Return to Sender : Confronting Lynching and Our Haunted Landscapes

This article considers a set of controversial images, primarily taken between 1880 and 1920, depicting lynchings and racial violence. Emory University has made these images publicly available, prompting some to worry that the collection will re-inflict trauma on those who suffered under racism in the United States. The articles asks, in part: if new initiatives in museums or other public spaces could help Americans to collectively confront their inner demons and move beyond the timeless repetition of trauma. The article is available from Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council, 1978-2003

"Perennially New": Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden

The evidence presented in "Perennially New": Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden shows that the iconic image of the mission garden was created a century after the founding of the missions in the late eighteenth century, and two decades before the start of the Mission Revival architectural style. The locus of their origin was Mission Santa Barbara, where in 1872 a Franciscan named Father Romo, newly arrived from a posting in Jerusalem, planted a courtyard garden reminiscent of the landscapes that he had seen during his travels around the Mediterranean. This invented garden fostered a robust visual culture and rich ideological narratives, and it played a formative role in the broader cultural reception of Mission Revival garden design and of California history in general. These discoveries have significance for the preservation and interpretation of these heritage sites

Sztuka dwóch Wschodów: Wielki Sfinks na drzeworytach Hiroshi Yoshidy

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), a Japanese painter and woodcutter, was known for his excellent landscape compositions, creating paintings using the European oil technique. He traveled the world and also ex- perimented with traditional woodcut printing. His woodprints depict- ed non-Japanese landscapes and architectural objects, such as ones found in the United States, India, the Swiss Alps, etc. He cultivated the tradition of the ukiyo-e convention, restored in the twentieth century as shin-hanga. The article concerns one of these extraordinary works: the night and day views of the Great Egyptian Sphinx. The woodcut is very precise, and a few of its details allow us to determine the date of the creation of the prototype, as it depicts an important stage in the conservation works carried out on the famous statue. The article also digresses into interesting Japanese-Egyptian themes in the nineteenth century and the works of contemporary Japanese Egyptologists.Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), japoński malarz i drzeworytnik, znany był szczególnie ze swoich doskonałych kompozycji krajobrazowych. Two- rzący w europejskiej technice malarstwa olejnego artysta podróżował po świecie i eksperymentował także z wykonanymi w tradycyjnym stylu drzeworytami, przedstawiającymi nie-japońskie pejzaże i obiekty archi- tektoniczne (m.in. Stany Zjednoczone, Indie, Alpy szwajcarskie itd.). Kultywował tradycję klasycznej konwencji ukiyo-e, w XX wieku odno- wionej jako shin-hanga. Artykuł przypomina jedno z tych niezwykłych dzieł: nocny i dzienny widok Wielkiego Sfinksa egipskiego. Drzeworyt jest bardzo precyzyjny, a dzięki kilku detalom można określić datę po- wstania prototypu, ponieważ odwzorowuje ważny etap prac konserwa- torskich prowadzonych przy sławnym posągu. Dygresją artykułu są tak- że uwagi o interesujących wątkach japońsko-egipskich w XIX wieku oraz współczesnych pracach japońskich egiptologów

Recognition of compound characters in Kannada language

Recognition of degraded printed compound Kannada characters is a challenging research problem. It has been verified experimentally that noise removal is an essential preprocessing step. Proposed are two methods for degraded Kannada character recognition problem. Method 1 is conventionally used histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature extraction for character recognition problem. Extracted features are transformed and reduced using principal component analysis (PCA) and classification performed. Various classifiers are experimented with. Simple compound character classification is satisfactory (more than 98% accuracy) with this method. However, the method does not perform well on other two compound types. Method 2 is deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) model for classification. This outperforms HOG features and classification. The highest classification accuracy is found as 98.8% for simple compound character classification. The performance of deep CNN is far better for other two compound types. Deep CNN turns out to better for pooled character classes

Shared territory: crossroads of languages, space for reflection

Contemporary painters like Mark Tansey and Michaël Borremans include photography and film in their artistic practices, reflecting, in shared territory and in a self-referential style, the undeniable technological mediation in which we see ourselves submerged. This article aims to analyze, inside this crossroads of languages, how a space for reflection is established

PreserVenice: Preserving Venetian Public Art

The public art of Venice is a defining characteristic of the city and is threatened by many factors. To establish public art\u27s significance to Venetian heritage, we systematically searched previously undocumented Venetian lagoon islands for public art and recorded our findings in an electronic database, laid the groundwork for a nonprofit organization to manage the condition and restoration of all 4376 objects in the collection, and adapted our research into a book chapter for the Venice Project Center\u27s 20th anniversary