scholarly journals ‘The troubles of collecting’: William Henry Harvey and the practicalities of natural-history collecting in Britain's nineteenth-century world

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
John McAleer
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Physical Constraints ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
Safe Transport ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

Narrated Photography

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop ◽  
Peter Ward
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Shed Light

This article describes how a recently refined visual ethnographic research method, “narrated photography,” contributes to the study of religion. We argue that this qualitative research method is particularly useful for studies of lived religion and demonstrate this through examples drawn from a study the sacred among young Polish migrants to England. Narrated photography, which entails asking people to photograph what is personally significant to them and then to narrate the image, generates visual and textual material that mediates the subjective. Through using this method we discovered that family was considered to be sacred, both in terms of links to religious practice and a desire for a secure home which family relationships provide. Additionally, narrated photography has the potential to expand our conceptions of lived religion through the inclusion of visual material culture and the visual context of the research participants. In this case the data revealed that the Polish young people view structures within their landscape through a particularly Polish Catholic lens. These findings shed light on the religious tensions that migrants encounter in everyday life.

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Woman Reader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Literacy ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
Shed Light

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

scholarly journals Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: Why it matters

Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Fotaki ◽  
Kate Kenny ◽  
Sheena J. Vachhani
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
New States ◽  
Shed Light

Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.

Posthumous baggage. Harper Lee’s letters

2021 ◽  
pp. 194-214
Author(s):  
D. V. Zakharov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Life ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Detailed List ◽  
Harper Lee ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

The article is devoted to the epistolary legacy of Nelle Harper Lee, the author of the American cult classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). The researcher examines a collection of Nelle’s letters written from 1956 to 2009, provides a detailed list of sources and makes suggestions about the potential new discoveries that could shed light on the life of ‘America’s most reclusive author.’ This short study of ‘posthumous baggage,’ as Lee referred to her private correspondence, offers an insight into the interests of the author, who insisted on keeping her personal life to herself. The letters included in the study concern the writer’s relationship to her father Amasa Coleman Lee, on whom she based the character of Atticus Finch, her attitude to her own biography published by Charles Shields, and personal anxieties of her final years. The author also details Lee’s opinions of literature, from the 19th-c. classics to contemporary authors, and shows how much she valued communication with her numerous fans.

scholarly journals Exploring a Rural English Teacher’s Lived Experiences of Assessment Practices in a Blended Learning Enactment: A Narrative Inquiry

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Haris Sugianto
Keyword(s):  
Blended Learning ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Alternative Assessment ◽  
Portfolio Assessment ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Assessment Practices ◽  
Assessment Practice ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Shed Light

Although a large number of studies have put a focus on the enactment of blended learning in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, there is a paucity of research into the teacher’s lived experiences of how they enact assessment in the blended learning activities. To fill such a gap, this paper reports on a narrative inquiry of an EFL teacher’s lived experiences of conducting assessment during blended learning in the pandemic era. The finding of the study shed light on the ineffectiveness of the assessment practice during the blended learning enactment, particularly in the context of rural schools. Albeit the participating teacher in this study was fully engaged to conduct assessment from his past experiences, two major problems hinder such a practice: students’ unsubmitted assignments and poor Internet connection. Based on these findings, teachers are encouraged to find an alternative assessment practice during the blended learning, portfolio assessment can be an option. This suggestion is anchored by the fact that the assessment practice was not technically supported during the blended learning activities.

scholarly journals A Comprehensive Phylogenomic Platform for Exploring the Angiosperm Tree of Life

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker ◽  
Paul Bailey ◽  
Vanessa Barber ◽  
Abigail Barker ◽  
Sidonie Bellot ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Flowering Plant ◽  
Target Sequence ◽  
Sequence Capture ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Public Data ◽  
Data Release ◽  
Life On Earth

AbstractThe tree of life is the fundamental biological roadmap for navigating the evolution and properties of life on Earth, and yet remains largely unknown. Even angiosperms (flowering plants) are fraught with data gaps, despite their critical role in sustaining terrestrial life. Today, high-throughput sequencing promises to significantly deepen our understanding of evolutionary relationships. Here, we describe a comprehensive phylogenomic platform for exploring the angiosperm tree of life, comprising a set of open tools and data based on the 353 nuclear genes targeted by the universal Angiosperms353 sequence capture probes. This paper (i) documents our methods, (ii) describes our first data release and (iii) presents a novel open data portal, the Kew Tree of Life Explorer (https://treeoflife.kew.org). We aim to generate novel target sequence capture data for all genera of flowering plants, exploiting natural history collections such as herbarium specimens, and augment it with mined public data. Our first data release, described here, is the most extensive nuclear phylogenomic dataset for angiosperms to date, comprising 3,099 samples validated by DNA barcode and phylogenetic tests, representing all 64 orders, 404 families (96%) and 2,333 genera (17%). Using the multi-species coalescent, we inferred a “first pass” angiosperm tree of life from the data, which totalled 824,878 sequences, 489,086,049 base pairs, and 532,260 alignment columns. The tree is strongly supported and highly congruent with existing taxonomy, while challenging numerous hypothesized relationships among orders and placing many genera for the first time. The validated dataset, species tree and all intermediates are openly accessible via the Kew Tree of Life Explorer. This major milestone towards a complete tree of life for all flowering plant species opens doors to a highly integrated future for angiosperm phylogenomics through the systematic sequencing of standardised nuclear markers. Our approach has the potential to serve as a much-needed bridge between the growing movement to sequence the genomes of all life on Earth and the vast phylogenomic potential of the world’s natural history collections.

SOME COMMENTS ABOUT THE INFLUENCE OXUS CIVILIZATION IN THEARABIAN GULF

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. 97-103
Author(s):  
Khayitmurod Khurramov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Unique Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Written Sources ◽  
Marine Shell

It is known that the Oxus civilization in the Bronze Age, with its unique material culture, interacted with a number of cultural countries: the Indian Valley, Iran, Mesopotamia, Elam and other regions. As a result of these relationships, interactions and interactions are formed. Archaeologists turn to archaeological and written sources to shed light on the historiography of this period. This research is devoted to the history of cultural relations between the Oxus civilization and the countries of the Arabian Gulf in the Bronze Age. The article highlights cultural ties based on an analysis of stamp seals and unique artifacts.Key words: Dilmun, Magan, marine shell, Arabian Gulf, Bahrain, Mesopotamia, Harappa, Gonur, Afghanistan

Iron Age landscape, society, and regionality : The material culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

In his review of South East Britain in the later Iron Age, Hill (2007, 16) observed that ‘Since the 1980s, little attention has been given to large-scale social explanations and narratives in British Iron Age archaeology. Debates over core–periphery models, the interpretation of hillforts, and the nature of social organization, were—for good reason—eclipsed by a focus on the symbolic meanings of space, structured deposition, and ritual.’ He goes on to argue that British archaeology is in need of more ‘straightforward storyboards’ around which data can be arranged (Hill 2007, 16), and Brudenell (2012, 52) has similarly noted how ‘close-grained understandings have often been won at the expense of broader pictures . . . [and that] with a few exceptions, recent approaches have atomized the study of later prehistoric society, focussing on the specifics of the local social milieu at the expense of broader scales of social analysis’. There have been some ‘big picture’ studies—most notably Cunliffe’s (1974; 1978; 1991; 2005) Iron Age Communities in Britain—but all too often studies of this period have focused on specific counties, types of site, or artefact, and it is noticeable how little systematic mapping of data there was in three recent collections of papers (Gwilt and Haselgrove 1997; Haselgrove and Moore 2007; Haselgrove and Pope 2007). This study, in contrast, aims to shed light on one important ‘storyboard’: the territorial structures within which communities built their landscapes. The written history of Britain begins in the first century BC when we first get insights into its political and territorial arrangements, although as this was a period when the island was becoming embroiled in the political instability caused by the expansion of the Roman world, the trends seen then may not reflect the longer-term patterns of territorial stability or instability that preceded it. In 54 BC, for example, Caesar describes how his major opponents were a civitas (usually translated as ‘tribe’) who had recently surpassed the neighbouring Trinovantes as the paramount group in South East Britain (Gallic War, 20–1; Dunnett 1975, 8; Moore 2011).

TRAVELLING WITH THE POTTER'S WHEEL IN THE EARLY BRONZE AGE AEGEAN

2020 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 59-104
Author(s):  
Maria Choleva
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Linear Diffusion ◽  
Craft Knowledge ◽  
Technological Tradition ◽  
Technological Study ◽  
Comparative Examination ◽  
Shed Light

By adopting the chaîne opératoire approach as a dynamic theoretical and methodological framework for studying ancient technologies, this paper investigates the modalities behind the appearance of the potter's wheel in the Aegean during the Early Bronze Age II (c. 2550–2200 bc). Based on the comparative examination of ceramic assemblages from different Aegean sites, an extended technological study has been carried out in order to track the earliest wheel-made pottery and reconstruct the craft behaviours perpetrated by the use of the potter's wheel across the Aegean. The paper presents the results of this multi-site study and aims to (a) trace out the wheel-based technological traditions, (b) explore the contexts of the learning and transmission of the new tool, (c) shed light on the connectivity among Aegean and western Anatolian communities that enabled the transfer of the new craft knowledge, and, finally, (d) bring into view the mechanisms behind its emergence and appropriation. By considering technologies as representing an entire social system of knowing, perceiving and acting on the material world, it will be argued that the spread of the potter's wheel in the Aegean does not reflect a moment of linear diffusion of a technological innovation, adopted thanks to certain techno-functional advantages. Instead, it discloses the resilience of social identities and values embedded through the practical engagement of individuals in the production of their material culture. The potter's wheel, in fact, emerges as a socially and culturally mediated practice, specific to small groups of potters trained within a technological tradition of Anatolian origin, performing their craft in the Aegean socio-cultural milieus. Furthermore, its transfer reveals a multidirectional and dynamic crossing of material cultures that designated a navigable world where traditions, objects and people travelled, mixed and merged in unpredictable ways.

scholarly journals How social factors influence the understanding of the computers by kindergarten pupils

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 229
Author(s):  
Argyris Kyridis ◽  
Kyriaki Patrali ◽  
Anastasia Alevriadou ◽  
Mikaela Petrou ◽  
Sofia Anastasiadou
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Place Of Residence ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
Higher Institution ◽  
Role Of Parents ◽  
Children’S Views ◽  
Mother's Educational Level ◽  
Preschool Aged Children

The aim of the research is to explore the views of infants and preschool aged children on computers as a concept and as an element of material culture. In other words, the research seeks to identify the ideas and concepts that the children have form on the computer and its peripheral units. At the same time there has been an effort to detecting the factors that probably affect the Greek preschool aged children’s formation of views and concepts on computers. The factors that have been checked are parents’ education level and profession, the existence or not of a computer in kindergarten class, the sex, the place of residence and children’s age. In order for the degree of infants’ conceptual change to emerge, the question “does a computer remain a computer if one of its external characteristics changes” had been investigated. The phenomenon of simile or parallelism of the computer or its parts with other objects had been observed (i.e. “the screen is like a TV” or “is a TV”, “the central unit and printer are machines” etc) especially on behalf of the preschool aged children. It seems that preschool aged children compared with infants, use in higher degree more essential characteristics in order to define computer and its parts (recognition - usage - preservation of identity). In general these findings confirm the findings of international researches which highlight the important role of parents’ educational level and profession in the acquisition of knowledge on new technologies by their children. In the majority of children there were evident difficulties in defining the concept of computer and also to realize what it is what it does.  This difficulty was expected as the computer is an artificial object with complex functions which essentially are based on its internal characteristics. In parallel, children’s notions on the computer and its parts are depended on factors as their mother’s profession and educational level as well as if there is or not a PC in kindergarten. On the contrary children’s sex, the place of residence, father’s educational level and profession don’t seem to significantly influence children. Specifically, mother’s profession influences significantly children’s performance. It has been found that children whose mother is a freelancer-scientist or a public servant statistically have significantly greater numbers of right answers from the children whose mother is a farmer or a worker and from those whose mother is a privet employee, a freelancer or a merchant.  Mother’s educational level seems to influence children’s views and notions even though something worth mentioning occurs: the greater number of right answers it is given by children whose mothers are secondary education graduates. This finding might be explained by the higher expectations that these mothers have from their children. Even though they, themselves don’t graduate form a higher institution, they very much want that for their children. The lowest performances have children whose mothers are elementary school graduates. It’s impressive the fact that on the question related to the computers identity change or not, no differences were found among the three groups, something that needs further investigation.

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