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1

Sagebiel, V. "The Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections - TxVP." Geological Curator 11, no. 3 (June 2020): 249–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.55468/gc1493.

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The purpose of this note is to establish the museum collection acronym TxVP for the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections (hereafter referred to as the collection) and to briefly discuss its history as the Texas state repository as codified in the general laws of the state of Texas. The Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections rank among the largest vertebrate fossil collections in the world and have enjoyed continuous support from the state of Texas. However, owing to the multiple functions of the collection as a museum object collection, state repository, source of teaching material, and international research institution its governance over the years has shifted with the relative emphasis of those roles. Repeated administrative changes over the past 130 years have resulted in a confusing array of institutional acronyms being applied to the collection. The most recent internal administrative change at The University of Texas at Austin transferred the collections from the Texas Memorial Museum to the Jackson School of Geosciences. This move prompted the curatorial committee to unanimously decide on the creation and establishment of TxVP as the permanent collection acronym from now on. The purpose for this new designation is to correctly ascribe vertebrate fossils to the State Collections, rather than to prior governing institutions that are unaffiliated with, and geographically removed from, the collections.
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Zachos, Louis G. "Occurrence of the spatangid echinoid Maretia arguta (Clark) in the Middle Eocene of Texas." Journal of Paleontology 67, no. 1 (January 1993): 148–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022336000021284.

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Echinoid fragments were reported by Zachos (1990) from a Weches Formation (Clairborne) outcrop on Hooker Creek in Burleson County, Texas. Enough fragments have been found at the latter locality to piece together a composite identifiable as a species of the spatangid genus Maretia, most likely M. arguta. This species has not previously been reported outside of Clarke County, Mississippi. A search of the stratigraphic collections of the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin, Texas, has uncovered several previously unidentified specimens of M. arguta from two Weches localities, at Kickapoo Shoals on the Trinity River in Houston County and at Nacogdoches in Nacogdoches County. In addition, spatangoid fragments, some of which are attributable to M. arguta, are common in collections from the Weches and Cook Mountain Formations.
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Dallam, Marie W. "The Branch Davidian Symposium and Twentieth Anniversary Memorial, 18–19 April 2013." Nova Religio 17, no. 2 (February 2013): 61–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.17.2.61.

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2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas. On 18 April 2013 an academic symposium was held at Baylor University featuring more than half a dozen speakers who explored topics related to the Branch Davidian religious community, the raid and siege, the fire, and the aftermath. On 19 April 2013 a memorial service was held in Waco that included speakers, a reading of the names of the dead, and the unveiling of a new museum exhibit about the Branch Davidians. The two events, recounted here, provided public forums for acknowledging and reflecting on the events that took place in Waco in 1993.
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Nelson, Velvet. "Tour Guide Perspectives on Representations of Slavery at a Heritage Museum." Tourism Culture & Communication 20, no. 1 (March 27, 2020): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/194341420x15692567324895.

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In recent years, scholars have called for greater recognition and representation of the role of slavery and the contributions of the enslaved at a multitude of heritage sites in, and outside, of the US. The framework of difficult heritage, as grounded in difficult knowledge, draws attention to the problems associated with the processes of heritage-making, including the challenges faced by those tasked with representing traumatic pasts as well as by those who encounter the representations. Thus, the purpose of this exploratory study was to obtain the perspectives of tour guides regarding a greater representation of slavery at one possible heritage museum, the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas, USA. These guides are crucial actors because they are responsible for both representing the heritage of slavery and managing a potentially complex range of visitor responses to these representations. The study drew from participant observation of guided tours of the museum property and semistructured interviews with museum staff, including those individuals who are directly responsible for guiding tours or play a supporting role in tours. While the guides indicated that they felt slavery was, indeed, an appropriate topic at the site, they expressed concerns about expanding representation of the topic. These concerns included the logistical constraints faced on tours, their knowledge of and comfort with the topic, and their perceptions about visitor expectations for the museum.
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Guedes, Sandra Paschoal Leite de Camargo, and Gina Esther Issberner. "O Memorial de Imigração Polonesa em Curitiba: dinâmicas culturais e interesses políticos no âmbito memoralista." Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 25, no. 1 (April 2017): 427–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1982-02672017v25n0115.

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RESUMO Neste artigo, analisa-se o conceito de memorial, considerando as atuais definições de Museu propostas pelo Conselho Internacional de Museus e pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, tendo como objeto de investigação o Memorial de Imigração Polonesa de Curitiba. Evidenciam-se a importância e a complexidade no trato com o patrimônio e as dificuldades de pensá-lo a partir dos sujeitos e das referências culturais de determinado grupo em contraponto aos interesses políticos e econômicos; no caso em questão, voltadas às necessidades da política de city marketing como estratégia de construção da imagem da cidade. Para tanto, foram considerados os perfis de atuação dos memoriais em diferentes partes do mundo, na tentativa de delimitação conceitual, exemplificando-se a pluralidade de temas e formatos dessas instituições no âmbito nacional e global. As discussões levantadas permitem pensar que os Museus Memoriais desempenham as atividades de um memorial no âmbito museológico, confirmando a ambivalência dessas duas instituições e sua interface privilegiada com o poder político.
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Chen, Chia-Li, and Min-Hsiu Liao. "National Identity, International Visitors: Narration and Translation of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum." Museum and Society 15, no. 1 (June 9, 2017): 56–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.29311/mas.v15i1.662.

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Although many museums nowadays provide multilingual services, translations in museums have not received enough attention from researchers. The issue of how ideology is embedded in museum texts is translated is particularly underresearched. Since museums are often important sites for tourists to learn about a nation, translation plays a pivotal role in mediating how international visitors construct the host nation’s identity. The translation of national identity is even more important when sensitive topics are dealt with, such as exhibitions of the past in memorial museums. This paper takes the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum as a case study to examine how Taiwanese identity is formatted in the Chinese text and reframed in the English translation. The current study found inconsistent historical perspectives embedded in both texts, particularly in the English translation. We argue that, without awareness of ideological assumptions embedded in translations, museums run the risk of sending unintended messages to international visitors.
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Liao, Min-Hsiu. "Translating time and space in the memorial museum." Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (November 28, 2016): 181–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ts.5.2.02lia.

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Translation has long been conceptualized in metaphors of space, whereas its temporal aspect is relatively underexplored. However, recently scholars have argued that translation does not only carry across but also carries forward, i.e., texts survive through time. The aim of this study is to examine how time and space are manipulated in translation, with a particular focus on how the two dimensions interact with each other. To achieve this aim, a memorial museum has been chosen for investigation. A museum, as a site to display dislocated objects from the past, constructs a unique temporal-spatial dramaturgy. This study argues that shifts of temporal-spatial frames in museum translations have a significant impact on how a nation’s past, present and future are perceived by target readers.
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Andrew, Brook. "Trading Lines." ARTMargins 5, no. 1 (February 2016): 80–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00132.

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Trading Lines is a photo essay that tracks nearly twenty years of research within international museums as well as collecting and sharing photographs and objects. This research began in 1996 at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, where I encountered an Aboriginal skull from N.S.W. Australia —that was part of the active international Aboriginal human remains trade activated from the early 18th century. This photo essay shares correspondence between myself and private and public collection managers and collectors. Some images are from actual installations where I have combined objects with artworks, as a whole, it is an attempt to draw lines between pure collection activities and legitimate anguish many people feel for not only their cultural heritage but also those of the human remains trade. Even though repatriation of human remains to Aboriginal communities in Australia has been an active endeavor over the last 10 or more years, many human remains, photos and other important documents are still being uncovered, repatriated and traded. The comparable texts and images explore the margins of both museum practice and community involvement and understanding of these actions and communications. I intend to present this photo essay as an archive that engages people within their own curiosity of access to a complex world of negotiations. Further documents, human remains and other materials are gradually and continually unearthed in museums and sold through private collections and markets. Reflecting on this, who owns their own culture and history, and how does a culture remember when they are not in receipt of their cultural materials. I hope to stimulate important considerations about the power of a public archive, noting the complex protocol tensions that can arise and how these lines or margins are negotiated, crossed, hidden or shared.
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Wienberg, Jes. "Kanon og glemsel – Arkæologiens mindesmærker." Kuml 56, no. 56 (October 31, 2007): 237–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/kuml.v56i56.24683.

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Canon and oblivion. The memorials of archaeologyThe article takes its point of departure in the sun chariot; the find itself and its find site at Trundholm bog where it was discovered in 1902. The famous sun chariot, now at the National Museum in Copenhagen, is a national treasure included in the Danish “Cultural Canon” and “History Canon”.The find site itself has alternated bet­ween experiencing intense attention and oblivion. A monument was erected in 1925; a new monument was then created in 1962 and later moved in 2002. The event of 1962 was followed by ceremonies, speeches and songs, and anniversary celebrations were held in 2002, during which a copy of the sun chariot was sacrificed.The memorial at Trundholm bog is only one of several memorials at archaeological find sites in Denmark. Which finds have been commemorated and marked by memorials? When did this happen? Who took the initiative? How were they executed? Why are these finds remembered? What picture of the past do we meet in this canon in stone?Find sites and archaeological memorials have been neglected in archaeology and by recent trends in the study of the history of archaeology. Considering the impressive research on monuments and monumentality in archaeology, this is astonishing. However, memorials in general receive attention in an active research field on the use of history and heritage studies, where historians and ethnologists dominate. The main focus here is, however, on war memorials. An important source of inspiration has been provided by a project led by the French historian Pierre Nora who claims that memorial sites are established when the living memory is threatened (a thesis refuted by the many Danish “Reunion” monuments erected even before the day of reunification in 1920).Translated into Danish conditions, studies of the culture of remembrance and memorials have focused on the wars of 1848-50 and 1864, the Reunion in 1920, the Occupation in 1940-45 and, more generally, on conflicts in the borderland bet­ween Denmark and Germany.In relation to the total number of memorials and public meeting places in Denmark, archaeological memorials of archaeology are few in number, around 1 % of the total. However, they prompt crucial questions concerning the use of the past, on canon and oblivion.“Canon” means rule, and canonical texts are the supposed genuine texts in the Bible. The concept of canon became a topic in the 1990s when Harold Bloom, in “The Western Canon”, identified a number of books as being canonical. In Denmark, canon has been a great issue in recent years with the appearance of the “Danish Literary Canon” in 2004, and the “Cultural Canon” and the “History Canon”, both in 2006. The latter includes the Ertebølle culture, the sun chariot and the Jelling stone. The political context for the creation of canon lists is the so-called “cultural conflict” and the debate concerning immigration and “foreigners”.Canon and canonization means a struggle against relativism and oblivion. Canon means that something ought to be remembered while something else is allowed to be forgotten. Canon lists are constructed when works and values are perceived as being threatened by oblivion. Without ephemerality and oblivion there is no need for canon lists. Canon and oblivion are linked.Memorials mean canonization of certain individuals, collectives, events and places, while others are allowed to be forgotten. Consequently, archaeological memorials constitute part of the canonization of a few finds and find sites. According to Pierre Nora’s thesis, memorials are established when the places are in danger of being forgotten.Whether one likes canon lists or not, they are a fact. There has always been a process of prioritisation, leading to some finds being preserved and others discarded, some being exhibited and others ending up in the stores.Canonization is expressed in the classical “Seven Wonders of the World”, the “Seven New Wonders of the World” and the World Heritage list. A find may be declared as treasure trove, as being of “unique national significance” or be honoured by the publication of a monograph or by being given its own museum.In practice, the same few finds occur in different contexts. There seems to be a consensus within the subject of canonization of valuing what is well preserved, unique, made of precious metals, bears images and is monumental. A top-ten canon list of prehistoric finds from Denmark according to this consensus would probably include the following finds: The sun chariot from Trundholm, the girl from Egtved, the Dejbjerg carts, the Gundestrup cauldron, Tollund man, the golden horns from Gallehus, the Mammen or Bjerringhøj grave, the Ladby ship and the Skuldelev ships.Just as the past may be used in many different ways, there are many forms of memorial related to monuments from the past or to archaeological excavations. Memorials were constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries at locations where members of the royal family had conducted archaeology. As with most other memorials from that time, the prince is at the centre, while antiquity and archaeology create a brilliant background, for example at Jægerpris (fig. 2). Memorials celebrating King Frederik VII were created at the Dæmpegård dolmen and at the ruin of Asserbo castle. A memorial celebrating Count Frederik Sehested was erected at Møllegårdsmarken (fig. 3). Later there were also memorials celebrating the architect C.M. Smith at the ruin of Kalø Castle and Svend Dyhre Rasmussen and Axel Steensberg, respectively the finder and the excavator of the medieval village at Borup Ris.Several memorials were erected in the decades around 1900 to commemorate important events or persons in Danish history, for example by Thor Lange. The memorials were often located at sites and monuments that had recently been excavated, for example at Fjenneslev (fig. 4).A large number of memorials commemorate abandoned churches, monasteries, castles or barrows that have now disappeared, for example at the monument (fig. 5) near Bjerringhøj.Memorials were erected in the first half of the 20th century near large prehistoric monuments which also functioned as public meeting places, for example at Glavendrup, Gudbjerglund and Hohøj. Prehistoric monuments, especially dolmens, were also used as models when new memorials were created during the 19th and 20th centuries.Finally, sculptures were produced at the end of the 19th century sculptures where the motif was a famous archaeological find – the golden horns, the girl from Egtved, the sun chariot and the woman from Skrydstrup.In the following, this article will focus on a category of memorials raised to commemorate an archaeological find. In Denmark, 24 archaeological find sites have been marked by a total of 26 monuments (fig. 6). This survey is based on excursions, scanning the literature, googling on the web and contact with colleagues. The monuments are presented chronological, i.e. by date of erection. 1-2) The golden horns from Gallehus: Found in 1639 and 1734; two monu­ments in 1907. 3) The Snoldelev runic stone: Found in c. 1780; monument in 1915. 4) The sun chariot from Trundholm bog: Found in 1902; monument in 1925; renewed in 1962 and moved in 2002. 5) The grave mound from Egtved: Found in 1921; monument in 1930. 6) The Dejbjerg carts. Found in 1881-83; monument in 1933. 7) The Gundestrup cauldron: Found in 1891; wooden stake in 1934; replaced with a monument in 1935. 8) The Bregnebjerg burial ground: Found in 1932; miniature dolmen in 1934. 9) The Brangstrup gold hoard. Found in 1865; monument in 1935.10-11) Maglemose settlements in Mulle­rup bog: Found in 1900-02; two monuments in 1935 and 1936. 12) The Skarpsalling vessel from Oudrup Heath: Found in 1891; monument in 1936. 13) The Juellinge burial ground: Found in 1909; monument in 1937. 14) The Ladby ship: Found in 1935; monument probably in 1937. 15) The Hoby grave: Found in 1920; monument in 1939. 16) The Maltbæk lurs: Found in 1861 and 1863; monument in 1942. 17) Ginnerup settlement: First excavation in 1922; monument in 1945. 18) The golden boats from Nors: Found in 1885; monument in 1945. 19) The Sædinge runic stone: Found in 1854; monument in 1945. 20) The Nydam boat: Found in 1863; monument in 1947. 21) The aurochs from Vig: Found in 1904; monument in 1957. 22) Tollund Man: Found in 1950; wooden stake in 1968; renewed inscription in 2000. 23) The Veksø helmets: Found in 1942; monument in 1992. 24) The Bjæverskov coin hoard. Found in 1999; monument in 1999. 25) The Frydenhøj sword from Hvidovre: Found in 1929; monument in 2001; renewed in 2005. 26) The Bellinge key: Found in 1880; monument in 2003.Two monuments (fig. 7) raised in 1997 at Gallehus, where the golden horns were found, marked a new trend. From then onwards the find itself and its popular finders came into focus. At the same time the classical or old Norse style of the memorials was replaced by simple menhirs or boulders with an inscription and sometimes also an image of the find. One memorial was constructed as a miniature dolmen and a few took the form of a wooden stake.The finds marked by memorials represent a broader spectrum than the top-ten list. They represent all periods from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages over most of Denmark. Memorials were created throughout the 20th century; in greatest numbers in the 1930s and 1940s, but with none between 1968 and 1992.The inscriptions mention what was found and, in most cases, also when it happened. Sometimes the finder is named and, in a few instances, also the person on whose initiative the memorial was erected. The latter was usually a representative part of the political agency of the time. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the royal family and the aristocracy. In the 20th century it was workers, teachers, doctors, priests, farmers and, in many cases, local historical societies who were responsible, as seen on the islands of Lolland and Falster, where ten memorials were erected between 1936 and 1951 to commemorate historical events, individuals, monuments or finds.The memorial from 2001 at the find site of the Frydenhøj sword in Hvidovre represents an innovation in the tradition of marking history in the landscape. The memorial is a monumental hybrid between signposting and public art (fig. 8). It formed part of a communication project called “History in the Street”, which involved telling the history of a Copenhagen suburb right there where it actually happened.The memorials marking archaeological finds relate to the nation and to nationalism in several ways. The monuments at Gallehus should, therefore, be seen in the context of a struggle concerning both the historical allegiance and future destiny of Schleswig or Southern Jutland. More generally, the national perspective occurs in inscriptions using concepts such as “the people”, “Denmark” and “the Danes”, even if these were irrelevant in prehistory, e.g. when the monument from 1930 at Egtved mentions “A young Danish girl” (fig. 9). This use of the past to legitimise the nation, belongs to the epoch of World War I, World War II and the 1930s. The influence of nationalism was often reflected in the ceremonies when the memorials were unveiled, with speeches, flags and songs.According to Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Inge Adriansen, prehistoric objects that are applicable as national symbols, should satisfy three criteria. The should: 1) be unusual and remarkable by their technical and artistic quality; 2) have been produced locally, i.e. be Danish; 3) have been used in religious ceremonies or processions. The 26 archaeological finds marked with memorials only partly fit these criteria. The finds also include more ordinary finds: a burial ground, settlements, runic stones, a coin hoard, a sword and a key. Several of the finds were produced abroad: the Gundestrup cauldron, the Brangstrup jewellery and coins and the Hoby silver cups.It is tempting to interpret the Danish cultural canon as a new expression of a national use of the past in the present. Nostalgia, the use of the past and the creation of memorials are often explained as an expression of crisis in society. This seems reasonable for the many memorials from 1915-45 with inscriptions mentioning hope, consolation and darkness. However, why are there no memorials from the economic crisis years of the 1970s and 1980s? It seems as if the past is recalled, when the nation is under threat – in the 1930s and 40s from expansive Germany – and since the 1990s by increased immigration and globalisation.The memorials have in common local loss and local initiative. A treasure was found and a treasure was lost, often to the National Museum in Copenhagen. A treasure was won that contributed to the great narrative of the history of Denmark, but that treasure has also left its original context. The memorials commemorate the finds that have contributed to the narrative of the greatness, age and area of Denmark. The memorials connect the nation and the native place, the capital and the village in a community, where the past is a central concept. The find may also become a symbol of a region or community, for example the sun chariot for Trundholm community and the Gundestrup cauldron for Himmerland.It is almost always people who live near the find site who want to remember what has been found and where. The finds were commemorated by a memorial on average 60 years after their discovery. A longer period elapsed for the golden horns from Gallehus; shortest was at Bjæverskov where the coin hoard was found in March 1999 and a monument was erected in November of the same year.Memorials might seem an old-fashioned way of marking localities in a national topography, but new memorials are created in the same period as many new museums are established.A unique find has no prominent role in archaeological education, research or other work. However, in public opinion treasures and exotic finds are central. Folklore tells of people searching for treasures but always failing. Treasure hunting is restricted by taboos. In the world of archaeological finds there are no taboos. The treasure is found by accident and in spite of various hindrances the find is taken to a museum. The finder is often a worthy person – a child, a labourer or peasant. He or she is an innocent and ordinary person. A national symbol requires a worthy finder. And the find occurs as a miracle. At the find site a romantic relationship is established between the ancestors and their heirs who, by way of a miracle, find fragments of the glorious past of the nation. A paradigmatic example is the finding of the golden horns from Gallehus. Other examples extend from the discovery of the sun chariot in Trundholm bog to the Stone Age settlement at Mullerup bog.The article ends with a catalogue presenting the 24 archaeological find sites that have been marked with monuments in present-day Denmark.Jes WienbergHistorisk arkeologiInstitutionen för Arkeologi och ­Antikens historiaLunds Universitet
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Grebenchenko, Irina Viktorovna. "Network Analysis of Memoires by Soviet Cosmonautics Creators: Professional Interactions Circle." Историческая информатика, no. 4 (April 2020): 239–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2585-7797.2020.4.34350.

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The article studies the interactions of the Chief Designers’ Council members by the network analysis method based on the prosopographic database covering the creators of Soviet cosmonautics. Personal contacts of cosmonautics creators were undoubtedly very important in the activities of senior managers of such a complex scientific and engineering industry as the Soviet cosmonautics was. These are professional relations of the Chief Designers’ Council members the article addresses. The source base of the research is the materials library of the Russian State Archive of scientific and technical documentation, the Russian State Public History Library, the Russian State Archive of scientific and technical documentation, the funds of the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics and the archive of the Memorial House Museum of academician Sergey Korolev. The research novelty is the goal set to study professional communications of the Soviet space program creators on the basis of network analysis as well as the first attempt to collect and process a large array of texts of biographical and memoir sources (5500 abridged pages) associated with the Chief Designers’ Council using a set of quantitative methods. The main results of this study are networks of interactions that show who of the members of the 1946-1967 Chief Designers’ Council had a significant impact on the development of the Soviet cosmonautics and how communication links were distributed between them.
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Shen, Huijia. "A Study on the Readability of the English Versions of Chinese Red Tourism Based on Readers’ Response." Journal of Practical Studies in Education 2, no. 3 (April 13, 2021): 5–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.46809/jpse.v2i3.23.

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The year 2021 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. With the rapid development of red tourism in China, the importance of red publicity translation has become increasingly prominent. How to evaluate the readability of red publicity translation has gradually become a hot issue. Taking the English versions of Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression, Jinggangshan Revolution Museum, Chongqing Hongyan Revolution History Museum and Nanhu Revolution Memorial Museum as examples, this article collects 16 target language readers’ feedbacks on the red tourism publicity translations through questionnaire and interview. The results show that the readability of the translation is influenced by many factors such as the quality of the text, the length of the text and the background of the readers. Due to the lack of understanding of the target language and text functions, there are various problems in the translation of words, sentences and discourses. Studies show that the emphasis of the importance of target language readers in quality assessment of red tourism publicity texts may effectively prevent researchers from substituting their own subjective judgments for readers’ feedback, thus; it is important to provide a more readable publicity text. This article attempts to improve the readability of red publicity translation, so as to better promote Chinese red tourism and spread Chinese red culture.
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Eremeeva, Anna N., and Timofey V. Kovalenko. "Preserving the Memory of the Great Patriotic War: Regional Practices (1941–1945)." Izvestia of the Ural federal university. Series 2. Humanities and Arts 23, no. 1 (2021): 25–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/izv2.2021.23.1.002.

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The perpetuation of the feat of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War through monuments, museum displays, and artistic texts has been going on for three-quarters of a century now. Perpetuation strategies at various stages have been determined by official interpretations of events, processes, and commemorative practices. Referring to the analysis of the situation in Krasnodar Krai, this article reconstructs the initial stage of war commemoration and the mechanisms of historical memory production that were formed synchronously with the events of 1941–1945. The sources for the reconstruction are various documents of central and local Soviet bodies and the Communist party, creative unions, cultural institutions, periodicals, memoirs, and artistic texts. The main directions of the war commemoration were the combination of all-Union recommendations as well as regional peculiarities. The work was developed mainly after the liberation of the region in 1943. Military and labour exploits of the Kuban population were actualised. The merits of the Cossack formations were specially highlighted, while information about the facts of collaboration was minimised. Resistance to fascism during the occupation of Kuban was represented by the partisan theme. The main print source of the partisan movement in the region was the books by P. K. Ignatov, commander of the partisan detachment, that were promptly published and replicated in the USSR and abroad. The exploits of his dead sons, Heroes of the Soviet Union, became a classic example. Memorial spaces, a system for recording military monuments were formed. The artistic chronicle of the war was created as a set of victorious stories. The theme of the ongoing war was added to the repertoire of professional and amateur art groups, as well as exhibitions of local museums. The calendar of holiday dates included anniversaries of the liberation of territories from the Nazis. The memory of the war was reflected in the local toponyms.
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Myatt, Tim. "Looting Tibet: Conflicting Narratives and Representations of Tibetan Material Culture from the 1904 British Mission to Tibet." Inner Asia 14, no. 1 (2012): 61–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105018-990123779.

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AbstractThis paper presents new research regarding the contentious issue of looting during the Younghusband Mission to Tibet of 1904. For the first time, it presents translations from Tibetan texts that not only catalogue items looting from Tibet, but also build a narrative of the mission from a Chinese and Tibetan perspective. It discusses the 'mind of the mission' by outlining the social and cultural milieu that formed the backdrop for the British officers and men who found themselves in Tibet, and explores the position of the 'archaeologist' to the Mission. It shows how items looted from Tibet are now represented in British museums and collections, and compares these to the 'Memorial Hall of the Anti- British' in Gyantse.
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ЛЕОНОВА, Б. А. "Funeral commemoration in the Orel Province in documents of the 1920s." ТРАДИЦИОННАЯ КУЛЬТУРА, no. 1 (March 25, 2019): 68–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.26158/tk.2019.20.1.007.

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Статья посвящена рукописному собранию текстов причитаний Малоархангельского уезда Орловской губернии, хранящемуся в фондах Орловского объединенного государственного музея И. С. Тургенева. Ценность этого собрания определяется практически полным отсутствием публикаций похоронно-поминальной причети Орловского края. Анализируемые записи сделаны в период, когда традиция похоронно-поминальных плачей еще не была утрачена и находилась в активном бытовании. На основе источниковедческих изысканий автора в статье освещается происхождение этих материалов, уточняются их атрибутивные параметры. Устанавливается связь плачей с эпизодами похоронного обряда. Рассматриваются наиболее характерные мотивы и образы орловской причети в контексте мифопоэтики похоронной обрядности. Выявляются некоторые локально специфичные черты в разработке мотивов и образной системе текстов. Статья вводит в научный оборот сведения о ранее неизвестном источнике для изучения плачей Центральной России и отчасти восполняет «белое пятно» на карте русской плачевой культуры, каковым сегодня предстает в научной литературе Орловский регион. The article is devoted to the manuscript collection of lamentation texts from the Maloarkhangelsky uezd of the Orel Province that are stored in the I. S. Turgenev Orel Combined State Museum. The collection is of particular value due the almost complete lack of publications about funerary lamentations from the Orel Region. The analyzed texts were recorded during a period when the tradition of funeral and memorial lamentations was not yet lost but was actively practiced. On the basis of the author’s research on sources, the article highlights the origin of these materials and clarifies their attributive parameters. A connection is established between the lamentations and parts of the funeral ceremony. The most characteristic motifs and images of the Orel lamentations are considered within the context of the mythopoetics of funerary ritual. Several locally specific features in the development of the texts’ motif and imagery system are identified.
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Connors, Thomas G., and Raúl Isaí Muñoz. "Looking for the North American Invasion in Mexico City." American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 1, 2020): 498–516. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz940.

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Abstract At a time when Latinxs play an increasingly important role in U.S. society, a group of teachers seek out places in Mexico City connected to the U.S. Invasion of 1847–1848, hoping to understand how it is remembered there today. Museums and memorials commemorate the sacrifices made by a wronged nation and honor the legendary figures who have come to dominate its popular narrative of the war, Los Niños Héroes and the San Patricios. By contrast, the historic landscape is nearly silent on Santa Anna and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Back home, the group incorporates the places they visited into their classrooms through images and stories. Finally, they consider how the war’s place in the teaching of Texas and U.S. history is changing and offer Elliott West’s Greater Reconstruction thesis as a framework for reimagining the nation’s history by focusing on how the expansion of this period affected the peoples over whom the border crossed and reoriented national attention toward Latin America and the Pacific. Throughout the essay, a Mexican American reflects on his first encounter with the capital of his ancestral homeland.
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Eremeeva, Anna. "Practice of Memorialization of the Anti-Soviet Movement in the South of Russia During the Civil War." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 4. Istorija. Regionovedenie. Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, no. 2 (May 2021): 171–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu4.2021.2.13.

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Introduction. The article is devoted to the memorialization of the anti-Soviet movement in the South of Russia, which took place during the Civil War. The author considers the approaches of Denikin and Cossack (Don and Kuban) governments to the glorification of the struggle against the Bolsheviks, the canonization of the leaders of this struggle, the creation of so-called places of memory. Methods and materials. The research is based on legislative acts and documentation records of anti-Soviet governments in the South of Russia. The unpublished documents are stored in central and regional archives of the Russian Federation and Hoover Institution Archives (USA). The other significant sources are periodicals, propaganda products, artistic texts of 1918–1920, and private correspondence. Analysis and results. The politics of memory of the “white” and Cossack governments was an important part of the official propaganda. It was aimed to legitimize and consolidate the anti-Bolshevik movement. During the Civil War, documents and other artifacts were actively collected for future archives and museums of the “liberation war”. The Military-Historical Commission under Denikin Propaganda Department played an important role in this activity. Museums of the struggle against Bolshevism in the Kuban and Don were being formed at the initiative of Cossack governments. There were monumental, toponymical and other projects to perpetuate the memory of the anti-Bolshevik movement heroes. The presence of the opposing memorial narratives in the South of Russia was the result of serious contradictions between the main actors inside the anti-Bolshevik camp.
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Kõresaar, Ene, and Kirsti Jõesalu. "Okupatsioonide muuseumist Vabamuks: nimetamispoliitika analüüs." Eesti Rahva Muuseumi aastaraamat, no. 60 (October 12, 2017): 136–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.33302/ermar-2017-006.

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From “Museum of Occupations” to “Vabamu”: Analysis of Naming Policy This article focuses on the debate around the name Vabamu and is aimed at discussing whether and how the culture of remembering the Soviet era can change in today’s Estonia. In February 2016, the Estonian Museum of Occupations announced its plans to refresh its identity and change the name of the museum to the Museum of Freedom Vabamu. The planned name change sparked controversy in society about the meaning of the (Soviet) military occupation, the sufferings of that period and ways of commemorating them. Over 60 stories were published in the Estonian media from February to August 2016, accompanied by lively discussion on social media. Estonia’s Russian-language media did not participate in the discussion. The article analyses the Vabamu name debate in the context of naming policy and Estonian 20th century historical memory. First of all, the term of “occupation” is explained from the aspect of Estonia’s political identity and Baltic, Russian and European relations. Secondly, the article analyses the main voices and topics in the debate and which of the current memory regime’s models and frameworks of memory policy emerged. It asks, from the perspective of memory studies, why the name change to “Vabamu” was not carried out according to original plans. The main sources of the analysis were texts in the media; including social media; interviews with the museum director, participatory observations at meetings of the museum’s advisory board, and at meetings and temporary exhibitions organized by the museum. In addition to documenting the development of the name debate, the participation, observation and interviews made it possible to explore the conceptual objectives behind the name “Vabamu”. The following opinions resonated in discussions: (1) opinions of the Memento organization (which advocates for the rights of those who suffered persecution by the Soviet regime) and Soviet-era dissidents in media opinion pieces and segments and public statements; (2) statements made by politicians (mainly rightconservatives); (3) opinions from members of the Estonian émigré community; (4) statements from museum managing director Merilin Piipuu and the chairwoman of the Kistler-Ritso foundation Sylvia Thompson, which reflected the museum’s intentions; and (5) the public discussion initiated by the museum. A key date in the development of the debate was 25 March 2016, the anniversary of mass deportations in 1949 when also the representatives of Memento organization voiced their opinion. Giving up “occupation” in the name of the museum occasioned property claims of the generation of victims of communism. The repressed people considered the Museum of Occupation their symbolic place. For this group, the disappearance of the word “occupations” from the museum name actualized the complexity of policy of recognizing their experience ever since the late 1980s. The debate regarding the establishing of a memorial to victims of communism in Tallinn also had an influence. The discussions over “Vabamu” were held in a transnational context, pertaining mainly to neighbouring Russia, and the global Holocaust memory culture. The name change was perceived above all as an adoption of Russian memory politics, not just in the context of the Baltic states but in the broader geopolitical context. Giving up the word “occupation” was seen by critics – and at the outset of the debate by the museum as well – as a national security issue. As the discussion evolved, the museum distanced itself from the security discourse and cited Russian tourists and Estonian Russians as target groups that needed to be reached and included. The comparison to the Holocaust memory culture was also used as an argument by both parties. The opponents of the new name used international comparisons to stress the remembering of the violent past in similar (national) threat contexts. On the other hand, the museum used the Holocaust argument from the standpoint of Jewish identity to justify its intention to move further past the national narrative of occupation. The debates over the name Vabamu were also related to a perception of intergenerational changes in memory work. The museum was reconceptualising the past and future to reach out to younger generations whose experience horizon is radically different from that of the generation of the victims of repressions and whose sense of freedom is more individualized. For opponents of “Vabamu”, the museum staff themselves represented the younger generation who no longer had a link to Estonia’s past ordeals and for whom intergenerational memory and solidarity had become interrupted. Their preference for a multiperspective narrative in place of a narrative of victimhood and resistance was interpreted as an ethical softening toward the victims and trivialization of trauma. As a result of the name debate, the museum decided to forgo a radical change in the name and opted for a compromise: Vabamu, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom. The debate over the concept of occupation showed the importance of linguistic definitions in a more extensive battle over how the past is represented. The concept of occupation has been the core of political identity both in postcommunist Estonia and the other two Baltics. The term “occupation” is related to all of the key elements in Estonia’s postcommunist narrative. Associating the memory of the (Soviet) occupation with security policy in the Vabamu debate points to a main reason for persistence of Estonian current memory culture – the so-called Russian threat, which is perceived as an existential danger, a constant challenge to the survival of the Estonian state. Earlier studies have shown that for Estonians, personal, social, cultural and political memory is strongly interwoven when remembering the 20th century: the national story is strongly supported by family stories. This makes the national narrative personal. When central symbols of the historical memory come under fire, fears are stoked and appeals to a moral duty to preserve a common past are heard.
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Kovalenko, Borys. "LOCALITY AND SUPRALOCALITY IN INDIVIDUAL STYLE (BASED ON THE MANUSCRIPT HERITAGE OF PODILLIAN WRITERS)." Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Literary Studies. Linguistics. Folklore Studies, no. 32 (2022): 28–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/1728-2659.2022.32.06.

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The results of the analysis of the manuscript heritage of Podillian writers: S. Rudanskyi, A. Svydnytskyi, M. Kotsiubynskyi are presented. Lingual features that feature the individual style of each of these authors are described. The topicality is due to the need to study the language practice of these authors as representatives of Ukrainian literature of the XIX century in the context of their connection with Podillia, to trace the ways of forming and developing of literary norms, the influence on the language of writers of the native Podillia dialect of the south-western dialect, which brings closer to solving to solving a broad problem of dialectal-literary interaction. The methodological basis of the article is attention to autographs and first editions, which turned out to be justified and effective in the study, since the texts of the works of these authors published later experienced editorial intervention and most of the features marking their individual style were leveled. Archival materials were used, in particular autographs stored in the Manuscripts Department of Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv), at the Manuscript Institute of the National Library of Ukraine named after VI Vernadsky of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv), in Chernihiv State Literary-Memorial Museum of Mikhailo Kotsyubinsky (Chernihiv) and others. This is an attempt to determine the role of the linguistic and cultural region (area) in the development of the national literary standard; to study the problems of formation of the Ukrainian literary language in the sequence personality – collective / region, taking into account the principle of duality individual – collective. Observation of the linguistic creativity of Podillian writers reveals duality, first of all. On the one hand, there is a close connection with the linguistic environment from which these linguistic personalities grew up and where they were formed, on the other hand, there is a clear desire for supra-locality. We state the presence of many individual features in their individual style, each of them is a separately formed linguistic figure, but most of the features we have recorded were common to all authors and common in Podillia dialects. And checking the collections of texts, the observed dialectal substance, the comparison with the Atlas of the Ukrainian language, and other dialectal descriptions gives grounds to claim that many of them are still existing today.
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Plachta, Bodo. "Die Inszenierung von Text- und Werkgenesen in Dichter-, Künstler- und Komponistenhäusern." Editio 33, no. 1 (November 1, 2019): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/editio-2019-0003.

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Abstract The homes of poets, artists and composers are not only memorials and biographical museums but also places in which texts, pieces of art and music were created. A person’s biography is quickly revealed in these homes by looking at the original furniture and the typical objects of daily life common at the time. To make the creative work visible though, guidance and explanations are necessary. In many homes the pieces of work aren’t merely shown, instead, an attempt has been made to provide specific insight into the process of the creation of them. Not only are the relevant documents shown but also, using various media, the origins of the pieces are made comprehensible to the beholder. The origins are staged. Sometimes, with the help of drawers which can be opened, the stages of the origins can be contemplated (Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Koeppen) and then the manuscripts are illustrated in the order of their creation on a time beam (Honoré de Balzac). In Heinrich-Schütz’s home the development of a melody can be followed acoustically. But there are also homes in which their owners – mainly visual artists – even developed concepts for the keeping and archiving of the creation of their works (Gustave Moreau, Auguste Rodin) during their lifetimes, so that the observer can later experience them in all their authenticity in their original surroundings. In this article various forms of conveying the creation of works are presented, commented on and placed in the exploration context of places of creativity.
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Barry, Jonathan. "West Country to World’s End: The South West in the Tudor Age. Sam Smiles, ed. Exh. Cat. Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Oct. 2013–March 2014. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013. 120 pp. £20. - Negotiating the Political in Northern European Urban Society, c.1400–c.1600. Sheila Sweetinburgh, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 434; Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 38. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. ix + 228 pp. $60." Renaissance Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2016): 1511–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/690382.

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Lorrio, Alberto J., Ester López Rosendo, and Mariano Torres Ortiz. "La Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante) y las fortificaciones fenicias de la península ibérica." Vínculos de Historia Revista del Departamento de Historia de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, no. 11 (June 22, 2022): 63–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.18239/vdh_2022.11.03.

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Se analiza el sistema defensivo de La Fonteta, una de las fortificaciones fenicias mejor conocida de la península ibérica, en el marco de las nuevas tácticas de la poliorcética implantadas en el Mediterráneo Occidental a partir de la colonización fenicia, que supusieron la rápida adopción en las costas del mediodía y el sureste peninsular de estos novedosos sistemas de fortificación que pronto se generalizaron en todo el territorio peninsular de influencia oriental.La muralla de La Fonteta, erigida en torno al 600 a. C., presenta elementos característicos de una obra de carácter oriental, como su construcción mediante cajones macizos ajustada a parámetros métricos establecidos, la presencia de torres cuadrangulares o el uso de mampostería de piedra y alzados de adobe y tierra, rematados con almenas. Además, se han identificado forros ataludados, una rampa o glacis y un foso en “V”, algunos de indudable origen oriental, pero otros de claro influjo indígena. Palabras Clave: muralla, foso, glacis, antemural, FeniciosTopónimos: La Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante),Periodo: Período orientalizante ABSTRACTIn this paper, the La Fonteta defensive system, one of the best-known Phoenician fortifications on the Iberian Peninsula, is analyzed within the framework of the new polyorcetic tactics introduced in the Western Mediterranean following Phoenician colonization. This involved the rapid deployment on the shores of Southern and Southeastern Iberia of these new fortification systems, which soon spread across throughout the entire Near Eastern influenced territory of the peninsula.The wall of La Fonteta, built around 600 BC., presents characteristic elements of a Near Eastern construction, such as the use of solid caissons adjusted to established metric parameters, the presence of quadrangular towers, or the employment of stone masonry and elevations of mudbricks and earth, topped with battlements. In addition, attached sloped walls, a ramp or glacis and a 'V'-shaped ditch have been identified, some of these features undoubtedly of Near Eastern origin, but others of clear indigenous influence. Keywords: wall, ditch, glacis, avant-mur, PhoeniciansPlane names: La Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante),Period: Orientalizing Period REFERENCIASAlmagro-Gorbea, M.; Lorrio, A. J. y Torres, M. (2021), “Los focenses y la crisis de c. 500 a. C. en el Sudeste: de La Fonteta y Peña Negra a La Alcudia de Elche”, Lucentum, 40, pp. 63-110.Almagro-Gorbea, M. y Torres, M. (2007), “Las fortificaciones tartésicas en el Suroeste peninsular”, en L. Berrocal y P. Moret (eds.), Paisajes fortificados de la Edad del Hierro. Las murallas protohistóricas de la Meseta y la vertiente atlántica en su contexto europeo, Bibliotheca Archaeologica Hispana, 28, pp. 35-55.Arancibia, A. y Escalante M. M. (2006a), “La Málaga fenicio-púnica a la luz de los últimos hallazgos”, Mainake, 28, pp. 333-360.— (2006b), “Génesis y consolidación de la ciudad de Malaka”, en Memoria Arqueológica del Museo Picasso Málaga. Desde los orígenes hasta el siglo V d.C., pp. 41-78.— (2010), “Aportaciones a la arqueología urbana de Málaga, de la Málaga fenicia a la Málaga bizantina a través de los resultados de la excavación de C/. Císter 3–San Agustín 4“, en Anuario Arqueológico de Andalucía 2006, pp. 3636-3656.Barrionuevo, F., Ruiz Mata, D. y Pérez, C. J. (1999), “Fortificaciones de casernas del Castillo de Doña Blanca (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz)”, en Actas del XXIV Congreso Nacional de Arqueología (Cartagena, 1997), 3. Impacto colonial y Sureste ibérico, pp. 115-123.Berrocal, L. (2004), “La defensa de la comunidad. Sobre las funciones emblemáticas de las murallas protohistóricas en la península ibérica“, Gladius, 24, pp. 27-98.Blánquez, J. (2007), “Novedades arqueológicas en los asentamientos feniciopúnicos del Cerro del Prado y Carteia”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Las ciudades fenicio-púnicas en el Mediterráneo occidental, pp. 257-279.Bueno, P. (2014), “Un asentamiento del Bronce Final-Hierro I en el Cerro del Castillo, Chiclana, Cádiz. Nuevos datos para la interpretación de Gadeira”, en M. Botto (ed.), Los Fenicios en La Bahía de Cádiz, Collezione di Studi Fenici 46 (Pisa-Roma), pp. 225-251.Bueno, P. y Cerpa, J. (2008), “Un nuevo enclave fenicio descubierto en la Bahía de Cádiz. El Cerro del Castillo, Chiclana”, Spal, 17, pp. 169-206.Bueno, P., García Menárguez, A. y Prados, F. (2013), “Murallas fenicias de Occidente. Una valoración conjunta de las defensas del Cerro del Castillo (Chiclana, Cádiz) y del Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño (Guardamar, Alicante)”, Herakleion, 6, pp. 27-75.Cecchini, S. M. (1995), “Architecture militaire, civile et domestique partim Orient”, en V. Krings (ed.), La civilisation phénicienne et punique. Manuel de recherche, pp. 389-396.Cobos, L. (2010), “Actividad arqueológica puntual en bastión norte y muralla del yacimiento arqueológico de Doña Blanca (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz)”. Anuario Arqueológico de Andalucía de 2005, Cádiz, pp. 390-406.Díes Cusí, E. (2001), “La influencia de la arquitectura fenicia en las arquitecturas indígenas de la Península Ibérica (s. VIII-VII)”, en D. Ruiz Mata y S. Celestino (eds.), Arquitectura oriental y orientalizante en la Península Ibérica, Lenguas y culturas del antiguo Oriente Próximo, 4, pp. 69-122.Escacena, J. L. (2002), “Murallas fenicias para Tartessos. Un análisis darwinista”, Spal 11, pp. 69-105.Gailledrat, E. (2007), “La stratigraphie”, en P. Rouillard; E. Gailledrat y F. Sala (eds.), L’établissement protohistorique de La Fonteta (fin VIIIe-fin VIe siècle av. J.-C.), Collection de la Casa Velázquez, 96, pp. 23-98.Gal, Z. y Alexandre, Y. (2000), Ḥorbat Rosh Zayit. An Iron Age storage fort and village, IAA Reports 8, Jerusalén.García Alfonso, E. (2018), “Malaka en los siglos VII-VI a. C. Los orígenes de una ciudad-estado fenicia-occidental”, en D. García, S. López y E. García Alfonso (eds.), La tumba del guerrero. Un enterramiento excepcional en la Málaga fenicia del siglo VI a. C., pp. 25-74.García Menárguez, A. (1994), “El Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño, Guardamar del Segura. Un poblado protohistórico en el tramo final del río Segura”, en M. Molina, J. L. Cunchillos y A. González Blanco (coords.), El mundo púnico. Historia, sociedad y cultura (Cartagena, 17-19 de noviembre de 1990), pp. 269-280.García Menárguez, A. y Prados, F. (2014), “La presencia fenicia en la Península Ibérica. El Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante)”, Trabajos de Prehistoria, 71.1, pp. 113-133.— (2017), “Las defensas y la trama urbana del Cabezo del Estaño de Guardamar. Un encuentro fortificado entre fenicios y nativos en la desembocadura del río Segura (Alicante)”, en F. Prados y F. Sala (eds.), El Oriente de Occidente. Fenicios y Púnicos en el área ibérica, pp. 51-78.García Menárguez, A., Prados, F. y Jiménez Vialás, H. (2020), “Del primer impacto fenicio a la consolidación del fenómeno urbano en la costa de Alicante: El Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño y el santuario del Castilo de Guardamar”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Entre Útica y Gadir. Navegación y colonización en el Mediterráneo occidental a comienzos del I milenio aC., pp. 293-313.González Prats, A. (2001), “Arquitectura orientalizante en el Levante peninsular”, en D. Ruiz Mata y S. Celestino, S. (eds.), Arquitectura oriental y orientalizante en la península ibérica, pp. 173-192.— (2002), “Los fenicios en la fachada oriental hispana”, en B. Costa y J. H. Fernández (coords.), La Colonización fenicia de Occidente: estado de la investigación en los inicios del siglo XXI, XVI Jornadas de Arqueología Fenicio-Púnica (Eivissa, 2001), Treballs del Museu Arqueológic d’Eivissa e Formentera, 50, pp. 127-143.— (2005), “Balanç de vint-i-cinc anys d’investigació sobre la influència i presència fenícia a la província d’Alacant”, en Fenicis i púnics als Països Catalans, Fonaments, 12, pp. 41-64.— (2007), “Rasgos arquitectónicos y urbanísticos de La Fonteta”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Las ciudades fenicio-púnicas en el Mediterráneo Occidental, pp. 69-82.— (2010), “La colonia fenicia de La Fonteta, en Guardamar del Segura”, Arqueología y museo: museos municipales en el MARQ [MARQ, diciembre 2010-febrero 2011], pp. 66-79.— (2011), La Fonteta. Excavaciones de 1996-2002 en la colonia fenicia de la actual desembocadura del río Segura (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante), vol. I, Seminarios Internacionales sobre Temas Fenicios. Alicante.— (2014), La Fonteta-II. Estudio de los materiales arqueológicos hallados en la colonia fenicia de la actual desembocadura del río Segura (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante), vol. I y II, Alicante.González Prats, A. y Ruiz Segura, E. (2000), El yacimiento fenicio de La Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante, Comunidad Valenciana), Serie Popular núm. 4, Valencia.Kempinski, A. (1992), “Middle and Late Bronze Age Fortifications”, en A. Kempinski, R. Reich y H. Katzenstein (eds.), The Architecture of Ancient Israel. From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. In Memory of Immanuel (Manya) Dunayevsky. Jerusalén, pp. 127-142.Leriche, P. (1992), “Fortifications 1. Orient”, en E. Lipinski (ed.), Dictionnaire de la civilization phénicienne et punique. Bruselas-París, pp. 172-175.López Castro, J. L., Alemán, B. y Moya, L. (2010), “Abdera y su territorio. Descubrimientos recientes”, Mainake, 32, pp. 91-107.López Castro, J. L., Manzano, F. y Alemán, B. (2010), “Altos de Reveque: un asentamiento fortificado fenicio-púnico en el litoral de Andalucía oriental”, Archivo Español de Arqueología, 83, pp. 27-46.López Castro, J. L. y Mora, B. (2002), “Malaka y las ciudades fenicias en el occidente del Mediterráneo. Siglos VI a.C.-I d.C.”, Mainake 24, pp. 181-214.Lorrio, A. J., López Rosendo, E. y Torres, M. (2021), “El sistema defensivo de la ciudad fenicia de La Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante). Campaña de 2018-2019”, Madrider Mitteilungen, 62, pp. 330-386.Maia, M. G. P. (2000), “Tavira fenícia. O território para Ocidente do Guadiana, nos inícios do I milénio a.C.”, en A. González Prats (ed.), Fenicios y territorio. Actas del II Seminario Internacional sobre temas fenicios, pp. 121-150.Maia, M. G. P. y Fraga da Silva, L. (2004), “O culto de Baal en Tavira”, Huelva Arqueológica, 20, pp. 171-194.Montanero, D. (2008), “Los sistemas defensivos de origen fenicio-púnico del Sureste peninsular (siglos VIII-III a.C.). Nuevas interpretaciones”, en B. Costa y J. H. Fernández (eds.), Arquitectura defensiva fenicio-púnica. XXII Jornadas de Arqueología Fenicio-Púnica (Eivissa, 2007). Treballs del Museu Arqueològic d'Eivissa i Formentera, 61, pp. 91-144.— (2020), “Demolishing Casemate Walls. Pasos hacia una primera clasificación tipológica de las murallas de la Edad del Hierro IIA-IIB en Fenicia y en el norte de Israel”, en S. Celestino y E. Rodríguez (eds.), Un viaje entre Oriente y el Occidente del Mediterráneo. IX Congreso Internacional de estudios Fenicios y Púnicos, Mytra, 5, pp. 443-459.Moret, P. (1996), Les fortifications ibériques. De la fin de l’Âge du Bronze à la conquête romaine, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez 56. Madrid.— (2007), “L’enceinte”, en P. Rouillard, E. Gailledrat y F. Sala (eds.), L’établissement protohistorique de La Fonteta (fin VIIIe-fin VIe siècle av. J.-C.), Fouilles de la Rábita de Guardamar 2, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, 96, pp. 126-140.Niemeyer, H. G. (1986), “El yacimiento fenicio de Toscanos: urbanística y función”, en G. del Olmo y M. E. Aubet, Los fenicios en la península ibérica, 1, pp. 109-126.Pappa, E. (2013), Early Iron Age exchange in the West: Phoenicians in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Leuven-París-Walpole.Prados, F. y Blánquez, J. (2007), “Las fortificaciones coloniales de la península ibérica: de los modelos orientales a los sistemas púnico-helenísticos”, en L. Berrocal y P. Moret (eds.), Paisajes fortificados de la Edad del Hierro. Las murallas protohistóricas de la Meseta y la vertiente atlántica en su contexto europeo, Bibliotheca Archaeologica Hispana, 28, pp. 57-74.Prados, F., García Menárguez, A. y Jiménez Vialás, H. (2018), “Metalurgia fenicia en el sureste ibérico: el taller del Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño (Guardamar, Alicante)”, Complutum, 29.1, pp. 79-94.Recio, A. (1988), “Consideraciones acerca del urbanismo de Malaka fenicio-punica”, Mainake, 10, pp. 75-82.— (1990), La cerámica fenicio-púnica, griega y etrusca del sondeo de san Agustín, Málaga.Rodero, V. y Berrocal, L. (2011-12), “Análisis morfoestructural de la arquitectura defensiva en el ámbito indígena y colonial de la protohistoria antigua peninsular (ca. 1000-600 A. C.)”, Cuadernos de Prehistoria y Arqueología de la UAM, 37-38, pp. 223-239.Roldán, L., Bendala, M.; Blánquez, J. y Martínez Lillo, P. (dirs.) (2006), Estudio histórico-arqueológico de la ciudad de Carteia (San Roque, Cádiz) 1994-1999. Madrid.Rouillard, P., Gailledrat, E. y Sala, F. (2007), L’établissement protohistorique de La Fonteta (fin VIIIe-fin VIe siècle av. J.-C.), Fouilles de la Rábita de Guardamar 2, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, 96, Madrid.Ruiz Mata, D. (2001), “Arquitectura y urbanismo en la ciudad protohistórica del Castillo de Doña Blanca (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz)”, en D. Ruiz Mata y S. Celestino (eds.), Arquitectura oriental y orientalizante en la Península Ibérica, Madrid, pp. 261-274.Ruiz Mata, D. y Pérez, C. (1995), El poblado fenicio del Castillo de Doña Blanca (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz), Biblioteca de Temas Portuenses, 5. El Puerto de Santa María.— (2020), “Fenicios en la Bahía gaditana: su construcción política, económica e ideológica (siglo VIII a.C.). El caso del Castillo de Doña Blanca”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Entre Útica y Gadir. Navegación y colonización en el Mediterráneo occidental a comienzos del I milenio aC., pp. 405-431.Sánchez Sánchez-Moreno, V. M., Galindo, L., Juzgado, M. y Dumas, M. (2012), “El asentamiento fenicio de “La Rebanadilla” a finales del siglo IX a.C.”, en E. García Alfonso (ed.), Diez años de arqueología fenicia en la provincia de Málaga, pp. 137-170.Sánchez Sánchez-Moreno, V. M., Galindo, L. y Juzgado, M. (2020), “El santuario fenicio de La Rebanadilla”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Entre Utica y Gadir. Navegación y colonización fenicia en el Mediterráneo occidental a comienzos del I milenio AC, pp. 189-200.Schubart, H. (1988), “Vorbericht über die Grabungskampagne 1984 im Bereich der phönizischen Siedlung und der Befestigungsmauer, en Forschungen zur Archäologie und Geologie im Raum von Torre del Mar 1983/1984, MB, 14 (Maguncia 1988), pp. 172-188.— (2000), “Alarcón. El yacimiento fenicio y las fortificaciones en la cima de Toscanos”, en A. González Prats (ed.), Fenicios y territorio. Actas del II Seminario Internacional sobre temas fenicios. Alicante, pp. 263-294.Suárez, J., Escalante, M. M., Cisneros, M. I., Mayorga, J. y Fernández Rodríguez, L. E. (2007), “Territorio y urbanismo fenicio-púnico en la Bahía de Málaga. Siglos VIII-V a.C.”, en J. L. López Castro (ed.), Las ciudades fenicio-púnicas en el Mediterráneo occidental, pp. 209-232.Wagner, C. G. (2007), “El barco negro en la costa. Reflexiones sobre el miedo y la colonización fenicia en la tierra de Tarsis“, en D. Plácido, F. J. Moreno Arrastio y L. Ruiz Cabrero (eds.), Necedad, sabiduría y verdad: el legado de Juan Cascajero, Gerión Extra, pp. 121-131.
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"A Pilot Study of Wichita Indian Archeology and Ethnohistory." Index of Texas Archaeology Open Access Grey Literature from the Lone Star State, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.21112/ita.1967.1.1.

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In 1965 several anthropologists drew up plans for a one-year pilot study of the archeology and ethnohistory of the Wichita Indian tribes. After financial support had been generously provided by the National Science Foundation, the proposed research was carried out. This is a report on the results of that study. The pilot study was designed to: a) obtain a body of field data from the components of the Spanish Fort sites, the largest and best=documented of the historic Wichita sites in the Red River area; b) make test excavations at several other sites in order that a problem=oriented program of future research can be accurately planned; c) attempt to locate, by field reconnaissance, sites that relate to the Wichita occupation of the southern plains on both the historic and prehistoric time levels; d) make a survey of available ethnohistorical data in order (1) to compile a bibliography of documentary materials relevant to Wichita ethnohistory, (2) to make a detailed study of documents that relate specifically to the excavations being carried out at Spanish Fort and at the sites being tested, (3) to seek information that might lead to the field locations of other Wichita sites, and (4) to appraise those sources best suited for more extended examination. The co-investigators of the project were Tyler Bastian of the Museum of the Great Plains, Robert E. Bell of The University of Oklahoma, Edward B. Jelks of Southern Methodist University, and W.W. Newcomb of the Texas Memorial Museum at The University of Texas. Bastian supervised the archeological field work in Oklahoma under the direction of Bell. Jelks directed the archeological work in Texas. Newcomb directed the ethnohistorical research. Marvin E. Tong of the Museum of the Great Plains served the project as general coordinator. The main part of the ethnohistorical study consisted of a thorough search of the archives at The University of Texas for documents relating to Wichita ethnohistory. The archeological work included extensive excavations at the Longest Site in Oklahoma and at the Upper Tucker and Coyote Sites in Texas. More limited excavations were carried out at the Glass and Gas Plant Sites in Texas. Several other archeological sites were visited but not excavated beyond a test pit or two: the Devils Canyon and Wilson Springs Sites in Oklahoma, and the Gilbert, Stone, Vinson, and Womack Sites in Texas. An effort was also made to locate several sites in Oklahoma and Texas which were reported in historical documents but which had not been located in the field. After the library research and the archeological field work had been completed, a brief, general report could have been prepared to satisfy our contractual obligation to the National Science Foundation. It was felt, however, that the data which had been collected would be of interest to archeologists and ethnohistorians and, if possible, it should be made available to them in some detail without delay. Consequently, a series of descriptive papers was prepared instead of a summary report. Those papers are presented here.
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Carmen Estefanni Solis Huamán, Mari, Filipe Augusto Peres Oliveira, and Savio Tadeu Guimarães. "A ARTE, A CULTURA E A ARQUITETURA EM EXPOSIÇÃO NA CAPITAL FEDERAL." Programa de Iniciação Científica - PIC/UniCEUB - Relatórios de Pesquisa, no. 3 (December 7, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5102/pic.n3.2017.5813.

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Este projeto de iniciação científica discorre sobre alguns museus e memoriais localizados na cidade de Brasília. Os temas arte, cultura e arquitetura, vinculados à temática dos museus, foram complementares no enfoque deste estudo. Tais espaços e objetos neles expostos na capital federal foram abordados no contexto do surgimento dessas instituições e de outros consideradas significativas para sua maior compreensão no contexto histórico, desde suas origens como criações da humanidade retratando a longa transformação pela qual passaram ao longo da História. Foi realizada uma pesquisa minuciosa sobre os museus considerados os mais relevantes da capital federal – Museu da República, Museu Vivo da Memória Candanga, Panteão da Pátria, Memorial JK, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas e Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil de Brasília – evidenciando brevemente sua história e atividades que cada um deles representa no contexto brasileiro e da cidade. De acordo com os parâmetros metodológicos utilizados, após a investigação realizada sobre tal tema e instituições por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica, foi considerada pertinente a participação do público da cidade de modo a confrontar os dados bibliográficos confirmando-os ou ampliando tais considerações sobre o tema. Esperamos que a presente pesquisa possa auxiliar outras reflexões sobre o tema estimulando o necessário debate sobre arte e cultura na contemporaneidade
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Herrero, Cayetano, Emilio Herrero, Javier Martín‑Chivelet, and Félix Pérez‑Lorente. "Avian ichnofauna from Sierra de las Cabras tracksite (late Miocene, Jumilla, SE Spain)." Journal of Iberian Geology, February 14, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41513-023-00205-x.

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AbstractThe Sierra de las Cabras (Lat. 38° 28′ 53″N, Lon. 1° 24′ 52″W) is an exceptional ichnofossil site of late Miocene age, located in the Prebetic ranges near the town of Jumilla (Murcia Province, SE Spain). The site contains abundant vertebrate ichnofauna preserved in carbonate facies that were deposited in a semi-arid wetland system with shallow ponds and marshes. The ichnofauna includes diverse mammal footprints and trackways, which have been recently studied, as well as bird ones, which are the target of this paper. We report a total of 51 avian footprints spread over two of the three track-bearing stratigraphic surfaces of the site. The detailed study of these ichnites (footprints and trackways) allows their attribution to the ichnogenus Fuscinapeda (Sarjeant and Langston, Texas Memorial Museum Bulletin 36:1–86, 1994), as well as to infer diverse patterns of bird’s behavior consistent with shallow water wetlands avifauna. Also, we discuss about the possible trackmakers, which should correspond to walking birds characterized by long legs, with no hallux or a raised one, which could probably belong to the Gruiformes order. The study confirms the presence of Fuscinapeda in the Iberian Peninsula and completes the characterization of the vertebrate ichnofauna of Sierra de las Cabras, a site that joins the nearby Hoya de la Sima ichnofossil site to yield the largest and most diverse record of vertebrate ichnites of late Miocene age in southern Iberia.
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Crippa, Giulia. "Encenações e reescritas da memória no capitalismo global entre teorias e práticas culturais | Scenarios and rewritings of memory in global capitalism between theories and cultural practices." Liinc em Revista 14, no. 2 (December 17, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v14i2.4473.

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RESUMO Discute-se a constituição da Memória Cultural após a queda do muro de Berlim e pelos fenômenos da globalização. Propõe-se o estudo de dois casos dedicados à memória no contemporâneo: o Memorial dos deportados italianos em Auschwitz, realizado em 1981 e hoje não mais existente; e o Museu da Memória de Ustica, em Bolonha, inaugurado em 2007. Trata-se de exemplos que permitem refletir sobre as transformações da memória dentro de uma discussão sobre capitalismo globalizado. Oferecemos as contribuições de experiências de representação alternativas, que tendem a deslegitimar as visões dominantes. Pretende-se indagar as maneiras de realização dos registros e sua mediação. Metodologicamente, o trabalho realiza uma revisão crítica da literatura sobre os temas abordados. Em um segundo momento, nos dois estudos de caso, observa a práxis.Palavras-chave: Memória; Capitalismo; Museu de Ustica; Memorial de Auschwitz.ABSTRACT The constitution of Cultural Memory is discussed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and by the phenomena of globalization.It is proposed to study two cases dedicated to contemporary memory: the Memorial of the Italian deportees in Auschwitz, held in 1981 and today no longer existent and the Museum of the memory of Ustica, in Bologna, inaugurated in 2007. These are examples which allow us to reflect on the transformations of memory within a discussion of globalized capitalism. We offer the contributions of alternative representation experiences, which tend to delegitimize dominant views. It is intended to investigate the ways in which the records are made and their mediation. Methodologically, the work carries out a critical review of the literature on the topics covered. In a second moment, in the two case studies, it observes the praxis.Keywords: Memory; Capitalism; Museum of Ustica; Auschwitz Memorial.
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Synenko, Joshua. "Topography and Frontier: Gibellina's City of Art." M/C Journal 19, no. 3 (June 22, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1095.

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Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. New York: Routledge, 2014.Bileddo, Marco. “Back in Sicily / The Three Dogs Gibellina.” Eodoto108 Magazine. 30 July 2014. Bilham, Roger G., and Susan Elizabeth Hough. After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010.Corbo, Stefano. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002.Museum Network Belicina. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Inoperative Community. Trans. Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Platzer, Elisbha Fabienne. “Semiotics of Spaces: City and Landart.” Seni/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment. Edward Huijbens and Ólafur Jónsson, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Simitch, Andrea, and Val Warke. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know. Rockport Publishers Incorporated, 2014.Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
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Pilcher, Jeremy, and Saskia Vermeylen. "From Loss of Objects to Recovery of Meanings: Online Museums and Indigenous Cultural Heritage." M/C Journal 11, no. 6 (October 14, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.94.

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Abstract:
IntroductionThe debate about the responsibility of museums to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights (Kelly and Gordon; Butts) has caught our attention on the basis of our previous research experience with regard to the protection of the tangible and intangible heritage of the San (former hunter gatherers) in Southern Africa (Martin and Vermeylen; Vermeylen, Contextualising; Vermeylen, Life Force; Vermeylen et al.; Vermeylen, Land Rights). This paper contributes to the critical debate about curatorial practices and the recovery of Indigenous peoples’ cultural practices and explores how museums can be transformed into cultural centres that “decolonise” their objects while simultaneously providing social agency to marginalised groups such as the San. Indigenous MuseumTraditional methods of displaying Indigenous heritage are now regarded with deep suspicion and resentment by Indigenous peoples (Simpson). A number of related issues such as the appropriation, ownership and repatriation of culture together with the treatment of sensitive and sacred materials and the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples’ identity (Carter; Simpson) have been identified as the main problems in the debate about museum curatorship and Indigenous heritage. The poignant question remains whether the concept of a classical museum—in the sense of how it continues to classify, value and display non-Western artworks—will ever be able to provide agency to Indigenous peoples as long as “their lives are reduced to an abstract set of largely arbitrary material items displayed without much sense of meaning” (Stanley 3). Indeed, as Salvador has argued, no matter how much Indigenous peoples have been involved in the planning and implementation of an exhibition, some issues remain problematic. First, there is the problem of representation: who speaks for the group; who should make decisions and under what circumstances; when is it acceptable for “outsiders” to be involved? Furthermore, Salvador raises another area of contestation and that is the issue of intention. As we agree with Salvador, no matter how good the intention to include Indigenous peoples in the curatorial practices, the fact that Indigenous peoples may have a (political) perspective about the exhibition that differs from the ideological foundation of the museum enterprise, is, indeed, a challenge that must not be overlooked in the discussion of the inclusive museum. This relates to, arguably, one of the most important challenges in respect to the concept of an Indigenous museum: how to present the past and present without creating an essentialising “Other”? As Stanley summarises, the modernising agenda of the museum, including those museums that claim to be Indigenous museums, continues to be heavily embedded in the belief that traditional cultural beliefs, practices and material manifestations must be saved. In other words, exhibitions focusing on Indigenous peoples fail to show them as dynamic, living cultures (Simpson). This raises the issue that museums recreate the past (Sepúlveda dos Santos) while Indigenous peoples’ interests can be best described “in terms of contemporaneity” (Bolton qtd. in Stanley 7). According to Bolton, Indigenous peoples’ interest in museums can be best understood in terms of using these (historical) collections and institutions to address contemporary issues. Or, as Sepúlveda dos Santos argues, in order for museums to be a true place of memory—or indeed a true place of recovery—it is important that the museum makes the link between the past and contemporary issues or to use its objects in such a way that these objects emphasize “the persistence of lived experiences transmitted through generations” (29). Under pressure from Indigenous rights movements, the major aim of some museums is now reconciliation with Indigenous peoples which, ultimately, should result in the return of the cultural objects to the originators of these objects (Kelly and Gordon). Using the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) as an illustration, we argue that the whole debate of returning or recovering Indigenous peoples’ cultural objects to the original source is still embedded in a discourse that emphasises the mummified aspect of these materials. As Harding argues, NAGPRA is provoking an image of “native Americans as mere passive recipients of their cultural identity, beholden to their ancestors and the museum community for the re-creation of their cultures” (137) when it defines cultural patrimony as objects having ongoing historical, traditional or cultural importance, central to the Native American group or culture itself. According to Harding (2005) NAGPRA’s dominating narrative focuses on the loss, alienation and cultural genocide of the objects as long as these are not returned to their originators. The recovery or the return of the objects to their “original” culture has been applauded as one of the most liberating and emancipatory events in recent years for Indigenous peoples. However, as we have argued elsewhere, the process of recovery needs to do more than just smother the object in its past; recovery can only happen when heritage or tradition is connected to the experience of everyday life. One way of achieving this is to move away from the objectification of Indigenous peoples’ cultures. ObjectificationIn our exploratory enquiry about new museum practices our attention was drawn to a recent debate about ownership and personhood within the context of museology (Busse; Baker; Herle; Bell; Geismar). Busse, in particular, makes the point that in order to reformulate curatorial practices it is important to redefine the concept and meaning of objects. While the above authors do not question the importance of the objects, they all argue that the real importance does not lie in the objects themselves but in the way these objects embody the physical manifestation of social relations. The whole idea that objects matter because they have agency and efficacy, and as such become a kind of person, draws upon recent anthropological theorising by Gell and Strathern. Furthermore, we have not only been inspired by Gell’s and Strathern’s approaches that suggests that objects are social persons, we have also been influenced by Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s defining of objects as biographical agents and therefore valued because of the associations they have acquired throughout time. We argue that by framing objects in a social network throughout its lifecycle we can avoid the recurrent pitfalls of essentialising objects in terms of their “primitive” or “traditional” (aesthetic) qualities and mystifying the identity of Indigenous peoples as “noble savages.” Focusing more on the social network that surrounds a particular object opens up new avenues of enquiry as to how, and to what extent, museums can become more inclusive vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples. It allows moving beyond the current discourse that approaches the history of the (ethnographic) museum from only one dominant perspective. By tracing an artwork throughout its lifecycle a new metaphor can be discovered; one that shows that Indigenous peoples have not always been victims, but maybe more importantly it allows us to show a more complex narrative of the object itself. It gives us the space to counterweight some of the discourses that have steeped Indigenous artworks in a “postcolonial” framework of sacredness and mythical meaning. This is not to argue that it is not important to be reminded of the dangers of appropriating other cultures’ heritage, but we would argue that it is equally important to show that approaching a story from a one-sided perspective will create a dualism (Bush) and reducing the differences between different cultures to a dualistic opposition fails to recognise the fundamental areas of agency (Morphy). In order for museums to enliven and engage with objects, they must become institutions that emphasise a relational approach towards displaying and curating objects. In the next part of this paper we will explore to what extent an online museum could progressively facilitate the process of providing agency to the social relations that link objects, persons, environments and memories. As Solanilla argues, what has been described as cybermuseology may further transform the museum landscape and provide an opportunity to challenge some of the problems identified above (e.g. essentialising practices). Or to quote the museologist Langlais: “The communication and interaction possibilities offered by the Web to layer information and to allow exploration of multiple meanings are only starting to be exploited. In this context, cybermuseology is known as a practice that is knowledge-driven rather than object-driven, and its main goal is to disseminate knowledge using the interaction possibilities of Information Communication Technologies” (Langlais qtd. in Solanilla 108). One thing which shows promise and merits further exploration is the idea of transforming the act of exhibiting ethnographic objects accompanied by texts and graphics into an act of cyber discourse that allows Indigenous peoples through their own voices and gestures to involve us in their own history. This is particularly the case since Indigenous peoples are using technologies, such as the Internet, as a new medium through which they can recuperate their histories, land rights, knowledge and cultural heritage (Zimmerman et al.). As such, new technology has played a significant role in the contestation and formation of Indigenous peoples’ current identity by creating new social and political spaces through visual and narrative cultural praxis (Ginsburg).Online MuseumsIt has been acknowledged for some time that a presence on the Web might mitigate the effects of what has been described as the “unassailable voice” in the recovery process undertaken by museums (Walsh 77). However, a museum’s online engagement with an Indigenous culture may have significance beyond undercutting the univocal authority of a museum. In the case of the South African National Gallery it was charged with challenging the extent to which it represents entrenched but unacceptable political ideologies. Online museums may provide opportunities in the conservation and dissemination of “life stories” that give an account of an Indigenous culture as it is experienced (Solanilla 105). We argue that in engaging with Indigenous cultural heritage a distinction needs to be drawn between data and the cognitive capacity to learn, “which enables us to extrapolate and learn new knowledge” (Langlois 74). The problem is that access to data about an Indigenous culture does not necessarily lead to an understanding of its knowledge. It has been argued that cybermuseology loses the essential interpersonal element that needs to be present if intangible heritage is understood as “the process of making sense that is generally transmitted orally and through face-to-face experience” (Langlois 78). We agree that the online museum does not enable a reality to be reproduced (Langlois 78).This does not mean that cybermuseology should be dismissed. Instead it provides the opportunity to construct a valuable, but completely new, experience of cultural knowledge (Langlois 78). The technology employed in cybermuseology provides the means by which control over meaning may, at least to some extent, be dispersed (Langlois 78). In this way online museums provide the opportunity for Indigenous peoples to challenge being subjected to manipulation by one authoritative museological voice. One of the ways this may be achieved is through interactivity by enabling the use of social tagging and folksonomy (Solanilla 110; Trant 2). In these processes keywords (tags) are supplied and shared by visitors as a means of accessing museum content. These tags in turn give rise to a classification system (folksonomy). In the context of an online museum engaging with an Indigenous culture we have reservations about the undifferentiated interactivity on the part of all visitors. This issue may be investigated further by examining how interactivity relates to communication. Arguably, an online museum is engaged in communicating Indigenous cultural heritage because it helps to keep it alive and pass it on to others (Langlois 77). However, enabling all visitors to structure online access to that culture may be detrimental to the communication of knowledge that might otherwise occur. The narratives by which Indigenous cultures, rather than visitors, order access to information about their cultures may lead to the communication of important knowledge. An illustration of the potential of this approach is the work Sharon Daniel has been involved with, which enables communities to “produce knowledge and interpret their own experience using media and information technologies” (Daniel, Palabras) partly by means of generating folksonomies. One way in which such issues may be engaged with in the context of online museums is through the argument that database and narrative in such new media objects are opposed to each other (Manovich, New Media 225). A new media work such as an online museum may be understood to be comprised of a database and an interface to that database. A visitor to an online museum may only move through the content of the database by following those paths that have been enabled by those who created the museum (Manovich, New Media 227). In short it is by means of the interface provided to the viewer that the content of the database is structured into a narrative (Manovich, New Media: 226). It is possible to understand online museums as constructions in which narrative and database aspects are emphasized to varying degrees for users. There are a variety of museum projects in which the importance of the interface in creating a narrative interface has been acknowledged. Goldblum et al. describe three examples of websites in which interfaces may be understood as, and explicitly designed for, carrying meaning as well as enabling interactivity: Life after the Holocaust; Ripples of Genocide; and Yearbook 2006.As with these examples, we suggest that it is important there be an explicit engagement with the significance of interface(s) for online museums about Indigenous peoples. The means by which visitors access content is important not only for the way in which visitors interact with material, but also as to what is communicated about, culture. It has been suggested that the curator’s role should be moved away from expertly representing knowledge toward that of assisting people outside the museum to make “authored statements” within it (Bennett 11). In this regard it seems to us that involvement of Indigenous peoples with the construction of the interface(s) to online museums is of considerable significance. Pieterse suggests that ethnographic museums should be guided by a process of self-representation by the “others” portrayed (Pieterse 133). Moreover it should not be forgotten that, because of the separation of content and interface, it is possible to have access to a database of material through more than one interface (Manovich, New Media 226-7). Online museums provide a means by which the artificial homogenization of Indigenous peoples may be challenged.We regard an important potential benefit of an online museum as the replacement of accessing material through the “unassailable voice” with the multiplicity of Indigenous voices. A number of ways to do this are suggested by a variety of new media artworks, including those that employ a database to rearrange information to reveal underlying cultural positions (Paul 100). Paul discusses the work of, amongst others, George Legrady. She describes how it engages with the archive and database as sites that record culture (104-6). Paul specifically discusses Legrady’s work Slippery Traces. This involved viewers navigating through more than 240 postcards. Viewers of work were invited to “first chose one of three quotes appearing on the screen, each of which embodies a different perspective—anthropological, colonialist, or media theory—and thus provides an interpretive angle for the experience of the projects” (104-5). In the same way visitors to an online museum could be provided with a choice of possible Indigenous voices by which its collection might be experienced. We are specifically interested in the implications that such approaches have for the way in which online museums could engage with film. Inspired by Basu’s work on reframing ethnographic film, we see the online museum as providing the possibility of a platform to experiment with new media art in order to expose the meta-narrative(s) about the politics of film making. As Basu argues, in order to provoke a feeling of involvement with the viewer, it is important that the viewer becomes aware “of the plurality of alternative readings/navigations that they might have made” (105). As Weinbren has observed, where a fixed narrative pathway has been constructed by a film, digital technology provides a particularly effective means to challenge it. It would be possible to reveal the way in which dominant political interests regarding Indigenous cultures have been asserted, such as for example in the popular film The Gods Must Be Crazy. New media art once again provides some interesting examples of the way ideology, that might otherwise remain unclear, may be exposed. Paul describes the example of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s project How I learned. The work restructures a television series Kung Fu by employing “categories such as ‘how I learned about blocking punches,’ ‘how I learned about exploiting workers,’ or ‘how I learned to love the land’” (Paul 103) to reveal in greater clarity, than otherwise might be possible, the cultural stereotypes used in the visual narratives of the program (Paul 102-4). We suggest that such examples suggest the ways in which online museums could work to reveal and explore the existence not only of meta-narratives expressed by museums as a whole, but also the means by which they are realised within existing items held in museum collections.ConclusionWe argue that the agency for such reflective moments between the San, who have been repeatedly misrepresented or underrepresented in exhibitions and films, and multiple audiences, may be enabled through the generation of multiple narratives within online museums. We would like to make the point that, first and foremost, the theory of representation must be fully understood and acknowledged in order to determine whether, and how, modes of online curating are censorious. As such we see online museums having the potential to play a significant role in illuminating for both the San and multiple audiences the way that any form of representation or displaying restricts the meanings that may be recovered about Indigenous peoples. ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Bal, Mieke. “Exhibition as Film.” Exhibition Experiments. Ed. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2007. 71-93. Basu, Paul. “Reframing Ethnographic Film.” Rethinking Documentary. Eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008. 94-106.Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998. 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Theorising Cultural Heritage. Indigenous Curation as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Thoughts on the Relevance of the 2003 UNESCO Convention. Washington: Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 2005.Langlois, Dominique. “Cybermuseology and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Intersection Conference 2005. York U: Toronto, 2005. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://yorku.ca/topia/docs/conference/langlais.pdf›.“Life after the Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/life_after_holocaust/›.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.———. Making Art of Databases. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003.Martin, George, and Saskia Vermeylen. “Intellectual Property, Indigenous Knowledge, and Biodiversity.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (2005): 27-48. Martínez, David. “Re-visioning the Hopi Fourth World: Dan Namingha, Indigenous Modernism, and the Hopivotskwani.” Art History 29 (2006): 145-72. 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Peoples, Sharon Margaret. "Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (August 7, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1013.

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IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011­ – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004­–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisements, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. As the number of museums grow, so should the number of fashion curators.ReferencesArgus. 10 July 1861. 20 June 2015 ‹http://trove.nla.gov.au/›.Batersby, Selena. “Icons of Fashion.” 2014. 6 June 2015 ‹http://adelaidereview.com.au/features/icons-of-fashion/›.Bitgood, Stephen. “When Is 'Museum Fatigue' Not Fatigue?” Curator: The Museum Journal 2009. 12 Apr. 2015 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.tb00344.x/abstract›. Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2006.Buick, Nadia. “Up Close and Personal: Art and Fashion in the Museum.” Art Monthly Australia Aug. (2011): 242.Clynk, J., and S. Peoples. “All Out in the Wash.” Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice. Eds. Annabella Pollen and Charlotte Nicklas C. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming Sep. 2015. Couchman, Sophia. “Making the ‘Last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘Vanishing’ People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories.” Australian Historical Studies 42.1 (2011): 78–91.Coates, Ian. “The Lambing Flat Riots.” Gold and Civilisation. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, 2011.Clark, Judith. Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. London: V&A Publications, 2006.Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.Crane, Susan. “The Distortion of Memory.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63.Davidson, Patricia. “Museums and the Shaping of Memory.” Heritage Museum and Galleries: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.Discover Central NSW. Milthorpe: BMCW, Mar. 2015.Dethridge, Anna. Fashion as Social Energy Milan: Connecting Cultures, 2005.Falk, John, and Lyn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whaleback Books, 1992.———, John Koran, Lyn Dierking, and Lewis Dreblow. “Predicting Visitor Behaviour.” Curator: The Museum Journal 28.4 (1985): 249–57.Fashion and Politics. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.fitnyc.edu/5103.asp›.Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/#!Fashion-India-Spectacular-Capitalism-Exhibition/cd23/85BBF50C-6CB9-4EE5-94BC-DAFDE56ADA96›.Frost, Warwick. “Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11.3 (2005): 235-250.Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costumes from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.Mazda, Xerxes. “Exhibitions and the Power of Narrative.” Museums Australia National Conference. Sydney, Australia. 23 May 2015. Opening speech.McGowan, Barry. Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina. Wagga Wagga: Museum of the Riverina, 2010.Meyer, Morgan, and Kate Woodthorpe. “The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries.” Sociological Research Online (2008). 6 July 2015 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/1.html›.National Museum of Australia. “Harvest of Endurance.” 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/endurance_scroll/harvest_of_endurance_html_version/home›. Peoples, Sharon. “Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers.” Paper presented at the Fashion Tales 2015 Conference, Milan, June 2015. Ravelli, Louise. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Riegels Melchior, Marie. “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums.” Paper presented at Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22–25 Sep. 2011. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992.Samuels, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 2012.Sandell, Richard. “Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectorial Change.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Schamberger, Karen. “An Inconvenient Myth—the Lambing Flat Riots and Birth of a Nation.” Paper presented at Foundational Histories Australian Historical Conference, University of Sydney, 6–10 July 2015. Smith, Laurajane. The Users of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Vergo, Peter. New Museology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.
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Leal, Adriana Guilhermano, and Cristina Calvão. "A ACESSIBILIDADE EMOCIONAL: RELATOS MEMORIAIS NO MUSEU VIVO DO SÃO BENTO." PIXO - Revista de Arquitetura, Cidade e Contemporaneidade 4, no. 13 (August 20, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.15210/pixo.v4i13.18627.

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Tendo em perspectiva o quadro do envelhecimento da população brasileira vemos que as demandas e perspectivas destes não se refletem na realidade espacial das cidades brasileiras tanto no campo físico, ao que se refere às questões de acessibilidade, bem como ao campo subjetivo. Neste sentido, este artigo propõe um debate ao que tange temas da acessibilidade emocional para fruição e participação social do idoso em percursos museais, estendendo estas percepções para uma escala urbana do bairro e até mesmo da cidade fluminense de Duque de Caxias, possibilitadas pelo estudo de caso do ecomuseu de percurso Museu Vivo do São Bento. Como forma de acessar as experiências subjetivas destes lugares, indicando possibilidades para uma acessibilidade plena do museu, foi utilizada a metodologia de percursos comentados proposta por Jean Paul Thibaud, pelo qual as autoras entendem ter acessado as ambiências sensíveis dos lugares do museu, e pela qual compartilharemos aqui nossas análises.Palavras-chave: idoso, acessibilidade emocional, ambiência, atmosfera, lugar.
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Broderick, Mick, Stuart Marshall Bender, and Tony McHugh. "Virtual Trauma: Prospects for Automediality." M/C Journal 21, no. 2 (April 25, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1390.

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Abstract:
Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. 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München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008. 7-16.Harris, Sam. “Waking Up with Sam Harris #64 – Ask Me Anything.” YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017. 16 Mar. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTuquaAC4w>.Kwon, Joung Huem, John Powell, and Alan Chalmers. “How Level of Realism Influences Anxiety in Virtual Reality Environments for a Job Interview.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 71.10 (2013): 978-87.Loh, Alyssa K. "I Feel You." Artforum, Nov. 2017. 10 Apr. 2018 <https://www.artforum.com/print/201709/alyssa-k-loh-on-virtual-reality-and-empathy-71781>.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Mathews, Karen. “Exhibit Allows Virtual ‘Interviews’ with Holocaust Survivors.” Phys.org Science X Network, 15 Dec. 2017. 18 Apr. 2018 <https://phys.org/news/2017-09-virtual-holocaust-survivors.html>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website” M/C Journal 17.9 (2014).Miller, Ken. More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Evolution of Screen Performance. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Murdoch University. 2009.Milk, Chris. “Ted: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED Conferences, LLC. 16 Mar. 2015. <https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine>.Nakamura, Lisa. “Cyberrace.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 42-54.North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and Joseph R Coble. "Effectiveness of Virtual Environment Desensitization in the Treatment of Agoraphobia." International Journal of Virtual Reality 1.2 (1995): 25-34.Pertaub, David-Paul, Mel Slater, and Chris Barker. “An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11.1 (2002): 68-78.Plantinga, Carl. "Emotion and Affect." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga. New York: Routledge, 2009. 86-96.Rizzo, A.A., and Sebastian Koenig. “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” Neuropsychology 31.8 (2017): 877-99.Rothbaum, Barbara O., Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and JoAnne Difede. "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1208.1 (2010): 126-32.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. 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Newsweek, 18 Oct. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://www.newsweek.com/2017/10/27/how-technology-keeping-holocaust-survivor-stories-alive-forever-687946.html>.
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