THE SYNTAX OF OBJECTS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORY: SPEAKING OF SLAVERY IN NEW YORK

The representation of history continues to evolve in the domain of museum exhibitions. This evolution is informed in part by the creation of new display methods—many of which depart from the traditional conventions used to achieve the "museum effect"—in part by an increased attention to the museum-visitor relationship. In this context the ethical force of bearing witness, at times a crucial aspect of the museum experience, has emerged as a particularly compelling issue. In seeking to represent and address atrocity, injustice, and the abrogation of human rights, museums have the potential to become "sites of conscience" and to encourage "historical consciousness." Through a series of three exhibitions devoted to slavery, the New-York Historical Society demonstrated how such sites can be constructed and how objects can be deployed to represent extreme or "limit cases." In this review/essay I investigate and interrogate these exhibitions, looking closely at the use of objects as a source of "indirect testimony" (Marc Bloch) and at the "dialogical situation" (Paul Ricoeur) that might arise in an encounter among objects, exhibit narratives, and visitors. Thinking in terms of point of view, I look at the variety of rhetorical platforms from which objects speak in these exhibitions; thinking in terms of syntax, I look at the effects of ordering and of the radical juxtaposition of objects; thinking in terms of irony, I look at the provocations of double-voiced narratives and at how objects are used to support those historical sentences.     

安徽马鞍山雨山银塘东晋墓发掘简报

2009年,安徽省马鞍山市博物馆抢救性发掘了马鞍山雨山银塘东晋墓。该墓是一座带甬道的单室砖墓,已严重破坏,但二十多件随葬品时代特征明显。出土的陶俑佐证了六朝时期男女衣著没有严格界限区分的特点,棺床和祭台构筑形式为研究长江下游东晋"凸"字形砖室墓形制演变提供了珍贵的实物资料。     

Terra incognita: terrestrial LiDAR documentation of Mound A at Kolomoki (9ER1)

ABSTRACT

The manifest representation of space and place is essential to good archaeology. Our ability to document and relate these concepts, projected into the past and reflected in the present, has increased tremendously with the expansion and availability of technology. We present recent efforts to further document a well-known place in the cultural landscape: the Kolomoki site in southwestern Georgia, occupied primarily during the Middle and Late Woodland periods. Specifically, we summarize older investigations of Mound A, then present the results of recent terrestrial LiDAR documentation. Our work substantiates the claim that Mound A was the largest Woodland-period mound in Eastern North America in terms of overall volume.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

论观景台之作用、保护与制度建设

观景台是人类经选择从事观察景物活动的最佳场所,其形式多样,既有天然观景台,也有人工观望台,还有的观景台本身即是景观。观景台对所观察到的遗产能发挥促进保护的作用,因此,既是一类重要的文化遗产保护对象,更是一类可以发挥重要作用的保护手段,可以纳入文化遗产保护的制度建设。     

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

Digital platforms have changed how property is sold and valued in the Global North, yet little is known about digital tools in emerging land markets. Drawing on in situ and digital ethnography, we argue that Facebook plays a key role in making a new kind of market in Myanmar, one in which land is transformed into a speculative asset, exchanged across ever-expanding networks. While commodification is familiar within longer histories of capitalism, this case highlights the significance of digital platforms to the contemporary remaking of property relations. Unlike classic cases of market-making enabled by active state regulation, Myanmar’s digital land markets were forged in the context of state absence by brokers who harnessed the technological affordances of social media to increase the scale, scope and speed of transactions. This creative re-appropriation of the platform forged new, unregulated digital markets that ultimately accumulated corporate profits and intensified participant risk.     

The Romantic Anti-Capitalisms of Short-Term Rental Hosting

This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short-term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the “Investor Host”, a stand-in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti-capitalism”, a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti-capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler-colonialism.     

Development of a web-enabled learning platform for geospatial laboratories: improving the undergraduate learning experience

This paper describes a web-enabled learning platform providing remote access to geospatial software that extends the learning experience outside of the laboratory setting. The platform was piloted in two undergraduate courses, and includes a software server, a data server, and remote student users. The platform was designed to improve the quality of the learning experience and to increase student confidence and proficiency with software-based geospatial skills. Laboratory grades of students using the platform were significantly higher than those of students who did not use the platform, and survey responses reported that students overwhelmingly liked the convenience of the platform, which allowed them to work from any location.     

Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of the Urban Building Environment in Nablus,Palestine

ABSTRACT

This article describes a specifically developed framework to produce a seismic physical vulnerability model of residential buildings in Nablus (Palestine) within the European project SASPARM2.0. Based on the structural taxonomy of the territory, two different forms were defined to collect geometrical and structural data of buildings by different stakeholders (citizens and practitioners). This data was then employed to produce fragility curves using the mechanics-based procedure SP-BELA. To estimate seismic risk, the developed fragility model was combined with a hazard curve for the corresponding location. The described procedure is implemented in a WebGIS platform that allows to georeference and assess the surveyed buildings and define retrofitting strategies. Finally, the article carries out a comparison between the fragility curves of buildings in Nablus and the ones calculated for similar building typologies within a UNDP Jordan project aiming at the integrated risk assessment in Wadi Musa and surroundings.     

Field Measurements of Wave Characteristics on a Near‐Horizontal Shore Platform,Mahia Peninsula,North Island,New Zealand

Waves are an important process responsible for the initiation and subsequent development of intertidal shore platforms. However, few field studies to date have described wave processes on shore platforms. A field experiment was conducted using an across‐shore array of wave gauges, including a directional sensor, on a near‐horizontal platform at Mahia Peninsula, North Island, New Zealand. Results show that the platform is very efficient in filtering wave energy at gravity wave frequencies (>0.05 Hz), with 40–80% reduction in wave height measured across the 140 m wide platform. By contrast, infragravity waves are present on the platform and increase in magnitude towards the cliff toe. Directional wave analysis indicates that wave reflection is mainly restricted to infragravity wave frequencies, demonstrating the differences in gravity and infragravity wave behaviour on the platform studied. Results indicate that, under fair weather conditions, the role of waves as an agent of cliff toe erosion is likely to be limited at present, although they are probably important for removing sediments accumulated at the cliff toe. The observed increase in infragravity wave energy towards the cliff toe implies that these long‐period waves may be important geomorphic agents on shore platforms.