scholarly journals Digital Sensoriality: The Neolithic Figurines from Koutroulou Magoula, Greece

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Costas Papadopoulos ◽  
Yannis Hamilakis ◽  
Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika ◽  
Marta Díaz-Guardamino

The image-based discourse on clay figurines that treated them as merely artistic representations, the meaning of which needs to be deciphered through various iconological methods, has been severely critiqued and challenged in the past decade. This discourse, however, has largely shaped the way that figurines are depicted in archaeological iterations and publications, and it is this corpus of images that has in turn shaped further thinking and discussion on figurines, especially since very few people are able to handle the original, three-dimensional, physical objects. Building on the changing intellectual climate in figurine studies, we propose here a framework that treats figurines as multi-sensorial, affective and dynamic objects, acting within distinctive, relational fields of sensoriality. Furthermore, we situate a range of digital, computational methods within this framework in an attempt to deprive them of their latent Cartesianism and mentalism, and we demonstrate how we have applied them to the study of Neolithic figurines from the site of Koutroulou Magoula in Greece. We argue that such methodologies, situated within an experiential framework, not only provide new means of understanding, interpretation and dissemination, but, most importantly, enable researchers and the public to explore the sensorial affordances and affective potential of things, in the past as well as in the present.

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Howland ◽  
Brady Liss ◽  
Thomas E. Levy ◽  
Mohammad Najjar

AbstractArchaeologists have a responsibility to use their research to engage people and provide opportunities for the public to interact with cultural heritage and interpret it on their own terms. This can be done through hypermedia and deep mapping as approaches to public archaeology. In twenty-first-century archaeology, scholars can rely on vastly improved technologies to aid them in these efforts toward public engagement, including digital photography, geographic information systems, and three-dimensional models. These technologies, even when collected for analysis or documentation, can be valuable tools for educating and involving the public with archaeological methods and how these methods help archaeologists learn about the past. Ultimately, academic storytelling can benefit from making archaeological results and methods accessible and engaging for stakeholders and the general public. ArcGIS StoryMaps is an effective tool for integrating digital datasets into an accessible framework that is suitable for interactive public engagement. This article describes the benefits of using ArcGIS StoryMaps for hypermedia and deep mapping–based public engagement using the story of copper production in Iron Age Faynan, Jordan, as a case study.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Jaime Almansa Sánchez

While Archaeology started to take form as a professional discipline, Alternative Archaeologies grew in several ways. As the years went by, the image of Archaeology started being corrupted by misconceptions and a lot of imagination, and those professionals that were claiming to be scientists forgot one of their first responsibilities; the public. This lack of interest is one of the reasons why today, a vast majority of society believes in many clichés of the past that alternative archaeologists have used to build a fictitious History that is not innocent at all. From UFOs and the mysteries of great civilizations to the political interpretation of the past, the dangers of Alternative Archaeologies are clear and under our responsibility. This paper analyzes this situation in order to propose a strategy that may make us the main characters of the popular imagery in the mid-term. Since confrontation and communication do not seem to be effective approaches, we need a change in the paradigm based on Public Archaeology and the increase of our presence in everyday life.


Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.


2001 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Chiroleu ◽  
Osvaldo Iazzetta ◽  
Claudia Voras ◽  
Claudio Diaz

Although university autonomy was apparently protected during Carlos Menem's government (1989-1999), actually it was gradually undergoing substantial changes. "Intrusive" devices had been prepared by the executive power, thus causing the restriction of its objectives. This kind of state participation was less explicit than in the past, being now associated with the establishment of a system of "punishment and reward," in which financing is subordinated to "performance," evaluated according to the parameters of multilateral credit organizations . In this work, we analyse the way in which this conflict took place under Menem's government, contrasting the meanings given to the idea of autonomy by the government and by the public institution; attentin focuses on the case of the National University of Rosario.


Temida ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Nina Mihaljinac

Using the research that mapped around 160 visual art works on the topic of NATO bombing of the FRY, the paper deals with the problem of incorporating various narratives of memory and artistic representations of collective traumas into the public memory discourse in Serbia (creation of sacrificial culture, rival memories, forgetting). The aim of the paper is to point out the possible methods of developing a holistic, inclusive and critical culture of remembrance that would lead to the treatment of collective traumas, and to underline the importance of showing public respect for all narratives of memory, and thus also narratives of victimization, which can often be politically abused. Therefore, the paper offers a new typology of representation of collective traumas, based on psychological analyses of types of traumatic reactions. The typology aims to achieve 1) equal appreciation of sufferings and all narratives of remembering, 2) critique of political misuses of narratives of trauma and reductionism. In order to overcome social tensions arising from the construction of the official sacrificial- patriotic narratives, it is necessary to break the binary constructed identities of ?good? and ?bad? ones, and to discover other narratives of the past, such as activist artistic memories.


Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Cuthbert

A series of harrowing reports across the 1990s on the past removal of children, black and white, from their families have impacted on children and family policy in contemporary Australia, and on the way in which this is reported by the media and understood by the public. This paper briefly surveys some of these consequences and asks how we, as a community, can learn from the past with respect to questions of the welfare of children, without being burdened by that past.


Author(s):  
Ivan Ivanov

Les métiers de la fonction communication dans les organisations publiques françaises de sécurité sociale ont beaucoup évolué depuis deux décennies. Si dans les entreprises privées, la mise en place des services communication a été accompagnée par une prise de conscience du rôle et de la valeur des métiers de la fonction communication, dans les organisations publiques, les communicants sont toujours en train de chercher une reconnaissance et une légitimité de leur savoir- faire et de leurs compétences. Le manque de règlementation interne et externe et de cadres institutionnels de reconnaissance professionnelle oblige les communicants à chercher des voies pour préserver l’intégrité de leurs services qui est menacée par la réduction de leurs effectifs. Cette recherche s’intéresse à la façon dont les communicants publics tentent de garantir l’existence de leur métier, en projetant une image voulue et valorisée de soi. Dans cette quête de légitimité professionnelle, la métacommunication devient une des missions fondamentales des communicants dans la recherche de reconnaissance de la « typicité » de leur métier. The every-day activities of the communication practitioners in the French public organizations have evolved deeply for the past two decades. The establishment of the communication departments in the private companies was backed by the growing awareness of its primacy and the increasing strategic role of the communicator’s profession. In contrast, the communication practitioners in the public organizations are still on the quest for recognition of their legitimacy and know-how, because of the lack of internal and institutional regulations and rule-makings. This research aims to investigate the way in which the communication practitioners in the organizations of the public sector attempt to guarantee the existence of their profession through self-work everyday practices. In this struggle for professional legitimacy, the meta-communication becomes one of the fundamental missions of the communication departments in order to acquire recognition of their professional « typicity ».


Muzealnictwo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Redakcja "Muzealnictwo"

If we want to describe the surrounding reality, while at the same time trying to grasp the best key to it, it seems that the word “change” is the most appropriate. Museums rank among that category of culture institutions which, while undergoing changes, and caring for their own institutional and axiological autonomy, attempt at the same time to influence the very changes; this, however, makes them face identity dilemmas, the necessity to find the right balance between the responsibilities that are sometimes referred to as “traditional ones”, namely the ones they have towards the collections, and the obligations commonly regarded to be an attribute of “modernity”, these towards the public in the variety of their impressive turnout growth and the increase of their expectations. The way to stabilize change effects, while at the same to stimulate them, also with respect to the closest editing of the museum Annual, are legislative efforts and bills. One could even be tempted to make the statement, this not fully irony-free, that the history of Polish museology is actually the history of implemented and unimplemented legislative projects (the latter dominating), of the attempts to define the position of museums in the context of the synergically perceived “cultural legacy”, of finding for them the appropriate governance model, without rejecting the above-mentioned identity dilemmas. The goal of the “Muzealnictwo” Annual No. 60 is to present an overview of the past and current trials to amend the “Museum Act”, to identify areas for essential corrections, reasons for negligence, yet first and foremost, difficulties in applying them to the culture domain in which the most frequently applied word next to “change” (and most highly appreciated by museum circles) is the word “specificity”. This overview will hopefully contribute to the reflection on the capacity of institutional operating under the circumstances in which the inadequacy between the letter of the law and its enforcement can be observed. Next to the theme that is key to the present issue of the “Muzealnictwo” Annual, you will find the well established and known sections describing the spheres of museum operations, these occurring regardless of the lapse of time and their legislative creations. Piotr Majewski Professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw Editor-in-Chief


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