John Thornton Caldwell's landmark Specworld demonstrates how twenty-first-century media industries monetize and industrialize creative labor at all levels of production. Through illuminating case studies and rich ethnography of colliding social-media and filmmaking practices, Caldwell takes readers into the world of production workshopping and trade mentoring to show media production as an untidy social construct rather than a unified, stable practice. This messy complex system, he argues, is full of discrete yet interconnected parts that include legacy production companies, marketers and influencers, aspirant online producers, data miners, financiers, talent agencies, and more. Caldwell peels away the layers of these embedded production systems to examine the folds, fault lines, and fractures that underlie a risky, high-pressure, and often exploitative industry. With insights on the ethical and human predicament faced by industry hopefuls and crossover creators seeking professional careers, Caldwell offers new interpretive frames and research methods that allow readers to better see the hidden and multifaceted financial logics and forms of labor embedded in contemporary media production industries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2007, held in Gold Coast, Australia, in December 2007.

The 58 revised full papers and 40 revised short papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 3 invited speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 194 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine learning, neural networks, evolutionary computing, constraint satisfaction, satisfiability, automated reasoning, knowledge discovery, robotics, social intelligence, ontologies and semantic Web, natural language systems, knowledge representation, expert systems, applications of AI, and short papers.

This book tells the story of the Christian religious movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita in the Kingdom of Kongo from 1704 until her death, by burning at the stake, in 1706. Beatriz, a young woman, claimed to be possessed by St Anthony, argued that Jesus was a Kongolese, and criticized Italian Capuchin missionaries in her country for not supporting black saints. The movement was largely a peace movement, with a following among the common people, attempting to stop the devastating cycle of civil wars between contenders for the Kongolese throne. Thornton supplies background information on the Kingdom, the development of Catholicism in Kongo since 1491, the nature and role of local warfare in the Atlantic slave trade, and contemporary everyday life, as well as sketching the lives of some local personalities.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics that made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors. This second edition contains a new chapter on eighteenth century developments.

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was a young Kongolese woman who in 1704 claimed to be possessed by St. Anthony, argued that Jesus was a Kongolese, criticized Italian Capuchin missionaries for not supporting black saints, and attempted to stop the devastating cycle of civil wars between contenders for the Kongolese throne. She was burned at the stake in 1706. Background information is supplied on Kongo, the development of Catholicism there, and the role of local warfare in the Atlantic slave trade.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics that made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors. This second edition contains a new chapter on eighteenth century developments.