The study of the Paippalāda recension of the Atharvaveda: The state of the art

This article provides a survey of recent scholarship on the Paippalādasaṃhitā (PS) of the Atharvaveda, and presents the main lines of research that are currently being pursued. In particular, it discusses: the different approaches to the text-critical work on the PS; the debate on the history of its transmission; the linguistic studies based on the text; the hypothesis that the PS is a manual for the king’s purohita; the ongoing research on the connection between the Paippalādins, the Vrātyas and the Pāśupatas; and recent scholarship on its ancillary literature

Towards robust real-world historical handwriting recognition

In this thesis, we make a bridge from the past to the future by using artificial-intelligence methods for text recognition in a historical Dutch collection of the Natuurkundige Commissie that explored Indonesia (1820-1850). In spite of the successes of systems like 'ChatGPT', reading historical handwriting is still quite challenging for AI. Whereas GPT-like methods work on digital texts, historical manuscripts are only available as an extremely diverse collections of (pixel) images. Despite the great results, current DL methods are very data greedy, time consuming, heavily dependent on the human expert from the humanities for labeling and require machine-learning experts for designing the models. Ideally, the use of deep learning methods should require minimal human effort, have an algorithm observe the evolution of the training process, and avoid inefficient use of the already sparse amount of labeled data. We present several approaches towards dealing with these problems, aiming to improve the robustness of current methods and to improve the autonomy in training. We applied our novel word and line text recognition approaches on nine data sets differing in time period, language, and difficulty: three locally collected historical Latin-based data sets from Naturalis, Leiden; four public Latin-based benchmark data sets for comparability with other approaches; and two Arabic data sets. Using ensemble voting of just five neural networks, a level of accuracy was achieved which required hundreds of neural networks in earlier studies. Moreover, we increased the speed of evaluation of each training epoch without the need of labeled data

<Literature, Film and Culture in Southeast Asia> Twelve Sisters: A Shared Heritage in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand

Edited by YAMAMOTO HiroyukiList of Contributors [v]Acknowledgements [ix]Introduction /YAMAMOTO Hiroyuki [x]1. Cultural Identity and Creative Tourism: The Folktale Nang Sip Song (Twelve Sisters) in the Global Contexts /Trisilpa BOONKHACHORN [1]2. From Folktale to Buddhist Tale: The Twelve Sisters in the Buddhist Tale, Paññāsajātaka in Thailand /Chanwit TUDKEAO [6]3. Shapes of Love in Lao Tradition: The Legend of the Twelve Sisters in Laos /Khamphuy PHOLLURXA [13]4. Being a Good Son is the Greatest Virtue: The Twelve Sisters in the Cambodian National Language Textbook /VAN Sovathana [26]5. Power of Tales: How Narrating Stories Instilled Hope to Survive during the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia /PAL Vannarirak [33]6. Male Mountain, Female Mountain: Local Topography and Oral Tradition in Laos /HASHIMOTO Sayaka [36]7. Princess Kongrey's Last Wish: Cambodian Utopia in Ly Bun Yim's Puthisen Neang Kongrey /OKADA Tomoko [50]8. Comical Thevada and Feminine Ogre: Innovative Characters Reflecting Modern Thai /HIRAMATSU Hideki [68]9. The Blooming Season: Thai Short Film /Chalida UABUMRUNGJIT [74]10. Aspiring for the Next "Golden Age" /DOUNG Sarakpich [77]11. For the Development of Lao Film: Film Archives and Film Industry in Laos /Dethnakhone LUANGMOVIHANE [88]12. Boosting Passions for Making Stories: The Short Filmmaking Scene in Laos /Athidxay BOUANDAOHEUANG [95

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of colour in portuguese manuscript illuminations

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Conservação e Restauro, especialidade Teoria, História e Técnicas, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis dissertation explores the materials used and practice undertaken by medievalist illuminators to produce some remarkable Portuguese illuminations from the 12th and 13th centuries. New techniques and applications were also explored to better characterize the paints’ composition. In the first part of this dissertation a methodology to study the illuminations of nine Lorvão scriptorium manuscripts, selected as representative and for being suitable for an analytical study, was developed and used to characterize the Lorvão’s scriptorium medieval palette. Further studies were performed in two very important dated manuscripts: Apocalypse and Book of Birds. Comparing them with other Portuguese or European copies it was concluded that the Lorvão Apocalypse differs from other contemporaneous Beatus Commentaries, either on the uniqueness of the colours used –orange, red and yellow- or on iconographic choices; and the Book of Birds was found to have many similarities with the copy made on Santa Cruz monastery. Based on medieval written sources, a database of paint reconstructions was built and characterized by HPLC-DAD, UV-VIS, μ-FTIR, μ-EDXRF, μ-Raman and μ-spectrofluorimetry. It allowed an easier description of the manuscripts’ paints components by non-invasive techniques: binders, organic and inorganic pigments. The last ones were found singly applied or in a mixture of two or three pigments, such as the orange paint of the Apocalypse or the blue paint of the Book of Birds. When mixtures were found, EDXRF analysis was used to quantify the inorganic paint components. The red lead degradation product in most of orange paint applied on Lorvão Apocalypse’s folia was recognized as galena, using μ-Raman and XRD techniques. The second part of this dissertation outcomes from the study of red organic colorants that could be expected in medieval illumination manuscripts, based on madder, lac dye and cochineal. Their main chromophores: alizarin, purpurin, acid laccaic A and carminic acid, were photochemically and photophysically characterized. Photodegradation studies were performed in homogeneous (alizarin, purpurin and carminic acid) and heterogeneous media. Based on this study, the use of microspectrofluorimetry as a new technique to identify red colorants was applied on red lake paint reconstructions, on the Book of Birds, on millenary Andean textiles (a collaboration with Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and applied on impressionists’ (Vincent van Gogh or Pissarro) paintings’ cross-sections (a collaboration with Red Lakes international project). It revealed that it is possible to characterize red lake pigments and paints based on alizarin, purpurin and eosin (weak, medium and strong emitters) and that can also be used as a semi-quantitative method for madder lake pigments, enabling the determination of purpurin lake ratio in a mixture of purpurin and alizarin.FCT and Feder for funding this work through the projects POCTI/EAT/33782/2000, POCI/QUI/55672/2004 and PTDC/EAT/65445/2006, and also the PhD grant SFRH/BD/36130/200