Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Musicological Writings from the Modern Arab “Renaissance” in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Syria and Egypt

Historians designate the early decades of the nineteenth century as the beginning of the modern era in the Middle East, initiated by Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the subsequent European colonial presence that extended into the twentieth century. This was a period of intense self-reflection, especially in Egypt, as Egyptians responded to their experience with colonialism, Westernized modernization, and new forms of national identity. In this environment, discourse concerning preserving tradition and pursuing innovation brought these contested issues into musical as well as social and political contexts. By the late nineteenth century, Arab authors and journalists were referring to a new Arab “renaissance (al-nahḍa, “rising, awaking, revival, renaissance”). In this dissertation, I examine four Arabic texts on music of this period, written between 1840 and 1936, by one Syrian and three Egyptian authors who contributed to the emergence of modern Arabic literature on music: Mikhā’īl Mashāqa, al-Risāla al-shihābiyya fī al-sinā‘a al-mūsīqiyya (The Shihābī Treatise on the Musical Art), 1840 (the only one of these texts translated into Western languages); Muḥammad ibn Ismā‘īl ibn ‘Umar Shihāb al-Dīn, Safīnat al-mulk wa-nafīsat al-fulk (The Ship of Royalty and the Boat’s Precious Gem), 1843; Muḥammad Kāmil al-Khula‘ī, Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-sharqī (The Book of Eastern Music), 1904/05; and Qusṭandī Rizq, al-Mūsīqā al-sharqiyya w’al-ghinā’ al-‘arabī (Eastern Music and Arab Song), 1936. From these texts, we learn of the environments in the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Egypt in which these authors developed their interest in the music of their regions and their contributions to Arabic literature on music in the new Arab “renaissance.” The 1840 treatise by Mashāqa is highly significant for his presentation of his conceptualization of the modern Arab tonal system and its application to his documentation of melodic modes current in Syria in the first half of the nineteenth century. His contemporary in Egypt, Shihāb al-Dīn, is known for his extensive song-text collection and commentary on the poetic origins of many of the songs, with historical and anecdotal commentary on numerous poetic genres he discusses. While demonstrating considerable knowledge of the “science of music” derived from ancient Greek concepts, his lack of understanding of the twenty-four tone octave presented by Mashāqa is indicative of the early stages of its adoption in Egypt. In their early-twentieth-century publications, Egyptians al-Khula‘ī and Rizq analyze the social and ideological dimensions of Arab music in the modernizing Arab world, demonstrating the need for integrating both old and new musical features, characteristic of Arab music throughout its history. Al-Khula‘ī stresses the need for understanding and preserving the heritage of traditional Arabic poetry as expressed in song, while explaining his interest in adopting Western models for Arab music, such as notation and recording devices, as a means for preserving the Arabs’ musical heritage. Rizq warns of the destructive dangers of “innovation” and “modernization” upon Arab music, while also defining acceptable adaptions of Western-style modernity for creating a modern Egyptian nation. From their individual perspectives, these four authors demonstrate their commonconcern with promoting the value of traditional Arab music as an essential element defining Arab identity, with the latter two stressing the need for preserving their musicsl heritage in a changing world by adapting it to inevitable processes of “innovation” and “progress” while retaining the traditional musical and poetic aesthetics

Static films and moving pictures: montage in avant-garde photography and film

Photomontage has more to do with film than with any other art form - they have in common the technique of montage. (Sergei Tretyakov) By considering that photomontage and film use the technique of cutting and gluing as dominant artistic device, and that montage, a technique unifying art and technology for the first time, emerged as a dominant artistic feature of the avantgarde, this thesis will explore the ideological and perceptual implications of its advent in avant-garde art and film. The technological advances of the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly the advent of photography, allowed avantgarde artists to break free from traditional concepts of artistic production – they dispensed with the old criteria of uniqueness, originality, handicraft and personal style. At a time when many avant-garde artists abruptly ceased to paint, photomontage emerged as the privileged locus for a caesura with traditional art forms. Photomontage envisioned film aesthetics insofar as it combines and juxtaposes images of various perspectival planes and angles (Raoul Hausmann described his early photomontages as “motionless moving pictures”). A corresponding observation can be made on the use of montage in cinema, a technique which crucially underpins the illusion of movement created through the succession of photographic stills. The present thesis will investigate photomontage and film in order to examine the effect technological reproduction played in revolutionising artistic production, perception and ideology – where the technique and philosophy of montage was key

Divergence in Architectural Research

ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2020: Divergence in Architectural Research, March 5-6, 2020, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.The essays in this volume have come together under the theme “Divergence in Architectural Research” and present a snapshot of Ph.D. research being conducted in over thirty architectural research institutions, representing fourteen countries around the world. These essays also provide a window into the presentations and discussions that took place March 5-6, 2020, during the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium “Divergence in Architectural Research,” under the auspices of the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. On a preliminary reading, the essays respond to the call of divergence by doing just that; they present the great diversity of research topics, methodologies, and practices currently found under the umbrella of “architectural research.” They inform inquiry within architectural programs and across disciplinary concentrations, and also point to the ways that the academy, research methodologies, and the design profession are evolving and encroaching upon one another, with the unspoken hope of encouraging new relationships, reconfiguring previous assumptions about the discipline, and interweaving research and practice

Writers and writing in the Roman Army at Dura-Europos

This socio-palaeographic thesis maintains that behind the uniform appearance of Roman army writing was a particular, dedicated training. Focussing on the third century Dura-Europos, it uncovers evidence for the thorough schooling given to the clerks of the resident Cohors XX Palmyrenorum enabling them to fulfil their administrative duties. These include maintaining efficient documentation systems and preparing a range of accurate, legible texts, and the clerks were trained to produce a repertoire of standard military scripts. Additionally other soldiers and the more general public were taught to read and to understand, to varying degrees, but the clerks, distinct, were specialist writers who found dignity in the work that they did. This dissertation, a preliminary study, draws throughout from the camp’s rich epigraphic and papyrological evidence. It sets out the context in which clerical soldiers worked and the evidence for army literate education and then introduces Roman writing, its form and development generally, before analysing in detail the letter-forms used in one particular standard hand over the decades the cohort’s documents span. In this hand, the well-known development out of Old Roman Cursive is presented and discussed. A brief additional chapter presents the possibility that military clerks also produced camp signage

Scriptinformatics

Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts

Developing a mixed reality assistance system based on projection mapping technology for manual operations at assembly workstations.

ABSTRACT Manual tasks play an important role in social sustainable manufacturing enterprises. Commonly, manual operations are used for low volume productions, but are not limited to. Operational models in manufacturing sisters cased of x-to-order paradigms (e.g. assembly-to-order) may require manual operations to speed-up the ramp-up time of new product configuration assemblies. The implications of manual operations in any production line may imply that any manufacturing or assembly process become more susceptible to human errors and therefore translate into delays, defects and/or poor product quality. In this scenario, virtual and augmented realities can offer significant advantages to support the human operator in manual operations. This research work presents the development of a mixed (virtual and augmented) reality assistance system that permits real-time support in manual operations. A review of mixed reality techniques and technologies was conducted, where it was determined to use a projection mapping solution for the proposed assistance system. According to the specific requirements of the demonstration environment, hardware and software components were chosen. The developed mixed reality assistance system was able to guide any user without any prior knowledge through the successful completion of the specific assembly task

The politics of Arabic script

This thesis explores the politics of Arabic script. Across multiple time periods and geographies, I open up the ways in which the Arabic alphabet has been politicised and strategically deployed in cultural debates. Focussing on the cultural dimensions of Arabic - the idea and visual form of script - I investigate how persistent, historical discourses have come to shape the way Arabic has been understood and used to effect complex political outcomes for individuals, communities, and nations. I situate the core of this thesis in the context of contemporary politics – in terror, war, and security – and argue that the ways in which individuals come to ‘know’ the alphabet are often racially coded and can work to reinforce systematic discrimination. While scholarship has begun to open up the field of ‘alphabet politics’, the political role of Arabic had not yet been comprehensively explored. My question therefore required that I build a conceptual foundation – a way of understanding the political work of Arabic script – as well as identifying how the script has contributed to certain social and political environments. Moving between past and present, I demonstrate that the Arabic script has been consistently used to articulate social threats and exclude unwanted identities. In this role, the Arabic script has been used to draw the line between the civilised West and the barbaric East, to inflame fears about immigration, and bolster orientalist discourses. Perhaps most critical of all, the script itself has come to act as a sign of terror. However, the construction of threat is only one aspect of Arabic politics. This thesis also examines the ways in which the script has been used as a powerful tool of art and revolution, particularly in events such as the Arab Spring. To this end, I explore the way in which aesthetic forms of Arabic script have been taken up to challenge totalitarian regimes, define community identities, and produce resistant, urban space. Here, I focus on disciplines such as Arabic calligraphy, digital typography, graphic design, and graffiti. These practices have created a space whereby the Arabic alphabet can be viewed through the frame of active, creative expression rather than simply threat, extremism, or the potential for violence. The Arabic alphabet operates as a complex political artefact, caught by historical discourse but always evolving to meet the demands of the contemporary world. A focus on Arabic script allows for a new lens on a familiar situation and discourse. As a result, this thesis sheds new light on an important cultural artefact - the Arabic script – as well as historical events and the macro-level discourses and practices that have shaped ways of thinking and seeing for decades, and continue to inform our world