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Digitally mediated encounters at the Unforgotten Lives exhibition.
No full textThe paper aims to evaluate the lessons from the Unforgotten Lives exhibition, a collaboration between the London Metropolitan Archives and Northeastern University London. The exhibition displays the Switching the Lens dataset, a collection of parish records mentioning people of colour in London. We designed digital tools to evoke a sense of ‘deep place’, where visitors are encouraged to consider the long-range presence of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage by making connections between past and present.
Three digital components, acting as contact zones, tackled this purpose in complementary ways. Firstly, an ‘Interactive Map’ in the heart of the exhibition allows users to browse the dataset, focusing on individuals and locations. Secondly, an animated Flow Map presents the routes and roots of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage, showcasing the global nature of migration. Finally, a smartphone walking application encourages the visitors to interact with the indigenous heritage of London after leaving, extending the exhibit over the walls of the archives by directly exploring the city. By juxtaposing the records (material temporal), the maps (digital spatial) and the app (digital-material spatial), the visitor can experience a synthesis between different forms of encounter with their local heritage.
The collaboration also reflects opportunities for partnerships. Universities with institutional infrastructure and research support can complement archives holding source material. It is an appropriate time for collaboration: many digital databases long in the making remain inaccessible or unengaging to the public. Our paper discusses the benefits and limitations of this partnership by evaluating the visitors’ engagement with our digital spaces
Switching the Lens: Constructing Personal Narratives through Colonial History Datasets
Get PDFThis case study gets students to use databases to create biographical profiles of figures from Britain’s domestic colonial history. By focusing on multiracial settlement in the UK from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, it counterbalances approaches that depict empire as a solely overseas phenomenon. The primary sources come from the London Metropolitan Archives’ ‘Switching the Lens’ database of parish records of baptisms, marriages and burials of people with African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous (e.g. Aboriginal Australian) heritage. The activities, however, can be readily adapted to other datasets. It is suitable for able sixth form level students and first year undergraduates. The exercise requires the availability of computers with internet access to use in class, but no preexisting technical knowledge is assumed or required on the part of either instructors or students. The emphasis is on student-led enquiry, with groups working together to explore the database, making notes of surprising or exciting discoveries. They will consider the technical and methodological challenges that emerge, examining what evidence is missing and how the perspectives of those creating the sources can distort what is recorded. In lesson two, students write short biographical profiles of an individual they have found. Created as a team, these 500 word personal narratives will require students to seek out additional information on the person and consider contextual questions of geography and chronology. In the process, they will reflect on the challenges historians encounter when dealing with the fragmentary but important evidence of Britain’s longstanding multiracial past
Determining the ability for universal quantum computing: Testing controllability via dimensional expressivity
Get PDFOperator controllability refers to the ability to implement an arbitrary unitary in SU(N) and is a prerequisite for universal quantum computing. Controllability tests can be used in the design of quantum devices to reduce the number of external controls. Their practical use is hampered, however, by the exponential scaling of their numerical effort with the number of qubits. Here, we devise a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm based on a parametrized quantum circuit. We show that controllability is linked to the number of independent parameters, which can be obtained by dimensional expressivity analysis. We exemplify the application of the algorithm to qubit arrays with nearest-neighbour couplings and local controls. Our work provides a systematic approach to the resource-efficient design of quantum chips
The Limit of the Useful
No full textThe first English-language translation of an essential, early work key to understanding the French philosopher's later thought.
In the decade prior to the publication of Inner Experience (L'expérience intérieure), the twentieth-century French philosopher Georges Bataille produced a nascent masterwork containing some of his most original and extensive reflections on a range of subjects. With thoughts on ritual sacrifice and military conquest, the nature of laughter, and the mechanisms of capitalism, The Limit of the Useful, as Bataille had planned to title the work, illuminates the philosopher's later corpus, yet it remained unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, and untranslated until now.
This is the first English-language translation of what Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott argue is one of Bataille's most structurally consistent works. Paired with draft essays and plans for The Accursed Share, along with over a hundred pages of appendixes and notes, the volume distinctively elaborates Bataille's thought. The Limit of the Useful spans a decade of rich intellectual ferment in Bataille's life as he first formulated his challenge to capitalism, engaging with concepts and ideas in ways not seen in his other published works. The volume bridges the gap between Bataille's surrealist literary writings and later scientific pretensions, drawing attention to, and filling in, an overlooked lacuna in his oeuvre
“Intimate Scripts” in the Chanson de Jérusalem: Another Approach to Crusader Motivation
Get PDFSince the pioneering scholarship of Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull in the last decade of the twentieth century, studies of crusader motivation have primarily focused on the early crusading movement, above all the First Crusade (1095–99), and have privileged a specific source type: charter evidence. Comparatively little attention has been afforded to the topic of crusader motivation in the thirteenth century, with a lack of scholarly consensus regarding the source material and methodologies that historians should utilize and prioritize. This article proposes that greater engagement with the history of emotions—specifically, the methodological approach of “intimate scripts,” which emphasizes the ability of literature to teach patterns of feeling and elicit emotional responses—offers a path forward. It does so by applying this framework, devised by Sarah McNamer in 2010 but largely neglected by historians, to the Chanson de Jérusalem: the third instalment in the triptych of Old French chansons de geste set during the First Crusade, known collectively as the central trilogy of the Old French Crusade Cycle. By scripting emotion, it is argued, the Jérusalem would have not only taught prospective crusaders how to feel and how to perform their feelings on crusade, but potentially also garnered actual emotional responses from listeners—emotional responses that may well have triggered crusade participation
Social media and political participation: making sense of digital feminist Twitter artifacts in the aftermath of a Belfast rape trial and# IBelieveHer
No full textA systemic approach to sustainable railway infrastructure planning: The case study of Milton Keynes
No full textPurpose
With the rise in demand and adoption of smart city initiatives, it is imperative to plan the railway infrastructure, as it will have a huge positive impact if adequately integrated into the planning process. Given the complexities involved, a whole systems thinking framework provides a useful platform for rail transport planners.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a simple, adoptable framework utilising systems thinking concepts and techniques taking into cognisance the key stakeholders. Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom is the adopted case study.
Findings
Selected systems thinking tools and techniques are adopted to develop a framework for mapping stakeholders and attributes when developing sustainable rail transport systems, taking note of their core functionalities and the complex systems wherein they exist.
Practical implications
The desire to build future (smart) cities is to effectively match infrastructural resources with a rapidly growing population, and the railway sector can play a strategic role in building a much more competitive low-carbon-emission transport system, which is a driving force for sustainable development.
Social implications
The urban rail service has become vital to urban development as railway stations serve as hubs for sustainable mobility to meet local requirements. Moreover, it takes extra effort to input railway development into smart city plans, as it is a herculean task to get governments to focus on it with clarity of purpose in passing legislation.
Originality/value
The developed framework reduces complexities when planning and designing rail transport systems compared to many of the existing reductionist planning approaches. The simplicity of the framework would also make it easily adoptable by a wide range of users
Trans Feminist Epistemologies in the US Second Wave
No full textWhy do “second wave” and “trans feminism” rarely get considered together? Challenging the idea that trans feminism is antagonistic to, or arrived after, second wave feminism, Emily Cousens re-orients trans epistemologies as crucial sites of second wave feminist theorising. By revisiting the contributions of trans individuals writing in underground print publications, as well as the more well-known arguments of Andrea Dworkin, this book demonstrates that valuable yet overlooked trans feminist philosophies of sex and gender were present throughout the US second wave. It argues that not only were these trans feminist epistemologies an important component of second wave feminism's knowledge production, but that this period has an unacknowledged trans feminist legacy
Entering the archive of second-wave transfeminist print culture: The journal of male feminism
Get PDFCommon stories of second-wave feminism equate the period either explicitly or by reference to its presumed biological essentialism, with trans-exclusionary feminism. This article deep-dives into issues published between 1977 and 1979 of the Journal of Male Feminism, an underground newsletter for a predominantly North American-based male-to-female(M-T-F) cross-dressing community. It argues that these texts contain a rich set of theoretical resources and nuanced perspectives on sex and gender developed by trans people in the 1970s and therefore deserve to be read as part of an expanded canon of second-wave feminis