scholarly journals Annotating Colonialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Leonie Treier

This exhibition review essay compares three recent interventions into historic cultural representations at the American Museum of Natural History: the Digital Totem that was placed in the Northwest Coast Hall in 2016 to partially modernize its content, the 2018 reconsideration of the Old New York Diorama, which attempts to correct its stereotypical representations of Native North American peoples, and the 2019 exhibition Addressing the Statue providing context for the Theodore Roosevelt statue. Paying attention to visual and textual strategies, I characterize these three interventions as temporary annotations to what have been remarkably static, long-term cultural representations. I argue that, through these annotations, the museum acknowledges the misrepresentations but does not resolve them. The case studies show varying degrees of critical historical reflection expressing the complexities of negotiating different approaches and agendas to engaging with the museum’s past. I also comment on the pervasiveness of a digital aesthetics in all three projects, even though only the Digital Totem was produced as a digital, interactive intervention into the museum space. The invocation of a digital design vocabulary enhances the impression of annotation.

Author(s):  
Federico Varese

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Kasten ◽  
Elizabeth Lewis ◽  
Sari Lelchook ◽  
Lynn Feinberg ◽  
Edem Hado

1980 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Edward F. Harris ◽  
Nicholas F. Bellantoni

Archaeologically defined inter-group differences in the Northeast subarea ate assessed with a phenetic analysis of published craniometric information. Spatial distinctions in the material culture are in good agreement with those defined by the cranial metrics. The fundamental dichotomy, between the Ontario Iroquois and the eastern grouping of New York and New England, suggests a long-term dissociation between these two groups relative to their ecologic adaptations, trade relationships, trait-list associations, and natural and cultural barriers to gene flow.


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6748
Author(s):  
Hsun-Ping Hsieh ◽  
Fandel Lin ◽  
Jiawei Jiang ◽  
Tzu-Ying Kuo ◽  
Yu-En Chang

Research on flourishing public bike-sharing systems has been widely discussed in recent years. In these studies, many existing works focus on accurately predicting individual stations in a short time. This work, therefore, aims to predict long-term bike rental/drop-off demands at given bike station locations in the expansion areas. The real-world bike stations are mainly built-in batches for expansion areas. To address the problem, we propose LDA (Long-Term Demand Advisor), a framework to estimate the long-term characteristics of newly established stations. In LDA, several engineering strategies are proposed to extract discriminative and representative features for long-term demands. Moreover, for original and newly established stations, we propose several feature extraction methods and an algorithm to model the correlations between urban dynamics and long-term demands. Our work is the first to address the long-term demand of new stations, providing the government with a tool to pre-evaluate the bike flow of new stations before deployment; this can avoid wasting resources such as personnel expense or budget. We evaluate real-world data from New York City’s bike-sharing system, and show that our LDA framework outperforms baseline approaches.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina G. Tsakiri ◽  
Antonios E. Marsellos ◽  
Igor G. Zurbenko

Flooding normally occurs during periods of excessive precipitation or thawing in the winter period (ice jam). Flooding is typically accompanied by an increase in river discharge. This paper presents a statistical model for the prediction and explanation of the water discharge time series using an example from the Schoharie Creek, New York (one of the principal tributaries of the Mohawk River). It is developed with a view to wider application in similar water basins. In this study a statistical methodology for the decomposition of the time series is used. The Kolmogorov-Zurbenko filter is used for the decomposition of the hydrological and climatic time series into the seasonal and the long and the short term component. We analyze the time series of the water discharge by using a summer and a winter model. The explanation of the water discharge has been improved up to 81%. The results show that as water discharge increases in the long term then the water table replenishes, and in the seasonal term it depletes. In the short term, the groundwater drops during the winter period, and it rises during the summer period. This methodology can be applied for the prediction of the water discharge at multiple sites.


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