, if racialized minorities exhibit weak intragroup social ties, then higher local concentrations of people from the same racial background results in lower levels of political engagement among racialized minorities. Moreover, we find that, in part, this dynamic may be an indirect consequence of the ways in which non-racialized populations respond to local racial diversity. The findings may help to account for the incongruent results of previous studies of the effects of residential concentration on the political engagement of members of racialized minority groups.

AbstractHummocky cross‐stratification is commonly observed in the marine offshore transition to lower shoreface environments. However, to date, the origins of hummocky cross‐stratification and its associated hummocky bedforms and hydrodynamic processes remain controversial and enigmatic. In the present study, a large‐scale flume experiment was conducted to study the formation of hummocky bedforms. In the central test area of the flume, combined flow with water waves, with period of 2 s and velocity of 0.34 m s−1, progressed at a right angle to a current with velocity of 0.17 m s−1, whereas a wave‐alone condition pertained upstream and downstream of the test area. The combined‐flow ripples in the test area had smaller dimensions than wave ripples, but their cross‐section geometries were very similar. Most importantly, the experimental results, for the first time, revealed that humps occur with lengths up to approximately 40 mm beneath combined flow ripples. The formation of these structures appears to relate to the enhanced turbulence for the combined flow, because the turbulence kinetic energy for combined flow was ca 50% higher than that under the wave‐only condition. Moreover, the observed small‐scale humps in the present experiment had comparable cross‐section geometries with hummock‐like bedforms previously reported in laboratories and fields under storm conditions. Additionally, these humps could scale up to large‐size hummocks under waves with longer period and faster velocity than the present conditions. The present experiment indicates that waves perpendicular to a current do generate hummock‐like structures in association with ripples and therefore provide a new perspective for future study of the origins of hummocky cross‐stratification.

AbstractThe lateral angle method of sex estimation is tested on an archaeological population with genetic sex estimates. Casts of the internal auditory canal were made using a quick drying impression material on 90 individuals (76 adults and 14 nonadults) from Anglo‐Saxon and Medieval Cambridgeshire. The anterior and posterior angles of the internal auditory canal were measured, and the relationship of the angle to genetic sex was tested. The posterior angle failed intra‐observer error tests, and only the anterior angle could be analysed. Using the previously published sectioning point for unburnt remains (45°), the method did not adequately distinguish between the sexes. Furthermore, the difference between male and female was insufficient to create population‐specific discriminant functions. The anterior angle does not meet the requirements for an osteological method of sex estimation, exhibiting no statistical correlation with genetic sex in this population.

Improving the quality of data is a critical issue in data management and machine learning, and finding the most representative and concise way to achieve this is a key challenge. Learning how to represent entities accurately is essential for various tasks in data science, such as generating better recommendations and more accurate question answering. Thus, the amount and quality of information available on an entity can greatly impact the quality of results of downstream tasks. This thesis focuses on two specific areas to improve data quality: (i) learning and deducing entities for data currency (i.e., how up-to-date information is), and (ii) linking entities across different data sources. The first technical contribution is GATE (Get the lATEst), a framework that combines deep learning and rule-based methods to find up-to-date information of an entity. GATE learns and deduces temporal orders on attribute values in a set of tuples that pertain to the same entity. It is based on creator-critic framework and the creator trains a neural ranking model to learn temporal orders and rank attribute values based on correlations among the attributes. The critic then validates the temporal orders learned and deduces more ranked pairs by chasing the data with currency constraints; it also provides augmented training data as feedback for the creator to improve the ranking in the next round. The process proceeds until the temporal order obtained becomes stable. The second technical contribution is HER (Heterogeneous Entity Resolution), a framework that consists of a set of methods to link entities across relations and graphs. We propose a new notion, parametric simulation, to link entities across a relational database D and a graph G. Taking functions and thresholds for measuring vertex closeness, path associations and important properties as parameters, parametric simulation identifies tuplest in D and vertices v in G that refer to the same real-world entity, based on topological and semantic matching. We develop machine learning methods to learn the parameter functions and thresholds. Rather than solely concentrating on rule-based methods and machine learning algorithms separately to enhance data quality, we focused on combining both approaches to address the challenges of data currency and entity linking. We combined rule-based methods with state-of-the-art machine learning methods to represent entities, then used representation of these entities for further tasks. These enhanced models, combination of machine learning and logic rules helped us to represent entities in a better way (i) to find the most up-to-date attribute values and (ii) to link them across relations and graphs.

Art interacting with innovative technologies has become one of the most significant areas in contemporary Chinese art and has received increasing international attention. However, the academic research on contemporary Chinese art engaging with novel media has been relatively meagre. The thesis focuses on the representation of the body in Chinese contemporary art experimenting with technological media since the late 1980s. The thesis creates the concept of expanded media art to investigate Chinese artists’ diverse methods of utilising technological media to represent bodies to provide a new critical approach beyond the binary distinctions between art and technology, humans and non-humans, nature and culture, urban and rural, local and global. With a close analysis of exemplary artists including Zhang Peili, Cao Fei, Yang Zhenzhong and Lu Yang, the thesis argues how technical media applied in China’s contemporary artistic creation offers possibilities to construct alternative subjectivity and identification in China’s dramatic globalisation and digitalisation context. The thesis demonstrates how artistic practices with novel media create a new methodological paradigm for complicating or challenging institutional power asymmetries and rethinking the role of contemporary art in the digital age.