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Perseus Digital Library

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:15:58 -0800

Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.

Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond.

The Friedberg Genizah Project

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:58:19 -0800

The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts (which may well equal three times that number of folios). Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat medieval Cairo, to the south-west of the modern city) between the 11th and 19th centuries. A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found.

Cockroach inspires &1,500 heart created by Indian doctor Sujoy Guha - Times Online

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:28:03 -0700

The human heart has four chambers, but only the left ventricle is responsible for building the pressure that moves blood around the body. Depending on one chamber to do the hard work places this part of an artificial heart under enormous strain.

Dr Guha likens the process to trying to scale a four-foot rise in just one bound. "Do it too often and your knees will give way," he said. "Much better to use a series of small steps."

The sudden build-up of pressure inside conventional artificial hearts can also damage blood cells, Dr Guha said. This can lead to clotting and strokes, and means that patients must be given anti-coagulants, which place them at risk of severe bleeding.

By contrast, his prosthetic heart builds pressure in stages, through five chambers -- a model based on the anatomy of a cockroach.

Thinking literally - The Boston Globe

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:15:20 -0700

. . . Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children's book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone's hands determines how "warm" or "cold" he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how "weighty" people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren't just how we talk and write, they're how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people's personalities to behave accordingly. What's more, without our body's instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. . . .

Mark Abley on Marie Smith Jones, the worlds last Eyak speaker | World news | The Guardian

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:07:49 -0700

The following words are all from languages which no longer have a single native speaker:

dorkbot

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:25:04 -0700

dorkbot has only a motto: "people doing strange things with electricity". Different groups have interpreted the motto in different ways. When I thought of the motto I purposely made it broad and inclusive so that it would interest many different kinds of people doing different kinds of things. Artists, inventors, scientists, engineers. The exciting thing to me is to learn about strange things that creative people are doing around the world, with no regard for genre, style, school of thought, area of expertise, etc.

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM | Portfolio | Flight Patterns

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:04:03 -0700

richard barnes
flight patterns

Richard Barnes's photographs, taken over two years in a Rome suburb, beautifully highlight the tension between the individual and the collective. They also highlight a growing field of research studying how animals self-organize into moving bodies. The results may provide clues to questions ranging from how cells aggregate around a wound to how financial markets swing on the aggregate choices of individuals.

ART REVIEW; View of Pine Barrens Through Painterly Lens - The New York Times

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:05:33 -0700

lynne clibanoff
intricacies of the abyss

''Lynne Clibanoff: 25 Years in Perspective'' is a formidable mid-career retrospective of 61 works that include prints, photographs, drawings and sculptures. ''I do a lot of different things,'' Ms. Clibanoff said. ''I make art because I have to amuse myself.''

Although the show may initially seem too inclusive, it emphasizes that the artist is dealing with spatial perception regardless of medium. She certainly blurs the distinction between art and craft.

Ms. Clibanoff creates architectural spaces that have a mysteriously haunting presence. They are familiar yet unidentifiable, questioning the notion of reality. Because her rooms have been realized as three-dimensional folded prints and box constructions, they do exist as real artistic representations.

Using her sculptures as architectural models, Ms. Clibanoff photographs these constructions. In ''Interior #25 (hard light),'' the black-and-white photograph represents a seemingly believable space, even documented by the camera. She uses light as a drawing tool to delineate such architectural features as the doorway and the staircase at the left. It may not be coincidental that her father was a popular Philadelphia magician; Ms. Clibanoff is able to create her own successful illusionist tricks.

Ms. Clibanoff is best known for box constructions, the primary focus of her career. These works suggest stage sets and recall the tradition of ideal Renaissance city plans as well as 17th-century architectural portraits by Saenredam. For example, ''Topiary'' is an intricate sculpture of three spaces with interior and exterior views. Looking directly at the electrified box, there is a staircase that leads to the manicured hedges and topiary bushes that are illuminated. At the right, a small room has a window view of another spiral topiary design. On the left side, there is a third area like some monastic cell. This is one of her largest designs, reaching a size that was less manageable for the artist. Ms. Clibanoff explained that it was cumbersome for her to carry these sculptures: ''I am a small person who does like things that are portable.''

For the past few years, she has been working on a more intimate scale with cigar boxes, calling them cabinets. They are little gems. The artist creates an architectural design of geometric forms that is perfectly sized for its container, leaving the original commercial markings on the sides of the wooden box. Each has an acrylic skylight that allows natural light to shine into the vacant interiors, adding a sense of intrigue like a setting for some story not fully told.

| Worrying about Emotions in History | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:15:27 -0700

barbara h rosenwein
emotional communities

. . . People lived--and live--in what I propose to call "emotional communities." These are precisely the same as social communities--families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships--but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others' emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.

I further propose that people move (and moved) continually from one such community to another--from taverns to law courts, say--adjusting their emotional displays and their judgments of weal and woe (with greater and lesser degrees of success) to these different environments. As Lyndal Roper has put it, "competing cultures [may be seen in the] same individual man [or woman]." There are two points here: not only does every society call forth, shape, constrain, and express emotions differently, but even within the same society contradictory values and models, not to mention deviant individuals, find their place. John Baldwin has pointed to the multiple voices in medieval discourses on sex. I suggest that we recognize the possibility of finding similar varieties, as well as convergences, in emotional feeling and expression. . . .

The grand narrative that has dominated emotions scholarship cannot stand. It is based on a debunked theory of the emotions and its concomitant, but flawed, notion of progressive self-restraint. Jettisoning the hydraulic view does not mean that one new approach must take over: there are plenty of issues to consider and a variety of useful modes of attack, no one of which is going to compass the whole field for all periods and every sort of evidence. The new narrative will recognize various emotional styles, emotional communities, emotional outlets, and emotional restraints in every period, and it will consider how and why these have changed over time.

Once we have embarked upon that narrative (and some already have), we may stop worrying about emotions in history and begin to enjoy them.

Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs: Observatory: Design Observer

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:39:20 -0700

photographer unknown
vanished civilization

World War Two witnessed the maturation of the newly mobile photographic technology and its ability to capture images of devastation. Think of Dresden after it was firebombed or London during the Blitz or the concentration camps of Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz after their liberation and a series of distinctive images flash in memory: powerful and haunting pictures of war's destructive impact.

But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Awesome in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed from human agency.

The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb's effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, "a kind of hole in human history."

These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage? . . .