METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city

Struggling to Remember: Perceptions, Potentials and Power in an Age of Mediatised Memory

What role do new, networked and pervasive technologies play in changing individual and collective memory processes? Many recent debates have focused on whether we are in the online era remembering ‘less’ or ‘more’ – informed, perhaps, by a tendency to think of memory spatially and quantifiably as working like an archive. Drawing on the philosophical theorising of Henri Bergson and its development through Gilbert Simondon, this thesis makes two interventions into the field. Firstly, conceptually, it establishes a process-based approach to perception, memory and consciousness in a shift away from the archive metaphor – thinking memory not as informing ‘knowledge of the past’ but ‘action in duration’. It situates the conscious, living being as transindividual – affectively relational to its perceived bodily and social environments, through psychic and collective individuation respectively. Moreover, it considers technologies as forms of transindividual extension of consciousness. Furthermore, it proposes the ‘antimetaphor’ of the anarchive as a conceptual tool with which to understand these durationbased, bodily and technological, action-oriented processes. Secondly, methodologically, it advocates a rephrasing of the question from how much we are remembering to how we are remembering differently. Armed now with a developed theoretical position and methodological approach, the thesis explores through three case-study chapters how personal and more historical pasts may be remembered, individually and more collectively, through new, prevalent technologies of memory such as search engines, forums and social-media sites. Analysing the material experiences of remembering, as well as examining the economic drives of the platforms and wider actors, and the resulting socio-political implications, the thesis sets out the original argument of a contemporary struggle for memory: a complex negotiation of tensions between agencies of the body, the social, and the multifarious and interconnected socio-political and economic interests of the technological platforms and hybridised media systems through which contemporary remembering increasingly takes place

‘The Erasures, the Silences Where There Should Have Been Evidence’: Dismantling Archived History and Dwelling Experience Within the Works of Hilary Mantel

The thesis critically examines Hilary Mantel’s work and its interpretation of the past through literary depictions of dwellings and archives. This thesis explores the concept of the dwelling-as-archive which has the overlapping roles and functions of a domestic dwelling and a historical archive. This thesis investigates this concept as it appears throughout Hilary Mantel’s works. These dwelling-as-archives are also in-between places where memory and historical meaning slip or are hidden. This thesis claims that Mantel’s historical fiction writing is an affective response that questions the ways characters struggle to preserve historical documents in both dwellings and archives. The thesis’ historico-materialist focus on Mantel’s works and dwellings-as-archives argues for a re-historicisation of phenomenology which the thesis defines as a phenomenological approach grounded in historical awareness. Characters attempt to reconstruct an affective experience of the past through domestic objects and archives. The dwelling-as-archives are conceptualised as containers of memory. However, their status as in-between places mean archived objects are frequently hidden, slip, or are waiting to be discovered to re-experience the past. The thesis explores Mantel’s poetic dissembling of the borders between absence/presence, belonging/rootlessness, and private/public that helps expose possible lost historical meaning. The various sites of dwelling examined in this thesis are haunted by memory and the dead, with the inhabitants of such dwellings causing the decay of architectural structures and family homelife. This thesis then examines instances of inscription, intertextuality, and historiographic metafiction in a select number of Mantel’s novels to reveal the archive as an unstable product of familial, national, and institutional historical consciousness. The dwelling-as-archive is a hinterland through which Mantel’s imagination can reconstruct the missing gaps she finds in the historical record. This thesis contributes to a growing critical field of studies on Mantel’s works which includes Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter’s Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2018) and Lucy Arnold’s reading of spectrality and intertextuality in Reading Mantel: Haunted Decades (2019). Recent commercial and critical responses to the Wolf Hall Trilogy often do not recognise a literary career spanning twenty-five years from 1985. This thesis then investigates Mantel's specific challenges when (re)interpreting the past through her imagination and research, with the dwelling-as-archive often a background character in her character’s experience of dwelling and history

Building information modeling – A game changer for interoperability and a chance for digital preservation of architectural data?

Digital data associated with the architectural design-andconstruction process is an essential resource alongside -and even past- the lifecycle of the construction object it describes. Despite this, digital architectural data remains to be largely neglected in digital preservation research – and vice versa, digital preservation is so far neglected in the design-and-construction process. In the last 5 years, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has seen a growing adoption in the architecture and construction domains, marking a large step towards much needed interoperability. The open standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is one way in which data is exchanged in BIM processes. This paper presents a first digital preservation based look at BIM processes, highlighting the history and adoption of the methods as well as the open file format standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) as one way to store and preserve BIM data

Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies : Year 2020 : Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage

The announcement of the creation of a European Year of Cultural Heritage (year 2018) – by the Decision 2017/864 of the European Parliament – encouraged the creation, in 2017, of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage (ESACH). ESACH has become the first still-growing interdisciplinary and cross- -generational network in the field. Currently brings together young researchers and researchers at early stages of their careers, in the fields of culture and heritage, from all kinds of academic disciplines and is made up of members from various European universities and research centres (see www.esach.org). Within the network, the main questions are: How do we engage with the past elements of our culture(s)? How and why do we protect culture as a genuine element of a contemporary cultural system? What do younger generations state as heritage and what ways do they see to safeguard and experience it? ESACH stands up for a participatory way of involvement and is eager to take part in the cultural discourse at European and national levels. Since ESACHS’ foundation, the Portuguese publisher Mazu Press (www.mazupress.com) has been associated with the initiatives of the Portuguese branch of ESACH based in Lisbon (Sharing Heritage Lisbon), firstly with the promotion actions and then with the publication of the book “New Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Cultural Heritage Studies. Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage in the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018”. In this atypical Covid-19 pandemic year, Mazu Press again invited ESACH to join the renewed idea of “unifying through Cultural Heritage”, creating the opportunity for all to associate their efforts to this volume of “Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies, Year 2020”. Until now, ESACH members have been given the opportunity to contribute their ideas in several European events organized by the respective stakeholders, such as the Genoa Meeting, in October 2019, which had the cultural, logistic and financial support of the University of Genoa and foremost the PhD Course in Study and Enhancement of the Historical, Artistic-Architectural and Environmental Heritage. This book brings together twenty chapters by twenty four authors from Canada, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey. This sharing of knowledge, culture and heritage studies, through various disciplines, shows the richness – advances and new perspectives – generated by the common passion for cultural heritage.Mazutech R&D; Università di Genova / Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche / Dottorato in Studio e Valorizzazione del Patrimonio Storico, Artistico-Architettonico e Ambientaleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox; Protection and Development of the Dutch Archeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension

To what extent can we know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape’s cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about ‘the management of future change rather than simply protection’. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy. This is supported by two unifying concepts: ‘biography of landscape’ and ‘action research’. This approach focuses upon the interaction between knowledge, policy and an imagination centered on the public. The European perspective makes us aware of the resourcefulness of the diversity of landscapes, of social and institutional structures, of various sorts of problems, approaches and ways forward. In addition, two related issues stand out: the management of knowledge creation for landscape research and management, and the prospects for the near future. Underlying them is the imperative that we learn from the past ‘through landscape’

Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse: Gender, Identity, and Digital Cultural Heritage

The current ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (2012-2023) in the Republic of Ireland has created a pretext for funding high-profile national digitisation projects. During this decade, digital archives have become part of the public experience of commemoration in a way they were not before. Social media also emerged as a prominent mode of communicating the commemorations online, leaving behind an historical record of engagement. Releases of state digital archives have been aligned with key anniversaries, notably in 2016, and has set a precedent for digitisation as a new ritual of commemoration in this late-modern remembrance culture. Online engagement built towards and spiked between March and April 2016, and though it is a burgeoning area of interest in digital history and memory studies Twitter as a source for the systematic study of contemporary commemoration in Ireland has been little explored. In this context, this thesis demonstrates how the profusion of digital archives and online engagement with heritage emphasises the digital space as a territory for the performance of remembrance culture, underpinned by a critical heritage and feminist discourse. Taking three centennial collections as case studies, it demonstrates how ‘digitisations may be recognized as vibrant and historically situated sources in their own right’ even as they instantiate Irish cultural and collective memory and identity. Using digital humanities methods, it further substantiates the ways in which Twitter was (re)appropriated for the commemorations for feminist ends. Commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising continues to be a powerful reference point in defining and redefining Irish cultural identity. This thesis shows how both digital commemorative archives and Twitter have been mobilized in articulating national identity during this decade of commemorations, as well as in critical remembrance around the centenary of the Easter Rising, challenging inequality and authorised commemoration