Janice Best

Bio: Janice Best is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Chronotope & Meaning (existential). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 16 citations.

The Chronotope and the Generation of Meaning in Novels and Paintings

Abstract: Despite the ever-increasing renown that Mikhail Bakhtin's works have enjoyed sinced his death in 1975,1 his theory of the chronotope, which is based on the idea that spatial and temporal dimensions are as inseparable in works of literature as they are in Einstein's theory of relativity, has attracted few scholars' attention.2 The main use Bakhtin made of this theory in his own published works was in the study of literary history, where it served principally to demonstrate the "process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature [. . . and] the articulation of actual historical per sons in such a time and space."3 In this paper, I shall take as my working hypothesis the notion that the concept of the chronotope is not restricted to the analysis of novels, but, as Bakhtin suggested, can also be applied to "other areas of culture," especially that of painting, where time is just as "intrinsically connected" to space as in the novel.

Exhibiting the everyday : the musealization of 1950s material culture in France and Germany

Abstract: Over the course of the last decade, the 1950s have been transformed from little more than a historical interregnum between the Second World War and the 1960s into a powerful trope in the popular imagination. Nowhere has this shift been more significant than in France and Germany, where processes of forgetting connected to post-war nation-building and mythification are giving way to more complex reappraisals of the 1950s. The French and German museum landscapes, in particular, have seen the emergence of a large number of museums and exhibitions devoted to the period since the turn of the new millennium. Concerned with the quotidian realities of day-to-day life and the grassroots experiences of ‘normal’ people, these sites are part of a proliferation of 1950s-related remembering enacted through the lens of the everyday. Using a variety of sources, ranging from personal interpretation of exhibitions and collections to museum catalogues and press reports, this thesis examines the multifarious nature of museum representation and remembering associated with the 1950s in France and Germany. By focusing on nine different sites, it assesses the different spatio-temporal frameworks and strategies used to narrate the 1950s, and determines how ‘counter-memories’ and more hegemonic memories and histories of the period are being constructed across different regional and national contexts. Despite the significance of national myths and memorial tendencies, it finds that the 1950s are being reimagined through a plurality of local, regional, national and transnational narratives, and that ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches are giving way to more nuanced ways of reframing the post-war period. These findings highlight the increasing democratization of history and memory and the diverse ways in which ‘counter-memory’ and ‘genealogy’ are employed to reclaim the 1950s past. As such, the 1950s are being reworked from a simple decadal period into a semantically richer ‘time-space’.

A Conceptual Application of Bakhtin’s Dialogic Discourse to Information and Interaction Design of Social Media

Abstract: Background and Purpose: This research explores how humanities – Bakhtin’s dialogical discourse – offer new insights into information and interaction design providing interdisciplinary theoretical, methodological and empirical sources for understanding design research and practices. Designing for social media is chosen as an empirical object for this research because it integrates the use of a variety of design and research approaches and their immediate implementation in social interaction. Structure: The structure of this work contains three major stages that can be described as follows: (1) Understanding Bakhtinian discourse as applied to information and interaction design. (2) Revealing and analyzing how Bakhtinian dialogic concepts contribute to design practices for social media. (3) By researching the crowd-sourced navigation social media application, Waze, we verify and validate how the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope corresponds to processing a flow of dynamic time-spatial data, to the app user experience, and to resolving the revealed problems, as well as for proposing new approaches in design practice. Results: Our work contributes to the research as the systematic application of Bakhtin’s dialogical concepts to interactive and information technology by revealing the use of these concepts as design principles and strategies for designing for social media tools and systems. We applied Bakhtinian core concepts as one dialogic coherence emphasizing its definitive social-historic dimension. We developed and implemented our interpretation of the chronotopic data analysis to the Waze app using it as our research case study. We analyzed how multiple chronotopes are realized in Waze, and how user interaction with the app through its design and deployment decisions is connected to the society-wide patterns of social practice, and yet simultaneously, also has the potential to transform existing social practice. Conclusion: Researching Waze’s design and user practices using Bakhtin’s dialogical discourse as an interpretive framework, we suggest a possible model for an alternate type of social interaction. A new form of performative practice that is actualized through technologically mediated dialogue, which could be used for further rethinking of design approaches for supporting new and emerging forms of social relations.

Ligatures of time and space: 1920s New York as a construction site for modernist "American" narrative poetry

Abstract: body in which Columbus’s voyage can be completed by the building of the Suez Canal, the underwater transatlantic cable, the union of the railroads, and the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, it too is fragmented and confining. If the sailor in “Cutty Sark” is the son from “Indiana,” he has left the land, presumably, because his parents have already depleted his frontiers by traveling to California, the edge of the continent. His inability to tell time seems to be the result of his confrontation with the Arctic, which, based on a close reading of the word "white," Lewis, among others, believes to be a version of the Bridge, or, at least, of infinity. It is probably safe to call it the ultimate frontier, whatever else it is. I'm not much good at time any more keep weakeyed watches sometimes snooze-...A whaler once-I ought to keep time and get over it--I'm a Democrat--I know what time it is--No 22 See Giles's chapter "Capitalism," pp. 29-42.

Toward a Bakhtinian typology of ambient advertising

Abstract: Ambient advertising represents a growing sector of creative advertising practice, but has garnered little academic research. This paper aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the examination of ambient advertising's place within the marketing communication mix. The author presents a typology of ambient advertising based on the theory of the chronotope by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), the creative expression of the intersection between temporal and spatial dimensions, arguing that this represents the most fecund model for exploring the way in which ambient advertising seeks to harness the matrix of time and place. The typology offers a rationale for comparing different ambient campaigns on the basis of the degree to which they clearly express a particular chronotope and goes on to link this to a consideration of rhetorical persuasiveness.