The American Congress Digital Archives Portal Project White Paper

This white paper documents the work of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal project to aggregate congressional archives into a single, online platform and make them more broadly available. Congressional archives document the democratic process; the development of public policy; and multiple narratives related to the country’s social, cultural, and political development. Work of the project included developing standards and best practices; creating governance structures for the one-year project and future phases; developing a web portal that meets user needs and adding archival content; determining digitization priorities via a research survey; conducting usability testing; and communicating and publicizing the project. The project was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Regressed but Not Gone: Patterns of Vision Gene Loss and Retention in Subterranean Mammals

Regressive evolution involves the degradation of formerly useful traits as organisms invade novel ecological niches. In animals, committing to a strict subterranean habit can lead to regression of the eyes, likely due to a limited exposure to light. Several lineages of subterranean mammals show evidence of such degeneration, which can include decreased organization of the retina, malformation of the lens, and subcutaneous positioning of the eye. Advances in DNA sequencing have revealed that this regression co-occurs with a degradation of genomic loci encoding visual functions, including protein-coding genes. Other dim light-adapted vertebrates with normal ocular anatomy, such as nocturnal and aquatic species, also demonstrate evidence of visual gene loss, but the absence of comparative studies has led to the untested assumption that subterranean mammals are special in the degree of this genomic regression. Additionally, previous studies have shown that not all vision genes have been lost in subterranean mammals, but it is unclear whether they are under relaxed selection and will ultimately be lost, are maintained due to pleiotropy or if natural selection is favoring the retention of the eye and certain critical underlying loci. Here I report that vision gene loss in subterranean mammals tends to be more extensive in quantity and differs in distribution from other dim lightadapted mammals, although some committed subterranean mammals demonstrate significant overlap with nocturnal microphthalmic species. In addition, blind subterranean mammals retain functional orthologs of non-pleiotropic visual genes that are evolving at rates consistent with purifying selection. Together, these results suggest that although living underground tends to lead to major losses of visual functions, natural selection is maintaining genes that support the eye, perhaps as an organ for circadian and/or circannual entrainment

A Novel Associative Memory Implemented Using Collective Computation

A radically new type of associative memory, the ASSOCMEM, has been implemented in VLSI and tested. Analog circuit techniques are used to construct a network that evolves towards fully restored (digital) fixed-points that are the memories of the system. Association occurs on the whole source word, each bit of which may assume a continuous analog value. The network does not require the distinction of a search key from a data field in either the source or target words. A key may be dynamically defined by differentially weighting any subset of the source word. The key need not be exact; the system will evolve to the closest memory. In the case when the key is the whole input word, the system may be thought of as performing error correction

An art history of means: Arendt-Benjamin

Transmissibility is an essential concept for any discourse on historiography and aesthetics. In fact, this concept traverses the contemporary impasse of art historical critical practice. Although explicitly associated with Walter Benjamin, the entirety of Hannah Arendt’s work on art and history is premised on transmissibility as well. It allows them to conceive a space of history from within the aesthetic, the world of artifice. This essay reads Benjamin and Arendt alongside and against one other in order to rethink art and history without resorting to eschatology or the histrionics of political theology. In creating this virtual historiography—Arendt-Benjamin—it conceives transmissibility as an aesthetic-historiographic concept that renders an openness between past and future, poiesis and aisthesis. Writing the history of art becomes the creation of a passage between what-has-been and artifice; it becomes the opening of history into life, an event of recollection

‘Relays, signals, actuality: a return to Focillon’. Review of: Annamaria Ducci, Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms, Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2021, 391 pp., 20 col. plates, 10 b. & w. illus, 26,00 €, ISBN 979-10-344-0079-9

A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabilities to magnetize content both within and without its historical milieu. Focillon’s real interest in the concept of a milieu and in the artwork’s ability to escape this originary context instigates a rethinking of the ontology, historiography, and the temporality of art. He challenges us to think and write through problematics, to experiment with both aesthetic agency and historical reception; to create new linkages between art and life, history and becoming, along the ἀκμή of the vie des formes—thus conceiving an artwork as a past-future event, as a ‘great ensemble’. Focillon posits that if the work of art is an event, then history is a modulated and controlled form of time as such, which itself is an actual-virtual movement or ‘becoming’. Ontologically art ‘goes further than…illustrate history’, he argues, which is why art historians must learn to encounter ‘modalities of life’ in order to write about how it creates ‘worlds’. Our ‘return to Focillon’ takes place within a threshold wherein the event of art is what matters most, that is, the capacities of a given formal property to harness and magnetize forces within and outside of itself in order to render humanist and post-humanist forces perceptible, sensible, and thinkable

National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

This white paper documents the work of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal project to aggregate congressional archives into a single, online platform and make them more broadly available. Congressional archives document the democratic process; the development of public policy; and multiple narratives related to the country’s social, cultural, and political development. Work of the project included developing standards and best practices; creating governance structures for the one-year project and future phases; developing a web portal that meets user needs and adding archival content; determining digitization priorities via a research survey; conducting usability testing; and communicating and publicizing the project. The project was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities