From glass plate to album: New Hebrides mission photographs in the album of Reverend William Veitch Milne

Mission photography and missionary photographers have been neglected in histories of the medium in New Zealand, as have photograph albums. The wealth of mission photographs held at the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand (PCANZ) Archives in Dunedin from the mission fields of New Zealand, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), China and India have yet to be thoroughly explored and studied. These photographs, the majority of which were taken by missionaries working in the field, were viewed by many New Zealanders in the form of postcards and magic-lantern slides, as reproductions in mission periodicals and newspapers, as well as in albums compiled by mission organisations and missionaries. It is this final manifestation of the mission photograph that interests me for, depending on its placement and framing on the album page as well as the uses to which the album was put, a photograph can take on meanings that go beyond the original intention behind its taking. In this essay I will briefly examine one such mission album compiled by Reverend William Veitch Milne, missionary on Nguna from 1905 to 1937.Peer Reviewe

Helen Smaill's Photograph Album: Traces of care in the mission archive

For my thirtieth birthday my mother gave me a photograph album she had compiled using an online template that was then printed and sent to her home. She had spent hours looking through old photographic prints that she keeps in a cupboard in her study and in large sealed plastic tubs under her bed as well as digital images she stores on an external hard drive. The photographs were scanned and copied and then lovingly ordered, juxtaposed and captioned to tell the story of me, my place in my family and my adventures out in the world. I was living in Australia at the time, working on my PhD dissertation, and the arrival of this book of personal and shared memories moved me to tears. While the album I discuss in this chapter differs in significant ways to the album my mother made for me in 2011, like my album it was produced by a mother from photographs that were taken, collected, gifted and then lovingly kept safe over the years. In both albums we see the work of women as transmitters of family memory, taking care to preserve images that connect past and present.Peer Reviewe

Exposing New Guinea: The early photographers, W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt

This thesis explores the early photographic representation of southeast New Guinea through a close examination of the lives and work of two of the first Europeans to fix the region and its inhabitants on glass plate negatives. It has been acknowledged that the London Missionary Society missionary William G. Lawes and the professional photographer John W. Lindt created images of New Guinea that have become iconic through their repeated reproduction in print media, their global dispersal, and replication by subsequent visitors-with-cameras to the region. However, the immediate circumstances of their photographs’ production have received little attention in the literature. Focussing on the nature of Lawes’s and Lindt’s photographic encounters, traces of which can be read from the images themselves as well as their writings, reveals the significance of the camera as well as the agency of Papuans in shaping the photographic record. The contemporary framings of their New Guinea images are also considered in order to understand fully the different trajectories for the promotion and influence of their photographs, which are now equally widely dispersed in archive collections around the world. In the chapters that follow I reconstitute the histories of Lawes’s and Lindt’s New Guinea photographs in order to better understand their production and circulation. The result of this investigation is a more nuanced visual history that encompasses the specific encounters, networks, technology, and texts that shaped the early photographic record of New Guinea

Lattice Super Yang-Mills: A Virial Approach to Operator Dimensions

The task of calculating operator dimensions in the planar limit of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory can be vastly simplified by mapping the dilatation generator to the Hamiltonian of an integrable spin chain. The Bethe ansatz has been used in this context to compute the spectra of spin chains associated with various sectors of the theory which are known to decouple in the planar (large-N_c) limit. These techniques are powerful at leading order in perturbation theory but become increasingly complicated beyond one loop in the 't Hooft parameter lambda=g_YM^2 N_c, where spin chains typically acquire long-range (non-nearest-neighbor) interactions. In certain sectors of the theory, moreover, higher-loop Bethe ansaetze do not even exist. We develop a virial expansion of the spin chain Hamiltonian as an alternative to the Bethe ansatz methodology, a method which simplifies the computation of dimensions of multi-impurity operators at higher loops in lambda. We use these methods to extract previously reported numerical gauge theory predictions near the BMN limit for comparison with corresponding results on the string theory side of the AdS/CFT correspondence. For completeness, we compare our virial results with predictions that can be derived from current Bethe ansatz technology.Comment: LaTeX, 1 figure, 28 pages; v2: typo correcte

Wrapping interactions and the genus expansion of the 2-point function of composite operators

We perform a systematic analysis of wrapping interactions for a general class of theories with color degrees of freedom, including N=4 SYM. Wrapping interactions arise in the genus expansion of the 2-point function of composite operators as finite size effects that start to appear at a certain order in the coupling constant at which the range of the interaction is equal to the length of the operators. We analyze in detail the relevant genus expansions, and introduce a strategy to single out the wrapping contributions, based on adding spectator fields. We use a toy model to demonstrate our procedure, performing all computations explicitly. Although completely general, our treatment should be particularly useful for applications to the recent problem of wrapping contributions in some checks of the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 41 pages, LaTeX, 12 figures, minor changes, final version in NP

A Universality Test of the Quantum String Bethe Ansatz

We show that the quantum corrected string Bethe ansatz passes an important universality test by demonstrating that it correctly incorporates the non-analytical terms in the string sigma model one-loop correction for rational three-spin strings with two out of the three spins identical. Subsequently, we use the quantum corrected string Bethe ansatz to predict the exact form of the non-analytic terms for the generic rational three-spin string.Comment: 12 pages, references adde

On one-loop correction to energy of spinning strings in S^5

We revisit the computation (hep-th/0306130) of 1-loop AdS_5 x S^5 superstring sigma model correction to energy of a closed circular string rotating in S^5. The string is spinning around its center of mass with two equal angular momenta J_2=J_3 and its center of mass angular momentum is J_1. We revise the argument in hep-th/0306130 that the 1-loop correction is suppressed by 1/J factor (J= J_1 + 2 J_2 is the total SO(6) spin) relative to the classical term in the energy and use numerical methods to compute the leading 1-loop coefficient. The corresponding gauge theory result is known (hep-th/0405055) only in the J_1=0 limit when the string solution becomes unstable and thus the 1-loop shift of the energy formally contains an imaginary part. While the comparison with gauge theory may not be well-defined in this case, our numerical string theory value of the 1-loop coefficient seems to disagree with the gauge theory one. A plausible explanation should be (as in hep-th/0405001) in the different order of limits taken on the gauge theory and the string theory sides of the AdS/CFT duality.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure

Rational three-spin string duals and non-anomalous finite size effects

We determine by a one line computation the one-loop conformal dimension and the associated non-anomalous finite size correction for all operators dual to spinning strings of rational type having three angular momenta (J_1,J_2,J_3) on S^5. Finite size corrections are conjectured to encode information about string sigma model loop corrections to the spectrum of type IIB superstrings on AdS_5xS^5. We compare our result to the zero-mode contribution to the leading quantum string correction derived for the stable three-spin string with two out of the three spin labels identical and observe agreement. As a side result we clarify the relation between the Bethe root description of three-spin strings of the type (J,J',J') with respectively J>J' and J<J'.Comment: 15 pages, v2: comparison to string theory changed, references added, v3: textual modifications and title change

Gauge invariant finite size spectrum of the giant magnon

It is shown that the finite size corrections to the spectrum of the giant magnon solution of classical string theory, computed using the uniform light-cone gauge, are gauge invariant and have physical meaning. This is seen in two ways: from a general argument where the single magnon is made gauge invariant by putting it on an orbifold as a wrapped state obeying the level matching condition as well as all other constraints, and by an explicit calculation where it is shown that physical quantum numbers do not depend on the uniform light-cone gauge parameter. The resulting finite size effects are exponentially small in the $R$-charge and the exponent (but not the prefactor) agrees with gauge theory computations using the integrable Hubbard model.Comment: 12 pages, some clarifications, references adde

1/J corrections to semiclassical AdS/CFT states from quantum Landau-Lifshitz model

One way to relate semiclassical string states and dual gauge theory states is to show the equivalence between their low-energy effective 2d actions. The gauge theory effective action, which is represented by an effective Landau-Lifshitz (LL) model, was previously found to match with the string theory world-sheet action up to the first two orders in the effective parameter $\tilde{\lambda} ={\lambda / J^2}$, where $\lambda$ is the `t Hooft coupling and $J$ is the total $R$-charge. Here we address the question if quantizing the effective LL action reproduces the subleading 1/J corrections to the spin chain energies as well as the quantum corrections to the string energies. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case provided one chooses an appropriate regularization of the effective LL theory. Expanding near the BPS vacuum, we show that the quantum LL action gives the same 1/J corrections to energies of BMN states as found previously on the gauge theory and string theory sides. We also compute the subleading $1/J^2$ corrections and show that these too match with corrections computed from the Bethe ansatz. We also compare the results from the LL action with a more direct computation from the spin chain. We repeat the same computation for the $\beta$-deformed LL action and find that the quantum LL result is again equal to the 1/J correction computed from the $\beta$-deformed Bethe ansatz equations. We also quantize the LL action near the rotating circular and folded string solutions, generalizing the known gauge/string results for 1/J corrections to the classical energies. We emphasize the simplicity of this effective field theory approach as compared to the full quantum string computations.Comment: 52 pages, references adde