The Bridge

The bridge is a popular image of formation of the city’s symbol, brand and composite character. The essay proposes interpretation of the mythopoetics of bridges, one of the most ambiguous, mysterious and attractive typological niches in architecture.

From Mary’s Motherhood to the Immaculate Conception: An Iconographic Analysis of Marian Art in Spain during the Tenth to Nineteenth Centuries

This article analyzes Marian art in Spain from the tenth to nineteenth centuries in order to show how popular piety represented Mary’s motherhood. Through art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and oral preaching, a popular image of Mary emerged and, in turn, became key for understanding the history of the family in western Catholic countries. Studying the evolution of Marian iconography during this thousand-year period reveals a kind of grandeur, and then a certain crisis, surrounding Mary’s motherhood. This crisis specifically involves the meaning of the body as an effective sign of the personal gift-of-self. We argue that this process ran parallel to growing problems in theological culture related to reconciling the natural and supernatural realms, and we further sustain that it contains a true cultural revolution, a shift that is at the origin of many later transformations. This interpretation helps better understand the dilemmas surrounding the history of the family in the West, and specifically of motherhood, from the point of view of the Christian tradition.

Zig Jackson: Postindian Warrior of Fine Art

The article is a discussion of contemporary photographic works featuring Native Americans. The argument is framed through references to the conventions of representations of Native people in photography, on the one hand, and the critical discourse of Gerald Vizenor and the notions of the “Indian” and “Postindian,” on the other. The article focuses on the artist, Zig Jackson, who is described as a Postindian “warrior of survivance” and whose practice is analyzed as an attempt at the deconstruction of the popular image of the “Indian.”

Ways of Othering: Literary Image of Russians in Habsburg Lviv

Ways of Othering: Literary Image of Russians in Habsburg LvivThe popular image of multicultural Lviv/Lwów in general, and under Habsburg rule in particular, usually excludes Russians from the group of genuine city dwellers. The main aim of this paper is to analyze the few portrayals of Russians in literary texts relating to the period of WWI. I compare Polish strategies of othering Russians as barbarians and an insidious element, prevalent in the literature for young readers of the 1920s, with the tendency of some Ukrainian authors to create a more nuanced image in the mass literature of the 2010s. The analysis of ways of othering Russians in the two identified groups of literary texts considers the geopolitical and national identity issues underpinning these trends. Kształtowanie obrazu Innego. Literacki obraz Rosjan w habsburskim LwowieW popularnym obrazie wielokulturowego Lwowa, zarówno polskim, jak i ukraińskim, do grona prawdziwych mieszkańców miasta zasadniczo nie mogą zostać zaliczeni Rosjanie. Głównym celem artykułu jest analiza nielicznych przykładów ich wizerunków w tekstach literackich dotyczących okresu I wojny światowej. Porównuję polskie strategie traktowania Rosjan jako „Innych” – barbarzyńców i wrogów, realizowane w literaturze dla młodych czytelników lat dwudziestych XX wieku, z ukraińską tendencją do tworzenia bardziej zniuansowanego obrazu w literaturze masowej ostatniej dekady. W analizie sposobów wykluczania Rosjan w tych dwóch grupach tekstów literackich uwzględnione zostają kwestie geopolityczne i problem tożsamości narodowej.

Exploring the Use of Deep Learning with Crowdsourcing to Annotate Images

We investigate what, if any, benefits arise from employing hybrid algorithm-crowdsourcing approaches over conventional approaches of relying exclusively on algorithms or crowds to annotate images. We introduce a framework that enables users to investigate different hybrid workflows for three popular image analysis tasks: image classification, object detection, and image captioning. Three hybrid approaches are included that are based on having workers: (i) verify predicted labels, (ii) correct predicted labels, and (iii) annotate images for which algorithms have low confidence in their predictions. Deep learning algorithms are employed in these workflows since they offer high performance for image annotation tasks. Each workflow is evaluated with respect to annotation quality and worker time to completion on images coming from three diverse datasets (i.e., VOC, MSCOCO, VizWiz). Inspired by our findings, we offer recommendations regarding when and how to employ deep learning with crowdsourcing to achieve desired quality and efficiency for image annotation.

This Person Does Exist

This Person Does Exist is an artistic approach to exploring a large dataset of photographic portraits in a randomised manner. The dataset was originally created by Nvidia Research Lab, which has scraped and analysed creative commons images from the popular image hosting platform Flickr. These pictures were then used to train a machine learning model which can create new stochastic images of faces. In contrast to a popular website that showcases the computer generated images, I am displaying random faces from the dataset with their corresponding metadata. This essay looks into extractivist mechanisms in current machine learning techniques, using the internet to populate and refine databases, while focusing on artistic approaches that expose them. I make the case for Dataset Art as an emerging field which reframes scientific corpora by placing them into galleries and exhibiting them as found objects online. Finally, I argue that this artistic practice is a legitimate way of opening up a larger public discourse, although artists working with human data must be aware of ethical issues and responsibilities regarding privacy and consent.

Image Analysis of Sauvola and Niblack Thresholding Techniques

Image segmentation is a critical problem in computer vision and other image processing applications. Image segmentation has become quite challenging over the years due to its widespread use in a variety of applications. Image thresholding is a popular image segmentation technique. The segmented image quality is determined by the techniques used to determine the threshold value.A locally adaptive thresholding method based on neighborhood processing is presented in this paper. The performance of locally thresholding methods like Niblack and Sauvola was demonstrated using real-world images, printed text, and handwritten text images. Threshold-based segmentation methods were investigated using misclassification error, MSE and PSNR. Experiments have shown that the Sauvola method outperforms real-world images, printed and handwritten text images in terms of misclassification error, PSNR, and MSE.

The Renaissance at a Glance

Since its inauguration in 1869, hardly anyone who travels to Florence will miss a visit to the Piazzale Michelangelo to enjoy the panoramic view of the city. But there is more than meets the eye. In this chapter it is argued that around 1800 the panorama of Florence started to grow into an iconic view, in line with the formative role that historians began to assign to the fifteenth-century Republic of Florence in Europe’s early cultural development; an idea that culminated in Burckhardt’s characterization of Florence as the cradle of modern man. Bearing this idea in mind, this chapter investigates how the panorama, at a glace, captures the Tuscan city in its almost unaltered early Renaissance state and how it slowly grew into a popular image that conjures up Florence’s historical achievements in a nutshell.

Health and Healing: Retention of the Popularity of Ashtavaidya Tradition during the Colonial Regime

During the early 19th century, health and medical care was one of the avenues of contestations whereby the British Raj sought to establish their hegemony. With the introduction of western epistemic framework, allopathic medicine became the official medical system of British India. Licenses, charters, permits and acts, colonial hospitals and doctors came together to disparage the indigenous system of medicine and healthcare. Assailed as using “unscientific Oriental procedures’ several folk healers lost their traditional practice and livelihood. However, amidst all these colossal manoeuvres, the popularity and relevance of the Ashtavaidya tradition, practiced by eighteen Namboodiri families in Kerala remained unscathed. The medical practices customized by the Ashtavaidyans who themselves were an “outcaste” within the Namboodiri community was highly codified and has remained a closely guarded secret within their lineage. This essay probes into the multiple reasons behind how the Ashtavaidya tradition retained its relevance, despite the colonial gambit to repudiate the indigenous practices. Through the legends and mythical stories woven around the healing practices of Ashtavaidyans in Aithihyamala by the court scribe of 19th century, Kottarathil Sankunni, the essay argues that the relevance of the Ashtavaidyans could be due to the transformation of Ashtavaidya tradition as markers of cultural pride and the popular image generated by various myths and legends that got registered in the public consciousness.

The Master Narrative and its Paradoxes

The chapter explores alternatives to the uplifting linear narrative of progress that underpins Dante’s Commedia and can be regarded as its ‘master narrative’. It investigates three counter-narratives that stand in tension with, and often subvert, its teleological trajectory. These are enacted by (i) the poem’s representations of an uncertain, open-ended future; (ii) the alternative endings voiced by various characters who imagine how their lives might have turned out differently; and (iii) the paradoxes that resist the poem’s linear temporality and offer important illustrations of a more unresolved Commedia that does not always seek ‘total coherence’. The chapter concludes that alongside established notions of Dante’s plurilingualism and pluristylism, it is fruitful to think of the Commedia in terms of its narrative pluralism. Exploring counter-narratives balances a popular image of Dante as a carefully controlling author with that of a writer open to a more liberal and reciprocal relationship with his readers.