Arranging sensations: smell and taste in augmented and virtual reality

The development of digital taste and smell underscores the importance of cultural dimensions of bodily perception in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) devices. This can be seen in Vocktail and Season Traveller, two digital devices incorporating taste and smell. Vocktail is an AR technology that augments the experience of drinking water, or even air, through the electrical stimulation of tastebuds and the manipulation of color and smell. Season Traveller is a VR game in which the user moves through four seasonal landscapes. It uses wind, odor, and temperature in addition to the more standard audio-visual displays. The cultural dimensions of these devices can be examined using phenomenological terms. They instigate perceptual circuits, and call on and create sedimented habits. Although VR and AR are often thought of in terms of their similitude to reality, understanding Vocktail and Season Traveller this way illustrates the world-creating dimension of multisensory devices. These technologies structure and shift thresholds of taste and smell, reworking past perceptual styles and habits to develop new perceptual experiences. In so doing, Season Traveller and Vocktail throw to the fore questions about the conditions according to which people exercise their senses in digitally dominated environments.     

英汉嗅觉动词隐喻的共性分析

隐喻是从一个具体语域“始发域”向一个抽象语域“目的域”的映射,在这种映射中存在着一种实体对应关系。通常人们把较为熟悉的,具体的概念域映射到不太熟悉的,抽象的概念域上,以便于对后者的理解。这一理论可用来研究词语多义现象和语义转变。英汉语言中都存在着许多嗅觉动词,嗅觉动词的隐喻义来自实指义。映射理论揭示了嗅觉动词隐喻义的形成过程,从而有力的证明了英汉两种语言中存在着相同的嗅觉隐喻。     

A Whiff of Nothing: The Atmospheric Absence of Smell

Abstract

This article uses the figure of “presence of absence” to consider the phenomenological significance of dimensions of smell that easily slip out of apprehension. The discussion highlights how not only loud smell but also absence of smell manages to exert an influence over the way people feel. Smells linked to emotions and bodily sensations are addressed as atmospheric, and facets of an atmospheric absence of smell are unfurled within the framework of “the smell of the hospital.” The case demonstrates how the atmospheric presence of absence of smell becomes of significance in the hospital as it is acted and reacted upon as a sense of (1) longing, (2) avoidance, (3) care and (4) cleanliness.     

现代汉语嗅觉动词的隐喻义

隐喻不仅仅是一种语言现象,更是人们一种认知活动,一种认知思维手段,它在我们的学习以及语言运用中无时不在。本文从一个独特的角度切入,深入分析现代汉语中嗅觉动词的种种隐喻义,同时对它们的语义、语用以及隐喻义方面的差异进行了比较,这有利于我们更多地了解和正确地使用汉语嗅觉动词。     

赵姨娘在《红楼梦》中的功能指向

赵姨娘是《红楼梦》中荣国府贾政老爷的小妾。她出场次数不多,性格并不复杂,可以称其为"扁平性格"。性格只有在功能中才能彰显其价值。赵姨娘在《红楼梦》中的功能指向有三:一是对《红楼梦》小说文本而言,赵姨娘是全书情节结构的关键性人物,具有引发故事的功能;二是对作家曹雪芹而言,赵姨娘所代表的顽劣小人和"金陵十二钗"所代表的"脂粉英雄",构成了曹雪芹对女性的全面认识,进而指向他对人性的辩证思考;三是对读者而言,可以说,赵姨娘是一个本体象征。即是贾府中绚烂至极的糜烂乖戾气息的绝妙象征。这种象征功能指向了对"钟鸣鼎食"的繁华世家走向式微命运的思考,并指向对封建末世的批判。     

《离骚》诗题新解

对于《离骚》诗题的解释,历来有离忧、离愁、遭忧、牢骚、劳商等说法。其实,“离骚”应是“离别骚臭”的意思。     

Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

ABSTRACT

Aromatherapy is a complementary and alternative medicine practice with several distinct lineages and with some uncertainty about the most appropriate way to professionalize. The historical feminization of smell and perfumes means that aromatherapy is culturally marked as a “feminized” practice. This feminization is a mixed blessing in relation to aromatherapy's attempts to advance itself as a discipline. While for many practitioners and clients the traditionally feminized associations of smell, such as its connections to emotions, memory, and the unconscious, serve as a source of value, for others, feminized languages and practices stand in the way of aromatherapy's advancement as a scientifically validated discipline.     

E-Nose for News?

ABSTRACT

Many journalists claim to have a “nose for news.” This metaphor, where a body part is used in a transferred sense for metaphorical change has occupied a central place in journalists' discourses. It appears to express something essential about their identity, profession, practice, and how they “see” and experience the world. This article uses the figure/ground approach of Marshall McLuhan to inform an exploration of the “nose for news” metaphor. By studying the “nose for news” we can understand how and why electronic noses and the Internet have made this once vital and living metaphor obsolete. We can also discover ways to reanimate this metaphor in order to: (a) help recover something of the essence of journalism expressed by journalists' claims to possess a “nose for news,” and (b) re-conceptualize the current “crisis” in journalism.     

The Human Snout: Pigs,Priests, and Peasants in the Parlor

ABSTRACT

Ireland reeked throughout the nineteenth century from the pages of English representation. The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dungheaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them also, Ireland's rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened,” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland's domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry's pigs for Irish national character—a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. This paper examines Irish and British literary and historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelo-Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland.     

有机物分子的偶极矩与化合物香味的关系

人类对化合物气味的感觉是长期以来学术上的一个讨论课题.McGill等用模式识别方法筛选了影响化合物香味的两个主要因素--分子的电子施主特性和偶极矩.本文作者初步研究了分子的偶极矩对化合物香味的影响.