A Review of Documentation: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Documents are tools of communication which are changing rapidly in nature and quantity. Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, digital formats have become ubiquitous. However, documents and documentation have a long pre-digital history. In seeking to survey document types and features, two major online journal databases from the Web of Science database were analysed over a 30-year period to 2020. Documents were classified into types and the (arbitrary) features of format, dimension, production, administration and distribution. Such tabulation of journal documents has not been undertaken previously. As the sampled journals covered a range of fields, the types and features of documentation in selected specialised areas were included. Digitalisation of documentation, especially of rare documents, has accelerated in recent times, contributing to the retention of knowledge and its rapid dissemination, despite the accompanying disadvantages of the digital age, with its largely unregulated social media. Classifying and describing the diversity of existing documents is a major task and we have initiated this process by analysing two scientific databases

IRAN’S REGIONAL POLICY IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS: CASE STUDIES OF RELATIONS WITH THE REPUBLICS OF AZERBAIJAN & ARMENIA

The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of Iran’s foreign policy and behaviour, roots of continuity and factors of change in the regional context of the South Caucasus, using the case studies of its relations with two important neighbouring countries, the Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. To offer a picture of regional geopolitical context in which the subject is examined, the study will discuss the importance of South Caucasus in the international system, introducing the existing challenges and opportunities in the region, as well as important regional and international players involved, their goals and policies towards those goals. The study will also provide a review of Iran’s foreign policy in different periods and discuss factors resulting in different approaches undertaken in each period. The implication of these policies will then be examined further in the context of the Middle East, as well as South Caucasus. That is to demonstrate the specific strategies Iran has taken in each of these regions, and to explain differences between the Middle East policies and that of the South Caucasus. Case studies will provide a more detailed picture of how regional policies work and what factors shape the bilateral relations

Habitus and Embodied Institutions; A Study of Manufacturing Enterprises in Kabul’s Conflict-Affected Market Economy and Adaptive Strategies for Enterprise Continuation during 2002-2018

This research studies the effects of embodied institutions rooted in social structures on the individual decision to enter manufacturing activities in Kabul during 2002-2018 – a political economy characterized by political conflict and a market-oriented ‘enabling environment approach’ (EEA). The EEA taken as the macro-level policy backdrop, the study draws on the dialectical relationship between the patriarchal family and Quranic injunctions pertaining to socio-economic life to draw the embodied institutions, which are then used as micro-analytic tools for explaining data patterns pertaining to the investment decision and the subsequent strategies for enterprise continuation. Using a ‘convergent parallel mixed method’, the research has adopted the Bourdieusian framework, in particular the concepts of habitus and field. Rooted in the family-religion relationship, the effects of investor habitus are observed in structuring the decision to enter manufacturing sector and the subsequent encounter with this field, including strategies for enterprise continuation. The latter, moreover, is seen as closely patterned along the patriarchal family hierarchy, reproducing in large degree the social structure where habitus is produced in the context. Building on this empirical analysis, the study relies on qualitative indicators to argue that the sector has not grown structurally significant in Kabul’s economy during 2002-2018. Habitus’ effect is also observed as a conduit for transmitting the hierarchy of power in the family to the production sector. Targeted state/bureaucratic intervention is therefore required in such a context to promote this sector’s growth within a modified EEA framework, and to moderate the uninterrupted transfer of the patriarchal family hierarchy into this sector through political and regulatory means

Architecture for "Other". China's eclectic pragmatism in developing countries within the framework of the Belt and Road initiative

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

The Terentius Frieze in Context

As the sun set on James Henry Breasted’s single day of field work at Dura-Europos in 1920 he and his team stood in front of the north wall of the pronaos of the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods, Although paintings covered the entire extant wall, they had only one film plate left and chose to photograph the painting of Julius Terentius with his troops, on the right hand side of the wall (pl. 37). When Franz Cumont returned in the season of 1922 through 1923, he re-exposed the decoration on the north wall, took pictures, made illustrations, and noted graffiti. Cumont also had a protective wall built in front of the paintings. This wall was dismantled eight years later, when most of the paintings adorning the temple were removed and transported to the National Museum in Damascus and the Yale University Art Gallery." Although scholars who work at Dura-Europos know when the paintings were removed and, generally, where they went, the current location of the remainder of the north wall of the pronaos is a mystery. In his description of the removal process, field director Maurice Fillet mentions only three in particular: the painting of Terentius; the painting of Lysias, Apollodorus, and Zenodotus on the south wall of the pronaos; and the painting of Conon and his family on the south wall of the naos. It is certain, however, that other paintings were removed and transported that day, for the mythological scene on the east wall of the pronaos went to Yale along with the Terentius painting. The remainder of the north wall has not resurfaced and its disappearance has contributed to the trend that began on that fateful day in 1920, with the painting of Terentius and his troops being studied as an independent tableau. The purpose of this essay is to place the painting back into its artistic context in order to understand better the function of mural adornment in the temple

Semantic Domains in Akkadian Text

The article examines the possibilities offered by language technology for analyzing semantic fields in Akkadian. The corpus of data for our research group is the existing electronic corpora, Open richly annotated cuneiform corpus (ORACC). In addition to more traditional Assyriological methods, the article explores two language technological methods: Pointwise mutual information (PMI) and Word2vec.Peer reviewe

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions provides case studies on archaeology, objects, cuneiform texts, and online publishing, digital archiving, and preservation. Eleven chapters present a rich array of material, spanning the fifth through the first millennium BCE, from Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Iran. Customized cyber- and general glossaries support readers who lack either a technical background or familiarity with the ancient cultures. Edited by Vanessa Bigot Juloux, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and Alessandro Di Ludovico, this volume is dedicated to broadening the understanding and accessibility of digital humanities tools, methodologies, and results to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Ultimately, this book provides a model for introducing cyber-studies to the mainstream of humanities research

Assessing relevance using automatically translated documents for cross-language information retrieval

This thesis focuses on the Relevance Feedback (RF) process, and the scenario considered is that of a Portuguese-English Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CUR) system. CUR deals with the retrieval of documents in one natural language in response to a query expressed in another language. RF is an automatic process for query reformulation. The idea behind it is that users are unlikely to produce perfect queries, especially if given just one attempt.The process aims at improving the queryspecification, which will lead to more relevant documents being retrieved. The method consists of asking the user to analyse an initial sample of documents retrieved in response to a query and judge them for relevance. In that context, two main questions were posed. The first one relates to the user's ability in assessing the relevance of texts in a foreign language, texts hand translated into their language and texts automatically translated into their language. The second question concerns the relationship between the accuracy of the participant's judgements and the improvement achieved through the RF process. In order to answer those questions, this work performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers were asked to judge the relevance of English documents, documents hand-translated to Portuguese, and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics. This work advances the existing research on RF by considering a CUR scenario and carrying out user experiments, which analyse aspects of RF and CUR that remained unexplored until now. The contributions of this work also include: the investigation of CUR using a new language pair; the design and implementation of a stemming algorithm for Portuguese; and the carrying out of several experiments using Latent Semantic Indexing which contribute data points to the CUR theory