1,720,968 research outputs found
Reframing reconstruction : trajectories of built heritage in Bhaktapur, Nepal after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake
Full text linkReconstruction of built heritage has been a focal point within the post-disaster recovery landscape in Nepal, following the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. Within the field of heritage conservation, reconstruction remains a contentious practice, largely due to the challenges it presents to conceptualisations of heritage as permanent, contingent on historicity, and at risk. Concomitantly, within the field of disaster risk management, post-disaster reconstruction and recovery are framed as opportunities for correction, improvement, and reduction of future disaster risks. Reconstruction in Nepal is also part of a complex ecology of the quotidian, local practices of caring for the built environment that responds to philosophical approaches, religious beliefs, and regional traditions. This thesis examines reconstruction through three frames: ‘reconstruction-as-restoration' which is framed by the field of heritage conservation, ‘reconstruction-as-recovery' which is framed by the field of disaster risk management, and ‘reconstruction-as-renewal' which is framed by local practices of care and repair. The thesis focuses on the post-disaster landscape of Bhaktapur, Nepal, tracing diverse trajectories of individual heritage reconstruction projects through a fourth frame, namely, reconstruction-in-practice, which seeks to describe both, the disjunctions between the three discursive frames of reconstruction and the gaps between discourse and practice in the city. Reconstruction of built heritage is examined as a negotiation between individual and community aspirations, local governance, and national and international policy. I explore themes of modernity and tradition, local and global, fragment and whole, not as binaries but relationalities mediating Bhaktapur’s post-disaster heritage reconstruction. The central finding of this research is that reconstruction not only functions as a form of heritage making, negotiating old and new values, collective memories, and associations, but equally as a form of urbanisation that contributes to the economy of Bhaktapur as a city increasingly dependent on heritage tourism. Multiple forms of authorisation, bureaucracy, and ritual underpin reconstruction in Bhaktapur, navigating community participation and formal governance structures at the city, state, and international scales. But the outcomes of reconstruction are also a negotiation with religious practices, (re)building traditions, and the deployment of various forms of heritage and disaster ‘expertise’. Materials, technologies, and aesthetics are politically deployed to erase or reclaim historical narratives through reconstruction, curating the degree of change and continuity for listed heritage, religious places, homes as well as neighbourhoods, in attempts to create a unified aesthetic. Both disaster and modernity are forces to be contended with, in Bhaktapur, as it (re)claims its identity as a ‘heritage city’ through reconstruction
Inventing Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal: The Trajectories of Lime in Heritage Reconstruction
Full text linkFirst paragraph: In the years that have followed the widespread devastation of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, built heritage has emerged as a key sector in the post-disaster recovery landscape of Nepal, receiving funding and expertise through both national and international sources. Most international attention has been directed toward reconstruction of built heritage in the Kathmandu Valley, which along with being the political and economic center of the country is also home to some of the most globally recognized heritage and tourism destinations in Nepal. In particular, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Kathmandu Valley, a series of seven monument zones, namely the Durbar Squares in the historic capital cities of Kathmandu, Patan (Lalitpur), and Bhaktapur, as well as the religious ensembles of Swayambhu, Bauddhanath, Pashupati, and Changu Narayan, has been at the center of debates over the post-disaster reconstruction of built heritage. Heritage conservation practitioners, both within Nepal and internationally have engaged in extensive debates surrounding issues of material and historic authenticity, as well as the appropriateness of materials, building technologies, and construction systems used in reconstruction. Considerable attention has also been paid to recurring practices of reconstruction (and other forms of heritage restoration and repair) that have led to substantial change in building form and style over time. Amid these ongoing debates, a recurring point of contention of practitioners working in Kathmandu Valley has been the use of lime mortars and plasters as a replacement for mud- (or clay-) based mortars. This paper traces the evolution of the discourse over the past several decades that has legitimized lime as a “traditional” building material in ongoing heritage reconstruction and the conflicts that have arisen surrounding its usage in the aftermath of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. We argue that the Department of Archaeology (DoA) narratives and associated local policies promoting lime for the conservation and reconstruction of built heritage in the Kathmandu Valley functions as an “invented tradition.” We analyze how lime has been simultaneously classified as traditional and modern, vernacular and foreign by engaging with previous restoration projects as well as recent reconstruction of built heritage in the Bhaktapur Durbar Square.Output Status: Forthcomin
Samuel Swinton Jacob e il Jeypore Portfolio: considerazioni sulla documentazione in architettura.
Full text linkIl saggio [i] illustra l’opera di Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob, una figura rilevante dell’epoca coloniale, che fu profondamente coinvolto, come architetto, nel revival dell’architettura tradizionale indiana nello Stato di Jeypore (ora Jaipur) durante il primo periodo del XIX secolo. In particolare il focus è sul Catalogo dei dettagli architettonici di Jeypore che è costituito dalla raccolta di una serie di rilievi compiuti dallo stesso Jacob. Il saggio esamina il contesto in cui il Catalogo è stato prodotto e la sua influenza sulle costruzioni tradizionali. Inoltre si evidenzia l’evoluzione del concetto di documentazione in India e le sue implicazioni culturali. [i] Questo saggio è un estratto della tesi di Master di Vanicka Arora
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
(Re)constructing heritage in Bhaktapur, Nepal
No full textNepal’s history is punctuated with a series of devastating earthquakes; the most recent being the Gorkha Earthquake of 2015. In the past five years, post-disaster recovery has been slow and arduous because of Nepal’s geo-political landscape, ecology and economy. Nepal’s vibrant cultural heritage is central to the process of recovery, not only for its contributions to the tourism industry but also as a matter of national and regional identity. There has been sustained international focus on the Kathmandu Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site, a series of seven ensembles of Hindu and Buddhist religious places and palatial complexes (UNESCO WHC, 2007, 2017). My doctoral research looks at post-disaster reconstruction of the built heritage in the city of Bhaktapur located a few kilometres outside the capital Kathmandu. In this essay, I argue that the physical reconstruction of Bhaktapur’s built heritage goes beyond an exercise in modernity and heritage practice. Instead, reconstruction of the built heritage enacts multiple intents and agencies through the deployment of different forms of expertise and labour. I focus on one of the seven ensembles of the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site—the Durbar Square—in Bhaktapur. The square itself is a series of built and open spaces in the centre of the historic core of city, with large palace buildings, tiered temples, shikhara (spire) style temples, water-bodies, platforms and rest-houses. Apart from being the central tourist attraction of the city, the Durbar Square functions as Bhaktapur’s civic and administrative core, and is at the heart of everyday commerce, leisure and religious life of most of its residents
Attention is All You Want: Machinic Gaze and the Anthropocene
Full text linkThis chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and
synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as
MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images
and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as
banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refracted commentary on the
preoccupations of Internet visual culture. While the effects of AI on visual
culture may themselves be transformative or catastrophic, we are more
interested here in how it has been trained to imagine shared human, technical
and ecological futures. Through a series of textual prompts that marry elements
of the Anthropocenic and Australian environmental vernacular, we examine how
this emergent machinic gaze both looks out, through its compositions of
futuristic landscapes, and looks back, towards an observing and observed human
subject. In its varied assistive, surveillant and generative roles,
computational vision not only mirrors human desire but articulates oblique
demands of its own.Comment: 19 page
Five years on from the earthquake in Bhaktapur, Nepal, heritage-led recovery is uniting community
No full textSince the Gorkha earthquake killed almost 9,000 people in April 2015, Nepal has been on a slow and arduous route to recovery. Nepal’s vibrant cultural heritage of monuments, religious places, crafts, festivals and traditional practices has been key to this process
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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