M-SCOPES – MEDIATED SIGNIFICATIONS IN FINANCE
May 17, 2012 § 1 Comment
While presenting recently at the conference, Photomedia 2012-Images in Circulation, organised by the Aalto University of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, I managed to hear the research presentation by Yrjö Tuunanen, titled, Visualising the Economy – Visual Representations of Financial News. Yrjö is a doctoral student in the Department of Media at the university where his research interests include visual communication, multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics with a special interest in financial news discourses mediated in the news media. His presentation was further informed as a result of his role, along with Dr. Heidi Hirsto in the transnational research project, M-Scopes – Mediated Significations of Finance, a collaborative undertaking including the Parsons The New School for Design, New York and the National University of Singapore:
M-Scopes is a collaborative research initiative focusing on the ways in which economic phenomena and mechanisms are visually reproduced in multimodal electronic news media.
‘Visualising Finance Lab’, Aalto University, Helsinki, May 2012 (Installation image)
A core component of the project took the form of a two-day seminar recently held in Helsinki which included an accompanying installation. Described as addressing the ‘confusion and loss, emotion, metaphor, and design process in the communication of financial concepts’, the exhibition had particular interest ‘in the power of metaphor to access the emotions that inform financial behaviors’.
The research project continues and an accompanying blog has been established providing updates and engagements with the discourse of media representation of finance, exemplified in this entry, Encounters in Multisemiotic Economy. At this critical global moment, M-Scopes forms a significant entry point to a number of international projects critically addressing the media representation of finance, also a key framing concern for Land of the Blind
Lockout, Dublin 1913: Interview with Padraig Yeates
May 11, 2012 § 8 Comments
Author of the authoritative and substantial account, Lockout: Dublin 1913, the journalist, Padraig Yeates has been interviewed over six chapters, outlining the build up, resulting events and the subsequent impact of the Lockout. Linked below in the final chapter, Yeates argues how with the actions of 1913 were deemed an ‘heroic failure within the nationalist pantheon’ and as a result, the socialist ideals of the movement were subsequently ‘hijacked’ in favour of the same nationalist agenda in the overthrow of colonial dominance. However, with the forthcoming centenary, Yeates advocates a need to ‘reclaim’, in their fullness, the pivotal events of 1913.
THE MARKET 