The First World War from above and below. Historical aerial photographs and mine craters in the Ypres Salient

2016 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 64-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birger Stichelbaut ◽  
Wouter Gheyle ◽  
Timothy Saey ◽  
Veerle Van Eetvelde ◽  
Marc Van Meirvenne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Aerial Photographs ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Applied Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Saint-Amour
Keyword(s):  
Traffic Control ◽  
First World War ◽  
Aerial Photographs ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Continuous Survey ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Aerial Reconnaissance ◽  
Close Study ◽  
First World

This article is about a period of technology transfer – the late 1910s and 1920s – when wartime aerial reconnaissance techniques and operations were being adapted to a range of civilian uses, including urban planning, land use analysis, traffic control, tax equalization, and even archaeology. At the center of the discussion is the ‘photomosaic’: a patchwork of overlapping aerial photographs that have been rectified and fit together so as to form a continuous survey of a territory. Initially developed during the First World War to provide coverage of fronts, photomosaic mapping was widely practiced and celebrated during the postwar years as an aid to urban development. The article traces both the refinements in photomosaic technology after the Armistice and the rhetorical means by which the form’s avant-garde wartime reputation was domesticated into an ‘applied realism’ that often effaced its site-specific perspective, its elaborately rectified optics, and the oppositionality of both its military and civilian uses. The article has a broader theoretical aim as well. Classic statements of both structuralist and post-structuralist spatial theory (Barthes and de Certeau are the primary examples here) have produced an ossified geometry wherein the vertical is the axis of paradigm, top-down strategy, and manipulative distance and the horizontal the axis of syntagm, grassroots tactics, and resistant proximities and differences. In its close study of the technology and rhetoric surrounding interwar photogrammetry, the article provides an example of how one might reverse the long-standing misrecognition of high-altitude optics as effacing time, difference, and materiality – and what it might mean to view such optics as, instead, a resource in turning from abstract toward differential conceptions of both aerial photography and our theoretical habits. This turn I call ‘applied modernism’, a term that accesses both the wartime photomosaic’s affiliation with avant-garde painting and its insistence that portraits of the total are always projections from partial, specific vantages.

scholarly journals Mapping Damascus during the First World War. A German-Ottoman Cooperation of Cartography, Archaeology and Military?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sebastian Willert
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
First World War ◽  
Aerial Photographs ◽  
World War ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Paradoxical Situation ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

Abstract. In 1916, the German museum director and archaeologist Theodor Wiegand travelled to the Near East and became “Inspector General of Antiquities in Syria” as head of the 19th Bureau within the IV Ottoman Army under Ahmed Cemal Pasha. In the post-war period the formation was called “German Turkish Commando for Monument Protection”, though it consisted mainly of German archaeologists and architects who dedicated themselves to the preservation of antique sites and the collection of antiquities. To investigate the region, the scientists also used Bavarian Flying-Detachments and had aerial photographs taken. The Commando enquired, preserved, and surveyed ancient sites. However, the scientists were also involved in mapping important sites and cities such as Damascus. For this purpose, the archaeologists not only conducted trigonometrical surveys but also used aerial photographs to complement the results taken on the ground.Against the background of the German-Ottoman cooperation and the involvement of experts such as archaeologists and architects, the paper analyses the – occasionally paradoxical – situation in which the actors dedicated themselves to map the city of Damascus. The contribution answers the question whether the map was developed to visualize ancient buildings and structures in Damascus for preservation purposes or was rather produced due to military objectives. In a helix of overlapping or rivalling aims and agendas of the German and Ottoman archaeology, military and politics it shows attempts, measures and intentions aiming at the production of maps during the First World War.

The application of First World War aerial photography to archaeology: the Belgian images

Antiquity ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 80 (307) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birger Stichelbaut
Keyword(s):  
Aerial Photography ◽  
Ground Surface ◽  
First World War ◽  
Aerial Photographs ◽  
World War ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Mapping Technology ◽  
First World

The First World War left its mark on the ground surface of Europe as perhaps no other human catastrophe before or since. The author applies modern digital mapping technology to the aerial photographs taken by the intrepid early pilots, and creates a landscape of military works that would not have been known in detail to either historians or generals at the time. The GIS inventory has great potential for historians of the war and is a vital instrument for the management of this increasingly important heritage.

Socio-political and confessional preconditions of the birth of the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church in Western Ukraine (20-30 years of the twentieth century)

2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
First World

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.

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