Mining History in the Material Turn – Some preliminary Thoughts

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Stefan Siemer
Keyword(s):  
MediaTropes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. i-xvi
Author(s):  
Jordan Kinder ◽  
Lucie Stepanik

In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.


Author(s):  
Hannah Cobb ◽  
Karina Croucher

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultural resource management (CRM), from heritage professional to undergraduate student. At its heart, it addresses the undervaluation of teaching, demonstrating that this affects the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice, and is particularly connected to the lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. It proposes a solution which is grounded in a theoretical rethinking of our teaching, training, and practice. Drawing upon the insights from archaeology’s current material turn, and particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages, this volume turns the discipline of archaeology into the subject of investigation, considering the relationships between teaching, practice, and research. It offers a new perspective which prompts a rethinking of our expectations and values with regard to teaching, training, and doing archaeology, and ultimately argues that we are all constantly becoming archaeologists.


Author(s):  
Emily I. Dolan ◽  
Alexander Rehding

Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lichun Ma ◽  
Kai Wang ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Qingfeng Tang ◽  
Hui Yan

AbstractThe Quaternary Lop Nor playa is the largest production base of potassium sulfate in the world. It has a mining history of more than 10 years, and its share in the Chinese potassium sulfate market is about 50% to-date. In this basin, the high-salinity potassium-rich brines are mainly contained in Middle Pleistocene–Holocene glauberite strata. Based on the monitoring of the underground brine table and geochemical analysis, this study reveals variations in the underground brine table and potassium-bearing grade before and after large-scale mining in the Lop Nor potash deposit. The results showed that the underground brine table and potassium sulfate grade decreased by varying degrees over sub-mineral areas after large-scale mining. The underground brine table declined by 8.5 m, on average, in the Luobei depression, by 6.4 m in the Tenglong platform and by 1.9 m in the Xinqing platform. However, the potassium-bearing grade showed the different trend. The Tenglong platform had the largest decline with average decreases in layers W1, W2 and W3 of 18.2%, 13.0% and 24.8%, respectively. In the Xinqing platform, the average decrease in layersW2 and W3 were 17.4% and 16.0% respectively. The Luobei depression decreases were relatively small (W1, W2 and W3 decreased 4.3%, 4.2% and 3.1%, respectively). This research provides a theoretical basis for the rational development and sustainable use of the potassium-rich brines in the Lop Nor basin.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6981
Author(s):  
Marcela Bindzarova Gergelova ◽  
Slavomir Labant ◽  
Jozef Mizak ◽  
Pavel Sustek ◽  
Lubomir Leicher

The concept of further sustainable development in the area of administration of the register of old mining works and recent mining works in Slovakia requires precise determination of the locations of the objects that constitute it. The objects in this register have their uniqueness linked with the history of mining in Slovakia. The state of positional accuracy in the registration of objects in its current form is unsatisfactory. Different database sources containing the locations of the old mining works are insufficient and show significant locational deviations. For this reason, it is necessary to precisely locate old mining works using modern measuring technologies. The most effective approach to solving this problem is the use of LiDAR data, which at the same time allow determining the position and above-ground shape of old mining works. Two localities with significant mining history were selected for this case study. Positional deviations in the location of old mining works among the selected data were determined from the register of old mining works in Slovakia, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements, multidirectional hill-shading using LiDAR, and accessible data from the open street map. To compare the positions of identical old mining works from the selected database sources, we established differences in the coordinates (ΔX, ΔY) and calculated the positional deviations of the same objects. The average positional deviation in the total count of nineteen objects comparing documents, LiDAR data, and the register was 33.6 m. Comparing the locations of twelve old mining works between the LiDAR data and the open street map, the average positional deviation was 16.3 m. Between the data sources from GNSS and the registry of old mining works, the average positional deviation of four selected objects was 39.17 m.


Author(s):  
JENNIFER SPINKS

Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.


2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 212-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolland Munro

The aim of this paper is to suggest how the material turn in sociology could benefit from a re-theorizing around wider understandings of disposal. The argument is that it is not enough to document how spaces for dwelling are produced and consumed; their building and use also entail a disposal of place that has to account for how the materials that make up a dwelling get arranged and ‘placed’ as moralities. Taking spaces for living and eating as its object of analysis, each section of this paper examines a different aspect of modernity, bringing the kitchen-diner ‘front stage’. Avoiding a ubiquitous conflation of disposal with waste – whereby ‘excess’ is dismissed out of hand as redundant and non-productive to design – the analysis goes on to suggest how modernity advances its orders through our making the ‘belongings’ of collective identity more detachable and by our thinning the ‘stickiness’ of cultural institutions.


2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher H. Gammons ◽  
John J. Metesh ◽  
Terence E. Duaime
Keyword(s):  

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