The Transformation Book, which belongs to Pessoa's pre-heteronymic period, contains a series of fragments written in English, Portuguese, and French, none of which were ever published during Pessoa's lifetime. Conceived by Pessoa in 1908, a year of great social and cultural transformation in Portugal, The Transformation Book was designed to reflect and advance social and cultural transformation in Portugal and beyond. Moving between a number of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and satire as well as essays on politics, philosophy, and psychiatry, The Transformation Book marks one of the fundamental stages in Pessoa's elaboration of a new conception of literary space, one that he came to express as a "drama in people." Alexander Search, Pantaleao, Jean Seul de Meluret, and Charles James Search are the four "pre-heteronyms" to which the texts of The Transformation Book are attributed. These four figures constitute a plural literary microcosm - a world that Pessoa makes, but that is occupied by a multiplicity of authors - and clearly anticipate the emergence of Pessoa's heteronyms. As the singular result of an intersection of Pessoa's personal intellectual trajectory with his hopes for fomenting cultural transformation, The Transformation Book makes for a unique contribution to Pessoa's ever-growing published oeuvre. Although some of the texts conceived as part of the Transformation Book have previously been published in isolation or as fragments, this is the first complete and critical edition of The Transformation Book, and most of the texts in this edition are published here for the first time. Through the critical efforts of Nuno Ribeiro and Claudia Souza, a fundamental project of Fernando Pessoa's is now brought from the confines of the archive to the public in its most complete and accurate fashion. The Transformation Book should contribute to future studies on the work of one of the most distinctive geniuses of modernist literature.

Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by thousands of philosophies, all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoa s musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoa s future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a poet animated by philosophy. Through editor Nuno Ribeiro s careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.

Digital information awareness is the process by which people obtain knowledge about important personal information stored on their computers. This is usually provided graphically: when information is hidden from view it must be summoned to the front and users are interrupted by the system, disregarding the costs of the interruption. A solution is to use speech output to complement the graphics, but its use invokes anthropomorphic feelings whose cues must be carefully controlled if the system is to be regarded as humanized. This book describes the design of a speech-based assistant nased on a set of intelligent agents and demonstrates how the content contextually cues the significance of visually hidden information, and how the delivery impacts on the social acceptability of a speaking system, including attentive interruptions, linguistic variation and politeness. An empirical study showed that people felt a degree of rapport with the such a system. These results led to the abstraction of design guidelines for speech-based systems that purport to be humanized in nature. The book is useful to scholars and professionals concerned with the design of next-generation user interfaces.