Fair and Tender Data. The FAIRness of Four Databases With Historical Individual Life Course Data Tested

Four databases with data on individual historical life courses are tested for FAIRness: the TRA, Umeå, HSN and IPUMS databases. All databases make their data much more Findable than they were in the original sources. But as databases, they are best findable if their name is a unique acronym, and if different sub-datasets all use that same acronym. Sensitive data have to be protected. Two databases make anonymous data sets or those only containing information on deceased individuals Accessible without any formalities, and other databases could follow this example. To increase Interoperability a large number of tools are offered by the databases. Reusability is among the raisons d’être of these databases.

Percepções do clássico Alma no Olho e o cinema negro de Zózimo Bulbul

This article purposes an observation of the sensations caused by watching the movie “Alma no Olho” (Brazil, 1974) from the writer, director, producer and actor Zózimo Bulbul. He started his career doing theater productions at the UNE (National Students Union) cultural center, was the first black man to play a lead role in the Brazilian television, having acted in more than thirty movies and directing six, including Alma no Olho, which will be discussed in this article. Through a research, done in person, we will analyse the perceptions the movie brings, whether they’re about historical, individual or social relations. It will also discuss a little about the definition of what is classic and a small biography from the master of the Brazilian black cinema, Zózimo Bubul.

Libraries in Ancient Egypt, c.1600–800 BCE

The chapter surveys the evidence for ancient Egyptian libraries during the period 1600–800 BCE. It looks at both private and institutional libraries, defined as collections of papyri with literary texts, with a notable focus on archaeological context, and the use and materiality of manuscripts. Given the paucity of archaeological remains of temple and palace libraries, many indirect sources play a key role in the analysis, including book labels, administrative titles, and patterns of transmission for literary texts. Private libraries are better attested, and here the main groups are described with a particular focus on their importance for reconstructing the circulation and reception of literature. Finally, the chapter includes a rare case study where an historical individual and his family can be identified as the owners of a private library.

The Beloved Disciple, the Fourth Evangelist, and the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel

Discussions of the authorship of the Gospel of John must answer two questions: who is the Beloved Disciple who is portrayed as the book’s primary source of information, and how is this individual related to the author, John the evangelist? On the first question, scholars are divided on whether the Beloved Disciple is a real historical individual or an ideal symbolic figure. Data from the text itself and from social-science perspectives on the reputations of key figures from the past suggest that both are correct: the Beloved Disciple was a legendary associate of Jesus whose presentation reflects his reputation as a source of information that was critical to the Johannine theological outlook. On the second question, data suggests that the evangelist was not the Beloved Disciple but rather a disciple of that individual, perhaps basing his own book on an earlier document produced by the Beloved Disciple.

Aurangzeb and the Nāth Yogīs

This article focuses on some representations of Aurangzeb in the Nath Yogi lore; their ambivalence appears as a signifier of the complex relationships the Nath Yogis had with Islam. Aurangzeb figures both as a powerful enemy and as a clumsy devotee, he is depicted more as a symbol than as an historical individual character.

Peryferyjność – historia – interkulturowość. O Wiośnie Brunona Schulza

The main goal of the article is to demonstrate how Bruno Schulz’s biographical experience has become a starting point for a revision of the structures of meaning in his fiction. Historical shocks let Schulz understand the variability of values in the world and realize the instability of the powers that ruled it. The article focuses on the correlation among categories such as peripherality, history, and interculturality in Schulz’s “Spring” and narrative points of view in the story. The author shows how historical, individual, fantastic, intercultural, and biological (micro- and macrocosmic) perspectives coexist in the text.

The Axiological Memory of Max Weber

Although it is been more than a century since the appearance of Max Weber’s famous essay about the objective character of knowledge in the field of social and political sciences, it still continues to attract the interest of researchers in the various cultural sciences. There is a whole secondary literature dedicated to concepts that Weber has not defined clearly enough, such as Idealtypus [ideal type], historisches Individuum [historical individual], Wertbeziehung [value-relation] or Werturteilsfreiheit [the freedom from value- judgement] ( Oakes, 1990 ). Our contribution falls into this category; since the phrase ‘axiological memory’ appears nowhere in Weber’s work, the concept itself is present, especially in his essays dedicated to methodology in the social and political sciences. As Guy Oakes noted, Weber did not always endeavour to argue his thesis rigorously, thus leaving ample room for the interpretation and development of his ideas.

Hydropolitics and hydropolitical dynamics between India and Nepal: an event-based study

India and Nepal not only share common borders and cultures, but also share precious freshwater sources, i.e., rivers. Rivers have been discussed often in the political corridors because they cross international borders, which transform water reserves into a competitive resource and lead to hydropolitical dynamics between riparian countries. Nepal and India are two of the major riparian nations that share the mighty and complex Ganges Basin. The objective here was to study the more-than-a-century-old hydro-diplomacy between India and Nepal, passing through tumultuous political scenarios to understand how water relations have been shaped and reshaped with time. For this, a database of historical individual events/actions of water cooperation and conflict from 1874 to 2014 was compiled. These events/actions were ranked by intensity, using precise definitions of conflict and cooperation as suggested by the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database under the Basins at Risk project formulated at Oregon State University. Statistical analyses indicated cooperative events greatly outnumbered conflictive events. Out of 351 events, only 4% were conflictive, 92% were cooperative, and the remaining 4% were neutral. The study revealed an abundance of cooperative events; however, when seen through the lens of conflict-cooperation levels, the findings indicated a moderately positive cooperation, without much concrete action.

Greek and Latin Biography

The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations spawned and recycled many stories about heroes, tyrants, sages, and other (predominantly male) celebrities. Yet, a holistic reading of Greco-Roman biography is tricky. The common denominator of Greek and Latin texts that must or may be considered biographical is narrative focused on the life of a noteworthy historical or quasi-historical individual. So the boundaries of the evidence base are blurred and negotiable, even around the core of the best-known mainstream authors such as Plutarch and Suetonius. Alongside the extant or attested works that present full-scale accounts of lives of statesmen and intellectuals, the ancient biographical outlook can be gauged from historiography, apophthegmatic anecdotes, encomia and lampoons, novelized history, and so on. Since no theory of life writing was developed in Greco-Roman criticism as far as we can tell, it is fair to think of ancient biography as an “inductive genre”: that is, a pattern suggested by the available material itself but also generating further interpretative configurations. Biography is thus a heuristic concept for unlocking a layered meshwork of political, sociocultural, and ethical values through a significant—or, better, a significantly “emplotted” and potentially paradigmatic—life story that acts out those values before the insiders of the Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman ideological and literary landscapes. Scholarship is now used to appreciating ancient biography on its own, however fuzzy, terms rather than treating it as a lighter and implicitly inferior form of historiography. While the questions of source criticism and historicity continue to be vital, there is an ever-growing flow of studies focusing on the specific writerly and readerly aspects of ancient biography, with its propensity toward ethopoetic moralism and anecdotal montage. Similarly, autobiographical texts should be regarded both as historical documents and as textual artifacts of self-legitimization and authority.

Dynamics of Individual Appropriation

This chapter focuses on ritual performance. An individual performance of a ritual was not merely a simple repetition of an eternally fixed formula, but rather the conscious attempt of a historical individual to do the ritual, to repeat a time-honored pattern, to perform it to and for others in a specific situation, in a particular place. Writing, that is literature, might have been part of the performance. Texts are not only a part of the actual performance but also a part of its context, part of the performer's and audience's knowledge. Communication about ritual performances can be a determining factor in the interpretation and modification of a ritual action, and an individual performance cannot be analyzed in isolation from communication about previous performances or about the norms of the ritual.