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The Warburg Iconographic Database: From relational tables to interoperable metadata
Full text linkThe Warburg Institute is one of the primary centres for iconology in the world. A core part of its collections is a photographic collection founded by Rudolf Wittkover in 1930. This collection of 400,000 images is arranged thematically by iconographic subject in approximately 18,000 subject folders. A significant proportion, around 40,000 images, has been digitized in a number of projects over the last ten years.
The database itself is an in-house production, designed and implemented in mySql using Php scripts written by the Deputy Curator of the Photographic Collection. Inevitably this presents problems of metadata interoperability: the database, and its metadata, is not compatible with community standards and so cannot be shared with others, wasting much of the scholarly work that has gone into its creation.
This chapter will detail a project to convert the database and its metadata from its current form to a fully interoperable, standards-based platform. The project involves detailed analyses of the functions of the database, the creation of new data models and their translation into interoperable formats such as METS, MODS and IIIF
How to sell a Carolingian illuminated manuscript in the nineteenth century? The Basle book-dealer J. H. von Speyr-Passavant and the "Moutier-Grandval Bible"
Full text linkLocating the value of the participatory approach to ‘humanitarian accountability’ in displacement contexts
Full text linkSo-called ‘participatory approaches’ are, along with associated concepts of accountability, empowerment and community development, now part of mainstream humanitarian discourse and reflected in many of the major standards and initiatives of the sector. Yet ‘participation’ is neither well defined nor is there consensus regarding its aims or its value to affected populations, particularly those affected by forced displacement.
This review explores the different, sometimes contrary, strands of thought within the humanitarian sector regarding ‘participation’ of affected persons in humanitarian programming. It traces the rise of the concept from its origins in the development sector to its transition through the arrival of rights-based approaches and the influence of shifts within Western governance. This history allows for an analysis of the varying motivations for participatory programming, whether ‘normative’, ‘instrumental’ or ‘emancipatory’ – all contributing in different ways to how accountability is viewed, pursued and found to be elusive in the sector.
Whilst participation remains a popular concept in itself, this article touches on the evolution of the concept over recent decades, providing context to newer debates around system innovation and governance, modalities of intervention such as cash-based programming and ultimately the drive for accountability to which all these contribute
International Evacuations of Refugees and Impact on Protection Spaces: Case Study of UNHCR Evacuation Programme in Libya
Full text linkCross-border mass evacuations of refugees are complex operations that require the support of the international community, which must agree to receive the evacuees. However, while they may be effective in evacuating a portion of the population at risk, they could leave behind non-evacuated refugees. In that case, a comprehensive analysis of how evacuations impact the protection spaces of the non-evacuated is to be carried out. Being highly visible and disruptive programmes, refugee mass evacuations also carry distinguishable political elements and can be instrumentalised for that. This essay researches the UNHCR evacuation programme from Libya. The programme has successfully evacuated circa 4,500 persons to safety, yet there are concerns regarding its scalability and impact on protection spaces. In Libya, UNHCR was forced to close a new dedicated facility after only 15 months, and reports emerged that damaged the agency’s reputation and questioned its work. In Niger and Rwanda, where evacuees are hosted pending resettlement, the proceedings require time, which slows the whole process. On the other side of the Mediterranean, Italy and the EU use the evacuation programme as their ‘humanitarian alibi’ for restrictive policies, making it harder for the refugees in Libya to escape the cycle of detention, exploitation, and abuses in which they are trapped. The Libya operations’ problems reveal many details of the complexity, inherent risks, and moral dilemmas of evacuating refugees
Towards a professional identity: Translators in the Victorian publisher’s archive
Full text linkThis essay situates itself at the intersection of book history and translation studies, and inquires how the archive, in this instance, those of British publishers, can help us chart the development of the professional literary translator in the nineteenth century. A key period in print culture, during which many cultural, technological and social shifts occurred, the Victorian era saw the rise of the literary profession, the relevance and impact of which on literary translation can be even better understood in the light of developments in British publishing practices. Using hitherto largely untapped primary sources and uncovering a number of significant processes in the publishing history of literary translation, the discussion offers fresh insights into the production of English-language translations in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on the archival records of Richard Bentley’s publishing house, including translators’ correspondence and the contractual agreements that underpinned the production and publication of translations, this study inquires into what may be termed the “proto-professionalization” of literary translators in the nineteenth century
When the lens is too wide: The political consequences of the visual dehumanization of refugees
Full text linkPhotojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them.
Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception
rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights
from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as
newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de) humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large
groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthylooking political leaders and supported fewer pro refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems
The Self in the Mind’s Eye: Revealing How We Truly See Ourselves Through Reverse Correlation
Full text linkIs there a way to visually depict the image people “see” of themselves in their minds’ eyes? And if so, what can these mental images tell us about ourselves? We used a computational reverse-correlation technique to explore individuals’ mental “self-portraits” of their faces and body shapes in an unbiased, data-driven way (total N = 116 adults). Self-portraits were similar to individuals’ real faces but, importantly, also contained clues to each person’s self-reported personality traits, which were reliably detected by external observers. Furthermore, people with higher social self-esteem produced more true-to-life self-portraits. Unlike face portraits, body portraits had negligible relationships with individuals’ actual body shape, but as with faces, they were influenced by people’s beliefs and emotions. We show how psychological beliefs and attitudes about oneself bias the perceptual representation of one’s appearance and provide a unique window into the internal mental self-representation—findings that have important implications for mental health and visual culture
Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain
Full text linkThe history of childhood and welfare in Britain through the eyes of children. Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain brings together the latest research as provided by the state, charities and families from 1830 to 1980. Demonstrating how the young were integral to the making, interpretation, delivery and impact of welfare services, the chapters consider a wide range of investments in young people’s lives, including residential institutions, emigration schemes, hospitals and clinics, schools, social housing and familial care. Drawing upon thousands of personal testimonies, including a wealth of writing by children themselves, the book shows that we can only understand the history and impact of welfare if we listen to children’s experiences
On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed
Full text linkFor over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality
Visceral politics: a theoretical and empirical proof of concept
Full text linkWhile the study of affect and emotion has a long history in psychological sciences and neuroscience, the very question of how visceral states have come to the forefront of politics remains poorly understood. The concept of visceral politics captures how the physiological nature of our engagement with the social world influences how we make decisions, just as socio-political forces recruit our physiology to influence our socio-political behaviour. This line of research attempts to bridge the psychophysiological mechanisms that are responsible for our affective states with the historical socio-cultural context in which such states are experienced. We review findings and hypotheses at the intersections of life sciences, social sciences and humanities to shed light on how and why people come to experience such emotions in politics and what if any are their behavioural consequences. To answer these questions, we provide insights from predictive coding accounts of interoception and emotion and a proof of concept experiment to highlight the role of visceral states in political behaviour