Application of micro-Raman spectroscopy for conservation projects in art and archaeology with a case study on Cappadocia rock-hewn wall paintings

This paper aims at reporting an overview of the principles and applications of micro-Raman spectroscopy in cultural heritage. Micro-Raman was used for characterizing painting pigments, inorganic binders, degradation materials in artworks with different goals: to know the materials and so the execution technique, to investigate the state of preservation, to establish the authenticity of the artefacts. The micro-Raman analyses were often performed on the occasion of conservative projects and they were able to supply valid and useful information to the conservators during their work. As case study, the project on the investigation of rock-hewn wall paintings in Cappadocia (Turkey) will be shortly presented as exemplificative of application of Raman techniques for the knowledge of the constituent materials, for supporting the conservation work and for detecting degradation products. Analysis were performed in the Interdepartmental instrument Center of Modena and Reggio Emilia University by a bench top system equipped with a microscope allowing for studying in non-destructive way different kinds of samples: powders, cross and thin sections, pre-treated samples

Facilitation of adolescents' agency and hybrid integration

This paper is based on a Horizon 2020 research project on the enhancement of migrant children's ability to contribute to the change of their conditions of integration in the education system in seven countries (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation, CHILD-UP; GA 822400). The paper draws on data collected in vocational schools, with adolescents aged 14–16, in Italy. It draws on transcribed interactions to analyse activities in school classrooms in which facilitators support migrant adolescent's agency in producing narratives of their personal cultural trajectories. The paper shows how facilitators and adolescents share the rights of telling the narratives, the gender differences that become visible in the adolescents' narratives, and the ways in which facilitation supports the hybrid integration of migrant adolescents

The conceptual framework

The chapter describes the conceptual framework of the project which combined the concepts of hybrid integration and the facilitation of migrant children’s agency. It deals with the concept that facilitating migrant children’s agency is extremely important for their hybrid integration. Agency is intended as a specific form of participation, based on the choices of action that enable children to promote change in their social contexts. The concept of agency is combined with the concept of facilitation of children’s narratives and non-essentialist theories that challenge the idea of permanent membership of cultural groups to conceive cultural identity as a contingent product of social negotiation in public discourse and interaction. The chapter explains that cultural and ethnic diversity can be conceived as social construction, so that negotiations can produce hybrid identities, i.e. changing and flexible manifestations of cultural identities so that integration can be seen as hybrid integration, based on the interlacing of children’s personal cultural trajectories. Finally, the chapter illustrates how expectations about girls and boys can differ, creating barriers and possibilities in terms of children’s agency. The combination of an agency-based perspective with a gender approach leads to approach gender as a social construction

Language mediation in schools. The case of parent-teacher meetings.

This chapter focuses on interpreter-mediated interactions between teachers and migrant parents. The chapter includes a review of studies on interpreter-mediated interactions in schools, a description of the data and methodology adopted and the discussion of our data. The main corpus of data consists in audio-recorded interpreter-mediated interactions between teachers and foreign-speaking parents in Italian contexts, largely in primary schools. Interpreting is provided by professional intercultural mediators, who are employed to provide interpreting service in many Italian public areas. The teachers participating in the interactions all speak Italian while parents are of diverse provenances and they speak Chinese, Twi, Arabic, Urdu and Albanian. The main issues dealt with in our interpreter-mediated interactions concern the children’s performance, both at school and during education activities at home (mainly homework). Some reflections are drawn on the ways in which language mediation may affect school–family communication when the families are migrant

Una lezione sulla resa traduttiva di turni "difficili"

This paper analyses two sociology lectures on dialogue interpreting I gave to a university class of students graduating in foreign languages and cultures. The lectures were video-recorded as part of a university programme aimed at facilitating students’ access to academic resources. During the lectures, the students, in groups, analysed transcriptions of interpreted interactions audio-recorded in Italian healthcare services and involving Arabic patients, Italian healthcare providers and Arabic mediators. These transcriptions were used to reflect on ways to render turns by healthcare providers, which might be difficult to understand for patients, in that they were either too short (implicating a number of details) or very long and technical. The lectures aimed to show how modified renditions of these turns may facilitate patients’ understanding and participation. The students were firstly invited to propose possible renditions of providers’ turns, then to analyse the mediators’ ones. The students then had to report their proposals and comments in a class discussion. Observation of the video-recorded discussion suggests ways to improve: a. the actual renditions of inexplicit or technical turns, b. the teacher’s coordination of the students’ discussion to guide them to appreciate the types of problems characterising the rendition proces

APPLICATION OF HEATING MICROSCOPY ON SINTERING AND MELTING BEHAVIOUR OF NATURAL SANDS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL INTEREST

In antiquity, beach sand was one of the main raw materials for glass-making and for the production of other vitreous materials, like Egyptian blue and faience. During the 1st century AD, glass and pigments manufacturing industry was active along the Gulf of Naples, Italy, where we sampled four littoral sands. Samples were analyzed with different techniques: chemical analysis was performed by means of X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and mineralogical analyses with X-Ray Powder Diffraction (XRPD) and Raman Spectroscopy. The complete sintering to melting thermal behaviour of the four sands was studied by heating microscopy or hot-stage microscope (HSM) equipped with an high resolution camera capable to collect sample profile during heating. The effect of the grain size on the sintering curves, which were automatically elaborated by specimen profile transformation, was also investigated. Finally, some deductions about the granulometry effect and the presence of alkaline and alkaline-earth oxides on sintering and melting behaviour were drawn. All the four sands were found suitable for highly sintered manufacts rather than glasses, to reach complete amorphous materials the addition of fluxes was necessary

Surface Core Level Shifts of Clean and Oxygen Covered Ru(0001)

We have performed high resolution XPS experiments of the Ru(0001) surface, both clean and covered with well-defined amounts of oxygen up to 1 ML coverage. For the clean surface we detected two distinct components in the Ru 3d_{5/2} core level spectra, for which a definite assignment was made using the high resolution Angle-Scan Photoelectron Diffraction approach. For the p(2x2), p(2x1), (2x2)-3O and (1x1)-O oxygen structures we found Ru 3d_{5/2} core level peaks which are shifted up to 1 eV to higher binding energies. Very good agreement with density functional theory calculations of these Surface Core Level Shifts (SCLS) is reported. The overriding parameter for the resulting Ru SCLSs turns out to be the number of directly coordinated O atoms. Since the calculations permit the separation of initial and final state effects, our results give valuable information for the understanding of bonding and screening at the surface, otherwise not accessible in the measurement of the core level energies alone.Comment: 16 pages including 10 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. B. Related publications can be found at http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm

Shot, scene and keyframe ordering for interactive video re-use

This paper presents a complete system for shot and scene detection in broadcast videos, as well as a method to select the best representative key-frames, which could be used in new interactive interfaces for accessing large collections of edited videos. The final goal is to enable an improved access to video footage and the re-use of video content with the direct management of user-selected video-clips