Ritual, Recycling, and Recontextualisation: Putting the concealed shoe in context

The concealed shoe is, possibly by design, shrouded in mystery. All that is known for certain on this subject is that a large number of shoes, usually old and damaged, were concealed in various, unconventional locations within buildings throughout England, and that this practice was particularly popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other than these few facts, all other information on the subject is speculation. With no contemporaneous written sources on the practice of concealing shoes, this article will utilize the archaeological evidence in order to ascertain the motivations behind the act of concealment. An analysis of two case studies of concealed shoe caches from North Yorkshire, with a particular focus on their locations and conditions, will hopefully prove invaluable in the investigation into this unusual practice, together with an examination of the relevant folk beliefs and superstitions of the period. It will also be questioned where the concealed shoe stands in relation to our everyday classificatory systems. As a marginal, mutable object, the concealed shoe boasts a highly complex biography, calling into question the pertinence of such categories as valuable/rubbish, and particular attention will be given to the shoes’ numerous recontextualizations, from practical footwear, to apotropaic device, to archaeological artefact; transitions which I have dubbed ‘ritual recycling’.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

From Popular Culture to Popular Custom, and Back Again : A love-lock's tale

Walk over a major bridge in a Western city and chances are you will come across at least one or two love-locks. These are padlocks inscribed with names or initials and attached to a public structure, typically by a couple in declaration of romantic commitment, who then proceed to throw the key into the river below. Some assemblages of these love tokens are modest; others number the thousands. This has become a truly global phenomenon, with over 400 love-lock assemblages catalogued across 62 countries in all continents bar Antarctica: popular custom in the true sense of the term. Although this custom was practised prior to the 21st century, with evidence of it in Serbia and Hungary in the 1900s,i it did not gain widespread popularity until the mid-2000s — sparked, this paper contends, by an Italian teenage romance novel. This paper explores the transition from popular culture, defined here as mass-produced cultural products — including but not limited to television, film, literature and music — accessible to and consumed by the majority of a given society, to popular (or folk) custom. It also explores the reverse. As the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture.Peer reviewe

The Wishing-Tree of Isle Maree

Ceri Houlbrook, ‘The Wishing-Tree of Isle Maree’ in Ceri Houlbrook, Natalie Armitage, eds., The Materiality of Magic: An artifactual investigation into ritual practices and popular belief (Oxford: Oxbow, 2015) ISBN 978-1785700101.In April 2012, a ‘wishing-tree’ was created by a local artist on the shores of Loch Maree, Scotland; visitors to the tree were encouraged to attach ‘offerings’ of rags, ribbons, and wooden baubles. In isolation, this appears to be a contemporary community art project. However, this construction boasts far more heritage than its recent creation would suggest, for it was intended as a reproduction of the nearby wishing-tree of Isle Maree, which has been the focus of folkloric customs since the 1700s. This chapter explores the numerous recontextualisations this custom has undergone since the 18th century, from the original tree’s various incarnations – as a rag-tree, pin-tree, and coin-tree – to its modern-day manifestation on the loch’s shore. A consideration of the custom’s shifting materiality will demonstrate the versatile nature of ritual, illustrating the importance of viewing popular belief as an unfolding storyboard rather than as a fixed and isolated snapshot.Peer reviewe

False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey

In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by considerable backlashes of this threat against the real world. As a matter of fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the proliferation of deceptive information. They also present unique challenges for all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look most promising for addressing false news

Revealing the Ritually Concealed: Custodians, Conservators, and the Concealed Shoe

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Material Religion, on 19 April 2018, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2018.1443892. Under embargo until 19 October 2019.Concealed shoes are footwear purposely concealed within domestic buildings. The motivations behind their concealments are unknown to us, but the prominent theory suggests that shoes were employed as apotropaic (evil-averting) devices. The metonymical connection between shoe and wearer is believed to imbue the shoe with the necessary protective power, and one theory suggests that, to possess this power, shoes must bear the unambiguous imprint of their past wearers, hence why the vast majority of them are old, well-worn or damaged. From the point of discovery (often during restructuring work), the concealed shoe’s biography can follow a variety of courses. Some debate, for example, surrounds their removal. Some finders believe it to be “bad luck” to remove concealed shoes and therefore wish to keep them in situ. Others are donated to museums, where still more debate surrounds their treatment: should they be restored by textile conservationists or left in their original state, their damaged conditions being considered central to the interpretation of the custom? This paper aims to trace the complex biographies of several examples of concealed shoes following discovery, considering how they have been variously perceived and treated by their finders and custodians.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Comparative Analysis of Five XML Query Languages

XML is becoming the most relevant new standard for data representation and exchange on the WWW. Novel languages for extracting and restructuring the XML content have been proposed, some in the tradition of database query languages (i.e. SQL, OQL), others more closely inspired by XML. No standard for XML query language has yet been decided, but the discussion is ongoing within the World Wide Web Consortium and within many academic institutions and Internet-related major companies. We present a comparison of five, representative query languages for XML, highlighting their common features and differences.Comment: TeX v3.1415, 17 pages, 6 figures, to be published in ACM Sigmod Record, March 200

An Independent Evaluation of the Strategic Legal Fund for Vulnerable Young Migrants

The Strategic Legal Fund for Vulnerable Young Migrants1 (SLF) was set up by the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund (DPOWMF) in 2011. When the Diana Fund closed down in late 2012, Trust for London agreed to take over the hosting of the SLF and provided additional funding with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation for a second phase (December 2012 to March 2014 initially, though this has now been extended).In 2012 an interim evaluation of the SLF concluded that it was achieving results, and suggested some changes of focus and operation for the future. One year on, the purpose of this further evaluation is: a. to identify the full range of outcomes, benefits and changes to which the SLF project has contributed in order to understand the value of what has been funded to date. b. to help Trust for London, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and other potential funders discuss and decide if and how they want to take forward the funding of strategic legal work on migration issues in the current climate. c. to take stock of the model being used to identify, assess, support and review SLF grants and learn lessons about this which can: i) help improve current ways of working; ii) enable decisions about how such a fund should be administered in the future. d. to stimulate discussions about the potential use of such a model in funding strategic legal work in other areas of law

PENINGKATAN KEMAMPUAN MOTORIK HALUS MELALUI MELIPAT DENGAN KERTAS KORAN PADA ANAK KELOMPOK B DI TK SANGGA WINAYA

This research was conducted to determine the improvement of children 's fine motor skills which were applied in using newspaper folding activities. This research is a Classroom Action Research (CAR). The subjects in this study were the children of Group B and the Sangga Winaya Babakan Kindergarten teacher. This research is collaborative, including researchers and classroom teachers. The data collection method used is the method of observation, interviews and documentation. The data analysis technique used is descriptive qualitative. The results of this study indicate an increase in children's fine motor skills through folding with newsprint. This can be seen from the average percentage of children's fine motor skills in 1 class before the action 26.3%, the first cycle 31.9%, the second cycle 50%, the third cycle 80%. The conclusion of this study is that folding newsprint activities can improve the fine motor skills of Group B children at Sangga Winaya Babakan Kindergarten in the 2019/2020 school year

Topology comparison of Twitter diffusion networks effectively reveals misleading information

In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon, showing that misleading information spreads faster, deeper and more broadly than factual information on social media, where echo chambers, algorithmic and human biases play an important role in diffusion networks. Following these directions, we explore the possibility of classifying news articles circulating on social media based exclusively on a topological analysis of their diffusion networks. To this aim we collected a large dataset of diffusion networks on Twitter pertaining to news articles published on two distinct classes of sources, namely outlets that convey mainstream, reliable and objective information and those that fabricate and disseminate various kinds of misleading articles, including false news intended to harm, satire intended to make people laugh, click-bait news that may be entirely factual or rumors that are unproven. We carried out an extensive comparison of these networks using several alignment-free approaches including basic network properties, centrality measures distributions, and network distances. We accordingly evaluated to what extent these techniques allow to discriminate between the networks associated to the aforementioned news domains. Our results highlight that the communities of users spreading mainstream news, compared to those sharing misleading news, tend to shape diffusion networks with subtle yet systematic differences which might be effectively employed to identify misleading and harmful information.Comment: A revised new version is available on Scientific Report