bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dickens and Astronomy, Biology, and Geology
Authors: Smith Jonathan
Published: October 2018

For the last half-century, in a reversal of a long-standing critical position, Dickens has been regarded as engaged with the science of his day, particularly that associated with the laws of thermodynamics; with theories of the evolution of the universe and of life as promulgated in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the nebular hypothesis, and Darwin’s Origin of Species; and with geology and the representation of geological change. This chapter summarizes and assesses the criticism on Dickens’s relationship to science and on the role of science in his periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round, and in his fiction. It argues that the work of historians of Victorian science in recent decades now enables us to see Dickens as not just interested in science, but immersed in the textual and visual culture of display in Victorian popular science.
Dickens as Professional Author
Authors: Bowen John
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses Charles Dickens’s work as a professional author and the ways in which he shaped his career and publications in the rapidly changing world of Victorian print and publishing. It discusses the importance of his self-understandings of authorship within an increasingly ‘professionalized’ literary world, as well as such shaping pressures as his use of serial publication, his innovative use of illustration and collaboration, and the increasingly international and cross-class nature of his readership. Dickens wrote many different kinds of literary texts for a wide variety of publication, and through these he transformed the ways in which fiction was marketed and read in the Victorian period. He was also an important innovator in magazine publication, particularly in the journals that he edited, Household Words and All the Year Round.
Dickens, Industry, and Technology
Authors: Menke Richard
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses Dickens’s treatment of industry, technology, and invention, forces that were reshaping not only the culture, economics, and geography but also the texture of daily life in nineteenth-century Britain. While the growth of London and other cities demanded innovations in sanitation and public health, revolutionary technologies in transport and communication reshaped the very experience of space and time. Some of Dickens’s most vocal contemporaries saw machinery and factory production as embodying the evils of the age, but Dickens approached technology with a more hopeful sense of its ability to magnify human power, to provoke dreams and wonder, and ultimately perhaps to offer a kind of spiritual meaning. Dickens expresses this rich vision in a range of works, from novels and stories to the essays he wrote and commissioned for his journals.
Dickens and Affect
Authors: Parkins Wendy
Published: October 2018

This chapter will examine Dickens’s engagement with, and depiction of, affects, emotions, feelings, and moods within the broader context of Victorian sentimentality. While affect is normally distinguished from emotion, with the former signalling an experience of bodily intensity beyond cognition, the two may not always be as clearly divided as this binary implies, seeping one into the other in their emphasis on embodied response. By bringing contemporary affect theory to a consideration of examples from Dickens’s writings, this chapter will trace the relation between the literary representation of affect and the affective responses of readers in order to argue that, to paraphrase Elizabeth Spelman, affect and emotion in Dickens provide powerful clues to the ways we are implicated in the lives of others and they in ours. In other words, feelings have an ethical dimension in the work of Dickens.
Dickens and the Environment
Authors: MacDuffie Allen
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses Dickens’s response to the environmental catastrophe brought about by nineteenth-century industrial modernity, focusing on the ways in which his departures from realism might register the arrival of what would become known as the ‘Anthropocene’. It assesses his place in the short history of eco-criticism, and his importance to recent eco-critical scholarship. It also attempts to take stock of the limits of Dickens’s environmental vision, including his occasional celebrations of the utopic promise of industrial technology; his tendency to blur the distinction between the moral and material valences of terms and concepts like ‘pollution’, and ‘corruption’, and his tendency to locate the solution to systemic ecological problems in individual moral behaviour.
Dickens and Religion
Authors: Gribble Jennifer
Published: October 2018

Networks of biblical allusion in the fiction of Dickens reveal the Judaeo-Christian grand narrative as source of story, structure, and imagery: as the ontological ground on which he stands to appeal to the social conscience of his readership, to set religious discourse in dialogue with other Victorian discourses, and to engage in topical theological disputes. His ‘Carol Philosophy’ celebrates the cultural role of the Incarnation narrative; his deathbed scenes reflect anxieties about time and progress, death and the future life. He deploys the conventions of the Gothic and the ghost-story to engage contemporary fascination with the supernatural, but looks to nature for evidence of divine power and intent, disclosed in liminal spaces and numinous moments. This chapter responds to current approaches to Dickens’s religion: Intertextuality, Discourse and Genre Studies, The Providential Aesthetic, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy and Religion, especially the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur.
Drinking in Dickens
Authors: Michie Helena
Published: October 2018

This chapter traces two distinct and diametrically opposed attitudes to drink in the Dickens canon that find their way into both the novels and the journalism. The first, associated with Dickens’s comic characters and with the spirit of conviviality, sees drink as a positive social force binding people and groups together, while the second sees drink in what we would now think of as the idiom of alcoholism, leading to violence, alienation, and death. Drawing from studies of narrative, and on scholarship about addiction, this chapter argues that the coexistence of euphoric and dysphoric drunkenness cannot entirely be explained by recourse to opinions held by a biographical Dickens—to ideas for example of ambivalence or even paradox. Instead, it maintains that Dickens’s comic and tragic or serious drunks are embedded in different relations of cause and effect, and different narrative temporalities, logic, and genres. The chapter examines these different rhetorics of drinking in essays from Household Words and in two novels from different stages in Dickens’s career, The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield.
Dickens’s Language
Authors: Tyler Daniel
Published: October 2018

Several of Dickens’s plots, from The Pickwick Papers on, turn on linguistic miscommunications, converting into a catalyst of the narrative the inherent instability of language, which the prose itself both diligently resists and playfully exploits. This chapter considers Dickens’s use of language across his writing career in the context of its propensity, as Dickens conceived it, to generate confusion or misunderstanding, whether through false usage or from intrinsic ambiguities. It considers puns, animisms, syllepsis, and the dislocation of pronouns from their antecedents in relation to local effects and to larger understandings of language as representative of a more general malaise.
Genres
Authors: Tracy Robert
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines Dickens’s use of interludes as a narrative device in serial publication. Interludes feature characters immediately recognizable when they appear and reappear at intervals, and are only tangentially involved in the central narrative. They are often absorbed in the drama about themselves they are performing. Often comically eccentric in behaviour and language, interludic characters vary the tone and texture of the dark patterns Dickens weaves into the 20 monthly numbers of a serial novel. Mrs Gamp’s greed allows Dickens, at play as auctor ludens, to parody the Chuzzlewits’ deadly sin. In the first number of Little Dorrit, Miss Wade predicts how Dickens’s story will develop. Playing within his own novel, Dickens lets her interrupt his narrative with a narrative of her own, and delay the resolution of his plot.
Dickens and the Theatre
Authors: Glavin John
Published: October 2018

Throughout his life and writing Charles Dickens expressed profound ambivalence about the professional theatre, which in almost equal parts he adored and loathed. As writer, performer, and public man, he expended both energy and invention to describe and to experience a theatricality purged of theatre. In his prose, he explored theatricality in increasingly bold ways until in the final decades it had become a driving pattern in the novels. In his life, until the late 1850s, he used amateur performance to satisfy this quest. But as the 1850s turned into the 1860s, he was able finally to invent, in the Public Readings, his ideal performance mode: a theatricality liberated entirely from theatre, which permitted him to feel the cynosure of attention without exposing, or risking, the self. The first part of this chapter traces Dickens’s complex relationship with both the professional and amateur theatre. The second part tackles the more elusive, and more problematic, question of what it may mean to call Dickens’s work theatrical, arguing that for him theatricality involves not direct mimesis but a gesture toward resemblance.
Dickens’s Visual Mediations
Authors: Groth Helen
Published: October 2018

By shifting the theoretical ground from questions of surveillance, adaptation, and illustration to questions of information, mediation, and storage, this chapter generates new ways of thinking about Dickens’s experimental and conceptual engagement with the new visual media such as photography and panoramas that were gradually transforming how people read, saw, and imagined the world around them. Drawing on Hablot Knight Browne’s iconic illustrations for Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit as exemplary instances of Dickens’s visual conception of the mediation of his writing, this chapter offers a new approach to the ways in which these memorable images circulated, and still do circulate, within complex global information networks.
Dickens’s Early Sketches
Authors: Schlicke Paul
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s early imaginative work, the sketches of 1833–40, first published in newspapers and magazines, attracted much attention and, months before Pickwick became famous, launched his career. Collected in two series as Sketches by Boz in 1836, accompanied with illustrations by George Cruikshank, they attracted massive and wildly enthusiastic reception. They were followed by two further series, Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Sketches of Young Couples, illustrated by Hablot Browne; neither of these latter volumes was publicly acknowledged as Dickens’s work during his lifetime. But although he was himself initially proud of his early sketches, he quickly became dissatisfied, revising them heavily on at least five separate occasions over nearly two decades, and from as early as 1839 publishing them with prefaces which dismissed them as crude juvenilia. Since then, with few notable exceptions, the critical consensus, when it has noticed the sketches at all, has been to disparage them as apprentice work. The present chapter proposes that this legacy is inappropriate for several reasons. It ignores Dickens’s own initial estimate and that of his first readers. It ignores the single most important evidence available of Dickens’s development as a writer, documented in exhaustive, meticulous detail in the revisions he effected. It overlooks a rich resource for understanding the very texture of life in London in the 1830s, and above all it disregards the intrinsic literary worth, described by Forster as ‘the first sprightly runnings of his genius’.
Crowdsourced Dickens
Authors: John Juliet
Published: October 2018

Since the publication of Paul Schlicke’s ground-breaking Dickens and Popular Entertainment in 1985, Dickens’s relationship with popular culture has become an increasingly prominent area of Dickens studies. Work on Dickens and popular culture splinters into three sub-fields: Dickens’s relationship with Victorian popular culture, Dickensian ‘afterlives’ or posthumous remediations, and, in recent years, ‘global’ Dickens. Research on Dickensian afterlives has overwhelmingly tended to focus on Dickens’s posthumous relationship with the screen and on the re-presentation of versions of Dickens’s works since his death. The 2012 bicentenary celebration website was perhaps the first major attempt to map the myriad of local, amateur, and hitherto unregulated Dickensian afterlives online and in communities. It made manifest the fact that cultural analysis of ‘the Dickensian’ today cannot simply be a matter of analysing artistic texts or even screen adaptations. As Linda Hutcheon argues in the Preface to the First Edition of her influential A Theory of Adaptation (2006), ‘Adaptation has run amok. That’s why we can’t understand its appeal and even its nature if we only consider novels and films.’ This chapter offers a first attempt at theorizing this new adaptive landscape in relation to Dickens. It employs the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ as an umbrella term to analyse a range of Dickensian appearances in new cultural space(s) which claim partnership, cooperation, or indeed a merging between cultural consumers and producers. While internet projects which define themselves as ‘crowdsourced’ are a main focus, the idea of crowdsourcing is also employed more elastically to examine a variety of self-proclaimed populist or participatory projects in order to revisit what we think we know about Dickens’s cultural reach in a new media era. The chapter tempers the optimism that characterizes so much new work which sees the internet as facilitating Dickens’s original utopian and inclusive vision of popular culture, breaking down cultural hierarchies and geographical boundaries to expand Dickens’s cultural impact and indeed the impact of literary culture. ‘Crowdsourced Dickens’ examines the evidence produced by a range of populist Dickensian ventures since the Bicentenary to argue that the internet has facilitated not an extension of Dickens’s audience or new ‘crowds’, but a reconfiguration of communication structures which allow ‘clubs’ to feel newly empowered. These clubs are literally and festively eccentric, the chapter argues, revelling in a celebratory sense of autonomous worldbuilding which rejects the tyranny of numbers and the cultural logic which associates value with larger cultural impact. The chapter draws analogies between postmodern and picaresque communication structures, implying that ‘new’ media theory would benefit from a sense of its own backstory. Finally, it calls for more interdisciplinary work on literary clubs, a topic largely neglected by both literary studies and new media theory which has yet to grapple seriously with the effect of the internet on the literary marketplace.
The Old Curiosity Shop and Master Humphrey’s Clock
Authors: Winter Sarah
Published: October 2018

Charting the publication history of Dickens’s weekly periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock (April 1840 to December 1841), this chapter focuses on the enormously popular novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which appeared within the Clock’s framing narrative as an extended tale told by Master Humphrey to his reading circle. Setting aside its reputation as an outmoded sentimental fiction, the chapter shows that Shop drew the attention of two prominent twentieth-century critics, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, who viewed Dickens’s novel as an illuminating allegory of modern capitalist culture. Exploring the rich critical response to Shop and its illustrations, the chapter opens up new avenues for interpreting the novel’s ‘mysterious’ depiction of modernity, including: the multiple meanings of curiosity; the history of capitalism; legal satire; allegorical readings; Victorian thing theory; the novel’s relationship to didactic genres and children’s literature; disability studies; gender and sexuality studies and queer theory; and comparative studies.
Deliberative Polling
Authors: Fishkin James
Published: October 2018

Deliberative Polling attempts to answer a simple question: what would the people think about an issue under good conditions for thinking about it? Most of the time most people are not paying a lot of attention, they are not well informed, and there are many efforts to manipulate public opinion. What would the people think if they were effectively motivated to pay attention and enabled to get information about competing arguments and if they could discuss those issues with their fellow citizens in moderated, civil discussions? These simple requirements lead to the design: advisory group vetting of briefing materials; random sampling with an initial survey permitting evaluation of attitudinal as well as demographic representativeness; moderated small group discussions; plenary sessions with competing experts; final confidential questionnaire permitting evaluation of opinion changes. The process has been applied in more than 27 countries.
Deliberative Democracy and Public Dispute Resolution
Authors: Susskind Lawrence , Gordon Jessica , Zaerpoor Yasmin
Published: October 2018

Deliberative democracy and public dispute resolution (PDR) have the same goal—to inform and determine the public interest—but they involve different skills and practices. This article considers the ways in which deliberative democratic approaches to policy-related decision-making can be supplemented with tools used in public dispute resolution—specifically, the use of an independent mediator, the well-developed technique of stakeholder assessment, and a new strategy called joint fact-finding, where stakeholders with different interests work together with outside experts to identify common assumptions, gather information together, and formulate and clarify opinions. All are designed to achieve fairer, wiser, more stable and more efficient outcomes.
Deliberative Democracy in India
Authors: Parthasarathy Ramya , Rao Vijayendra
Published: October 2018

This chapter traces the evolution of deliberative institutions in India, as well as the ways in which deliberative bodies influence, and are in influenced by, entrenched social inequality. The paper first unpacks the historical roots of Indian deliberation, emphasizing the ways in which religious traditions fostered a culture of debate and dialogue. The paper then explores the interplay between Western liberal philosophers, most notably Henry Maine, and Indian political thinkers, including Gandhi and Ambedkar, on participatory democracy in India. The discussion then highlights the continued dialogue between Indian and Western ideas in the push for greater participatory development. Finally, the chapter probes the current incarnation of state-sponsored deliberation in India—namely, village assemblies known as gram sabhas under the constitutionally mandated system of Indian village democracy or Panchayati Raj, and reviews the growing empirical scholarship about these village assemblies.
Africa and Deliberative Politics
Authors: Ani Emmanuel
Published: October 2018

This chapter shows that deliberative democracy is an important consideration for African nations, especially with an eye on the divisive effects of aggregative politics on democracies involving multi-ethnic groupings. The chapter explores Wiredu’s plea for democracy by consensus as an alternative model better suited than multi-party politics for an African context, and concludes that we need further research to determine where we could institute consensual mechanisms in African countries. Furthermore, it proposes that research on deliberation in Africa needs to go beyond philosophical discussions, and that empirical scholars need to begin testing various arguments in the philosophical and theoretical debates about deliberation.
Deliberative Planning Practices—Without Smothering Invention
Authors: Forester John
Published: October 2018

Organizers of democratic deliberations—along with interested and contentious participants—can resist the smothering of invention that decision-centric views of deliberation too easily produce. Why debate choices from a mediocre menu when the accessible restaurant next door offers far better options at similar prices? Building upon a practice-focused oral history method and considering urban cases in Canada, Holland, and Italy, this analysis examines public deliberations over local environmental policy, community development, and urban design. We see how a practical aesthetics of deliberative invitations can shape less defensive, more creative deliberations that integrate invention and option generation with subsequent practices of argumentation and negotiation.
The Epistemic Value of Democratic Deliberation
Authors: Estlund David , Landemore Hélène
Published: October 2018

Recently, some normative approaches to democracy have emphasized its actual or aspirational epistemic value—a tendency to make good or correct decisions. While some accounts explain how such value might arise in a broadly statistical and probabilistic way, other accounts emphasize ways in which interpersonal political deliberation might have epistemic value of the right kind. Epistemic democratic deliberation plays a role in some traditional approaches, but it has been more prominent in recent decades. In this chapter we explain and discuss approaches which consider mechanisms by which democratic deliberation might have epistemic value, and also approaches which focus on the role that such a hypothesized epistemic value might play in an account of the authority or justification of democratic arrangements.
Deliberation and Justice
Authors: Rummens Stefan
Published: October 2018

Discussions of the relationship between justice and democracy are generally premised on the assumption that they are two different things, only contingently and externally related. As a result, genuine conflicts seem possible whereby we are forced to decide whether democracy should trump justice or whether justice has priority over democracy. By focusing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, this chapter aims to show that deliberative democracy can provide a constructivist conception of justice which challenges this premise by explaining the internal relationship between justice and democracy. There is no justice without democracy in the sense that only citizens can democratically determine the specific content of justice. At the same time, there is also no democracy without justice in the sense that democratic outcomes are legitimate only to the extent that they can be understood as proper elaborations of the substantive but abstract ideal of justice-as-impartiality.
Qualitative Assessment of Deliberation
Authors: Bevir Mark , Bowman Quinlan
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses three qualitative approaches to the assessment of deliberative participation: speech analysis, ethnography, and comparative case studies. In discussing these approaches, it considers exemplars of “problem-driven” research. With respect to research on deliberative democracy, problem-driven research may be characterized as research that is inspired by, and that seeks to contribute to the resolution of, substantive problems associated with the political project of deliberative democracy. The chapter illustrates what problem-driven research looks like by considering three qualitative exemplars of it: one involving speech analysis, another involving ethnography, and a third involving comparative case studies. Each exemplar is concerned with when and how citizens deliberate. Empirical evidence is primarily drawn from the United States of America, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Deliberative Policy Analysis
Authors: Fischer Frank , Boossabong Piyapong
Published: October 2018

Deliberative policy analysis has its origins in the argumentative turn in policy analysis. It emerged as an alternative to the use of standard empirical-analytic methods of the social sciences to solve public policy problems. Not only has the conventional neopositivist approach failed to produce the promised results, it has generally operated with a technocratic, and largely an anti-democratic, bias. Basic to deliberative policy analysis is a method for bringing together a wider spectrum of citizens, politician and experts in the pursuit of policy decisions that are both effective and democratically legitimate. This chapter begins with an outline of the theoretical perspectives underlying deliberative policy analysis. Then, the process and practice is illustrated by the case study, which shows how the approach has moved from a theory to a practical method for policy decision-making.
Religious Reasons in Public Deliberation
Authors: March Andrew F. , Steinmetz Alicia
Published: October 2018

This chapter reviews the history of and analyzes current trends within normative debates about the role of religion in public deliberation. Starting with the idea of an “exclusivist” approach, we look at the status of religious reasons within the frameworks broadly inspired by Rawlsian and Habermasian theories of public reason and deliberation, and recount seven core arguments against excluding religious reasons from public deliberation. The second section reviews approaches which work from similar moral assumptions and principles to those of exclusivism, but take the critiques surrounding the status of religious reasons seriously, leading to the development of a wide variety of models that we refer to broadly as “liberal inclusivist.” In the final section, we treat models which seek to incorporate religious reasons by rejecting the standard assumptions of public reason and communicative action, sometimes in the process, also rethinking the fundamental goals and methods of deliberation as such.
Institutional Deliberation
Authors: Quirk Paul , Bendix William , Bächtiger Andre
Published: October 2018

Advocacy of new forums for democratic deliberation should take into account the deliberative functions of the regular policymaking institutions of representative democracies. In view of the important consequences for citizens, research on institutional deliberation focuses mainly on the ability to produce intelligent decisions. It employs a wide range of approaches to assess that ability. We review diverse literatures on institutional deliberation, with attention to legislatures (especially the US Congress), chief executives, bureaucratic agencies, courts, and popular referendums. These institutions employ a variety of distinctive processes and routinely assess voluminous and detailed information. Deficiencies in institutional deliberation often arise from imbalanced or uninformed constituency pressures. Thus institutional deliberation appears to benefit from moderate insulation from public and interest-group demands. Popular referendums have mixed effects on the intelligence of policymaking. In some circumstances, regular policymaking institutions can create opportunity for more deliberative popular forums to play effective roles in policy development.
Acquiring and Maintaining Expertise in Aging Populations
Authors: Morrow Dan , Azevedo Renato F. L.
Published: October 2018

This chapter reviews literature related to relationships between expertise and aging. It first considers how experts excel on domain-relevant tasks despite cognitive limitations and how these expertise-related advantages develop, which suggest ways in which adults can offset age-related cognitive constraints to maintain performance in later years. The chapter then reviews studies that examine two issues about how expertise influences performance as we age. First, to what extent high-level experts can retain superior levels of performance as they age, an issue often addressed in fairly narrow domains such as games, sports, and music. A second, broader issue concerns whether the benefits or costs associated with domain-general as well as domain-specific knowledge change with age. This second issue is central to lifespan theory: To what extent does knowledge and skill associated with experience offset age-related declines in abilities and function.
The “War” on Expertise
Authors: Klein Gary , Shneiderman Ben , Hoffman Robert R. , Wears Robert L.
Published: October 2018

Five communities actively disparage the benefits of expertise. This chapter explains why their criticisms are misguided. Experimental psychologists have shown that linear models can outperform experts, but the factors driving these models are drawn from experts’ judgments. The Heuristics and Biases community asserts that experts are prone to flawed reasoning, but ignores the ways that heuristics let us handle complexity and ambiguity. The evidence-based performance community wants practitioners to rely on best practices identified through carefully designed research, but ignores the cognitive challenges of handling incidents that involve multiple interactions and demand adaptation. Computer scientists have shown that artificial intelligence can outperform experts in games such as chess and Go—fixed tasks with little ambiguity. Some sociologists argue that expertise is just a social attribution, an ideological position that minimizes the contributions of individual experts. Studying these criticisms can help us discover better methods for supporting experts and fostering expertise.
Multisensory Processing in Music
Authors: Russo Frank
Published: October 2018

This chapter provides an overview of multisensory processing in music by individuals with normal hearing, hearing loss, and deafness. The first section provides an account of theory and evidence regarding the neural mechanisms underpinning multisensory processing. The second section considers auditory-only processing of music with a focus on lateralization, basic modularity, and pathways. The final section considers non-auditory and multisensory processing of pitch, timbre, and rhythm. For each dimension, psychophysical evidence is presented before reviewing the extant neuroscientific evidence. Where no neuroscientific evidence exists, proposals have been made about the types of neural mechanisms that may be involved. Neuroplastic changes following deafness are also considered. The chapter ultimately argues that although most individuals will justifiably focus on sound as the core of music processing, a more inclusive and nuanced consideration of music takes a multisensory perspective, involving the integration of inputs from auditory, visual, somatosensory, vestibular, and motor areas.
Neurochemical Responses to Music
Authors: Koshimori Yuko
Published: October 2018

Neuroscientific pursuit of music is of growing interest. Literature shows that music enhances neurochemical release, activating the pleasure center of the brain; promotes the secretion of an antibody, enhancing immunity; as well as attenuates and prevents the release of a stress hormone, helping to cope with stressors. These findings demonstrate that music can potentially serve as a scientifically proven medium to exert positive effects on physical and psychological health and well-being. However, research on neurochemical responses to music is still in its infancy and further research is critically needed to determine more specific effects of music. This chapter summarizes existing literature investigating central and peripheral molecular responses to music including neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, hormones, and immune biomarkers, discusses the limitations, and warrants more neuroimaging studies to aim to expand interdisciplinary research in music and neuroscience.
Genomics Approaches for Studying Musical Aptitude and Related Traits
Authors: Järvelä Irma
Published: October 2018

Although music and other forms of art can develop in diverse directions, they are linked to the genetic profiles of populations. Analysis of music-related human traits using the methods of genomics revealed that genetic loci containing genes for inner ear development, auditory pathways, and cognition are linked to musical aptitude. Analysis of the human transcriptome after listening to music and music performance plus genome-wide analysis of the selection regions in the human genome uncovered the activities of genes affecting hearing, birdsong, cognition, and language development. These data suggest that music and language share a common evolutionary background. In addition, identification of several genes (e.g., SNCA, RGS2, RGS9) known to contribute to dopaminergic metabolism supports the role of the dopaminergic pathway as a mediator of the effects of music in the human body.
Brain Research in Music Performance
Authors: Altenmüller Eckart , Furuya Shinichi , Scholz Daniel S. , Ioannou Christos I.
Published: October 2018

This chapter summarizes research on the effects of musical training on brain function, brain connectivity, and brain structure. First, it addresses factors inducing and continuously driving brain plasticity in dedicated musicians, arguing that prolonged goal-directed practice, multisensory–motor integration, high arousal, and emotional and social rewards contribute to these plasticity-induced brain adaptations. Subsequently, the chapter briefly reviews the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology underpinning musical activities by focusing on motor planning and motor control. A review of the literature on functional changes in brain activation and brain connectivity along with the acquisition of musical skills is provided. Structural adaptions in the gray matter of the brain and in fiber tract density associated with music learning are critically discussed. Finally, the chapter addresses the phenomenon of de-expertise, when intensive music-making induces dysfunctional changes of brain networks.
Neuroplasticity in Music Learning
Authors: Putkinen Vesa , Tervaniemi Mari
Published: October 2018

Studies conducted during the last three decades have identified numerous differences between musicians and non-musicians in neural correlates of sensory, motor, and higher-order cognitive functions. Research employing event-related potentials/fields has been particularly important in this framework. This chapter reviews the evidence that has emerged from these studies with emphasis on longitudinal studies comparing functional brain development in children taking music lessons and those engaged in non-musical activities. The literature provides empirical and theoretical grounds for concluding that musical training enhances sound encoding skills that are relevant for both music and speech processing. The question whether the benefits of musical training transfer to more distantly related cognitive functions remains controversial, however. Finally, it appears likely that training-induced plasticity alone does not account for the differences in brain function between musicians and non-musicians and, conversely, that predisposing factors also play a role.
The Role of Musical Development in Early Language Acquisition
Authors: Brandt Anthony , Slevc L. Robert , Gebrian Molly
Published: October 2018

Language and music are readily distinguished by adults, but there is growing evidence that infants first experience speech as a special type of music. By listening to the phonemic inventory and prosodic patterns of their caregivers’ speech, infants learn how their native language is composed, later bootstrapping referential meaning onto this musical framework. Our current understanding of infants’ sensitivities to the musical features of speech, the co-development of musical and linguistic abilities, and shared developmental disorders, supports the view that music and language are deeply entangled in the infant brain and modularity emerges over the course of development. This early entanglement of music and language is crucial to the cultural transmission of language and children’s ability to learn any of the world’s tongues.
Cerebral Organization of Music Processing
Authors: Braun Janzen Thenille , Thaut Michael H.
Published: October 2018

This chapter presents a broad panorama of the current knowledge concerning the anatomical and functional basis of music processing in the healthy brain. Neuroimaging studies developed over the past 20 years provide evidence that music processing takes place in widely distributed neural networks. Here, attention is focused on core brain networks implicated in music processing, emphasizing the anatomical and functional interactions between cortical and subcortical areas within auditory-frontal networks, auditory-motor networks, and auditory-limbic networks. Finally, the authors review recent studies investigating how brain networks organize themselves in a naturalistic music listening context. Collectively, this robust body of literature demonstrates that music processing requires timely coordination of large-scale cognitive, motor, and limbic brain networks, setting the stage for a new generation of music neuroscience research on the dynamic organization of brain networks underlying music processing.
Neural Basis of Rhythm Perception
Authors: Nederlanden Christina M. Vanden Bosch der , Taylor J. Eric T. , Grahn Jessica A.
Published: October 2018

To understand and enjoy music, it is important to be able to hear the beat and move your body to the rhythm. However, impaired rhythm processing has a broader impact on perception and cognition beyond music-specific tasks. We also experience rhythms in our everyday interactions, through the lip and jaw movements of watching someone speak, the syllabic structure of words on the radio, and in the movements of our limbs when we walk. Impairments in the ability to perceive and produce rhythms are related to poor language outcomes, such as dyslexia, and they can provide an index of a primary symptom in movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The chapter summarizes a growing body of literature examining the neural underpinnings of rhythm perception and production. It highlights the importance of auditory-motor relationships in finding and producing a beat in music by reviewing evidence from a number of methodologies. These approaches illustrate how rhythmic auditory information capitalizes on auditory-motor interactions to influence motor excitability, and how beat perception emerges as a function of nonlinear oscillatory dynamics of the brain. Together these studies highlight the important role of rhythm in human development, evolutionary comparisons, multi-modal perception, mirror neurons, language processing, and music.
The Psychology of Online Lurking
Authors: Popovac Maša , Fullwood Chris
Published: October 2018

Lurking, or passive online participation, is often defined as non-participation or minimal participation in online groups or communities. Although lurking has previously been considered a negative behavior in online spaces, with lurkers accessing the social capital of online communities without providing anything in return, current perspectives consider lurking as a legitimate form of online participation. Current literature shows that lurking is a more nuanced activity than previously considered, as individuals may not only vary in their participation across different online groups but their participation may also vary over time within an online group. This chapter examines the key personal and situational factors associated with active or passive participation, as well as the differential outcomes linked to levels of engagement in online groups generally, followed by a more detailed exploration of lurking in the context of online support groups and education.
Social Media and Cyberactivism
Authors: Stiff Chris
Published: October 2018

When created, social media was merely a somewhat frivolous method of disseminating media to others within an online network. Since then it has evolved to become a key facet of online life. This chapter examines how social media has fostered cyberactivism, the propagation of political and social change through the use of online resources. It first considers broad motives for social media use and how these may map onto cyberactivism. The chapter then investigates how classic models of offline collective action may apply to online versions of this behavior. It also asks if cyberactivism actually has any meaningful effect or, if not, if it simply provides users with the illusion of philanthropy without contributing anything authentic, that is, “slacktivism.” Finally, the chapter considers the future of cyberactivism, and how continued developments in social media mean the online arena will only become more important when attempting to change hearts and minds.
Languages of the Iberian Peninsula
Authors: de Hoz Bravo Javier
Published: October 2018

Writing appeared in the Iberian Peninsula no later than the seventh century bce as an adaptation of Phoenician script, from which the Palaeohispanic scripts developed as a series of variants. These variants correspond to the linguistic and social particularities of diverse Palaeohispanic communities, notably the Tartessians, the Iberians, and the Celtiberians. The Roman occupation influenced the development of local inscriptions, some of which appeared for the first time at this moment, and in the case of the Lusitanians were only ever written in the Latin alphabet. Epigraphic evidence provides information about little understood aspects of indigenous literatures and cultures, in particular that of the Turdetanians, who followed on from the Tartessians. Limited data regarding Latin literature produced in Hispania (the Roman designation for the Iberian peninsula) by Hispanic peoples, in contrast to that of Hispanic writers active in Rome, do not allow for detailed assessment of the pre-Roman tradition.
Berkeley and Newton
Authors: Jesseph Douglas
Published: October 2018

This article examines Berkeley’s responses to the mechanics and mathematics of Isaac Newton. After a brief section outlining some of the key elements of Berkeley’s idealistic metaphysics and empiricist epistemology, his criticisms of Newton are considered, as is his attempt to accommodate the success of Newtonian mechanics within the constraints of his own philosophy. In particular, investigations are made of Berkeley’s criticisms of absolute space and time, his proposal to expunge the notion of matter from natural philosophy, his claim that laws of nature are purely descriptive and do not identify genuine causes, and his instrumentalistic approach to the concept of force. Berkeley’s critique of the Newtonian calculus of fluxions in his 1734 treatise The Analyst is also investigated.
NICE public health guidance update
Authors: Van Hove Maria , Kettle Rachel , Walsh Rachel , Leng Gillian
Published: October 2018

This article covers recent National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance relevant to public health. The article includes an overview of key public health aspects of the Community pharmacy: promoting health and wellbeing guideline, summarizing recommendations for commissioners and health promoting organizations and professionals around the potential to integrate community pharmacies into wider health and care pathways.
Implementation of the “Pregnancy Reasonably Excluded Guide” for Pregnancy Assessment
Authors: Wyatt Michelle A. , Ainsworth Alessandra J. , DeJong Stephanie R. , Cope Adela G. , Long Margaret E.
Published: October 2018

OBJECTIVE:

Preoperative evaluation for pregnancy at our institution lacked standardization among individual health care providers and surgical services. This pilot project aimed to improve assessment for pregnancy before scheduled outpatient gynecologic surgical procedures. The Pregnancy Reasonably Excluded Guide incorporates historic, evidence-based criteria to facilitate identification of patients with a higher chance of pregnancy.

METHODS:

We retrospectively reviewed documentation for women undergoing gynecologic surgery at an outpatient surgical center from March through September 2016, before and after implementation of the pregnancy assessment protocol. After implementation, all eligible women (aged 18–50 years, not undergoing an emergent or pregnancy-related procedure) were assessed using the Pregnancy Reasonably Excluded Guide on arrival to the preoperative area. The Pregnancy Reasonably Excluded Guide checklist uses traditional and World Health Organization criteria for reasonable exclusion of pregnancy. Nursing staff reviewed responses with patients and pregnancy tests were completed as indicated by patient responses. Women who were unable to read, understand, or freely respond to the checklist received pregnancy testing. Pregnancy assessment, testing, results, and delays were recorded. This project was deemed exempt by the institutional review board.

RESULTS:

Two hundred thirteen eligible patients underwent outpatient gynecologic procedures during the study period (excluding a 2-week washout period at implementation). In the preimplementation period, 93 of 136 patients (68%) had pregnancy risk documented; 73 of 77 (95%) had documentation in the postimplementation period (P≤.01). Pregnancy tests were completed in 45 preimplementation patients (33%) and 16 postimplementation patients (21%) (P=.06). No pregnancy test results were positive. No procedural delays were associated with pregnancy assessment.

CONCLUSION:

Patient-centered assessment using the Pregnancy Reasonably Excluded Guide at presentation for outpatient gynecologic surgery significantly improved evaluation and documentation of pregnancy status before scheduled procedures without increasing the number of pregnancy tests or causing procedural delays.
The Sign of Leser-Trelát and Malignant Acanthosis Nigricans Associated With Fallopian Tube Carcinoma
Authors: West Lindsey , Carlson Matthew , Wallis Luke , Goff Heather W.
Published: October 2018

BACKGROUND:

The sign of Leser-Trelát is controversial and rarely reported in gynecologic malignancies. It is characterized by rapid development of new or enlarging seborrheic keratoses.

CASE:

A 78-year-old woman presented with unintentional weight loss and new-onset erythematous patches and plaques with thickened, rugated skin and stuck-on brown waxy papules on the chest and back. Her symptoms were concerning for a paraneoplastic eruption; workup revealed an elevated CA 125 level and an ovarian mass on abdominal computed tomography scan. Exploratory laparotomy revealed a stage IIIC serous fallopian tube carcinoma and a synchronous low-grade endometrioid adenocarcinoma of the endometrium.

CONCLUSION:

The sign of Leser-Trelát can be associated with fallopian tube carcinoma. When recognized, paraneoplastic dermatoses can prompt clinicians to initiate a workup for occult malignancy.