scholarly journals Human versus computer vision in archaeological recording

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-159
Author(s):  
Philip Sapirstein
Keyword(s):  
Great Majority ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Technical Drawing ◽  
Recording Process ◽  
Greek Architecture ◽  
Human Interpretation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Ancient Record

As 3D scanning and photogrammetry are supplanting traditional illustration techniques with increasing speed, archaeologists and architectural historians have sounded alarms about what stands to be lost if hand drawing is altogether eliminated from fieldwork. This paper argues that the most direct threat is to a particular form of archaeological illustration which does not necessarily share the advantages attributed to other kinds of drawing. Recording by means of “technical drawing” communicates a collectively agreed interpretation of the ancient record, and its primary benefit is not stimulating creative thought but rather enhancing human observation. A review of two cases comparing the illustration of ancient Greek architecture through analogue and digital methods indicates that, in practice, both approaches draw attention away from the ancient subject and focus it on distracting protocols for the great majority of the time spent in the field. Even so, technical drawing requires protracted, in-person scrutiny of the subject, whereas 3D technologies pose a genuine risk of altogether eliminating meaningful human interpretation from the recording process. The greater efficiencies of digital techniques suggest a path forward, as time once allocated to tedious stages of technical drawing might be applied toward more thoughtful interpretive tasks. However, such measures must be deliberately integrated into a digital research program through planning around the very different cadences of the digital process.

The Devil's Tabernacle

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
European Thought ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Huge Variety

This is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. The book shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. The book examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance—that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally an organic element of ancient Greek society. The range of discussion on the subject, as he demonstrates, is considerably more complex than has been realized before: hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the oracles, drawing on a huge variety of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs. A central chapter interrogates the landmark dispute on the oracles between Bernard de Fontenelle and Jean-François Baltus, challenging Whiggish assumptions about the mechanics of debate on the cusp of the Enlightenment. With erudition and an eye for detail, the book argues that, on both sides of the controversy, to speak of the ancient oracles in early modernity was to speak of one's own historical identity as a Christian.

scholarly journals Author identification of short texts using dependency treebanks without vocabulary

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 812-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Text Classification ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Combinatorial Explosion ◽  
Independent Variables ◽  
Author Identification ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
And Control

Abstract How to classify short texts effectively remains an important question in computational stylometry. This study presents the results of an experiment involving authorship attribution of ancient Greek texts. These texts were chosen to explore the effectiveness of digital methods as a supplement to the author’s work on text classification based on traditional stylometry. Here it is crucial to avoid confounding effects of shared topic, etc. Therefore, this study attempts to identify authorship using only morpho-syntactic data without regard to specific vocabulary items. The data are taken from the dependency annotations published in the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank. The independent variables for classification are combinations generated from the dependency label and the morphology of each word in the corpus and its dependency parent. To avoid the effects of the combinatorial explosion, only the most frequent combinations are retained as input features. The authorship classification (with thirteen classes) is done with standard algorithms—logistic regression and support vector classification. During classification, the corpus is partitioned into increasingly smaller ‘texts’. To explore and control for the possible confounding effects of, e.g. different genre and annotator, three corpora were tested: a mixed corpus of several genres of both prose and verse, a corpus of prose including oratory, history, and essay, and a corpus restricted to narrative history. Results are surprisingly good as compared to those previously published. Accuracy for fifty-word inputs is 84.2–89.6%. Thus, this approach may prove an important addition to the prevailing methods for small text classification.

scholarly journals Mytens tvang

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus
Keyword(s):  
Blind Spot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The purpose of the article is to show how the negative dialectics of Adorno gets involved with a concept of myth that is questionable in several respects. First of all, Adorno tries to combine, but rather conflates, two understandings of myth. On the one hand, the concept of myth is defined as the ancient Greek mythos, in which the subject of man is projected on to nature; on the other hand, myth is defined as the backfire of enlightenment, in which self-reflection becomes the blind spot of instrumental reason. Along these lines of argument, Adorno’s interpretation of Homer, which, at any rate, is highly inspiring, attempts to demonstrate that Odysseus is already enlightened in that he keeps the myth at bay in order to gain his self. The point is, as a matter of dialectic necessity, that he just ends up in myth once again, albeit in the second sense, namely by being a victim of his own self-denial. A question that seems to remain unanswered, though, is how the two kinds of myth are related. Further, Adorno draws on a problematic distinction between myth and literature in order to claim that Homer separates himself from the realm of myth. By adopting Adorno’s own game of interpretation, however, it is possible to regard myth as such, including the Homeric one, as being contingently open-ended rather than just a matter of dialectic determination.

scholarly journals Acre and Alphito: to the question of Greek scary stories for children

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Vladislava Igorevna Makeeva
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Murdered Children

This article is describes the Ancient Greek mythological characters Acre (Ἀκκώ) and Alphito (Ἀλφιτώ). Both of them are commonly attributed to surly persons who frighten and posed treat to the little ones, by analogy with Lamia, Mormo and Gello, who murdered children. The goal of this research is to determine the differences between the tales about Acre and Alphiro and the tales about demons who murdered children. The object of this work is the mythological representations of Ancient Greeks, while the subject is the Greek scary stories for children. The author analyzes the testimonies of ancient authors about Acre and Alphito. The conclusion is made that these characters differed from the typical children's monsters. Special attention is given to the tale of Acre due to better preservation of its history in the sources. She was a stupid woman, known for her absurd actions. Her name was associated with the origin of the words denoting stupidity; it also became a common name and was of proverbial nature. The foolish acts of Acre made her a fitting example of the wrong pastime. The tales of Acre and Alphito were not typical scary stories for children; their motif was not to frighten the little ones with their terrible doings as Lamia, Mormo and Gello, but to demonstrate not to waste their time in a foolish way.

PEDIATRICS IN GENERAL PRACTICE

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-370
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
General Practice ◽  
Medical School ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Pediatric Care ◽  
The Subject

A STUDY of the general practitioners' opinions about that portion of their practice devoted to pediatrics is the subject of a recent report. In view of the fact that the great majority of pediatric care in the United States is provided by general practitioners, this report is of interest to pediatricians as well as general practitioners. In this study, approximately 125 general practitioners living in the state of Washington were interviewed. All of them had graduated from medical school after 1950. The data obtained showed that the proportion of general practice devoted to pediatrics in 1957 was virtually identical to that reported in the survey made by the Academy of Pediatrics in 1948. In 1948, one-third of the general practitioners' patients were children; the figure obtained in 1957 was 34%.

PUBLIC HEALTH, NURSING AND MEDICAL SOCIAL WORK

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 627-630
Keyword(s):  
Rheumatic Fever ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Medical Social Work ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Health Nursing ◽  
Clinical Advances ◽  
Specific Diagnostic Test ◽  
Rheumatic Heart

FROM his earliest writings on rheumatic fever, Hugh McCulloch recognized the importance of geographic variation in incidence and prevalence of the disease. What was behind this variation was not clear then and is not clear now. Other problems have, perhaps, been easier to attack, [SEE TABLE I AND II IN SOURCE PDF] since multiplicity of factors impedes definitive analysis of geographic influences, but it is clear that elucidation of the specific reasons behind variations from one locality to another, may go far in promoting effectiveness of preventive measures. As collaborative international efforts in the field of health have progressed, data on the subject are becoming available from more and more nations. Despite difficulties in interpreting the data, to be pointed out later, there are presented herewith information on [SEE FIG.1, FIG.2 AND TABLE III IN SOURCE PDF] the current world-wide situation as reflected in reports to official agencies. It has been repeatedly pointed out that any analysis of incidence of rheumatic fever and chronic rheumatic heart disease is subject to difficulty because of lack of a specific diagnostic test. Clinical advances have gone far towards clarifying the criteria for establishing the diagnosis, but, in the great majority of cases, decision rests on the clinical acumen of the physician, in terms both of alertness to the possibility that a case is rheumatic fever, and in critical appraisal of the evidence before accepting the diagnosis in doubtful cases.

Greek civilisation and slavery

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Slave System ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Greek Civilization

This chapter examines whether Greek civilization was based on slavery. The silence of classicists on the subject is not surprising. The discussion here is limited to Anglo-American scholarship, in an attempt to achieve a manageable focus, though a great deal of the last half-century's work on ancient Greek slavery has been written in French and German. Slavery may cover very different types of unfreedom, such as the chattel slave system of Athens and the helotage that was the predominant form of servitude practised by Sparta. Whether slaves, especially chattel slaves, are to be seen principally as living property or as socially dead outsiders evokes further levels of definition, which are also contested.

The earliest Greek settlements on the Black Sea

1976 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Drews
Keyword(s):  
Black Sea ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Subject

The date and circumstances of the first Greek settlements on the Black Sea are matters of considerable disagreement. This is the result both of the scattered nature of the literary evidence on the subject, and of the dearth of archaeological evidence for Pontic settlements other than those on the western and northern shores. A century ago it was commonly thought that although the great majority of colonies were sent out in the seventh and sixth centuries, Trapezus and Sinope, as our sources say or imply, were founded in the middle of the eighth. For a variety of reasons, among them an increased reliance on archaeologically secured dates, this view went out of favour, and opinion inclined toward the view that the Greeks did not enter the Black Sea at all until after 700. This view was both expressed in and supported by Rhys Carpenter's thesis that not until the penteconter was invented (an invention which he dated to the early seventh century) could the Greeks make head against the four-knot current which flows through the Bosporus from the Black Sea. Articles by B. W. Labaree and A. J. Graham, however, have undermined Carpenter's argument, and it is now once again not unusual to find references to Greek activity in the Black Sea before 700.

LYKOPHRON AND EPIGRAPHY: THE VALUE AND FUNCTION OF CULT EPITHETS IN THEALEXANDRA

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Hornblower
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Religion ◽  
Local Origin ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many ◽  
And Function

The subject of this paper is a striking and unavoidable feature of theAlexandra: Lykophron's habit of referring to single gods not by their usual names, but by multiple lists of epithets piled up in asyndeton. This phenomenon first occurs early in the 1474-line poem, and this occurrence will serve as an illustration. At 152–3, Demeter has five descriptors in a row: Ἐνναία ποτὲ | Ἕρκυνν' Ἐρινὺς Θουρία Ξιφηφόρος, ‘Ennaian … Herkynna, Erinys, Thouria, Sword-bearing’. In the footnote I give the probable explanations of these epithets. Although in this sample the explanations to most of the epithets are not to be found in inscriptions, my main aim in what follows will be to emphasize the relevance of epigraphy to the unravelling of some of the famous obscurity of Lykophron. In this paper, I ask why the poet accumulates divine epithets in this special way. I also ask whether the information provided by the ancient scholiasts, about the local origin of the epithets, is of good quality and of value to the historian of religion. This will mean checking some of that information against the evidence of inscriptions, beginning with Linear B. It will be argued that it stands up very well to such a check. TheAlexandrahas enjoyed remarkable recent vogue, but this attention has come mainly from the literary side. Historians, in particular historians of religion, and students of myths relating to colonial identity, have been much less ready to exploit the intricate detail of the poem, although it has so much to offer in these respects. The present article is, then, intended primarily as a contribution to the elucidation of a difficult literary text, and to the history of ancient Greek religion. Despite the article's main title, there will, as the subtitle is intended to make clear, be no attempt to gather and assess all the many passages in Lykophron to which inscriptions are relevant. There will, for example, be no discussion of 1141–74 and the early Hellenistic ‘Lokrian Maidens inscription’ (IG9.12706); or of the light thrown on 599 by the inscribed potsherds carrying dedications to Diomedes, recently found on the tiny island of Palagruza in the Adriatic, and beginning as early as the fifth centuryb.c.(SEG48.692bis–694); or of 733–4 and their relation to the fifth-centuryb.c.Athenian decree (n. 127) mentioning Diotimos, the general who founded a torch race at Naples, according to Lykophron; or of 570–85 and the epigraphically attested Archegesion or cult building of Anios on Delos, which shows that this strange founder king with three magical daughters was a figure of historical cult as well as of myth.

Photography and Cinema in 20th-Century Mexico

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mraz
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Mexican Society ◽  
International Audience ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Revolution

Photography, film, and other forms of technical imagery were incorporated quickly into Mexican society upon their respective arrivals, joining other visual expressions such as murals and folk art, demonstrating the primacy of the ocular in this culture. Photojournalism began around 1900, and has formed a pillar of Mexican photography, appearing in illustrated magazines and the numerous picture histories that have been produced. A central bifurcation in the photography of Mexico (by both Mexicans and foreigners) has been that of the picturesque and the anti-picturesque. Followers of the former tendency, such as Hugo Brehme, depict Mexicans as a product of nature, an expression of the vestiges left by pre-Columbian civilizations, the colony, and underdevelopment; for them, Mexico is an essence that has been made once and for all time. Those that are opposed to such essentialism, such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, choose instead to posit that Mexicans are a product of historical experiences. The Mexican Revolution has been a central figure in both photography and cinema. The revolution was much photographed and filmed when it occurred, and that material has formed the base of many picture histories, often formed with the archive of Agustín Víctor Casasola, as well as with documentary films. Moreover, the revolution has been the subject of feature films. With the institutionalization of the revolution, governments became increasingly conservative, and the celebrity stars of “Golden Age” cinema provided models for citizenship; these films circulated widely throughout the Spanish speaking world. Although the great majority of photojournalists followed the line of the party dictatorship, there were several critical photographers who questioned the government, among them Nacho López, Héctor García, and the Hermanos Mayo. The Tlaltelolco massacre of 1968 was a watershed, from which was born a different journalism that offered space for the critical imagery of daily life by the New Photojounalists. Moreover, the representation of the massacre in cinema offered sharply contrasting viewpoints. Mexican cineastes have received much recognition in recent years, although they do not appear to be making Mexican films. Television in Mexico is controlled by a duopoly, but some programs have reached an international audience comparable to that of the Golden Age cinema.

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