Search Results (12)

The Harry Potter fandom community around the world prefers a universe of wizards and witches that includes all people, but also has concerns about the author’s perspective regarding gender identity. This disjunction paralyzes the cultural reader with moral confusion, which is a danger to their emotional investment in the text. Although scholars have analyzed this phenomenon using fragmented prisms, such as social media activism, cognitive engagement, translation, pedagogy, and fan creativity, there is no unifying model that can be used to understand why reading pleasure endures. This article aims to fill this gap by examining these strands of research in a divergent manner, adopting a convergent mixed-methods study approach. Based on neurocognitive (EEG) values, cross-cultural focus groups, social media analysis, and corpus linguistics, we outline the terrain of reader coping mechanisms. We identify separate fan fractions and examine the corresponding practices. The results are summarized by proposing a model called the MDRL (Moral dissonance repair loop) which is a theoretical model that shows how translation smoothing, pedagogical reframing and fan-based re-moralization interact with one another in creating a system that enables the reader to be collectively able to obtain their relations with the text back to a manageable point and continue being engaged. This model makes a theoretical contribution to new areas in the study of fans, moral psychology, and cognitive literature. Full article

This paper explores how sound design in the Harry Potter film series shapes the symbolic significance of written words within the magical world. Sound mediates between language and meaning; while characters gain knowledge by reading and seeing, viewers are guided emotionally and thematically by how these written texts are framed through sound. For example, Harry’s magical identity is signalled to viewers through the score long before he fully understands himself—first through music when he speaks to a snake, then more explicitly when he receives his letter from Hogwarts. Throughout the series, characters engage with a wide array of written media—textbooks, letters, newspapers, diaries, maps, and inscriptions—that gradually shift in narrative function, from static props to dynamic, multi-sensory agents of transformation. Using a close analysis of selected scenes to examine layers of utterances, diegetic sounds, underscore, and sound design, this study draws on metaphor theory and adaptation theory to examine how sound design gives writing a metaphorical voice, sometimes framing it as character, landscape, or moral authority. As the series progresses, becoming more autonomous from the literary source, written words take on greater symbolic significance, and sound increasingly determines which texts are granted narrative power, whose voices are trusted, and how viewers interpret truth and agency across media. Ultimately, written words in the films are animated through sound into agents of growth, memory, resistance, and transformation. Thus, the audio-visual treatment of written magic reveals not just what is written, but what matters. Full article

Implementing education for sustainable development (SD) into higher education requires curricular changes, embodying various constraints. Therefore, exploring students’ understanding of sustainable development goals (SDGs) is part of the initial steps. In doing this, students’ reflections on literary works can yield valuable insights and guide what and how to teach for effective ESD practices. This study investigated university students’ understanding of SDGs through their reflections on a literary work. A mixed-methods research design was employed, collecting data from senior English literature students at a Turkish state university. Qualitative data were collected through an open-ended survey and students’ term papers, while quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire. The survey and term papers showed divergent results regarding students’ understanding of SDGs. Although the survey indicated a restricted understanding, the term papers showed a more nuanced understanding. The quantitative findings also suggested that students had a systems perspective related to SDGs. Moreover, the term paper findings showed that students focused primarily on characters and settings while clarifying and elaborating their associations. Literary texts can be valuable tools to gain more insights into students’ understanding of SDGs, as they provide explicit and implicit instances in which essential plot elements construct rich and meaningful contexts. Full article

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a plausible fictional creationist explanation of when and how a fictional object comes into existence without a successful creative intention, focusing on the problem posed by Stuart Brock’s nominalist author scenario. I first present some intuitions about parallel scenarios for fictional objects and concrete artifacts as data to be explained. Then I provide a sufficient condition for the existence of artifacts that can explain both cases. An important upshot of this is that there is an overlooked way to bring artifacts into existence that should merit serious consideration, and this leads to a version of the mind-dependence, but not the intention-dependence, view of artifacts. Full article

Data on wildfire growth are useful for multiple research purposes but are frequently unavailable and often have data quality problems. For these reasons, we developed a protocol for collecting daily burned area time series from the InciWeb website, Incident Management Situation Reports (IMSRs), and other sources. We apply this protocol to create the Warehouse of Multiple Burned Area Time Series (WoMBATS) data, which are a collection of burned area time series with cross-check data for 514 wildfires in the United States for the years 2018–2020. We compare WoMBATS-derived distributions of wildfire occurrence and size to those derived from MTBS data to identify potential biases. We also use WoMBATS data to cross tabulate the frequency of missing data in InciWeb and IMSRs and calculate differences in size estimates. We identify multiple instances where WoMBATS data fails to reproduce wildfire occurrence and size statistics derived from MTBS data. We show that WoMBATS data are typically much more complete than either of the two constituent data sources, and that the data collection protocol allows for the identification of otherwise undetectable errors. We find that although disagreements between InciWeb and IMSRs are common, the magnitude of these differences are usually small. We illustrate how WoMBATS data can be used in practice by validating two simple wildfire growth forecasting models. Full article

The tense-aspect system of Breton, a continental Celtic language, is largely under-described. This paper has two main goals. First, it gives an overview of the numerous verbal morphosyntactic constructions of Breton, with the aim of evaluating how they carve up the tense-aspect domain. The second goal is to zero in on one particular set of constructions, namely, perfect-like constructions. In particular, it investigates the use of the present perfect in narrative and oral discourse, compared to two other competing constructions, the simple past and the past perfect. In the spirit of de Swart and Le Bruyn’s Time in Translation project, we adopt a parallel corpus-based approach from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its Breton translation. We develop an account of the distinction between these temporal forms, in particular the present and past perfects, drawing on the interaction between rhetorical relations and temporal structure. Results show that in written narrative stretches, the simple past is the norm; however, in dialogues, the present perfect is required in cases of ‘weak’ narration, and if the past situation is somehow felt to be currently relevant, even if the situation refers to an explicit past time. However, the past perfect occurs in narrative stretches within the dialogue, in cases of ‘strong’ narration, especially if the situation described is anaphorically tied to a temporal antecedent. Full article

To analyze crossdialectal variation between the use of a Present Perfect form (Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto) and a Perfective Past form (Pretérito Indefinido) in Spanish, we make use of two converging methodologies: (i) parallel corpus research, where we compare different translations of the same text (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) into specific standardized written varieties of Spanish (Peninsular, Mexican, Argentinian), and (ii) an elicitation forced-choice task, where native speakers of each of the cities in which these standardized written norms are produced (Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires) have to choose between the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto and the Pretérito Indefinido as the most natural filler for a blank in contexts extracted from the novel. Results from these two tasks do not align completely. While the data from our parallel corpus work indicate a wider distribution of Perfect use in the Mexican translation than in the Peninsular and the Argentinian ones, the elicitation task shows that only the choices of the speakers of Madrid (Castilian Spanish) and Buenos Aires (Rioplatense Spanish) converge with their respective translations patterns. Since the distribution observed in the Mexican translation not only goes against the elicitation data, but also contradicts previous findings in the literature, we abandon it in further analyses. In the second part of the paper, through a detailed annotation of the Peninsular and Argentinian corpora, we show that the constraints allowing Perfect use in each of these standardized varieties respond only to some features previously advanced in the literature. While both dialects allow for experiential and resultative readings of the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto, Castilian Spanish also prefers the use of this marker to locate an event in the hodiernal past. On the other hand, Rioplatense Spanish systematically defaults to the Pretérito Indefinido in these cases, displaying a more restricted distribution for the Perfect form. Both dialects also seem to exhibit a preference for the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto in continuative contexts. Our work thus provides two crucial take-home messages: (i) understanding crossdialectal variation in written language is crucial for advancing crosslinguistic generalizations about tense-aspect phenomena; and (ii) combining parallel corpus and experimental methodologies can help us understand in a more thorough way the distribution of Perfect and (Perfective) Past forms across dialects. Full article

Popular media, including films, television, comics, videogames, and books, are an increasingly important aspect of contemporary tourism. This is especially the case in Scotland, where popular culture led to the development of Scotland’s tourism industry. In this article, we will describe the phenomenon of media-related tourism in Scotland with respect to three selected case studies within Scotland: First, Glenfinnan Viaduct, made famous by the Harry Potter film series; Second, Doune Castle, used as a set for Monty Python, Game of Thrones and more recently, Outlander; Third, Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott, a classical novelist now celebrating his 250th Birthday Anniversary. In examining these case studies, the article will consider how sustainable media tourism is. This approached is from the lens of media tourism and its impact on rural communities, concerns over local infrastructure, wider understandings of media tourism as a growing sub-sector, and the sustainability of the wider Scottish tourism industry in relation to the coronavirus pandemic. Full article

Nowadays, education requires changes in the teaching and learning processes, through the implementation of innovative and motivating pedagogical actions, owing to the existing needs in society. Education, owing to the current needs of society, requires changes in the teaching and learning processes through the implementation of innovative and motivating pedagogical actions. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the collaborative method, based on the Harry Potter theme, with respect to the traditional method in the first year of Obligatory Secondary Education for the learning of geometric figures in the subject of mathematics. For this purpose, a quasi-experimental, quantitative, descriptive, and correlational study has been designed, using a standardized questionnaire as a technique to collect information. The sample is composed of 236 students from the first year of Obligatory Secondary Education distributed in eight groups (four control and four experimental) from a public high school in the city of Cádiz (Spain). The tests carried out show that collaborative learning generates improvements in the attitudes and mathematical dimensions. Therefore, the collaborative method, developed by means of the Harry Potter theme for students in the first year of Compulsory Secondary Education in the subject of mathematics, causes a better attitude of the student towards the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, it facilitates the acquisition of mathematical contents related to geometry, which does not directly affect the students’ grades because, although those of the experimental group are better than those obtained by the control group, the differences between the two are minimal. Full article

This article proposes that the experiences of screen tourists in Oxford help to create a theoretical “deep map” of the city which explores place through narrative. Building on the travel writing of William Least Heat-Moon and other recent work in the spatial humanities, two case studies of major screen tourism drivers are considered and analyzed. The British television drama Inspector Morse (1987–2000) explores the ambiguity of Oxford intellectualism through its central character. Morse’s love of high culture, especially music, provides suggestive additional layers for multimedia mapping, which are realized online through user-adapted Google Maps and geolocated images posted on the Flickr service. Harry Potter fans may not be “pure” or independent screen tourists, but they provide a wealth of data on their interactions with filming locations via social media such as Instagram. This data provides emotional as well as factual evidence, and is accumulating into an ever richer and deeper digital map of human experience. Full article

The book and film franchise of Harry Potter has inspired a monumental fandom community with a veracious output of fanfiction and general musings on the text and the vivid universe contained therein. A significant portion of these texts deal with Professor Severus Snape, the stern Potions Master with ambiguous ethics and loyalties. This paper explores a small community of Snape fans who have gone beyond a narrative retelling of the character as constrained by the work of Joanne Katherine Rowling. The ‘Snapewives’ or ‘Snapists’ are women who channel Snape, are engaged in romantic relationships with him, and see him as a vital guide for their daily lives. In this context, Snape is viewed as more than a mere fictional creation. He is seen as a being that extends beyond the Harry Potter texts with Rowling perceived as a flawed interpreter of his supra-textual essence. While a Snape religion may be seen as the extreme end of the Harry Potter fandom, I argue that religions of this nature are not uncommon, unreasonable, or unprecedented. Popular films are a mechanism for communal bonding, individual identity building, and often contain their own metaphysical discourses. Here, I plan to outline the manner in which these elements resolve within extreme Snape fandom so as to propose a nuanced model for the analysis of fandom-inspired religion without the use of unwarranted veracity claims. Full article