scholarly journals Banglascapes in Southern Europe: Im-mobilities, emplacements, temporalities

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Andrea Priori ◽  
Josè Mapril ◽  
Francesco Della Puppa
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
European Conference ◽  
South Asian Studies

This special issue stems from a panel we organised at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in 2018, under the title ‘Banglascapes in Southern Europe: comparative perspectives’. Not all the panel participants from that conference feature in this special issue, and not all the authors included here were present at the conference. Nevertheless, the panel represents a first important moment in which we began to collect case-studies and insights on a relatively new aspect of the so-called Bengali, or Bangladeshi, ‘diaspora’.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-408
Author(s):  
SARAH ANSARI
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
First Century ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
South Asian Studies ◽  
University Of British Columbia

This special issue of the JRAS, guest-edited by Heidi Pauwels University of Washington and Anne Murphy University of British Columbia, brings together an extremely interesting set of articles that collectively explore vernacular perspectives on the emperor Aurangzeb/Alamgir drawn from outside the Persianate heartland of Mughal India. Its beginnings lay in an innovative interdisciplinary panel at the 2014 European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) held in Zurich in July 2014, which was organised by Heidi and Monika Boehm-Tettelbach (Horstmann). Drawing on vernacular literature, as opposed to more mainstream Persian sources, their authors seek, in various ways, to complicate past and present-day assumptions about the nature of Aurangzeb's rule, how he interacted with his subjects, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and how his subjects in turn viewed him. Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707 as Alamgir) continues to divide opinion sharply, as reactions to Audrey Truschke's 2017 study Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press) have recently underlined. Aurangzeb remains a firm fixture in South Asia's twenty-first century ‘culture wars’. By drawing on less-commonly referenced vernacular sources, and hence offering access to less state-centric views of Aurangzeb, this special issue makes a welcome — and very opportune — case for more rounded and nuanced understandings of the emperor and the India in which he lived.

scholarly journals Learning-free pattern detection for manuscript research:

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hussein Mohammed ◽  
Volker Märgner ◽  
Giovanni Ciotti
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Pattern Detection ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
South Asian Studies ◽  
Training Samples ◽  
Nearest Neighbour Classifier

AbstractAutomatic pattern detection has become increasingly important for scholars in the humanities as the number of manuscripts that have been digitised has grown. Most of the state-of-the-art methods used for pattern detection depend on the availability of a large number of training samples, which are typically not available in the humanities as they involve tedious manual annotation by researchers (e.g. marking the location and size of words, drawings, seals and so on). This makes the applicability of such methods very limited within the field of manuscript research. We propose a learning-free approach based on a state-of-the-art Naïve Bayes Nearest-Neighbour classifier for the task of pattern detection in manuscript images. The method has already been successfully applied to an actual research question from South Asian studies about palm-leaf manuscripts. Furthermore, state-of-the-art results have been achieved on two extremely challenging datasets, namely the AMADI_LontarSet dataset of handwriting on palm leaves for word-spotting and the DocExplore dataset of medieval manuscripts for pattern detection. A performance analysis is provided as well in order to facilitate later comparisons by other researchers. Finally, an easy-to-use implementation of the proposed method is developed as a software tool and made freely available.

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