Traditional identity management systems, often centralized, face challenges around privacy, data security, and user control, leaving users vulnerable to data breaches and misuse. This paper explores the potential of using the Arweave network to develop an identity management solution. By harnessing Arweave's permanent storage, our solution offers the users a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework, that uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to allow individuals and other entities to create, own, and manage their digital identities. Further, the solution integrates privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs and the BBS(+) signature scheme, enabling selective disclosure. This approach ultimately enhances user privacy and supports compliance with European Union legislation and regulatory standards like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by design.
James WhaleThe Monster Man Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Portrait of James Whale, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum [End Page 89] In 1917, while serving as a second lieutenant in the British Army on the Western Front, twenty-six-year-old James Whale was captured by the Germans at Aisne Farm in France. Led off at bayonet point, he felt lucky; most of his platoon had been killed. He was transported to Holzminden, a prison camp in the heart of enemy territory where six hundred officers were already imprisoned. The brutal camp commander, Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, claimed that the camp was escape-proof. Prisoners dug a hundred-yard tunnel with knives, forks, and frying pans, and twenty-nine men crawled free. Another seventy might have made it through if not for a New Zealand aviator who got stuck in the hole, blocking their passage. Indifferent to the escapeesâ plans, Whale stayed put. Despite a meager diet of potato rations and occasional horsemeat and the campâs reputation as the worst in Germany, he made effective use of his time, gambling, painting, and producing amateur theatrical productions. For his plays, he designed and painted the scenery and wrote original material. On Saturday nights after dinner, the tables were pushed together, creating a solid platform for a makeshift stage at the far end of the barracks. For two hours, in the small theater space, inmates performed a James Whale production, forgetting about their harsh circumstances until the final curtain dropped. His plays became popular among both prisoners and camp officials, who would send to Cologne for special costumes and props. After fifteen months, he left Holzminden with his career path set: he would make a life in theater. He said, âI couldnât follow anything seriously after that.â When he left Holzminden, IOUs scribbled on paper scraps filled his pockets, winnings from the campâs many poker and bridge games. The officers, most from wealthy British families, paid their debts, and with the sales of his prison drawings, Whale had several hundred pounds to stake a new life in London. He freelanced cartoons and illustrations for commercial magazines, but the postwar housing shortage made rents prohibitively expensive. He moved to Birmingham, six miles from where heâd grown up, worked for the Birmingham Repertory Company, and enrolled in Ryland Memorial School of Art. The world of theater offered Whale an escape from a life of hard physical labor and poverty. He was born in 1889 in Dudley, a mining and ironworking town in the West Midlands, to working-class parents in a house crowded with siblings. Unusually thin, with intense blue eyes, red hair, and âfaun-like charm,â he carried himself with a regal bearing. [End Page 90] Family and friends thought that he was meant for a life grander than what Dudley could offer. Click for larger view View full resolution Frankenstein, 1931, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum With a large family to help support, Whale left school in his teens to work for a cobbler, salvaging nails from shoe soles for scrap metal before burning the leather. His talent as a draftsman made him extra money lettering fancy price tags for local merchants, which he saved for tuition at the Dudley School of Arts and Crafts. In 1910, he enrolled and took classes at night while working during the day in a sheet-metal factory hammering ornamental designs into buggy fenders. Other than his attendance at the occasional performances at the Dudley Opera House, [End Page 91] there was no indication when he left art school in 1914 that he would seek a life in theater. Click for larger view View full resolution Frankenstein, 1931, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum Whale understood that success and recognition, as well as money, would be hard to come by. He said, âNo one should wish to become an actor or have anything to do with the theater for any other reason than an inner compulsion.â Yet he pursued his dream as soon as he was liberated, thin and frail, from Holzminden. After a stint in Stratford-upon-Avon playing small parts in the Shakespearean Festival...
Hallab, Mary Y. Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 169 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-4384-2860-4. $24.95. Mary Hallab pushes her way into the already crowded shelves of vampire criticism with Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture, an academic examination of the appeal of vampires in Western culture. Vampire Gods is a fairly short work--only 136 pages, excluding endnotes--but it covers a lot of ground as she examines folkloric and literary vampires. Rather than relying on definitions that reduce vampires to symbolic manifestations of desires or political ideologies, Hallab focuses on the vampire's liminal status as creature both human and supernatural (4). This status, Hallab argues, is the very definition of the vampire: it is the one thing all vampires--comic or terrifying, sexy or revolting--have in common. It is also central to the vampire's role as a focus for universal concerns about death [and life] that allows the mind to dwell on possibilities beyond those offered by conventional religion or rational empiricism (6-7). Hallab organizes the text into four main sections: (1) the relation between vampires and science; (2) the social implications of vampires; (3) the psychological implications of vampires; and (4) the religious implications of vampires. The bulk of the text (as implied by the title Vampire Gods) focuses on the last section: religion. However, the vampire's god-like ability to give structure and meaning to life ties all of the sections together. Chapter 1, and Science, illustrates Hallab's strengths as a writer and researcher. Here, as elsewhere in the study, Hallab combines a brief, but compelling review of academic studies with historical and literary examples. Where Hallab excels is in relating a broad, widely accepted concept (i.e., folklore often constitutes a kind of pre-scientific attempt to explain natural occurrences) and then, after noting the myriad variations of that concept, offering her own position (vampires [if accepted as real] offer ... irrefutable proof that the dead are still in some way alive) (17-18). Though there is much new in her analysis, she manages to stake subtle claims on some well-established ideas. She is even more successful at using a broad range of vampire stories to illustrate her point. In chapter 1, for instance, she traces links from the Catholic Church's scientific investigations into eighteenth-century Hungarian vampires to classic literary vampires such as Varney and Dracula, modern vampire dramas such as Forever Knight and Dark Shadows, and at least seven other lesser-known literary manifestations. It is a lot to cover in fifteen pages, but Hallab manages it without eliding too many complexities. Chapter 2, and Society, extends the commonplace concept that folkloric vampires reinforce communally shared beliefs [and] ... provide ties with the family and community past (33) into an analysis of literary vampires serving similar functions. Whether inspired by historical figures or other vampires from the literary tradition, literary vampires, like their folkloric counterparts, present a sort of shared social history that even modern societies crave. These histories, no matter how fictionalized, assure readers that a real history actually exists. As she explains, the undead teach us that are all trapped in the flow, or cycle, of history, tumbling along with others--dead and undead-whether we like it or not (48). In chapter 3, and Psychology: Body, Soul, and Self, Hallab argues that vampires have too often been reduced to a simple symbol of our unconscious sexual desires and fears (54). This reading, she claims, unnecessarily limits the vampire's appeal and ignores its broader, more universal function as a symbol of an immortal self. Vampires are defined by their undying sense of self. âŠ
B eginning with a broken metamorphosis, Chaucerâs Book of the Duchess attempts to resolve the scandal of genderâs visuality through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. In the Ovidian story, metamorphosis saves Alcyone from suicide; this transformation revives her and reifies her husband, changing both into sea birds. 1 Chaucerâs rendition sees Alcyone dead within three days of the return of her husbandâs body. Mortality, along with its ultimate proof, death, is more visible in Chaucerâs poem than in his sources. 2 Chaucerâs treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative thus reveals a suspicion of superficial visions that is relevant to the larger composition to which it belongs. This account, like the Black and White story it presages, is a tangible arrangement of differences that are narrative, visual, and topographic. 3 Because gender difference is staked on degrees of visual distance in the Book of the Duchess , this chapter addresses the spatial arrangement of perspective across its aesthetic, religious, scientific, and philosophical contexts. The process of spatial arrangement is more relational than linear in the poem itself, so the argument of this chapter will follow the poemâs meandering path in order to address the artistic, religious, and intellectual controversies that Chaucer finesses through his creation of a powerful feminine image. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.