Documentary Record Research Articles

Competencias laborales para la gestión pública y productividad de las unidades orgánicas de un municipio provincial.

El objetivo de esta investigación es explicar de qué manera las competencias laborales para la gestión pública afecta en la productividad de las unidades orgánicas de la Municipalidad Provincial Jorge Basadre, en el año 2018. Es una investigación de tipo básica - cuantitativa, no experimental, explicativa. En la presente investigación, se ha tomado información de 108 trabajadores, del total de la población; se utilizó como instrumento un test de competencias laborales y una ficha de registro documental para consignar los datos de la productividad. La validación de contenido fue mediante la opinión de expertos, la prueba de confiabilidad del test se realizó mediante el método Alfa de Cronbach, habiéndose obtenido un indicador alfa de 0.866 puntos. Los resultados de las competencias laborales, reportan una media de 44.54, según la escala se encuentra en el nivel regular, la medición de los indicadores reporta que 63.9% de los evaluados tiene nivel regular de conocimientos, 59.3% con habilidades regulares y 67.6% con actitudes indiferentes. Los resultados de la productividad, indican una puntuación de 49.14 que significa un nivel de avance en proceso, el análisis de las actividades de cada unidad orgánica reporta que la Sub Gerencia de Liquidación de Proyectos posee el menor promedio con un 26.67% y la Sub Gerencia de Contabilidad posee el mayor promedio con un 70.0%. Existe correlación positiva alta, según coeficiente de correlación r, entre las competencias laborales y la productividad de las unidades orgánicas de la Municipalidad Provincial de Jorge Basadre.

Transatlantic relations and the Sino-US opening

Using the Nixon tapes and the documentary record of US diplomacy, this article argues that the Sino-American opening came as a shock to US allies in Europe but nevertheless was viewed generally in a positive light by transatlantic partners. These sources corroborate other scholarship that the Nixon’s surprise announcement in July 1971 of the opening to China was something of an irritant in Anglo-American relations. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s secret maneuvers stole some of the limelight from Prime Minister Edward Heath’s efforts to upgrade London’s relations with Beijing to the level of ambassador. Whereas Heath’s government had kept US Secretary of State Rogers apprised of the efforts, Rogers was out of the loop in Washington and the Nixon administration did not reciprocate to London until right before the announcement. Finally, the announced intention of establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing opened something of a floodgate toward broader recognition of the People’s Republic of China, even among traditional transatlantic partners, and disrupted Washington’s efforts at promoting dual representation of Taiwan and the PRC at the United Nations.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights by Kelly J. Shannon

Reviewed by: U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights by Kelly J. Shannon Sarah B. Snyder (bio) Kelly J. Shannon, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), ISBN 9780812249675, 269 pages. Kelly J. Shannon's well written and concise account explores how and why the American public and later the United States government came to care about the human rights of Muslim women. She shows that concern about Muslim women's rights has intersected with US foreign policy in meaningful ways over the last forty years, yet no historical work has previously examined this aspect. In particular, with U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights, Shannon demonstrates the link between the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the "human rights revolution" of previous years. Her work studies how Americans concerned about the abrogation of women's rights in Iran worked to make women there "less alien" to the US public.1 Shannon shows how activists engaged in a process of "symbolic politics," to use Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's term, by representing Iranian women in the US.2 Such an effort, through which distant victims are made immediate, has been central to effective human rights advocacy. As the chapters progress, Shannon investigates a second intersection of revolutions—that of the rise of the international women's movement with the human rights movement. There has been limited scholarship on the United Nations Decade for Women (1975 to 1985), and Shannon's book shows why many scholars may benefit from greater examination of the role of the United Nations in shaping attention to human rights internationally. In Shannon's analysis, the decade was essential: "Without the United Nations Decade for Women, it is unlikely that the growing American attention to Muslim women's rights following the Iranian Revolution would have moved beyond the public sphere and into policy."3 Breaking with the traditional methodology of histories of US foreign relations, Shannon uses limited documents from presidential libraries or the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series. In part this is because, as she highlights with the Carter years, the documentary record is silent on the issue [End Page 967] of Muslim women's human rights. Furthermore, Shannon undoubtedly faced issues of inaccessible records given the recent period in which she was working. But, it also reflects a different appraisal of the sources most significant to her analysis. Shannon frames each chapter with a cultural phenomenon of the time, such as Betty Mahmoody's memoir Not Without My Daughter and Nawal el Saadawi's book The Hidden Face of Eve. Here, like Mark Philip Bradley's recent work The World Reimagined, she seeks to show how cultural production influenced those in the United States to care about violations of women's rights in the Muslim world. Her approach reveals how human rights issues permeated and resonated in US culture and public life. Importantly, in Shannon's evaluation of how films, memoirs, and novels influenced US awareness of and concern about violations of Muslim women's rights, she highlights how many influential cultural works were written or created by Muslim women. They claimed human rights for themselves and rebutted critiques circulating at the time that human rights were merely a foreign ploy to impose a new form of Western imperialism. Their work was significant because, as Shannon shows, Western women too often focused on the veil, which distorted their understanding of Muslim women's concerns. In other methodological innovations, she illustrates how scholarship by historians Judith Tucker and Nikki Keddie as well as anthropologist Lois Beck shaped United States attitudes regarding women's rights.4 In her analysis of US reactions to the "gender apartheid" in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, Shannon makes excellent use of Department of Army oral history interviews with women who served there. She has also done considerable analysis of the US media coverage in the years after the Iranian Revolution and found that it characterized Islamic fundamentalism as "a threat both to U.S. interests and to women's human rights."5 Shannon shows that she is well versed in Orientalist...

The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760–1825 by Sandro Jung

Reviewed by: The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760–1825 by Sandro Jung Jeff Strabone Sandro Jung, The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760–1825. (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh Univ. Press., 2017). Pp. 266; 80 illus. $90.00 cloth. Sandro Jung's new book, The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760–1825, is a deep dive into Scottish book illustration that fills a scholarly gap in both book history and Scottish studies. Despite the advance of Archipelagic perspectives in recent decades, the field of eighteenth–century studies too often defaults to an Anglocentrism that obscures Scottish, Welsh, and Irish events or situates them as peripheral to an imagined English core. Jung's book focuses attention on an aspect of Scottish history too long neglected: the role of printed visual culture—specifically, engravings and woodcuts—in marketing a national literary canon. Boasting "a consideration of the largest number of Scottish illustrated editions examined to date," the book's critical and methodological interventions are both Scotland-specific and book-historical (xix). Jung upends traditional assumptions that favor fine artists and neglect the engravers who adapted their designs for the printed page. Indeed, Jung insists throughout the book on "the central importance of the engraver" (xxiii). Another unusual move is the attention given not only to original commissions but also to reprinted engravings and their function in the selling of printed books. Jung is not shy about noting the theoretical and other shortcomings of his fellow scholars of book illustration for, among other things, failing to produce a systematic bibliography of illustrations and not giving engravers their due. Online resources, including ECCO and the British Museum's image database, are similarly called out. Jung's own approach is closest to that of Lisa Maruca, whose notion of "the polyvocality of print" Jung acknowledges in the introduction (xxvii). The study that results from this overturning of traditional priorities is less literary– historical than, one might say, business–historical: Jung's remit is to understand the social history of professional relationships among the printers and engravers who produced the first generation of distinctly Scottish illustrated editions. His main objects of attention are individual editions and engravings, with supporting evidence provided by advertisements, wrappers, business accounts, and copyright statutes. In an age of digital scholarship, Jung's study is possibly best described as analogue humanities: he has amassed a large personal library of Scottish illustrated books and examined them closely. All eighty of the book's illustrations come from his own collection. The book's chapters balance attention to large and small publishing enterprises, from the Morisons of Perth and Oliver & Boyd in Edinburgh to little–known operations in small Scottish towns. The geographical sweep is reflected in the book's unusual index, which lists individuals separately as engravers, illustrators, or general names and divides publishers by town. Scottish publishers, for instance, are listed under Aberdeen, Ayr, Cupar, Dunbar/Haddington, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kirkaldy, Montrose, Paisley, Perth, and St. Andrews. The attention given to small publishers gives the book a national scope not seen before in studies of eighteenth–century Scottish illustration, of which there have been, as Jung notes, too few. [End Page 329] Chapter one, on the Morisons, focuses on illustrated editions of the leading lights of eighteenth–century Scottish writing—Allan Ramsay, James Thomson, and James Macpherson—and shows how publishers' efforts to link these modern writers to their Middle Scots predecessors yielded a continuous national literary canon. The second chapter develops the argument about the importance of reprinting engravings and uncovers a fascinating lost publication of the 1790s, The General Magazine, the subjects of whose illustrations Jung reconstructs from ancillary evidence like advertisements. Chapter three treats Robert Chapman's firm in Glasgow, not yet the Victorian metropolis it would later become, and early illustrated editions of Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The final chapter looks at the rise of Oliver & Boyd in the early nineteenth century. Jung compensates for gaps in the documentary record by his "examination of all surviving copies of Oliver & Co.'s illustrated literary texts referenced in WorldCat and COPAC" (191). Throughout the book, Jung pushes carefully forward in situations of...

The Philosopher in the Workshop: Romanticism and the New Utilitarianism

The Philosopher in the Workshop: Romanticism and the New Utilitarianism Paul Keen (bio) Romanticism has been played in a symphonic and sometimes cacophonous range of major and minor keys over the past two centuries, from the earliest critics who dismissed the new poetry of their day as the fulminations of a “sect of poets” driven by “a splenetic and idle discontent,”1 to Arnoldian humanists who embraced the affirmative power of the imagination as an antidote to the strife of politics and industrialism, to Practical Critics who sought to cleanse literature of history by isolating (and elevating) the poems as verbal icons, to history-from-below leftists who foregrounded the age’s unruly mix of poetry and politics, to New Historicists who seized on the ways that Romantic poetry was itself marked by a swerve from history, to Book Historians who pointed out that history didn’t come from below or anywhere else; it had been there all along, immanent in the modes of production, hidden in plain sight if only we hadn’t gotten used to taking the books themselves for granted. Through it all, Romanticism has proven to be extraordinarily amenable to approaches that favor slow reading, thick description, deep time, long revolutions, and hot chronology. Whether critics were trying to rescue literature from history or to redeem history through literature, to restore literature to a fuller sense of history or to highlight the ways that the literature was marked by a denial of history, Romantic poetry has always been a kind of literary canary in the critical coalmines, a most-intense example of changing ideas, not just about why literature matters but about much broader questions about the humanities and that infinitely thornier thing, humanism itself. I want to offer a new variation on these arrangements by asking how knowing more about the struggles and achievements of this period can help with the challenge of making the case for the public value of the humanities today in the face of pressures from skeptics who demand to know what use the humanities are: what sort of metrics we can provide to demonstrate [End Page 493] their impact, or how they can contribute to the challenge of solving real life problems. In doing so, I take my cue from Jerome McGann’s reminder, in so many of his books, that the task of responding to new phenomena often demands a richer understanding of the past. As he pointed out back when it was still necessary to reassure literary critics that we did not need to fear that rough beast called the world wide web, it is often when developments seem the most unprecedented that we are best served by paying closer attention to these longer historical contexts when “so much of what is apparent today was being forecast.”2 Few interventions have insisted on the urgency of this need for a renewed historical consciousness in an era whose capacity for memory is increasingly shaped by “the machineries of the just-in-time” more eloquently than McGann’s extraordinary call in A New Republic of Letters for a new philology, or what McGann, echoing Susanne Langer, calls a “philology in a new key”: still a focus on “the documentary record” driven by a “love of the word” in its most materialist forms, but now in ways that are animated by a recognition of the “significant practical and institutional pressure for change” that information technology is exerting in “humanities research and scholarship.”3 Drawing on Edward Said’s call for a “Return to Philology” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, but even more on D. F. McKenzie’s emphasis on the sociology of the text, A New Republic of Letters offers a trenchant reminder that coming to terms with the undeniable fact that “the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures” involves a deeper recognition that this shift must be measured in terms of loss as well as gain, and more than that, that we can never be in a position to adequately understand what that loss will amount to. If our work today is shaped by the uncomfortable paradox that...

The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber

Reviewed by: The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber Dale Stover The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. By Jennifer Graber. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Jennifer Graber writes about the role of religion in telling the nineteenth-century story of the Kiowa nation as it faced westward-expanding European Americans after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. She chose to focus on the Kiowas because they left a documentary record regarding their religious commitments. They were also broadly representative of the western plains, having migrated from the northern plains—where they learned the Sun Dance ritual from the Crow nation— and found their permanent home on the southern plains—where they formed a primary alliance with the Comanche nation and also allied with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. Graber is to be commended for her unstinting effort to tell the truth on both sides of this contested chapter in American history. On one side, she details how religiously concerned Protestants, calling themselves “Friends of the Indian,” followed political strategies to rescue the Kiowas from what they considered superstition and savagery by persuading them, sometimes coercively, to follow a path of assimilation into Christian religious faith and culture. On the other side, she relates how the Kiowas reacted to these [End Page 91] Protestant American strategies by struggling to retain their Indigenous identity. This identity was rooted in their connection with dwdw, a sun-derived sacred power that assisted them in hunting the respected buffalo, which played a prominent symbolic role in the Kiowa’s annual Sun Dance ceremony and were themselves recipients of dwdw. In 1829, President Andrew Jackson sent a bill to Congress authorizing the removal of five tribal nations from the southeastern states to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, creating a physical separation between Indigenous peoples and the citizens of the United States. Friends of the Indian strongly opposed this action because it targeted even Indigenous nations who had independently assimilated. Jackson’s removal plan was carried out with brutal force, and “Indian Country” was soon filled with agricultural tribes in the eastern sector and “wild” buffalo hunters in the west. The next determining moment in this history occurred in January 1848 with the discovery of gold in California, which brought hordes of emigrants west across the plains. This prompted a call for a new kind of separation between Indians and migrating settlers by creating reservations to restrict the nomadic Kiowas and their allies and to establish boundaries for Indian communities. Friends of the Indian were solidly in support of reservations, viewing them as the bedrock for what was regarded as the civilizing process. After years of negotiating, a reservation was established in 1867 in southwestern Oklahoma to include separate parcels of territory for Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches. President Ulysses S. Grant, upon his inauguration in 1869, established a peace policy for the still “uncivilized” tribes of Indian Country and appointed a Quaker agent to oversee the Kiowas. Another Quaker, Thomas Battey, who was hired to teach Kiowa children and witnessed his first Sun Dance in 1873, was shocked by what he saw “in beholding the depth of heathen superstition into which this people have fallen” (9). In 1882, the government enacted the Code of Religious Offenses that criminalized the Sun Dance, and the disappearance of buffalo herds from the plains imperiled the Kiowa’s ability to continue Sun Dances at all. As Graber says, “Kiowas then tried new ritual forms for securing protection and blessing. At the same time, their ritual revisions reflected their long-held posture toward sacred power. As in their Sun Dance days, they came to Jesus, the father peyote, and Feather Dancing to ask for pity, health, and long life” (190). Eventually, the Friends of the Indian “proclaimed that reservations had failed to assimilate Indians”(152), and they advocated allotment of reservation lands and off-reservation boarding schools to negate children’s Indigenous culture by suppressing all that was native: their language, clothes, appearance, and contact with their parents. “On the reservation,” Graber writes, “Kiowas and their allies felt...

Análisis documental sobre el tema del big data y su impacto en los derechos humanos

The aim of this article is to provide the reader a documentary record on the subject of the technological infrastructure and the knowledge management of big data analytics and their relation to human rights. Currently, human rights violations around the world due to the indiscriminate use of big data analytics is a constant, since the information that is generated every day and every second by the use of technological devices —such as smartphones— makes possible the collection of information, that goes from consumption data to even private information, such as religious opinions or biometric data. Human rights violations due to big data analytics starts by the way personal data is collected and treated. Sometimes people do not know how their data are being processed, stored or used.As a result of the analysis, it was observed that several articles, books and papers refer to personal data and privacy regulations, focusing in the regulations of the data mining conditions. Despite, those regulations, it can be observed that big data analytics could allow a wide margin for infringement of not only the human right to privacy, but also of another human rights; for instance, through actions that promote racism, the creation of blacklists, the promotion of segregation and the limit of the freedom of speech, just to mention some examples.

“E indo a Carvalho, de la veyo boa”: os exorcismos numa paróquia portuguesa durante o século XVIII

O artigo apresenta os resultados da pesquisa realizada no Arquivo da Universidade de Coimbra (AUC) acerca da prática de exorcismos no território do bispado, durante o século XVIII. Busca caracterizar o registro documental, redefinir alguns conceitos e elucidar a presença de um destacado exorcista, responsável por muitas curas e, igualmente, muitos testemunhos por parte da população.
 Palavras-chave: Visitas pastorais; exorcismos; feitiços; poder eclesiástico.

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

A comparison of drought information in early North American colonial documentary records and a high-resolution tree-ring-based reconstruction

Abstract. Historical documentary records contain valuable information on climate, weather, and their societal impacts during the pre-instrumental period, but it may be difficult to assess the objectivity and reliability of this information, particularly where the documentary record is incomplete or the reliability of the information it contains is uncertain. This article presents a comprehensive review of information relating to drought found in original written records concerning all early European expeditions (1510–1610 CE) into the present-day US and Canada, and compares this information with maps and time series of drought generated from the tree-ring-based North American Drought Atlas (NADA). The two sources mostly agree in the timing and location of droughts. This correspondence suggests that much of the information in these early colonial historical records is probably objective and reliable, and that tree-ring-based drought atlases can provide information relevant to local and regional human historical events, at least in locations where their reconstruction skill is particularly high. This review of drought information from written sources and tree-ring-based reconstructions also highlights the extraordinary challenges faced by early European explorers and colonists in North America due to climatic variability in an already unfamiliar and challenging environment.

Feriby's “Lament for Richard II” and the English Literary History ca. 1400

Abstract William Feriby was an historic actor: Richard II's secretary between the “Revenge Parliament” of 1397–98 and the deposition of the king in September 1399; subsequently, a contributor to the deposition proceedings; and, finally, a rebel against Henry IV in January 1400. Feriby was also a literary figure, the author of an historical “Lament for Richard II,” amongst other things, written in a highly mannered style of a sort to indicate an interest on Feriby's part in the purely literary: imagination and form. Though Feriby's prose style is distinctive, he was not the only historic-historiographical figure who manifested an interest in the strictly literary at the same moment, ca. 1400. The writings of Adam Usk, Thomas Favent, the Historia vitae author, and Thomas Brinton—even the deposition proceedings and the documentary record of them (the “Record and Process”)—are comparably (though differently) literary. The relations between Ricardian history and literature can be reconceived, dialectically, by light of such evidence: the literature is historical and historic, but, also, the history itself and historiography are literary.

What Evicting Grizzly Bear Spirit Does (and Doesn’t) Tell Us about Indigenous “Religion” and Indigenous Rights

The Canadian Supreme Court’s (2017) decision in Ktunaxa First Nation v. British Columbia is instructive because it demonstrates the continuing incompatibility of what religion “means” in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, respectively. There are, however, additional lessons to be learned by looking carefully at an aspect of this case that troubled many non-Indigenous commentators, namely, that much of the Ktunaxa claim seemed to rest upon an “epiphany” experienced by a single Ktunaxa elder. What can be detected in the documentary record about that epiphany is evidence of a gradual process by which better understandings of the world are brought into being under the influence of a “web of interconnections” understanding of the world. Recognizing that this process is operative in Indigenous communities has implications not just for the study of Indigenous religion, but also for the way Courts (using their own criteria) might “think about” Indigenous rights.

The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews: What Postwar Jewish Testimonies and Wartime Documents Reveal

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to Nazi exterminationist policies is among the most controversial topics of wartime Polish–Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing since the 1980s have reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its sacrifice in the Warsaw Uprising of August–September 1944. In this article, I will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies as a source for evaluating the attitude and behavior of the Home Army towards the Jews during the Second World War. Archival repositories used will include testimonies preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and the Shoah Foundation Visual Archive at the University of Southern California. I will demonstrate that the widely held view in collective Jewish memory and Jewish historiography that the Home Army was hostile is largely confirmed by these sources. At the same time, however, the same sources reveal that a substantial minority of the testimonies—approximately 30 percent—tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews. The second part of this article compares testimonies to the documentary record, asking whether or not the behavior of the Home Army as a whole reflected the experience of Jews as reflected in postwar testimonies. The article will give more concrete form to the debate over the Polish underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the Second World War.

LONDON’S WATERFRONT 1100–1666: SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS FROM FOUR EXCAVATIONS THAT TOOK PLACE FROM 1974 TO 1984

The area around the north end of the medieval London Bridge in the City of London has attracted much archaeological attention. This article summarises the main findings for the period 1100–1666 from four excavations, recently published. In doing so, it explores a number of key issues: the main characteristics of this waterfront area in the medieval and Tudor periods; the sources of the pottery and artefacts incorporated into reclamation units, and any significance in their locations behind waterfront revetments or on the foreshore; what the medieval and post-medieval artefacts say about culture, fashion and religious beliefs; the functions of the buildings and open areas, and to what extent these can be linked to owners or occupiers specified in the documentary record; and how the port of London fits within its European trading network. The article also examines if and to what extent the area south of Thames Street was an industrial suburb of the medieval City. Here also lay the parish church of St Botolph Billingsgate, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt, many details of which can be reconstructed from archaeology and rich documentary evidence. Sixty-nine human burials in the church include one of a man in his sixties who may be John Reynewell, mayor of London in 1426–7. The several thousand artefacts and several hundred kilos of English and foreign pottery (the latter now analysed into over 100 separate wares) from the four sites in the study deserve further research by scholars, who can use this article as a stepping stone into the archive held at the Museum of London.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology

To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site.

Discernment, technology, and digital citizenship in a Christian school system

Using a qualitative analysis of school artifacts, this article analyzes the documentary record of one Christian school system’s experience with technological change. It focuses on documentary evidence for how the concept of Christian discernment was deployed to situate new technologies within a Christian discourse. The idea of discernment shifted in emphasis as new technologies were implemented. The theologically rooted concept of discernment both shaped and was shaped by the ongoing effort to manage technological change. Examining this evolution offers an empirical contribution to discussions of how Christian schools can sustain an integrity of fit between faith and practice.

The Siting of Medieval Castles and the Influence of Ancient Places

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the ways in which the siting of castles in England was influenced by the remains of monuments and landscapes from the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. It explores the character, distribution and scale of ancient monument reuse as evidenced through the archaeological and documentary record, in an attempt to discern patterns in peoples’ responses to monuments from the ancient past. It considers the ways in which these places were perceived by both the ruling elite and the local community: exploring how inherited landscapes were used in castle building to structure concepts of belonging, constituted through memory and genealogy. The conclusion is that ancient places were reused by castle builders from the 11th to the 14th century as part of an evolving narrative aimed at enhancing rights to people, place and power.

Clouds and Cataracts: Optical Experiments at Sir John Soane’s Museum

Plagued by cataracts, Sir John Soane’s (1753–1837) failing eyesight prompted new design strategies at his house museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1792–1837) that filtered light through colored glass and raised ambient luminescence with myriad mirrors. Revisiting the site as a laboratory for architectural technology, this paper explores design research at Soane’s museum through the lens of optical innovation. An experiment leveraged elements of the 3-D scanning process, such as capture “errors” and panoramic photographs, to create a series of digital models and stereographic photographs for the study of reflection, refraction, and distorted perspective within the context of the Soane house. Moving beyond the use of digital tools solely for documentary record, this project highlights how scanned data sets and by-products can be used to study ephemeral aspects of architecture, including time and perception.

DOCUMENTING COMMUNITY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

AbstractThis article traces a conflict that erupted in the late 19th century between the Armenians and the Süryani. This conflict, I argue, precipitated nothing less than the creation of the Süryani community itself. The dispute began over the key to a closet in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it quickly evolved. Soon, the Armenians and the Süryani were clashing over holy places all around Jerusalem. The dispute centered on an Ottoman administrative arrangement which had been institutionalized nearly 400 years earlier:yamaklık. The Ottoman investigators, however, were unfamiliar with this archaic arrangement and had to be reeducated as to its terms and its history. The Süryani and the Armenians offered divergent accounts. Where the Armenians furnished hard documentation, however, the Süryani could produce only claims to tradition and local practice. In this article I argue that, through this protracted conflict, the Süryani came to understand the importance of the documentary record in a post-Tanzimat Ottoman world. They thus turned to an alternative strategy that would conform to this documentary sensibility and render their community visible to the state: a series of petitions with thousands of Süryani signatures from around the Ottoman Empire.