Repository Of History Research Articles

Film, landscape and political aesthetics:Deseret

Irrevocably historical, landscape is already denatured before it is represented, a repository of history which becomes, in representation, a record of history’s erasure under the banner of natural beauty. Questioning key aesthetic concepts of human freedom and the autonomy of art in dialogue with Theodor Adorno and James Benning, this essay argues the significance of eco-critique for film (and by implication electronic media) studies as exemplary of a political aesthetics adequate to contemporary historical conditions of landscape: neoliberal crisis, environmental degradation, and renewed colonialism.

Posidonia: A Tool for HPC and Remote Scientific Simulations [EM Programmer's Notebook

This article presents a software tool named Posidonia. Posidonia removes the barrier to entry for the novice user of high-performance computing (HPC) systems, and remote scientific simulations in general, while increasing productivity of the experienced user. Posidonia manages communication with the remote computer system and interacts with its batch system (job scheduler). In addition, Posidonia keeps a history repository of simulations. The software also comes in several versions, including desktop, Android, and web interfaces; fully integration with given simulators/solvers has also been developed. We have designed an implementation within the paradigm of object orientation using Java and as a layered architecture that provides increased code reuse. In this article, we show the functionality, usability, and software architecture of Posidonia.

Looters, collectors and a passion for antiquities at the margins of Italian society

Unearthing old objects was for centuries a widespread activity in Italy. Artefacts were removed from the soil and re-incorporated into the social realm as votives, chits and treasure. Women and men knowledgeable about old things and old places were respected repositories of history. The twentieth century brought significant changes to this sphere of cultural activity: archaeology became a professionalized discipline, regulated by the state, and artefacts became scientific objects belonging to the Italian nation. Today, unauthorized excavators risk prosecution, fines and imprisonment. In this paper I ask: What is the effect of state power on the use and circulation of antiquities by unauthorized excavators and collectors? How do the men and women who inhabit the cultural margins distinguish themselves from each other? My analysis draws on ethnographic data and textual analysis of newspaper articles concerning tombaroli or ‘tomb robbers’. I focus on marginalized cultural production, a key dimension that is missing from most accounts of looters.

Troubadour, Griot and Evangelist: The Compelling Narrative Rhetoric of ‘Erujeje’

AbstractThe power of narratives as didactic tools, the repository of history, cultural knowledge and cultural identity is well known. Walter Fisher depicts stories as the sum of rhetorical expressions and applications of the pre-existing values of a community. Narratives and its corollaries—narrator, receptor (audience)—form a tightly woven knit. To be effective, the receptor must be complicit in the narrator’s jeu (game) which is to persuade the receptor of the fidelity and plausibility of the story. Numerous agents exploit the digital age as a new medium which has appropriated them a special niche in the arena of communication. In evangelism, Michael Fasina, also known as Erujeje, is at the heart of such a movement. This article is a treatment of Fisherian narrative and Aristotelian syllogism in an attempt to suggest that Erujeje, the Nigerian dramatist extraordinaire, combines those elements coupled with topoi familiar to his audience in order to proselytize.1

Complicating the Identity Narrative

The potential for individual experience each human carries is crucially unique, surpassing the increasingly categorical modes of identity that have become our covenant with human culture. While partially inaccessible to anyone else, the complex meaning each of us finds in this world is detectable to others through our interaction with that meaning. In our image-based contemporary world, meaning is expressed and gathered more and more through pictures. Photography remains an increasingly democratic medium of expression, documentation, and inibrmation dissemination, and the world is connected through an unending chain of images. We probably consume as many photographs in a day as we do calories, says Kitty Hubbard, an artist, an associate professor of Art at The College at Brockport: State University of New York, and curator of Regarding Place: Photo Media Invitational, an exhibition recently held at Brockport's Tower Fine Arts Gallery. Amid so much photographic noise, says Hubbard, the four exceptional artists included in this exhibition give us pause to consider and explore the many implications of the power of photo-based media. (1) In Regarding Place, diverse applications of the photographic image were used to explore issues of identity, and time. Transpiring within an academic context, the initial spark of active engagement generated by the exhibit was reignited within the gallery space through the month of February and into March. Hubbard designed an experience for students that included weekly Skype chats with the artists and a forum page dedicated to the exhibition on the as-yet uneclipsed social media force of Facebook. Angela Kelly's current body of work, shared in this exhibit, is a series of contemporary documentary photographs of places in Northern Ireland paired with diminutive portraits from the artist's own family album. Photographs resonate with me as repositories of history beckoning the viewer to a new understanding of place, explained Kelly's artist's statement. Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast 2010 11 connects the history of a place through the juxtaposition or modern urban and rural landscapes, their geographic coordinates, and traditional family portraits and snapshots taken by her father in Belfast in the 1960s. The private experience of the artist in these environs and their meaning exist only in the realm of memory--not quite tangible to t he viewer, but anchored for our exploration by each photographic pairing. The then-and-now groupings relate the personal and particular to a public aftermath of conflict, where psychic scars on the war-torn landscape remain for Kelly despite the fbrward march of time. In Bird's Eye View .f om The Black Mountain of the Peace Wall divide between the catholic and Protestant West Belliist and beyond (2010), an aerial shot of a suburban housing development is paired with a snapshot of a trio of seated ladies, each of whom bears stories associated with the space undetected by viewers of the landscape. In another shot, adolescent boys loiter amid towers of shipping pallets and mounds of tires under a heavy sky, and we wonder how their youth compares to that of the 1960s children in the smaller accompanying image. Kelly's oeuvre points at t he intangible meaning of tethered somewhere between the boundaries of what is seen, sensed, and remembered. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The inner-outer dichotomy offered in i he works of Pinky Bass leads the viewer to regard the precious mysteries of the body in more conscious ways, amid increased cultural fixation upon all things skin-deep. In Zodiac Perceptions (2008), an installation of four colorful and plush organs made of fabric, crocheted silk, thread, and applied digital images representing the heart, lungs, uterus, and intestines were mounted to the wall, each with a looped strip of a series of photographs of bodies hanging below. …

Susana Maria Halpine and Yolanda Retter: An Appreciation

InterActions serves as core research component in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. In an effort to be of service to this community, we would like to take the opportunity to recognize those who dedicated their lives to activism and scholarly pursuits in the academy and in the community, and who have tragically and recently passed away. We do so to pay tribute to their academic work, their passion, and their service. Students with such multi-disciplinary talents truly embody the potential of the next generation of up and coming academics. As we grieve the loss of their life, we also want to celebrate their accomplishments, and have included a brief description of their lives and work, which we invite you to explore through the remembrances and links below. InterActions Editors Susana Maria Halpine On Tuesday November 6 th Susana Maria Halpine died unexpectedly leaving a great void in the many people whose lives she touched. Susana’s rare combination of talents–biochemist, professional artist and educational researcher–grew out of an insatiable desire to explore life, to understand how things were inter-connected, and then to impart that knowledge to others. In the 1980s she worked at the Protein Analysis Facility in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University under Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. At the facility, Susana pioneered the use of protein analyzers and DNA synthesizers. She went on to transfer this state-of-the-art bio-technology to art conservation and history research under the auspices of a Mellon Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Susana was also an artist, exhibiting her oil paintings in New York City, Washington, DC, Southern California and greater Boston area galleries. She received an artist-in- residence grant at the Milay Colony for the Arts. Her work won several “Best of Show” awards and was reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her pursuits in science and art came together in her passionate commitment to the education of future scientists and artists. When she moved to Los Angeles in 1996 she began developing award-winning interactive educational animations, videos, CD-ROM's and Websites for publishers Scholastic and W. Yolanda Retter Yolanda Retter, an activist, librarian, archivist, and author, best known for raising the visibility of lesbians and people of color, died at her home in Van Nuys on August 18, 2007. She was 59. For the past four years, Retter was Head Librarian/ Archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, but she was also an integral member of the Department of Information Studies, where she ably filled multiple roles as a student pursuing additional certification, an activist working on behalf of students, an adjunct professor, and a conscience- and consciousness-raising force. Among her many accomplishments— too many to name here—Yolanda was strumental in organizing lesbian history repositories at UCLA, USC, and in West Hollywood. She co-edited and co-wrote three books: Queers in Space (1997), Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States (2003), and Great Events from History: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Events, 1848-2006 Yolanda was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1947. She attended Pitzer College in Claremont in 1966. During the 1980s, she earned master's degrees in library science and social work from UCLA and thereafter a doctorate from the University of New Mexico in American studies. Her dissertation was titled, On the Side of Angels: Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1990. In 1978, Yolanda directed a program to address the needs of lesbians at the Los

Security and Confidentiality Approach for the Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF)

CLEF is an MRC sponsored project in the E-Science programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure for the next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. The heart of the CLEF approach to this challenge is to design and develop a pseudonymised repository of histories of cancer patients that can be accessed by researchers. Robust mechanisms and policies have been developed to ensure that patient privacy and confidentiality are preserved while delivering a repository of such medically rich information for the purposes of scientific research. This paper summarises the overall approach adopted by CLEF to meet data protection requirements, including the data flows, pseudonymisation measures and additional monitoring policies that are currently being developed. Once evaluated, it is hoped that the CLEF approach can serve as a model for other distributed electronic health record repositories to be accessed for research.

New Jersey African American Women Writers and Their Publications

ABSTRACT This study examines the use of written sources, and personal interviews and informal conversations with individuals from New Jersey's religious, political, and educational community to identify African American women writers in New Jersey and their intellectual output. The focus on recognizing the community as an oral repository of history and then tapping these oral sources for collection development and acquisition purposes is supported by empirical and qualitative evidence. Findings indicate that written sources are so limited that information professionals must rely on oral sources to uncover local writers and their publications.

Charles Brockden Brown and the "Art of the Historian": An Essay concerning (Post)Modern Historical Understanding

In the inaugural publication of his Annals of Europe and America, which appeared serially in the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics & Science from 1807-09, Charles Brockden Brown commented on the difficulties of history writing, remarking that the chain of successive and dependent causes is endless and that an active imagination was necessary for representing the past. An individual, wrote Brown, be said to be imperfectly acquainted with the last link, who has not attentively scrutinized the very first in the series, however remote it may be.1 Although this early American novelist used his knowledge of to write narrative, his self-conscious commentary about history writing may seem unremarkable given our familiarity with romantic history writers such as Washington Irving and William Prescott and the more modern assumption that the historian seeks truth but can never really obtain it in an absolute shape or form.2 Yet recent debates about and the boundaries between fact and fiction in history writing have returned scholars to this familiar territory, causing historians to re-evaluate assumptions of progress and reasoning associated with methods of late Enlightenment historiography and the empirical foundationalism of history's literary form.3 Most prominently, the publication of Robert Berkhofer's Beyond the Great Story has renewed the long-standing disagreement over representation and the role of poststructuralist theories in understanding the rhetorical and ideological aspects of inquiry. As Betsy Erkkila has observed, the very moment when literary critics are turning to history as the solid ground of their cultural analysis, historians are experiencing an increasing crisis about the ontological status of history itself.4 Historians are, in other words, reassessing more closely than ever long-standing Enlightenment assumptions about the form and purpose of history. At the heart of such debates is the degree to which historians are willing to examine-and accept-history as a literary artifact and to concede certainty and meaning. While such debates often focus on the inherent contradictions of opposing views and the value of inter- and intradisciplinary inquiry, minimal attention has been given to the ways late eighteenth-century historians and novelists grappled with issues concerning representation and truth and how such inquiries correspond with our own.5 That is, if, as Peter Novick has observed, the objectivist point of view has remained the ideal: It has been the key term in defining progress in scholarship,6 several questions linger about and aesthetic issues at the end of the eighteenth century and how they relate to contemporary debates about representation and narrative meaning. For example, if early national history writers understood the question relative to then overlapping perceptions of writing and fiction, to what extent were those modes of writing distinguished from each other in the late eighteenth century? Did romantic ideas, in other words, about the role and meaning of history intersect or overlap with late Enlightenment ones and alter methods of representation? By extension, if greater self-consciousness is one of the windfalls of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century historiography, to what degree does discourse from that period about historical objectivity and bias relate to our own debates about the fictive nature of history writing? Are boundaries, historiographical or otherwise, always in place, or can past ways of approaching, or writing about, history resemble and inform the present? That is, if it is possible that we postmoderns have unfairly characterized the Age of Reason as essentially rational or objective, have we also given too much credence to poststructuralists and their claims or assumptions about narrative meaning and linguistic representation? …

Editor's Note

Editor's Note As this issue went to press, all of the files, disks, and books, along with the worries and joys, of the Journal of Women's History were in the process of moving from Bloomington, Indiana to Columbus, Ohio. Our first issue will not appear until the spring of 1997, but starting July 1 we assume responsibility for the final stages of issues already put together at Indiana University. We at Ohio State are thrilled about this opportunity, and we are grateful to our predecessors and especially to editors Christie Farnham and Joan Hoff for trusting us with their "baby." I suspect that they feel both relief and some anxiety as we take over. I keep thinking of Madeleine Doty, an American member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, who wrote as she stepped down from the editorship of the organization's journal Pax in 1931, "It is a little bit a child to me as I have given so much of my time and strength to it." The Journal is already a sturdy child and we look forward to ushering her into her adolescence. As the journal of record for the international field of women's history, the Journal of Women's History is committed to publishing and reviewing feminist scholarship about women. For us, the contested term "feminist" means a recognition that gender is an important category of analysis; an assertion that women have been historically disadvantaged relative to men of their race, class, ethnicity, religion, or sexual identity; and a commitment to changing the structures that systematically privilege men over women. The Journal has never attempted to impose one feminist "line" but has recognized the multiple perspectives captured by the term "feminisms." Its central principle has been a focus on the study of women rather than gender systems. But we believe that the divide between "women's history" and "gender history" can be, and is, bridged by work on women that is sensitive to the particular historical constructions of gender that shape and are shaped by women's experiences. Our vision for the Journal of Women's History involves building on what we see as great strength. We hope to facilitate even more interaction among different national fields of women's history by seeking out explicitly comparative work and by publishing special thematic issues that juxtapose scholarship on different nations and regions of the globe. We will continue to include, in reviews and abstracts, books published in languages other than English. Martina Kramers, Dutch editor of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance journal Jus Sujfragii, insisted in 1907 on the need to translate material into English for the "poor monolingual © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 Editor's Note 7 Americans," and we believe that bridging the language gap remains important. We intend to maintain and develop the extremely provocative dialogues —or what Claire Robertson likes to call "multilogues"—on conceptual frameworks in women's history, extending discussion on the uses of interdiciplinary and theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism, Marxism, womanism, subaltern studies, and queer theory for practitioners of women's history. By publishing responses and rejoinders, and seeking authors beyond the borders of the U.S., we hope to stimulate creative thinking about issues that sometimes divide us. And we want to continue the letters to the editor section, so we invite readers to write us with their thoughts and concerns about the field and the contents of the Journal. Finally, we plan to expand the "Documents" section by regularly including discussions of particular archival collections, oral history repositories , or other materials located anywhere in the world. We encourage submissions of this sort that might serve as a valuable resource for Journal readers. A final word about the new editorial staff. I had to decide about putting in a bid to take on the responsibilities of the editorship while my mother was dying in the spring of 1995. Given how difficult it was even to think about it, I am delighted to say that I think I made the right decision. As a women's historian interested in comparative and international women's history, I...

Rwenzururu protest songs

Opening ParagraphIn this article we shall examine songs of the Rwenzururu movement of the Bakonzo and Baamba people in Western Uganda. We will be concerned with their different uses, as repositories of history and vehicles of exhortation, and also with their origins in time and space. The main interest in this paper, however, is to find explanations for the simultaneous expression of often strongly contrasted moods, viewpoints and styles in Rwenzururu songs.

Classificatory thinking from Kinner to Wilkins: classification and thesaurus construction, 1645-1668.

In mid-seventeenth-century Britain, scholars were much interested in a universal language, which would overcome the language barrier, and in systems of classification that would organize the rapidly developing sciences. This study investigates the contributions of the Silesian physician and lawyer Dr. Cyprian Kinner, the educator George Dalgarno, and one of the first two secretaries of the Royal Society, Bishop John Wilkins. Kinner designed a special classification scheme for botany, suggested a universal classification and language, proposed important elements of vocabulary control, and stressed expressive notations reflecting the nature of things and notions. Dalgarno and Wilkins constructed general conceptual classification schemes based on revised Aristotelian categories. Beyond that, Wilkins created an impressive thesaurus-like dictionary which provided various mechanisms for vocabulary control and displayed a variety of relationships of individual terms. Wilkins's scheme was used for organizing the objects of the natural history repository of the Royal Society. The study also traces the relationship between Wilkins's thesaurus and the modern information-retrieval thesaurus.

Business History Repository Planned for Miami University

Business History Repository Planned for Miami University