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Marking Impermanence: The Life of the Object (and Index) in Sonam Dolma Brauen’s Art
Get PDFThis essay explores works by contemporary artist Sonam Dolma Brauen through two lenses: as the result of ongoing and changing functions of an object, and as part of a broader dialogue about indexical imagery in contemporary art. Sonam Dolma’s family escaped from Tibet to India when she was young, carrying few possessions on their difficult journey through the Himalayas. One of these items, a small metal tsa tsa mold used in Tibetan Buddhist rituals, would later become an instrument of creation in Sonam Dolma’s art practice. Comprised of multiple plaster casts made from the original object, the artworks mark the former presence of the object—they are indexical. I examine two works, My Father’s Death (2010) and Red Carpet (2011), exploring this indexical nature and asking, how might new functions emerge from old forms
On Being Back, and Being Home
Get PDFThis flash ethnography explores the concept of home against the backdrop of the recent spectacle of building destruction and the forceful removal of street vendors enabled by the local government in Kathmandu, Nepal. Rituals provide the structure and stability of what one calls home. Home, and being able to feel home, are not experienced uniformly, especially by people who continue to be questioned about where home is—through the violent disruption of space in which one conducts everyday rituals of livelihood, and the erasure of markers in one’s mental map. It explores how being able to feel and call a place home is changed or severed by the forced inability to continue or renew rituals
Nurturing responsible data practices in creative industries R&D through applied ethics and open research practices
Get PDFNurturing responsible data practices in creative industries R&D through applied ethics and open research practice
How does open innovation support open research? Lessons from the eCHOing project
Get PDFIn the past two years, the eCHOing project fostered open innovation practices in small cultural heritage organisations. The term open innovation is applied to partnerships supporting innovative practice where an organisation doesn’t just rely on their own internal knowledge, sources and resources (such as their own staff) for innovation of products, services, business models, marketing processes, funding etc. but creates relations with other organisations and the citizens to introduce novel practices.
The project, funded by the Erasmus+ programme, aimed to explore how the cultural heritage sector, which had been considerably impacted by the closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, can recover, fostering new partnerships. The focus was on small cultural heritage organisations which have limited budgets and staff and traditionally worked with volunteers to deliver their activities.
Within the project we developed training content and established collaborations between universities and small museums which aimed to develop specific activities typical for open innovation in the sector (hacktivism, innovation labs, crowdsourcing, citizen science, maker culture, developing new communities, etc.).
In this poster, we will be sharing our experience from open innovation activities, which, in fact, produced outcomes beneficial for research and discuss the connection between open innovation and open science. Over 20 small collaborative projects had been implemented in 2022-23 in various institutions across Norway, Estonia, Italy, Bulgaria and Greece. About a third of the implemented collaborative projects had outcomes relevant to research.
While open innovation within the cultural heritage organisations’ context is seen as a booster of their capacity and expanding activities, it also has a positive impact on research in several ways.
Open innovation, which supports the development of new technological tools. One of the examples was a project where students developed a tool for searching in a historical collection of newspapers in the Bulgarian language, allowing them to discover relevant content across two centuries and six orthographic reforms. This tool can be used for research by historians, linguists, and media scholars and adds a valuable new instrument within the open science domain.
Expanding digital collections. Examples from Norway, Italy, and Bulgaria contributed to the creation of 3D museum objects and virtual exhibition components. These are valuable additions to the digital services and content offered by small museums and, in fact, expand collections with free content which will be available to researchers and educators.
Promoting citizen science. We also had several examples of citizen science projects in Greece and Bulgaria. Involve citizens in activities which help to answer research questions or help the creation of new digital resources which will be openly available to scholars, educators, and members of the general public is another contribution to developing open science.
We will discuss challenges we had to overcome ranging from lacking capacity to language barriers.
The poster will share real-life examples as an inspiration for fostering more open innovation activities and will discuss the importance of planning for open science outcomes in open innovation initiatives
Open Research at Edinburgh
Get PDFOpen research practices, which seek to foster research collaboration, transparency, and accessibility, are an integral part of research culture change. Policies are being introduced, particularly at the level of research funding and publishing, to make open research the ‘new normal’. However, the support currently available to help researchers adopt open research practices varies by institution; college, school, or department; and research discipline and methods. Our primary aim in this report was to identify the open research support available to University of Edinburgh research students and staff at various levels including central, local, and grassroots initiatives. As a secondary aim, we sought to understand post graduate researchers’ (PGRs) experiences with open research, including PGRs own personal knowledge and adoption of open research, their experiences accessing support, and what kinds of support they think would benefit them most. This report presents a summary of open research support available at the University of Edinburgh between October 2023 and February 2024, alongside key findings and action items related to open research support for PGRs from semi-structured discussions with seven researchers across the University’s three colleges
Distribution and procurement strategies of black obsidian in central-western Santa Cruz province (Patagonia, Argentina)
No full textIn southern Patagonia, research proposals regarding the procurement strategies of black obsidian are still open. In broad spatial and temporal terms, Pampa del Asador has been proposed as the main source of this lithic resource. On a macro-regional scale, direct and indirect mechanisms of obsidian procurement from Pampa del Asador source were suggested. At the same time, variability in transport and exploitation strategies was recorded through the regional study of obsidian cores. Such variability indicates that the distance to the source does not unequivocally explain all the observed patterns.
In this opportunity, we seek to deepen this proposal to discuss the different factors involved in the mechanisms for obtaining this lithic resource by hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited the region after 2000 years B.P. We work on a broad regional scale, relevant to discuss aspects of mobility and social interaction. Thus, the sample includes 147 archaeological sites located in different environmental sectors: basaltic plateaus (Cerro Pampa, Guitarra and Strobel plateaus) and lake basins (Cardiel and Salitroso). A macroscopic analysis was carried out to integrate the information of cores with that of tools and debitage.
Results highlight the variability of strategies initially suggested. It is emphasized that the particularities of land use and availability of other lithic resources are relevant for understanding the patterns observed in the archaeological record
Bolas, projectile points and hunting technologies in Southern Patagonia (Santa Cruz, Argentina) during the Late Holocene
Get PDFThe late Holocene in the central-western region of the Santa Cruz province (Southern Patagonia, Argentina) was characterized by the occurrence of climatic and environmental change processes which implied a progressive drought, markedly recorded after ca. 3000 years BP. Peopling processes in the region during this period implied mobility strategies that included residential mobility in lowlands combined with logistical mobility in highlands. In this changing context, local hunter-gatherer groups used a variety of weapons for obtaining prey: bolas, bow and arrow and spears or darts.
In this context, this work analyses the distribution and chronology of the lithic components of these technologies (arrow and spear/dart stone points and stone balls) including evidence of their manufacture (preforms and raw materials). For this, we consider different environments (different low basins and high basins and plateaus) and different types of sites (open air site, basaltic wall, rock shelter, hunting blind and burial). The aim is to assess the role of these technologies in the context of changes in mobility strategies and landscape use. The evidence collected suggests that these three technologies had important differences in their use and production, especially in their replacement potential, manufacturing possibilities, transport and repair. These differences possibly made them complementary. Our main argument suggests that hunter-gatherers diversified technologies, specifically those used to obtain prey, in a context of landscape and resource fragmentation. Therefore, there was a complementary but differential use of technologies and not a process of adoption and abandonment. New technical options were incorporated into previously established ones, thus offering greater flexibility to the subsistence system
Cultivating Care: Notes from a Mental Health Organisation in India
No full textThis Field Note reflects on the ethics and work of professional mental health care in the context of a non-profit counselling organisation in the city of Bengaluru, India. During fieldwork, having conversations with the counsellors and attending their group meetings brought the practices of cultivating care to the forefront. Deep listening and empathy are central to the care work of counselling. Yet these do not simply emerge from spontaneous feelings of love and compassion. Rather, they are cultivated through systematic individual and collective work. In this Field Note I focus on the collective modalities of cultivating care in terms of learning how to listen to the unsaid, recognise one’s ‘biases’, and establish the limits of care. These constitute the ethics of care work
