Abstract:

This paper presents a new object of study: the so-called camerini, private rooms for study and reflection in the great stately palaces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which contained riches and artistic heritage of inestimable value and were characterized by very dim lighting. The analysis of the camerini, true precursors of the modern museum, is not only a specific subject of study but also extremely relevant because it allows us to re-analyze the entire evolution of the museum type and its characteristics: discovering its origins, following its evolution, and critically reviewing its current features. Starting from the case study of the Quarto Camerino of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, a superset of the specific features of this type of space and the possible problems in its 3D reconstruction, the article presents a method, and a workflow aimed at the reconstruction and visualization with high visual quality of these spaces and their features. Digital surveying technologies are integrated with advanced methods that allow the reproduction of the full optical properties of spatial surfaces and with tools for semantic modelling and visualization to generate a digital artefact that is consistent with the available information and its interpretations and that can be analyzed both perceptually and analytically.

Abstract: Nawal El Saadawi’s groundbreaking novel Two Women in One presents the arduous journey of Bahiah Shaheen, an 18-year-old medical student, as she navigates the complex terrain of self-discovery and self-assertion within the confines of a patriarchal Egyptian society. This comprehensive research paper offers a meticulous textual analysis of Bahiah’s quest for self-realization, illuminating the nuances of El Saadawi’s feminist agenda and the universal struggle of women to forge autonomous identities. Grounded in feminist literary criticism and relevant theoretical frameworks, the study examines Bahiah’s confrontations with patriarchal authority, societal gender norms, and familial expectations. The analysis situates the narrative within the socio-political context of post-colonial Egypt, underscoring the intersections of gender, culture, and national identity. Through a close reading of the text, the paper explores Bahiah’s evolving self-awareness and her interactions with the “other,” highlighting the complexities of female identity formation. The protagonist’s defiant acts of resistance, culminating in her dramatic desertion of an arranged marriage, are analyzed as powerful symbols of her refusal to be subjugated by the patriarchal order. This comprehensive analysis contributes to the scholarly discourse on Nawal El Saadawi’s feminist literature, inviting further exploration of the emancipatory potential of her narratives and their relevance to contemporary feminist movements.

Abstract: This research, situated in the geographical and historical context of the Tangut and East Java, uncovers a significant aspect of the evolution of Buddhist art styles. A thangka of the goddess Vajravārāhī found in Khara Khoto, dated to the late 12th century, shows the bodhisattva decorated with a pearl-chain girdle and upper armbands. This form of pearl-chain jewellery, which appears on Vajravārāhī and other Sino-Tibetan style bodhisattvas, also appears on three stone statues of the goddess Prajñāpāramitā in East Java, all of which depict a near identical use of this pearl-chain ornamentation, as well as on a statue of Prajñāpāramitā at the Muara Jambi Buddhist site in Sumatra. Maritime trade between the regions of China and Java was extensive. The commonality of such motifs in China and Java may highlight a convergence of cultural forces and perhaps shared styles originating from the maritime realm and traded via the maritime routes. However, a direct or indirect influence of Sino-Tibetan styles on thangka paintings featuring this depiction of the jewellery perhaps occurred following dynamics of north-south exchange, highlighting the interrelated links along the maritime and overland routes through the Pāla Buddhist kingdom in eastern India. Thus, I propose that the connection between the Vajravārāhī and the other Tibetan thangka paintings was inspired by northeast Indian influence from the Hexi corridor, eventually reaching East Java.

Abstract: Chalmers’ Constructing the World offers an exploration into complete bodies of information – for which he proposes that an entity such as Laplace’s Demon has a scrutable interpretation over available information. However, Chalmers does not address a true realisation of what a complete knowledge should be; Laplace’s Demon remains very much human. This article further suggests that information is limited – specifically in a post-modernist framework – because the limited number of perceptible differences (known as Categories) reduces the scale of differences such that the information converges into a common limitation.

Abstract:

This study analyzes the award-winning documentary film SEARCHING FOR RODAKIS, directed by Kerem Soyyilmaz, produced in 2023. The aim is the historic comprehension and analysis of this filmic narrative in the field of social-semiotic literacy and its utilization in historical studies for approaching issues of conflict in modern History, otherness, collective experience and trauma, collective memory. The research material is the documentary "Searching for Rodakis" (Produced by: Denmark, Turkey 2023, Screenplay/Director: Kerem Soyyilmaz, Duration: 57'), received the awards: Adana Golden Boll FF 2023 Turkey | Best Documentary, Thessaloniki International Doc. Festival 2023 Greece, Greek Film Festival Los Angeles 2023 USA, Istanbul Documentary Days 2023 Turkey. The historic context: the year of production, 2023, coincides with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, where Turkey's current borders were set and the "population exchange" legally sealed, i.e. the violent expulsion of 400,000 Muslims, citizens of Greece, many of whom spoke only Greek, and 200,000 Orthodox citizens of Turkey, who in the majority spoke Turkish. At the same time, the Treaty (1923) ratified and finalized the expulsion of approximately one million Orthodox who were forced to leave the Ottoman Empire as well as 120,000 Muslims who had fled Greece since the beginning of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). About two million people emigrated, lost their citizenship and property, in the context of "national homogeneity" that connotes an ethnic cleansing, with the official states ignoring the criticisms of lawyers and academics who spoke of violations of constitutional rights. Mohammedan Greeks, estimated at around 190,000 as early as 1914, based on ecclesiastical statistics in the Pontus region, did not receive attention from the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne even though linguistically and culturally (origin, customs, culture and traditions) they did not differ in any way from the orthodox Greeks. In Turkey there was general indifference to the thousands of desperate people who arrived, with the exception of a few academics and the Lausanne Exchange Foundation. The filmic scenario: as a Greek tombstone of unknown origin is discovered underneath the floorboards in an old village house in Turkey, an almost forgotten story from the country’s creation unravels; the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The engraved Greek letters tell of a woman, Chrysoula Rodaki, who died in 1887. Thus the search for her descendants begins: it leads director Kerem Soyyilmaz to local archives, where his own family's role in history is laid bare; to abandoned ghost towns and through the memories of older villagers – all while Soyyilmaz meets massive support for his quest from Greeks on the other side of the border. The stone becomes a portal to the past – and for a while, the trauma becomes redeemed when the previous owners of the village house return. Searching for Rodakis is a movie that reconnects people, culture, and the stories that were discarded in order to build a strong, nationalist state – told through the director's personal experiences. The release also marks the 100-year anniversary of the forced population exchange. Image 1, Poster- https://www.filmy.gr/movies-database/searching-for-rodakis/ The research questions as they arise from the cinematographic material itself, are: How the historical memory of traumatic events of the previous century such as the exchange of populations according the Treaty of Lausanne is recorded in the cinematographic narrative? What are the historical sources? To what extent did the origin, ethnicity, geographical location of the narrators as participants influence the preservation of historical memory and the historical research? What are the criteria of the approach of the creator, what are the criteria of the participants? Methodologically, we apply the historic and the socio-semiotic analysis in the field of the public and digital history. The results: the types of historical sources found in filmic public discourse are the oral narration of testimonies, of experiences and of memories, the director’s historical research in state archives, the material culture objects and the director’s digital research. Thus, historic thematic categories occur, such as a) the specific persons and actions by country in Turkey/Greece, by action as on-site and online research, by type of historical source, as oral testimonies, as research in archives, as objects of material culture. B) Sub-themes such as childhood, localities and kinship also emerge. Discussion: these cinematic recording of biographical, oral narratives as historical and sociological material helps us to understand the political ideologies of the specific period 1919-1923. The multimodal film material is analyzed as testimonies of oral and digital history and it is utilized to approach the historical reality of the "otherness", seeking the dialogue in cross-border history in order to identify differences, but above all the historic and cultural similarities vs the sterile stereotypes. The historic era and the historic geography as Greek and as Turkish national history concern us for research and teaching purposes a hundred years after the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) which set the official borders of the countries.

Abstract:

Throughout human history, understanding the fundamental nature of language has been a central concern of scholars and thinkers. Although substantial progress has been made in many areas of linguistics, a precise definition of language remains elusive. This study introduces new insights into the understanding of language and precisely describes its true nature. It formulates a simple universal model of language by applying a newly discovered law–the law of a trio linking thought, language, and reality. The study also illustrates how the law and model can be applied to address important linguistic issues, including the language skills, the universality of languages, the syntactic structure of complex sentences, and the acquisition of first and second languages. The identification of a triadic relationship linking thought, language, and reality is expected to resolve the conflicts between different theories of language, often referred to as theories of meaning. This discovery is expected to elevate linguistics to the same status as the natural sciences for the first time in its history.

Abstract: This paper shows the results of an experimental approach on automatic reading of 16th-century Portuguese Inquisition manuscripts using two Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) applications. Therefore, the experiment involved modeling the handwriting of one scribe, measuring the differences between the human-made and the machine transcriptions and analyzing those differences from a palaeographic perspective. Two independently developed HTR applications were selected for the experiment: Transkribus (by ReadCoop, an European Cooperative Society) and Lapelinc Transcriptor (by LaPeLinC, Corpus Linguistic Laboratory of the State University of Southern Bahia, Brazil). Both tools use machine learning technology. The results indicated that palaeography can contribute to the development of HTR technologies in a number of ways, apart from the evident contribution of helping in the deep understanding of the results. Finally, serving both pragmatic and scientific interests. So, with this article we express the desire to promote discussions about the state-of-the-art and the challenges ahead on the road to what many already call ‘digital palaeography’ - in particular, with regard to Early Modern Portuguese manuscripts.

Abstract:

While Kepler is regarded as a major figure in standard historical accounts of the scientific revolution of early modern Europe, he is typically seen as having one foot in the new scientific culture and one in the old. In some of his work Kepler appears, along with Galileo, to be on a trajectory towards Newton’s celestial mechanics. Besides his advocacy of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, he appeals to physical causes in his explanations of the movements of celestial bodies. But other work expresses a neo-Platonic “metaphysics” or “mysticism”, as most obvious in his self-alignment with the ancient tradition of the “music of the spheres”. Here I problematize this distinction. Kepler’s purported neo-Platonic “metaphysics”, I argue, had been tied to Platonic and neo-Platonic features of the methodology of a tradition of mathematical astronomy that would remain largely untouched by his shift to heliocentrism and that would be essential to his actual scientific practice. Importantly, certain inherited geometric practices—one’s later formalized as “projective geometry”—would carry those “harmonic” structures expressed in the thesis of the music of the spheres.

Abstract: The UNESCO site of Arslantepe is located in Eastern Anatolia in the Malatya Plain (Türkiye) about 10km from the Euphrates River. Here for about a century archaeological excavations have been carried out reconstructing a long sequence of human frequentation starting from 5000 years BC up to the Middle Ages. The settlement, one of the most important and largest in the region, has undergone numerous changes over time resulting in a complex superposition of structures, palac-es, temples and burials concentrated on the hill. With the aim of extending the knowledge of the site, in 2022 geophysical surveys were carried out through the application of electrical resistivity tomography, covering a surface of approximately 4,300 m2 in an unexplored area at the foot of the hill. In this paper, the Extended data-adaptive Probability-based Electrical Resistivity Tomog-raphy Inversion approach (E-PERTI), recently published as development of the probability to-mography imaging approach, has been applied to a large apparent resistivity field dataset providing the best estimate of the most probable estimate of the resistivity distribution through an intrinsic linear regression model implementing standard least squares routines. Results seem to prove the effectiveness of the E-PERTI approach in noise dejection enhancing associated resistivity highs that can be ascribable to the trace of a potential fortification. The obtained information rep-resents new unexpected data that opens new frontiers of archaeological research adding value to the knowledge of the site.

Abstract: Seeking to examine cases of sacrificial love for another that is empathetic, unconditional, and morally redemptive, I focus on writer Jeff Lemire’s and artist Dustin Nguyen’s heralded comic series, Descender and Ascender (published by Image Comics starting in 2015 and 2018, respectively). In the first main subsection, I argue how illustrative fictional cases can mirror inter-human ethical struggles in our own world. Next, I look at some representative theoretical, literary, and biblical examples of sacrifice, especially regarding morally problematic theories about Jesus’ death on the cross, a classic Western example of sacrificial love. I then provide a brief context for why Descender and Ascender and highlight some of the main themes and characters in the comics. In doing so I draw from three main examples: the cyborg and mother Effie (Queen Between), the companion robot TIM-21, and an extended focus on the robot, Driller (“a real killer”), where I gleam key traits of sacrificial love as empathetic, unconditional, and morally redemptive. I close with how to distinguish unholy and holy forms of sacrificial love, and reflect on how the examples of sacrificial love in the comics ultimately complement my reading of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross while adding some stipulations to his oft-quoted saying: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).