Smartphone Time Machine: Tech-Supported Improvements in Time Perspective and Wellbeing Measures

Individuals with a balanced time perspective, which includes good thoughts about the past, awareness of present constraints and adaptive planning for a positive future, are more likely to report optimal wellbeing. However, people who have had traumas such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are likely to have less balanced time perspectives and lower overall wellbeing when compared to those with fewer or no ACEs. Time perspective can be improved via time-travel narratives that support people in feeling connected to a wise and loving future version of themselves, an approach that has until now only been provided in counseling contexts. Our team used an iterative inclusive design process to shape a scalable time-travel narrative tool – a responsive and progressive web application called Time Machine. Among other functionalities, Time Machine allowed people to record and listen to messages as if they were from and to their past and future selves. Using pre-planned as well as post-hoc analyses, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data from 96 paid design partners (participants) who were taken through a 26-day pilot study of the technology. Among other effects, the results revealed: (1) high engagement throughout the design process, (2) improvements in self-reported time perspective and overall wellbeing scores that were greater for those using Time Machine during an optional-use period, (3) twice as much improvement in overall wellbeing scores for design partners with high ACEs (16%) versus low ACEs (8%), and (4) feelings of unconditional love apparently mediating the relationship between scores on time perspective and overall wellbeing measures. We discuss the limitations of these results as well as implications for the future role of spiritually informed scalable time-travel narrative technologies in healthcare and wellness.

Window to a world beyond: Göran Schildt’s journey to Bulgaria and Romania in 1963 and some multilingual and multicultural strategies

International traveller and acclaimed Swedish-language author Göran Schildt sailed in the Black Sea in the summer of 1963. He was a well-read scholar with a deep interest in the Antiquity and a seasoned traveller with a vast experience of multilingual and multicultural situations. This was the first and last visit of his yacht Daphne to the Black Sea and the Eastern Bloc. Through the eyes of this keen observer, a small aperture can be detected among the bricks in the walls dividing Europe. A window had been opened by world politicians in the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1950s. Although there were periods of high global tension, new possibilities for travel and tourism were created in some Eastern Bloc countries, among them Bulgaria and Romania. Visits by dozens of journalists, writers and artists and thousands of charter tourists from the Western Bloc over the next few decades opened up new windows to the world beyond the Iron Curtain. Göran Schildt stands out among the Nordic cultural visitors to Bulgaria and Romania in the post-war period. His desire to get acquainted with everyday life and ordinary people, capability to see behind facades and analysing experiences could be defined as journalistic, but his travel writing went deeper. In comparison with some other writers from Finland, who visited Bulgaria or Romania during the Cold War, such as the poet Lassi Nummi or comic fiction writer Arto Paasilinna, and the Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov who visited Sweden, Schildt’s background, interests and multilingual and multicultural strategies supported the discovery and collection of extensive information and the processing of it into a multidimensional travel book. This article discusses the journey and travel narrative of Göran Schildt from the perspective of multilingual and multicultural strategies for encountering other languages, societies and cultures, and the processing of experiences as recorded in his diary and his popular travel narrative.

Authoritative Structures of British Feminist Colonial Discourse: Emily Keen’s Travel Narrative My Life Story as a Case Study

This paper analyses the representation of Morocco by a British female traveller during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Emily Keen’s My Life Story attempts to set out the conditions in which women travelled and translated the reception of their experiences into autobiographies in their native countries, breaking down the boundaries of space and time to discover and interpret the discourse that traverses the writer’s narrative. The endeavour is to show how what was imagined about the country, what was a fantastic legend about Morocco, what started as an innocent story and literary entertainment for British readers, built up to make an authoritative discourse of colonisation. My intention and method go so far as to broaden the range of issues connected to travel writing. These issues include gender, race, identity, and personal experience, etc. Through this lens, I argue that such writers were conscious and unconscious informants preparing the way for the European colonisation of the country; they are the living witnesses of an evolution through which a culture was forced to open itself to foreign powers.

The Inevitable Otherness behind the Maskin T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The concept of “Otherness” can be perceived in several European narrative writings. Despite the complications that the definition of the term might imply, most of the works presented have a deliberate emphasis on presenting the deleterious chauvinisms concerning the Orient. In Orientalist literature, one can notice the insistence on keeping the potentials and differences between the East and the West. The reader is presented with a variety of events that serve to indicate the Western superiority over the East in all aspects. In this conception, the social, philosophical and cultural structure of the Eastern societies is to be considered inferior to the Western one. Therefore, negation is viewed as the only way of comparison between the two. This study examines T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (SPW) as a typical orientalist text. Moreover, it sheds light on the conflicting powers in the personal identity of Lawrence himself. Through evidences and insights, it argues that though Lawrence contends that he has written a travel narrative in SPW, the novel is an autobiography of an Orientalist imperial agent, a White Man who continues the tradition of reductionism and stereotyping and technically rests on Orientalist strategies.

Carte blanche to Travel Narrative

The “spatial turn” in the humanities has pointed out how space is produced and how it is affected by power relations, while critical geography has identified the impact of these relations on cartographic representation of space. The presence of maps in travel narratives thus carries certain ideologies and influences the narratives. In Un livre blanc: récit avec cartes [ A Blank Book: Narrative with Maps ] (2007), contemporary French author Philippe Vasset attempts to describe the fifty blank spaces that he has noticed on the topographic map of Paris and its suburbs and visited over a one-year period. This article analyzes the major impact of maps on this narrative and the representation of space that it creates. Despite a direct experience of these “blank spaces”, the narrator is affected by a “cartographic performativity” that prompts him to treat space as a map, and he aims to write as a disembodied cartographer.

5. Masterpieces

‘Masterpieces’ focuses on three of Henry James’s novels that are generally considered his greatest: The Ambassadors (1902), The Wings of the Dove (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The Ambassadors is a meditation on the nature of ambition, destiny, and what makes a life meaningful. The Wings of the Dove deals with illness and suffering, and the moral conundrum presented by a dying girl possessed of great wealth she cannot enjoy, and her needy friends who seek to inherit it. The Golden Bowl is about the institutions of marriage and family, and how they are disrupted by passion. The chapter also examines James’s travel narrative, The American Scene (1907).

Jerusalem and the Restoration of Israel in the Gospel of Luke

Jerusalem occupies a central place throughout the Gospel of Luke. This chapter accordingly examines how Jerusalem fits into Luke’s wider eschatological program. In Luke, Jerusalem is the center of Jesus’s eschatological activity. This theme emerges especially in the so-called travel narrative, which presents Jerusalem as the site where Jesus must fulfill his task of liberation—through his death, resurrection, ascension, and return—thereby tying the destiny of the messiah of Israel with his people. The major eschatological speech of the Third Gospel also deals with the fate of Jerusalem, including its destruction in 70, which is a source of grief for Luke’s Jesus. Tragedy, however, is not the end of Luke’s story of salvation on behalf of Israel. The Jewish people will be restored at Jesus’s return to Jerusalem.

Daniel J. Walkowitz, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xv + 281 pp.

This chapter explores Daniel J. Walkowitz's The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States (2018). This book is in part a family history with a pronounced political twist, and in part a travel narrative intended to reflect upon the author's family's journey from Russia–Poland through Western Europe and then to the United States. It is, in addition, a reflection on heritage installations in major sites of Jewish settlement where the Jewish presence has often disappeared either through emigration, genocide, or social mobility and dispersion. To some degree, Walkowitz's project simply reviews intellectual terrain well combed by others. But throughout the book, Walkowitz brings a persistent and unique critical gaze eschewing the nostalgic sentiments of so much Jewish heritage tourism, along with the false lachrymosity that laments abandoned synagogues or the absence of observant Jews, or the persistent focus on famous men and the well-to-do at the expense of ordinary Jews.

Once bitten, twice shy: A French traveller and go-between in Mughal India, 1648–67

This article examines the materials around François le Gouz de la Boullaye, a French gentilhomme (gentleman or minor aristocrat) from the Anjou Province of western France, who visited India twice, once in the late 1640s, and again in the mid-1660s. The result of his first visit, in which he mostly spent time in Surat and Goa, was an extended travel-narrative, the Voyages et Observations, of which two editions appeared in 1653 and 1657. On this basis, Boullaye became a fairly well-known ‘expert’ on Islamic and Indian affairs in Louis XIV’s France. Because of his reputation, he was then chosen as a member of an embassy sent to open trading relations with Safavid Iran and Mughal India in 1664 on behalf of the French Compagnie des Indes. This second visit was not a great success on account of misconceptions regarding diplomatic protocols and because of deep rivalries and divisions amongst rival French actors, including celebrated travellers like Bernier and Tavernier.