Cultural Repositories Research Articles

A Documentary History of Naples: Ancient Naples, Chapter Seven - Haven of Hellenism: Greek Culture in Roman Neapolis

In the Roman Imperial period, Naples gradually waned as a commercial and maritime power but gained influence as the greatest repository of Greek culture and traditions in the Roman West. This chapter analyzes the city's legacy as a center of literature, Greek athletics, performance, oratory, and visual arts.

On the death and life of languages

Twenty-five languages die each year; at this pace, half the world's five thousand languages will disappear within the next century. In this timely book, Claude Hagege seeks to make clear the magnitude of the cultural loss represented by the crisis of language death. By focusing on the relationship of language to culture and the world of ideas, Hagege shows how languages are themselves crucial repositories of culture; the traditions, proverbs, and knowledge of our ancestors reside in the language we use. His wide-ranging examination covers all continents and language families to uncover not only how languages die, but also how they can be revitalized-for example in the remarkable case of Hebrew. In a striking metaphor, Hagege likens languages to bonfires of social behavior that leave behind sparks even after they die; from these sparks languages can be rekindled and made to live again.

The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction

Reviewed by: The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction Ondra Krouse Dismukes (bio) Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction by Eric J. Sundquist builds upon the foundation laid by W. E. B. Du Bois with his groundbreaking book, Souls of Black Folk (1903), which celebrates the retentions of African culture in America. Each chapter of Sundquist's book is an extension of the author's presentations at the Lamar Memorial Lecture Series held at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in October 1991. Sundquist analyzes James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) for their examinations of African American performance—music, sermons, and songs—as repositories of African culture. Through his focus on the influence of African American folk culture on America-at-large, Sundquist lays the foundation for his succeeding work, To Wake the Nations: Race in American Literature and Culture, 1830–1930 (1993), as well as his later scholarship that re-examines the way African American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois have affected the cultural landscape of American literature. Sundquist begins this particular project with an examination of the James Weldon Johnson novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Chapter 1, entitled "'These Old Slave Songs': The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," illuminates spirituals as repositories of African American culture. Moreover, just as Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk elucidates spirituals, or "sorrow songs," as stories of a sad African American people displaced from home and in search of community, Johnson's work suggests spirituals are indicative of what Sundquist describes as "longing and memory" (17) for and of a connection to one's home, in this case one's African heritage. A theme consistent with literature during this post-Reconstruction period, when the aforementioned works of Du Bois and Johnson were written, is that of the liminal mulatto. As the term suggests, this type of figure is characteristically displaced from both his African and European ancestry. Accordingly, Du Bois proclaims the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line, whereas Johnson describes the African American spiritual as a "melody without words" (17), which becomes the metaphor for the African's (mulatto protagonist included) fragmentary survival in America. This scenario that Sundquist creates in this first chapter juxtaposes that in Johnson's earlier work, God's Trombones (1927), in which he posits African American sermons as an attempt at recovery from this fragmented existence. According to Sundquist, in the second chapter of his book, Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine builds upon Johnson's treatment of sermons. He posits Hurston's description of sermons as existing somewhere between "preservation and erosion" (91). The daughter of John Hurston, an African American minister in the Baptist church, Hurston was no stranger to the sermon as a repository of African American culture. In some of her earlier works, such as the essay entitled "Shouting," first published in The Negro: An Anthology (1934), Hurston references the power of the sermon, particularly in the black church. Sundquist observes Hurston's focus on African American sermons in chapter 2, "'The Drum with the Man Skin': Jonah's Gourd Vine." In fact, he compares Hurston's treatment of sermons with that of Johnson's in God's Trombones. In this book of poetry, Johnson presents what Hurston calls the "barbaric poetry" rooted in black sermons. Embedded in each sermon [End Page 897] is a rhythmic quality emerging from the preacher's cadence and intonations. Hurston, on the other hand, does not create verse from a sermon as much as she reproduces an actual sermon of the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston originally transcribed the Lovelace sermon in Eau Gallie, Florida, in 1929, and published it in "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals" in Nancy Cunard's anthology, entitled Negro (1931). Then, in Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston inserted Lovelace's words into...

Rapid characterisation of cell cultures by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometric typing

Misidentification or cross-contamination of cultured cell lines used for scientific or diagnostic purposes are a continuing challenge for laboratories and tissue culture repositories. Institutions dedicated to veterinary virology are particularly affected since the variety of viruses under investigation often requires the parallel maintenance of numerous different cell lines from different host species. To provide rapid but yet exact characterisation of cell cultures, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometric typing was applied to 66 cell culture samples representing 34 species from insects to primates. A reference spectra library was generated that allows unambiguously the identification of all 66 cell lines. Spectrum-based phylogenetic analysis showed that clustering was mainly driven by taxonomy and allows the species determination of unknown samples.

Obligation for cell line authentication: Appeal for concerted action

Cell lines isolated from various human cancers are widely used to study the mechanisms of tumor development and as preclinical models for tumor diagnosis and therapy. This key role played by cell lines in basic and applied cancer research is often taken for granted, but the chronic problem of cell line crosscontamination as well as of altered function due to over-subculturing—first recognized for HeLa cells more than three decades ago—has now become a major issue. As stated in a recent editorial published in Nature 1 ‘‘many studies have found that 18 to 36% of cell lines contain misidentified cells,’’ data which have been confirmed by the major cell repositories. Despite several recent initiatives to correct this intolerable situation, such as the open letter from a panel of scientists led by Roland Nardone to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2007 2 and several subsequently published research articles, reviews and letters all confirming the dilemma of a still growing use of cross-contaminated cell lines, little has changed in reality. Many papers are still being submitted to this and other journals using mis-identified cell lines and many authors seem to be unaware of the problem. This situation prompted the Editors of International Journal of Cancer (IJC) to take the initiative and to impose strict rules for papers submitted for publication in the IJC beginning with the year 2010. In our new Instructions for Authors we now require that ... ‘‘manuscripts dealing with established cell lines have to provide authentication of cells by DNA profiling using Short Tandem Repeats (STR).’’ This ‘‘simple solution (of) routine, cheap DNA profiling’’—as stated in the Nature editorial—can be conducted at each laboratory using commercially available kits and is provided as a service by most cell culture repositories at a reasonable cost (see respective link in the Instructions for Authors). One major prerequisite for a reliable and comparable DNA profiling according to Nature—: ‘‘an electronic database of authenticated DNA profiles’’—of known cell lines has now been established by a consortium, thanks to the initiative and persistent activity of Willy Dirks of the German Cell Bank (DSMZ). This consortium, including major cell banks, has compiled a reference database of more than 2,300 known cell lines that is accessible online and with which scientists can compare their own DNA profiling data for authenticating a given cell line (see Dirks et al. Letter to the Editor, this issue, and the respective link to the database). Moreover, due to the long-standing efforts of Ian Freshney, a pioneer in cell culture technology and advocate of cell line authentication, a list of already confirmed cross-contaminated and mis-identified cell lines with the relevant references has been compiled; this is also freely accessible (see Freshney, Letter to the Editor, this issue, and respective link in the letter and Instructions for Authors of IJC). With these tools authors can easily see whether the cell line they want to use is already ‘indexed’ as cross-contaminated or mis-identified before they start with further authentication procedures. Thus, a solid basis has now been established to eliminate mis-identified cell lines that have produced misleading results and wasted funding, provided the scientific community will accept this offer. One prerequisite for the general acceptance of such a regulation is a concerted action of scientific journal editors and funding agencies to reject all manuscripts and grant applications (based on cell line data) without proper cell line authentication. When we first published a Mini Review in IJC in January 2008, we had addressed a Letter to the Editors-in-Chief of several leading cancer and cell biology journals asking them to join us in this effort, but got little to no response. Therefore, we now reiterate our appeal to the Editors-in-Chief of all life science journals publishing manuscripts with data based on cell lines to require proper authentication of all cell lines. This same petition is also being extended to all granting organizations to accept only grant applications with authenticated cell lines. A letter to major granting agencies has been sent by the Editors of IJC also requesting them to allow additional funds for cell line authentication. Some journals have already included respective demands in their instructions and others have indicated their willingness to do so, but too little has actually happened. The Editors of IJC are convinced that the time is overripe now to take consequent, concerted action on the part of all life science journals and granting agencies and to take the chance to defeat this ‘‘chronic disease’’ in cell culture research.

Ballad Hunting in the Black Republic: Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37

Les enregistrements réalisés par Alan Lomax en Haïti entre 1936 et 1937 (plus de 1500 au total), quoique peu connu, constituent un véritable trésor de l'expression culturelle haïtienne; ceux-ci ont été enregistrés peu après le départ des Marines américains et alors qu'Haïti était en voie d'un mouvement nationaliste et afro-centrique. Cet article présente une analyse de la complexité des motivations d'Alan Lomax (et les différents ethnographes américains traivallant simultanément en Haïti, y compris Melville et Frances Herskovits, George E. Simpson, Harold Courlander, Katherine Dunham et Zora Neale Hurston) en relation avec les luttes idéologiques de race et de l'identité de la diaspora africaine aux États Unis et en Haïti. L'article explique comment les préjugés de Lomax, les difficultés de terrain, les interactions avec les agents de la culture locale et les problèmes de santé et de financement ont affecté cet héritage.

“Spread your ass cheeks”: And other things that should not be said in indigenous languages

ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe the use of indigenous‐language swearwords by the younger generation in the Cucapá settlement of El Mayor in northern Mexico. I argue that this vocabulary functions as a critique of and a challenge to the increasingly formalized imposition of indigenous‐language capacity as a measure of authenticity and as both a formal and an informal criterion for the recognition of indigenous rights. I argue that this ethnographic case can also be read as a critique of the notion of language as a cultural repository popularized in recent linguistic anthropological literature on language endangerment. For the youth in El Mayor, indigenous identity is not located in the Cucapá language but in an awareness of a shared history of the injustices of colonization and a continuing legacy of state indifference. [language death, indigenous people, politics of recognition, Mexico, swearwords, identity, language ideology]

The Digitization of African American Publications

ABSTRACT The digitization of African American publications is significantly increasing access to the voice of a community that educators and information specialists have been recapturing through the development of subject-based collections housed in cultural repositories (museums, libraries, and archives) throughout the country. The task is proving immensely challenging and time consuming, while at the same time rewarding because of the impressive results of the work being done. The biggest challenge in digitizing African American collections is the pursuit of permission and acknowledgement of copyright restraints.

Cross-lingual thesaurus for multilingual knowledge management

The Web is a universal repository of human knowledge and culture which has allowed unprecedented sharing of ideas and information in a scale never seen before. It can also be considered as a universal digital library interconnecting digital libraries in multiple domains and languages. Beside the advance of information technology, the global economy has also accelerated the development of inter-organizational information systems. Managing knowledge obtained in multilingual information systems from multiple geographical regions is an essential component in the contemporary inter-organization information systems. An organization cannot claim itself to be a global organization unless it is capable to overcome the cultural and language barriers in their knowledge management. Cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a challenge in multilingual knowledge management systems. Dictionary is a tool that is widely utilized in commercial systems to cross the language barrier. However, terms available in dictionary are always limited. As language is evolving, there are new words being created from time to time. For examples, there are new technical terms and name entities such as RFID and Baidu. To solve the problem of cross-lingual semantic interoperability, an associative constraint network approach is investigated to construct an automatic cross-lingual thesaurus. In this work, we have investigated the backmarking algorithm and the forward evaluation algorithm to resolve the constraint satisfaction problem represented by the associative constraint network. Experiments have been conducted and show that the forward evaluation algorithm outperforms the backmarking one in terms of precision and recall but the backmarking algorithm is more efficient than the forward evaluation algorithm. We have also benchmarked with our earlier technique, Hopfield network, and showed that the associate constraint network (either backmarking or forward evaluation) outperforms in precision, recall, and efficiency.

MORAL REGULATION IN A POSTCOLONIAL NATION-STATE

This paper looks at two instances of ‘moral panic’ in the recent history of Pakistan. As women are the repositories of national culture, their moral and sexual regulation is arguably coextensive with state formation. However, in countries like Pakistan, this process cannot be understood as based on some pre-given ‘Muslimness’; rather, Islamization itself is contested terrain and not the only source of meaning, with local tribal traditions and complex class alignments equally at play. This is demonstrated in the first case that I discuss: General Zia ul-Haq's military regime's enactment of a series of laws in the1980s – the Zina Ordinance and the Laws of Evidence – aimed at controlling women's sexual, social and political status. A direct consequence of these policies and their implementation was the launch of a counter-attack against the regime by urban middle-class women who formed an umbrella organization of feminist groups and individuals, deploying innovative forms of cultural protest in a situation where direct public action was severely restricted. The second example, popularly known as the ‘Saima love-marriage case’, which occurred during the democratic years of the 1990s, also reveals how contending social classes and cultural forces mediated their struggles for hegemony through the bodies of women (and men). At issue throughout the discussion is the need to reorient common-sense approaches to the victim figure of Islamic fundamentalism, especially at a time when Islam has globally become the sign of illiberalism and the justification of new imperial agendas.

Language-Based Discrimination

This article integrates the language-discrimination nexus under four headings: the linguistic justification of discrimination and its linguistic encoding, enactment, and routinization. (a) Barriers to jobs, education, and citizenship can be legally justified on the basis of language requirements to exclude particular groups. Once legalized, the language requirement provides a stowaway for more subtle discrimination against other target groups. (b) Language is a cultural repository of ideas for portraying particular out-groups. These ideas and the language in which they are encoded reflect power inequalities and associated discriminations (e.g., sexist, racist, and ageist languages). (c) Language can be manipulated to produce linguistic masking devices that, when coupled with the choice of verbs to influence the attribution of causality, offer tools for subtly enacting discrimination while masking reality and reducing perceived conflict of interest. (d) Language routinizes (normalizes) discrimination by turning discriminatory scripts and practices into part of taken-for-granted, everyday discourse.

Libraries as repositories of popular culture: is popular culture still forgotten?

PurposeThis paper seeks to replicate a study done in 1992 on the bibliographic availability of 55 popular culture periodicals sold by a Kroger supermarket in Royal Oak, Michigan. The earlier study asked the question whether time might be a relevant variable for the number of holding libraries.Design/methodology/approachThe authors searched WorldCat for the number of reported library holdings for the same 55 popular culture periodicals and analyzed the results.FindingsDuring both periods, 34 periodicals with holdings had a median increase of 58.4 percent; but, when the 83.5 percent increase in OCLC governing members during the same period was taken into account, holdings had a median decrease of 13.7 percent. For the 19 cases with no library holdings in 1992, eight (42.1 percent) now had library holdings, including several high circulation periodicals such as Star and Soap Opera Weekly.Practical implicationsPopular culture materials read by many Americans are still not widely available in libraries or are not entered into WorldCat, the prime source for bibliographic holdings.Originality/valueThis paper provides additional statistical evidence on the availability of popular culture materials in libraries.

A Poetics of Love and Rescue in the Collection of Chicana/o Art

Using ethnographic information and archival research, the essay investigates the meaning of Chicana art collections. It uses two connotations of Chicana art collectors: the Mexican American woman who acquires art and the person whose collection emphasizes art by Chicanas. Drawing on Latino and US third-world feminist studies, the essay finds that private collectors fill the vacancy created by local and federal museums and establish a public repository of Chicana art and culture. Chicana art collectors have less in common with the scholarly image of the collector and more in common with US third-world feminist activists who generate movements for social change. It argues that collections of art enact a poetics of love and rescue for Mexican-origin communities in the United States.

Indiginous knowledge archives in a west african society

This article argues that resort to and competency in the deployment of indigenous knowledge archives are a prerequisite rather than a supplement for studying African life and phenomena, and I use the Bono (Akan) of West Africa and a shared dimension of African cultural knowledge — indigenous medicinal knowledge — to elucidate this position. The issue is not that indigenous knowledge has not been valuated inasmuch some revere European archives but rather indigenous archives have been left malnourished and after our hiatus to ‘things Western,' the realization is that the latter can provide its own interpretative perspective on African realities. Indigenous African archives of knowledge ‘have things to say,' which presupposes that these archives have a language that functions as a repository and transmitter of culture — in spiritual, conceptual, and material terms — and serves as a nexus between the life of this language and the life of its speakers. The production of knowledge on indigenous therapeutic or other systems, especially from the perspective of indigenous specialists and the culture in which they are a part, are challenges left in abeyance. The following, therefore, represents an attempt to explore the relationship between indigenous medicine and the proverbial, ‘gold weight,' adinkra symbolism, and oral narrative archives of the Akan. Keywords : Indigenous knowledge archives, indigenous medicinal knowledge, proverbial archives, oral archives. Indilinga Vol. 5 (1) 2006: pp. 12-26

Why Bioethics Cannot Figure Out What to Do with Race

Race and religion are integral parts of bioethics. Harm and oppression, with the aim of social and political control, have been wrought in the name of religion against Blacks and people of color as embodied in the Ten Commandments, the Inquisition, and in the history of the Holy Crusades. Missionaries came armed with Judeo/Christian beliefs went to nations of people of color who had their own belief systems and forced change and caused untold harms because the indigenous belief systems were incompatible with their own. The indigenous people were denounced as ungodly, pagan, uncivilized, and savage. Hence, laws were enacted because of their perceived need to structure a sense of morality and to create and build a culture for these indigenous people of color. To date bioethics continues to be informed by a Western worldview that is Judeo/Christian in belief and orientation. However, missing from bioethical discourse in America is the historical influence of the Black Church as a cultural repository, which continues to influence the culture of Africans and Blacks. Cultural aspects of peoples of color are still largely ignored today. In attempting to deal with issues of race while steering clear of the religious and cultural impact of the Black Church, bioethics finds itself in the middle of a distressing situation: it simply cannot figure out what to do with race.

Science for the People: Northern Field Stations and Governmentality

Noah Piugaattuk, one of Igloolik's most celebrated Elders, was a local icon of indigenous wisdom. Piugaattuk (Figure 1) passed away a few years ago in his mid-nineties, having lived to witness Igloolik life for nearly the entire twentieth century. Among his many experiences, he had travelled the region as a catechist and guide to the early missionaries, witnessing many of the profound changes to Inuit culture from these early days. His knowledge of the language and skills of the land was probably second to none. He was a living repository of Inuit language, history, and culture. I had the honour to get to know Piugaattuk a little when I spent some months in 1988 living in Igloolik studying how new technologies were transforming oral traditions and recording voices and sounds for a photography exhibition. When I met Piugaattuk, he already had a reputation as a unique source of Inuit traditional knowledge. Equipped with a tape recorder and microphone, I followed in the tracks of previous researchers, listening to stories about his life and times, and asking questions to understand how Inuit expert knowledge about Arctic travel is stored and taught through their oral tradition. Piugaattuk seemed to me not to possess the habit familiar to many of us of communicating dry information; he was too much of a leader and teacher, possessed of a wry sense of humour, which forced us 'researchers' - a label broadly applied to people who incessantly ask questions, whether natural scientists, social scientists or journalists - to reflect on the nature of the questions we put to him. I remember one instance when Piugaattuk (personal communication June 1988) was telling me that contrary to what I had read in the scholarly literature about the remarkable accuracy of Inuit topographical knowledge, he did not consider maps, mental or material, to be a traditional Inuit technology, on the grounds that they were too unreliable a medium for storing geographical knowledge safely. As if to prove their marginal importance, he wryly recalled that that his first map had been given to him by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, who, searching for a lost person, needed Piugaattuk to show him his own location on his map, and then to direct him towards the area where the missing person had last been sighted. One reason I still remember the story of the RCMP officer is that it captured a truth about knowledge in small communities such as Igloolik: knowledge is virtually always mediated. This flew in the face of a pervasive myth about travel, that one can find out what a distant place is really like by going there to see it first-hand. My own journey to Igloolik had been motivated by a burning desire to see life in a northern community. Much of what I had read back in Cambridge had seemed distanced, dated, removed. I wanted to see things for myself and form my own judgements. What I discovered that summer in northern Canada was that access to life in the community, and no less 'out on the land', away from it all, was mediated by gatekeepers. Perhaps this should not have come as such a surprise for me. In previous summers, I had visited other communities while working as a satellite communications engineer for Telesat, a private company - thereby becoming known to locals as the 'Telesat man'. Sensing that Inuit kept a distance from transitory visitors, I had imagined that behind the scenes was an Inuit culture that, under other circumstances, I would be able to join in as myself once I had shed my professional baggage. This was to prove naive because the institutionalisation of Inuit culture had been taking place for decades in complex ways that I did not yet understand. Most Inuit had direct experience with institutions both new (e.g. government officials, the Hudson Bay trading post) and old (social institutions such as the extended family). Although some institutions, such as residential schools, were the source of many Inuit problems, other institutions could provide some of the solutions. …

A networked engineering portal to support distributed supply chain partnership

In this paper, the authors discuss the latest advancement of supply chain management (SCM) that leads to the development of a networked supply chain partnership (SCP). A deep insight is given into the nature, motivation and implementation of the SCP as a value-added component in the forefront of SCM. The role of the Internet in SCP is examined, and the current situation of SCP in China is analysed. Compared with available e-portals in the global market, a web-based DRAGON Engineering Portal (DEP) across geographical borders and cultural barriers is proposed to support European and Chinese industrial partners in developing strategic manufacturer–supplier partnerships. E-partnering and cultural repository are in-built to support a dislocated supply chain partnership for collaborative product development, starting with the location of partners and the implementation of contact initiation.

Special Collections to Digitize Historic Tobacco and Crop Science Materials

Thanks to support from the North Carolina Farm Bureau, the North Carolina Tobacco Foundation, and the North Carolina Research Commission, the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Research Center will construct, enhance, and maintain the “Living Off the Land” Web site. The site will provide digital access to collections of rare and unique items on tobacco and crop science history in North Carolina dating from 1850 through 1950. Tobacco has figured prominently not only in the economy of the state, but also in its culture, from colonial times to the present. Agricultural history is a frequent area of interest for researchers and visitors alike to North Carolina's cultural repositories. Completion of this project will result in expanded access to the resources available for the study of the state's tobacco and crop science history.

Building a Common Catalog for Cultural Heritage Repositories

ABSTRACT The Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook is a common catalog with records from 328 cultural heritage repositories. Creating the online scrapbook, however, did not involve lengthy discussions of cataloging issues among the participants. Decisions about how materials would be described were made by staff at the Ohio Historical Society and were influenced by a commitment to integrating collections of different formats from multiple repositories, a centralized approach, use of Dublin Core, development of metadata standards, and adoption of controlled vocabularies. Participating institutions, and end users, are more concerned with the results of the cataloging process than the details of description.

Border-Building

Border-Building