Perspective and the Past: Modeling Historical Representation from Camera Obscura to Virtual Reality

This article examines the concept of “perspective” as an embodied metaphor with ontological and epistemological implications for the modeling of historical understanding of contested pasts. The metaphors employed in modeling past reality shape how we make sense of the controversial past. In particular, I explore how perspectival metaphorical models conjure the notions of presence/proximity/engagement and absence/distance/detachment. To open this up, the paper juxtaposes two distinct models of seeing and knowing as sources of embodied metaphor: 1) static and distancing optical metaphors of cognition, and 2) a “post-cognitive” (i.e., enactive, embodied and dynamic) process of interaction. I argue that the shift towards the affective, experiential and immersive forms of engagement in historical representation is indicative of the growing importance of dynamic, embodied and interactive features in mediated models of the past. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of virtual reality as an emergent medium that offers a new way of modeling the past. Despite its novelty, however, virtual reality raises age-old questions about the dynamics of engagement and detachment in historical understanding.

Reimagining the Family of King Charles I in Nineteenth-Century British Painting

The nineteenth century represents a formative period for the development of historical consciousness in Britain, with texts and, increasingly, images shaping perceptions of the past. This article examines how Stuart history was interpreted and experienced, through a series of historical genre paintings of King Charles I and his family. It explores how Anthony van Dyck's depiction of politicized domesticity in royal portraiture was revised and reworked in these later images. Reimagining Stuart family life, they extended processes of remembering, enlisting audiences in an active, participatory engagement with the past. Probing temporal, visual, and verbal alignments and connections, the article contributes further dimensions to the understanding of historical representation. It argues that these paintings stirred the viewer's intellectual, emotional, and associative responses to encourage a sense of proximity. Establishing an episodic narrative, they initiated processes of recollection and recognition, they reflected sympathetic historiographies, and they encouraged a shared community with their pictorial protagonists. By so doing, nineteenth-century artists diminished historical distance and fashioned a familiarized past.

History Contra Collective Memory: Collective Memory’s Finite Province

In the humanities and social sciences, with the rise of memory studies, there has been an important theoretical shift in how we engage the past. What used to be studied with the methodically elaborate field of history no longer seems adequate. With memory becoming an ever-present framework with which to look at culture, literature, social phenomena, politics, and the arts, a theoretical conviction has come to prevail that says collective memory is a larger framework within which history and other approaches to the past must be situated. This paper tries to address this theoretical conviction of conflating history with collective memory by arguing that collective memory cannot be a be-all umbrella term encapsulating historical representation or other approaches to the past such as tradition. It does so by uncovering the ground for such a conviction, during which a clearer view of the role of history and the limits of collective memory emerge. The investigation shows that indiscriminate application of the concept of collective memory in every approach dealing with the past makes the concept almost meaningless and betrays its two crucial characters, or limits: that of i) temporal finiteness and ii) fragmentariness. In so doing, it restores the vital role history plays in trying to get at the truth of the past. The article concludes by calling for deeper engagement with foundational conceptual and theoretical issues in collective memory research if it is to establish itself as a longstanding field of inquiry.

The Politics of History in Russia and Theatricalisation of Traumatic Events

This article examines how historical representation of the deportation of Kalmyks to Siberia has changed in compliance with the politics of history in Russia. It traces the shift from silence on this topic under communism to the dramatisation of it in the 1990s when the communists lost their power, and finally to the softening of this event in the last decades when state ideology under Putin’s administration is striving to unite the peoples of Russia around the victory in the World War II, leaving the history of the ‘purged peoples’ on the sidelines of this triumph. This evolution from a tragic to a more positive narrative is reflected in the messages of public spectacles about the deportation. The softened approach to this traumatic event was also linked to generational change: its eldest witnesses today are the people who were born between 1943 and 1956 and who were too young to remember its hardships. The author analyses classic theatre performances (‘Arash’, 1995, and ‘Kalmychka’, 2018) and mass agitational campaigns, such as the Trains of Remembrance which took present-day Kalmyks to Siberia to express gratitude symbolically to Siberians who helped them in the difficult period. These spectacles are not mere historical illustrations of the past, but new revisions of it.

Malaria Trigram: improving the visualization of recurrence data for malaria elimination

Background Although considerable success in reducing the incidence of malaria has been achieved in Brazil in recent years, an increase in the proportion of cases caused by the harder-to-eliminate Plasmodium vivax parasite can be noted. Recurrences in P. vivax malaria cases are due to new mosquito-bite infections, drug resistance or especially from relapses arising from hypnozoites. As such, new innovative surveillance strategies are needed. The aim of this study was to develop an infographic visualization tool to improve individual-level malaria surveillance focused on malaria elimination in the Brazilian Amazon. Methods Action Research methodology was employed to deal with the complex malaria surveillance problem in the Amazon region. Iterative cycles were used, totalling four cycles with a formal validation of an operational version of the Malaria Trigram tool at the end of the process. Further probabilistic data linkage was carried out so that information on the same patients could be linked, allowing for follow-up analysis since the official system was not planned in such way that includes this purpose. Results An infographic user interface was developed for the Malaria Trigram that incorporates all the visual and descriptive power of the Trigram concept. It is a multidimensional and interactive historical representation of malaria cases per patient over time and provides visual input to decision-makers on recurrences of malaria. Conclusions The Malaria Trigram is aimed to help public health professionals and policy makers to recognise and analyse different types of patterns in malaria events, including recurrences and reinfections, based on the current Brazilian health surveillance system, the SIVEP-Malária system, with no additional primary data collection or change in the current process. By using the Malaria Trigram, it is possible to plan and coordinate interventions for malaria elimination that are integrated with other parallel actions in the Brazilian Amazon region, such as vector control management, effective drug and vaccine deployment strategies.

Adjacent Histories

In this conversation, composed through written correspondence, Julie Beth Napolin and Amanda Armstrong-Price discuss aspects of Denise Riley’s “Am I That Name?” in light of contemporary feminist debates, including debates within black feminism and transfeminism. The authors begin by considering the significance of Riley’s unconventional title, outlining what might be at stake—and what might be occluded—in the title’s allusion to Sojourner Truth’s interjection, “Ain’t I a woman?” Allusion and juxtaposition form key aspects of Riley’s approach to historical representation, which involves reading sources on sex and gender for what they say about adjacent historical categories and constellating discrepant historical situations in ways that speak to ongoing conundrums about identity and alliance. With respect to the latter, the authors consider the historical situation—in feminism and more generally—that occasioned Riley’s 1988 work while also reading her work in relation to the challenges of our current moment. Riley’s phenomenological account of the inconstancy of gendered being is read for its resonances with contemporary transfeminist work while her broader oeuvre is brought to bear on some of the scraps of phobic common sense—the voices without mouths—that circulate online and work to forestall what remain urgent acts of alliance.

Diarchy and history in Hawaiʻi and Tonga

This paper treats a well documented case of tension between diarchic and monarchic tendencies — that of ancient Hawaiʻi. The instability of diarchy in Hawaiʻi is contrasted with its stability, until the late eighteenth century, in another Polynesian society, Tonga. These different solutions correlate with the different place that a properly historical representation of kingship — that is one that recognizes discontinuities in time, that does not abolish time by making the present identical to the past — have in the two societies.

Creating Comfort in the Absence of Memory

<p><b>As New Zealand’s population ages, so does the risk of developing age-related cognitive diseases such as dementia. Whilst most associate dementia with memory loss alone, the progressive nature of the disease can affect and create problems with thinking and behaviour, as well as memory. To date, there is no known cure.</b></p> <p>Increasingly, rural areas such as Alexandra, located in the Central Otago region, find that aged-care services cannot meet the growing demand. This issue has had a negative impact on the local community, causing stress for individuals who must move far from their home - losing their sense of ‘place-identity’ and, therefore, ‘self’ in the process.</p> <p>Stemming from the notion of ‘difference’, people living with dementia are equally at risk of being stigmatised due to the misunderstanding of behaviours and historical representation of aged-care architecture, which cut off individuals from the wider society. As a result, the unfamiliar and often unhome-like quality of these environments, alongside the stigma associated with cognitive diseases, can lead to a faster deterioration of a person’s condition.</p> <p>Through a design-led research approach, this thesis explores the design of a ‘normative aged-care environment’ – one that can allow an individual to live well with dementia. An independent review of literature and a case study analysis established that integrating an intergenerational programme can promote a sense of community and remove the stigma of ‘difference’ through architectural intervention. By designing for community engagement, this thesis aims to suggest an architecture that can provide support and comfort to an individual in the absence of memory.</p>

Creating Comfort in the Absence of Memory

<p><b>As New Zealand’s population ages, so does the risk of developing age-related cognitive diseases such as dementia. Whilst most associate dementia with memory loss alone, the progressive nature of the disease can affect and create problems with thinking and behaviour, as well as memory. To date, there is no known cure.</b></p> <p>Increasingly, rural areas such as Alexandra, located in the Central Otago region, find that aged-care services cannot meet the growing demand. This issue has had a negative impact on the local community, causing stress for individuals who must move far from their home - losing their sense of ‘place-identity’ and, therefore, ‘self’ in the process.</p> <p>Stemming from the notion of ‘difference’, people living with dementia are equally at risk of being stigmatised due to the misunderstanding of behaviours and historical representation of aged-care architecture, which cut off individuals from the wider society. As a result, the unfamiliar and often unhome-like quality of these environments, alongside the stigma associated with cognitive diseases, can lead to a faster deterioration of a person’s condition.</p> <p>Through a design-led research approach, this thesis explores the design of a ‘normative aged-care environment’ – one that can allow an individual to live well with dementia. An independent review of literature and a case study analysis established that integrating an intergenerational programme can promote a sense of community and remove the stigma of ‘difference’ through architectural intervention. By designing for community engagement, this thesis aims to suggest an architecture that can provide support and comfort to an individual in the absence of memory.</p>

Modes of exhibition: Uses of the past in Tehran art galleries

While emerging literature explores how organizations engage with the past, investigations of how complex relationships to the past influence mobilizing multiple forms of historical representation in practice remain scarce. The current study examines different relationships to the past to shed light on how their complex and at times contradictory connotations relates to the use of multimodal historical cues in organizational practices, based on a qualitative study of art galleries in downtown Tehran, Iran. We describe how fondness for, aversion to and conflicted relationships with the past coexist, and how and why actors use diverse historical cues to express these diverse relationships in practice. We add to current understandings of organizational uses of the past by offering insights into how and why organizations actively evoke and manage positive, negative, and conflicted relationships to the past, and how these relationships draw upon diverse discursive and non-discursive supports to organizational practices aiming at different yet complementary goals.