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Petra Janouchová - Hellenisation of Ancient Thrace based on epigraphical evidence Abstract: More than 4600 inscriptions in the Greek language come from Thrace, the area located in the Southeastern Balkan Peninsula. These inscriptions provide socio-demographic data, allowing the study of changing behavioural patterns in reaction to cross-cultural inter- actions. Traditionally, one of the essential indications of the influence of the Greek culture on the population of ancient Thrace was the practice of commissioning inscriptions in the Greek language. By using quantitative and systematic analysis, the inscriptions can be studied from a new perspective that places them into broader regional context. I use this methodology to assess the concept of Hellenization as one of the possible interpretative frameworks for the study of ancient society. Using a spatiotemporal analysis of inscrip- tions, this research shows that epigraphic production cannot be solely linked with the cultural and political influence of Greek speaking communities. However, the phenome- non of epigraphic production is closely connected to the growth of social complexity and consequent changes in the behavioural patterns of the population. The growth in social complexity is followed by an increase of epigraphic production of public and private...

Photographs and plans are an essential source for historical research (Münster, Kamposiori, Friedrichs, & Kröber, 2018) and key objects in Digital Humanities (Kwastek, 2014). Numerous digital image archives, containing vast numbers of photographs, have been set up in the context of digitization projects. These extensive repositories of image media are still difficult to search. It is not easy to identify sources relevant for research, analyze and contextualize them, or compare them with the historical original. The eHumanities research group HistStadt4D, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until July 2020 consists of 14 people – including 4 post-doctoral and 5 PhD researchers. Since a focal interest is to comprehensively investigate how to enhance accessibility of large scale image repositories, researchers and research approaches originate from the humanities, geoand information technologies as well as from educational and information studies. In contrast to adjacent projects dealing primarily with large scale linked text data as the Venice Time Machine project (“The Venice Time Machine,” 2017), sources addressed by the junior group are primarily historical photographs and plans. Historical media and their contextual information are being transferred into a 4D – 3D spatial and temporal scaled - model to support research and education on urban history. Content will be made accessible in two ways; via a 4D browser and a location-dependent augmented-reality representation. The prototype database consists of about 200,000 digitized historical photographs and plans of Dresden from the Deutsche Fotothek (“Deutsche Fotothek,”).

Digitalisierung generiert ‚hybride‘ Objekte, die zwar als digitale Datei lesbar und manipulierbar sind, das zugrundeliegende kulturhistorische Objekt jedoch weiterhin ‚enthalten‘. Eine Bibliothek, die Objekte aus ihren Beständen digitalisiert, begründet also eigentlich keine sog. digitale Bibliothek, sondern eine hybride Bibliothek. Im Falle musikalischer Überlieferung ist die Sachlage aufgrund der medienhistorischen Komplexität musikalischer Artefakte besonders unübersichtlich. Verschärft wird die heutige Situation noch durch die Erzeugnisse der Digital Humanities, die keineswegs bloß ‚Informationen‘ sind, sondern ihrerseits komplexe und in der Regel hybride Textgebilde, die häufig komplette digitalisierte Re-Publikationen von Kulturobjekten einbinden, die digital ‚beschriftet‘ und vernetzt werden. Das digitale ‚Dickicht‘ erfordert einen gleichsam genetischen und relationalen Katalog, in dem die konkreten kulturhistorischen Objekte in ihren konkreten Sammlungskontexten – also als Unikate – Ankerfunktion haben. / Digitization produces ‚hybrid‘ objects that are readable as digital data files but at the same time still ‚contain‘ the original cultural-historical object. In this perspective, ‚digital collections‘, ‚digital libraries‘, etc. are in fact hybrid collections, or libraries. For musical artefacts, the range of historical media is especially complex, which again concerns the digital world. Digital Humanities publications also contribute to the complex and confusing situation as they themselves are not only ‚information‘, but as a rule, complex and hybrid textual systems that often contain complete digitized re-publications of cultural objects, providing them with digital ‚inscriptions‘, and interlinking them. So the hybridity of ‚digital libraries‘ increases as soon as Digital Humanities publications are integrated. Therefore, metadata should mirror precisely the hybrid nature of the digitized/digital objects catalogued.

This study examines the object biographies of musical instruments and the function of age in the cultural and material history of the lute. It follows the central question of why old instruments were valued more greatly than new ones and what measures had to be executed to adapt the objects to the ever-changing musical style. It traces the lute in its several cultural functions from the 17th to the 19th century: as a musical instrument, as a symbol, as a commodity, and as an object that had to be adapted, repaired, and altered by several generations of lute makers. This interdisciplinary approach uses a broad spectrum of sources from treatises, lute manuals, forewords in printed lute music, and depictions of lutes in literature, poetry, and visual arts to construct a narrative of the appreciation of old musical instruments. It investigates the material changes that were necessary to ensure their continued use by a profound study of more than 100 instruments in public and private collections. The different business models and prices in the trade of lutes are compared and connected to the common knowledge about old instruments and their brand characteristics among lute players. This study employs methods from musicology, organology, material culture studies, acoustics, economics, art history, technology, and digital humanities. This multivalent approach enhances the understanding of the general dynamics of commodities as status symbols, object biographies, and functional objects and connects them to the material and cultural history of objects using the lute as a case study. / Die Studie untersucht die Objektbiografien von Musikinstrumenten und die Funktion des Alters für die kulturelle und materielle Geschichte von Lauteninstrumenten. Sie geht der zentralen Frage nach, warum alte Instrumente höher geschätzt wurden als neue und welche Maßnahmen ergriffen werden mussten, um die Objekte an den sich ständig verändernden Musikstil anzupassen. Sie verfolgt die Laute in ihren verschiedenen kulturellen Funktionen vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert: als Musikinstrument, als Symbol, als Gebrauchsgegenstand und als Objekt, das von mehreren Generationen von Lautenbauern angepasst, repariert und verändert werden musste. Der interdisziplinäre Ansatz nutzt ein breites Spektrum von Quellen wie Traktate, Lautenhandbücher, Vorworte in gedruckter Lautenmusik und Darstellungen von Lauten in Literatur, Poesie und bildender Kunst, um die Geschichte der Wertschätzung alter Musikinstrumente nachzuverfolgen. Anhand einer eingehenden Untersuchung von mehr als 100 Instrumenten in öffentlichen und privaten Sammlungen werden die Eingriffe untersucht, die notwendig waren, um ihre weitere Nutzung zu gewährleisten. Die unterschiedlichen Geschäftsmodelle und Preise im Handel mit Lauten werden verglichen und mit dem Wissensvorrat unter Lautenisten über alte Instrumente und deren Markencharakteristiken in Verbindung gebracht. Die Studie verwendet Methoden aus der Musikwissenschaft, der Organologie, der materiellen Kulturwissenschaft, der Akustik, der Ökonomie, der Kunstgeschichte, der Instrumentenbautechnologie und der Digital Humanities. Der multivalente Ansatz verbessert das Verständnis der allgemeinen Dynamik von Waren als Statussymbole, von Objektbiografien funktionaler Objekte und verbindet sie mit der materiellen und kulturellen Geschichte der Objekte am Beispiel der Laute.

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This dissertation examines the creation of innovative scholarly environments, publications, and resources in the context of a social knowledge creation affordances engendered by digital technologies. It draws on theoretical and praxis-oriented work undertaken as part of the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL), work that sought to model how a socially aware and interconnected domain of scholarly inquiry might operate. It examines and includes two digital projects that provide a way to interrogate the meaning of social knowledge creation as it relates to early modern studies. These digital projects – A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add. 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network – approach the social in three primary ways: they approach the social as a quality of material textuality, deriving from the editorial theories of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann; as a type of knowledge work that digital technologies can facilitate; and as a function of consciously designed platforms and tools emerging from the digital humanities. In other words, digital humanities practitioners are uniquely placed to move what has until now been customarily an analytical category and enact or embed it in a practical, applied way. The social is simultaneously a theoretical orientation and a way of designing and making digital tools — an act which in turn embeds such a theoretical framework in the material conditions of knowledge production. Digital humanists have sought to explain and often re-contextualise how knowledge work occurs in the humanities; as such, they form a body of scholarship that undergirds and enriches the present discussion around how the basic tasks of humanities work—research, discovery, analysis, publication, editing—might alter in the age of Web 2.0 and 3.0. Through sustained analysis of A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network, this dissertation argues argues that scholarly communication is shifting from a largely individualistic, single-author system of traditional peer-reviewed publication to a broadly collaborative, socially-invested ecosystem of peer production and public facing digital production. Further, it puts forward the idea that the insights gained from these long-term digital humanities projects – the importance of community investment and maintenance in social knowledge projects, building resources consonant with disciplinary expectations and norms, and the necessity of transparency and consultation in project development – are applicable more widely to shifting norms in scholarly communications. These insights and specific examples may change patters of behaviour that govern how humanities scholars act within a densely interwoven digital humanities. This dissertation is situated at the intersection of digital humanities, early modern studies, and to discussions of humanities knowledge infrastructure. In content it reports on and discusses two major digital humanities projects, putting a number of previous peer-reviewed, collaboratively authored publications in conversation with each other and the field at large. As the introduction discusses, each chapter other than the introduction and conclusion originally stood on its own. Incorporating previously published, peer-reviewed materials from respected journals, as well as grants, white papers, and working group documents, this project represents a departure from the proto-monograph model of dissertation work prevalent in the humanities in the United States and Canada. Each component chapter notes my role as author; for the majority of the included material, I acted as lead author or project manager, coordinating small teams of makers and writers. In form this means that the following intervenes in discussions surrounding graduate training and professionalization. Instead of taking the form of a cohesive monograph, this project is grounded in four years of theory and practice that closely resemble dissertations produced in the natural sciences. / Graduate

Analyzing cookbooks, gastronomic guides, literature and film, this dissertationoutlines the creation of a Spanish national cuisine. Studying the works of Carmen de Burgos, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Dionisio Pérez, Ana María Herrera, Juan Mari Arzak and Ferrán Adrià among others, the project examines the evolution of this nationalist discourse by identifying common and recurring themes in an effort to extrapolate and describe the historical and cultural evolution of food from 1900 to the present day. Within the framework of Food and Cultural Studies, this project treats cookbooks, culinary manifestos and guidebooks as texts. Influenced by a variety of culinary and gastronomic of critics such as Roland Barthes, Arjun Appadurai, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Mintz and others, this dissertation analyzes nationalism through the perspective of gastronomy as a cultural practice that contributes to individual and collective identity building. This dissertation concludes that Spanish national cuisine has been defined as a unique, pluralistic blend of regional cuisines since the early twentieth century. While early authors such as Pardo Bazán admit to heavy French influence and the centralized hegemony of Madrid due to its privileged status as economic and political capital of Spain, most subsequent authors acknowledge that Spanish national cuisine is a construction of various regional influences and by the 1960s, this regional view of national cuisine is universally accepted. Shaped during the twentieth century by civil war, Francoism and globalization, Spanish cuisine today continues to be a blend of regional cuisines that mutually influence each other while also exhibiting the effects of a globalized world by incorporating non-Spanish ingredients and techniques into nationally accepted dishes.

This thesis considers the phenomenological experience of e-reading (reading on an electronic screen) as a way-in to discussing wider issues of technology and our encounter with objects in our environments. By considering the resistance shown toward reading on iPads and Kindles in popular and academic discourse as a source of valuable “folk phenomenological” report, this thesis hopes to shed light on both the particular engagement of portable e-reading and the general experience of embodied encounters with artefacts. The first chapter will consider the shortcomings of contemporary definitions of technology and aims to provide its own definition commensurate to the task of describing the intimate and very human encounter with equipment, an encounter which will be described as “technological.” In the second chapter an ontology (begun in the background of the first) will be developed which primarily considers our encounter with things that are as embodied as ourselves. This ontology sees evolution as an epistemological concern, with every evolutionary act occurring as a response to environmental pressures and producing a knowledge of that environment. This knowledge, it will be argued, in light of conclusions drawn from an engagement with Object Oriented Ontology, can be tested only via repeatable successful action with that which might be known. Such evolutionary concerns, it will be further argued, are equally applicable to our artefacts. The third chapter will focus on metaphor and critical theory to consider how e-reading in particular might function as a material metaphor, enabling productive thought. It will conclude with readings of three texts which put the language of all three chapters to work. This thesis draws on several fields, including Critical Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Philosophy, the bringing together of which is intended to be of use to the still emerging Digital Humanities and the work's home discipline of English Studies as it gets used to the substantial alterations in the substrate of its object of study.

This thesis explores social memory, migration, place and belonging and cultural citizenship in Pulaski, Virginia, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). Through the lens of autoethnography, a participant-researcher model, I look closely at the affects that globalization has had on the economic and cultural life of this semi-rural community. The Autoethnographic approach has allowed me to reflect on my role as the co-author of oral and written narratives, a communal archive of historical images and a collection of collaborative photography. The impact of this thesis is, in part, a deeper understanding of collective social memory and the research we do on this subject exists in the border space between the self and community. As such, participant based modes of inquiry can help us help address the needs of academic institutions and expectation of community partners with a greater degree of success.