In search of China’s first library: Materials, housing and arrangement

Historically, the origin of libraries has an intimate association with written records supporting administrative or ritual functions at the palace or temple. This article attempts to discuss the possibility of the existence of China’s first library in the Shang dynasty (c.1570-1045 BCE) during the beginning of the formative period of Chinese civilization. The article analyzes and synthesizes both paleographical and archaeological evidence from the perspective of available materials, houses, and arrangement, which answers the questions of what the books were made of, where they were stored, and how they were arranged. The article ends with a conclusion that there is likelihood that China’s first library might have existed in the Shang dynasty, which grew on a great foundation on the technical aspect. This article also points out that the exploration of China’s first library is an ongoing process, considering new paleographical and archaeological discoveries in the future

Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage

This article presents a case study examining the slow-death of the Berlin Führerbunker since 1945. Its seventy year longitudinal perspective shows how processes of ruination, demolition and urban renewal in central Berlin have been affected by materially and politically awkward relict Nazi subterranean structures. Despite now being a buried pile of rubble, the Führerbunker’s continued resonance is shown to be the product of a heterogeneous range of influences, spanning wartime concrete bunkers’ formidable material resistance, their affective affordances and evolving cultural attitudes towards ruins, demolition, memory, memorialisation, tourism and real estate in the German capital

How does Concept Transform into Product? An Appraisal of Analogy-based Design Practices in Architecture Education

AbstractWhen defining the concept of ‘metaphor’ as ‘an intuitive abstraction of uniqueness in diversities’, Aristoteles also creates a common-sense in comprehending analogy-based design processes. Therefore, as in all design practices, drawing analogies -with/to/between- by generating metaphors is also an important tuition for learners/students in architectural design education. Starting from the question of ‘how a designer's initial concept is transformed into an architectural product’, this study generates a discussion on architectural thinking and designing practices based on analogies, aiming at creating perspectives with regard to architectural design education which primarily intends to improve students’ designing abilities by providing the sustainability of current environmental data through the subsequent designs. In this education, the students are firstly directed to reveal metaphors in their specific studying areas by gathering inspiration from directly formal and physical environmental data or from indirectly informal and contextual data; and secondly expected to transform analogies into spatial decisions with architectural programs. In this sense, this study is methodologically carried out in two sections. The first part analyses the stages of the process that lead students from concept to product in the education of architectural design by emphasizing the relational potential of design by considering analogies/metaphors. In the second section, six student studies/products selected from design education studios are appraised in context of the metaphors they captured in their study areas and the analogies they created –or in other words, the reasons they asked for to design-. Among the consequences of the study are the inferences to be made on how to transform design practices, in which the students interrelates between environmental data, into architectural products

ArchAIDE-Archaeological Automatic Interpretation and Documentation of cEramics

The goals of H2020 project "ArchAIDE: are to support the classification and interpretation work of archaeologists with innovative computer-based tools, able to provide the user with features for the semi-automatic description and matching of potsherds over the huge existing ceramic catalogues. Pottery classification is of fundamental importance for the comprehension and dating of the archaeological contexts, and for understanding production, trade flows and social interactions, but it requires complex skills and it is a very time consuming activity, both for researchers and professionals. The aim of ArchAIDE is to support the work of archaeologists, in order to meet real user needs and generate economic benefits, reducing time and costs. This would create societal benefits from cultural heritage, improving access, re-use and exploitation of the digital cultural heritage in a sustainable way. These objectives will be achieved through the development of: - an as-automatic-as-possible procedure to transform the paper catalogues in a digital description, to be used as a data pool for search and retrieval process; - a tool (mainly designed for mobile devices) that will support archaeologists in recognizing and classifying potsherds during excavation and post-excavation analysis, through an easy-to-use interface and efficient algorithms for characterisation, search and retrieval of the visual/geometrical correspondences; - an automatic procedure to derive a complete potsherds identity card by transforming the data collected into a formatted electronic document, printable or visual; - a web-based real-time data visualisation to improve access to archaeological heritage and generate new understanding; - an open archive to allow the archival and re-use of archaeological data, transforming them into common heritage and permitting economic sustainability. Those tools will be tested and assessed on real-cases scenarios, paving the way to future exploitation

Developing the ArchAIDE Application: A digital workflow for identifying, organising and sharing archaeological pottery using automated image recognition

Pottery is of fundamental importance for understanding archaeological contexts, facilitating the understanding of production, trade flows, and social interactions. Pottery characterisation and the classification of ceramics is still a manual process, reliant on analogue catalogues created by specialists, held in archives and libraries. The ArchAIDE project worked to streamline, optimise and economise the mundane aspects of these processes, using the latest automatic image recognition technology, while retaining key decision points necessary to create trusted results. Specifically, ArchAIDE worked to support classification and interpretation work (during both fieldwork and post-excavation analysis) with an innovative app for tablets and smartphones. This article summarises the work of this three-year project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement N.693548, with a consortium of partners representing both the academic and industry-led ICT (Information and Communications Technology) domains, and the academic and development-led archaeology domains. The collaborative work of the archaeological and technical partners created a pipeline where potsherds are photographed, their characteristics compared against a trained neural network, and the results returned with suggested matches from a comparative collection with typical pottery types and characteristics. Once the correct type is identified, all relevant information for that type is linked to the new sherd and stored within a database that can be shared online. ArchAIDE integrated a variety of novel and best-practice approaches, both in the creation of the app, and the communication of the project to a range of stakeholders

Restoration of Fragmentary Babylonian Texts Using Recurrent Neural Networks

The main source of information regarding ancient Mesopotamian history and culture are clay cuneiform tablets. Despite being an invaluable resource, many tablets are fragmented leading to missing information. Currently these missing parts are manually completed by experts. In this work we investigate the possibility of assisting scholars and even automatically completing the breaks in ancient Akkadian texts from Achaemenid period Babylonia by modelling the language using recurrent neural networks