Archives in motion: Concrete steps towards the digital disclosure of audiovisual content

Various authors have stressed the need for an adequate archiving and preservation policy of audiovisual material, given its cultural, historical, juridical, social and economic value. In view of the sustainable preservation of audiovisual material, the opening up of the archive is seen as a real challenge. Various aspects, such as requirements concerning formats, metadata standards and legal implications, need to be taken into account. Furthermore, different types of users should be able to consult the archive in a user-friendly way, a factor which should not be neglected. This article studies and discusses the current situation in Flanders regarding the digitisation and disclosure of the Flemish audiovisual cultural heritage, comprising the audiovisual material in the archives of different Flemish institutions, including broadcasters, (post-) production companies, government institutions and cultural organizations. Based on 45 qualitative interviews, a SWOT analysis is created to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats concerning the digitisation and disclosure of the audiovisual archive. Moreover, this environmental analysis includes some recommendations concerning the future preservation of this audiovisual cultural heritage.     

Social network markets: a new definition of the creative industries

We propose a new definition of the creative industries in terms of social network markets. The extant definition of the creative industries is based on an industrial classification that proceeds in terms of the creative nature of inputs and the intellectual property nature of outputs. We propose, instead, a new market-based definition in terms of the extent to which both demand and supply operate in complex social networks. We review and critique the standard creative industries definitions and explain why we believe a market-based social network definition offers analytic advance. We discuss some empirical, analytic and policy implications of this new definition.

Racial incorporation through alignment with whiteness

This study examines alignment with whiteness as a form of racial incorporation among Asian Indian immigrants. Alignment—lining up—explains the process of racial incorporation as a creative construction of similarities in social position, values, interests, and culture. Thirty Asian Indian immigrants were interviewed. We found that they were positioned to interact with white Americans by their material resources, terms of immigration, and prearrival imagination of the U.S. as white. They incorporated themselves by constructing terms of equivalence with whiteness and adopting the discourse of racelessness. We demonstrate how identity capital and affect enable and secure racial alignment.     

Towards a commodity theory of token money: on ‘Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world’

ABSTRACT

Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodity money, wherein both precious and non-precious currencies are treated as the products of social construction. By contrast, I suggest the need to supplement such approaches with what I term a commodity theory of token money, wherein money objects made from both precious and non-precious materials are treated as inherently valuable. Exploring the semiotic convergence between gold, Bitcoin and modern paper money, I suggest that the broadly Peircean notion of rhematization in which symbol and indexical signs are (mis)taken for iconic ones is particularly suited to unpack the continuing social salience of commodity theories of money across the gold/paper divide. Moreover attention must be paid to how we define the icon itself.     

Culturalisation and devices: what is culture in cultural economy?

Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.     

立足中国、面向世界的宗教学

习近平总书记在《在哲学社会科学工作座谈会上的讲话》(2016年5月17日)中首次把宗教学列为11个需要"加快完善对哲学社会科学具有支撑作用的学科"之一。宗教学在"国家学科分类"里早已是"一级学科",但在"高校学位授予和人才培养学科目录"里却迟迟难以升格,这显然与我国教育界对宗教学的学科建设、特别是高校宗教学教育的认识程度有关。鉴此,在充分论证高校宗教学建设的必要性与重要性的基础上,笔者着重阐发了加强我国高校宗教学建设的"三大着力点",即坚持与发展马克思主义宗教观、扎根并弘扬中国文化传统以及宗教学建设的国际学术视野。本文最后一部分论及的北京大学宗教学专业探索经验,或许也对推进我国高校的宗教学建设有借鉴意义。     

The natural sciences,the social sciences and politics

Conclusion The social sciences stand at a strange crossroads. There is a greater need for disciplined inquiry into the issues of policy facing the United States. Yet the incentives in the political system, and in the professional guilds of those performing social research, discourage a close involvement of many prominent social scientists with policy. The political system, fearing an elite imposing its values on society, welcomes the natural scientist who seems to conform to the model of the politically neutral expert who solves problems and addresses facts. This model also fits the higher ranks of the civil service, made up of specialists rather than generalist administrators, and the outside advisers serving officials concerned with high policy. Likewise, to protect themselves from changes of partisanship, leading academic social scientists forsake policy concerns for topics within the analytic traditions of Weberian Wertfreiheit. Just as Weber sought to avoid censorship by value neutral scholarship, the modern social scientist disdains the normative concerns of policy in favour of more tractable, morally neutral issues defined as the core of the discipline.The country needs to draw some of the best analytical talent in the social science community into the policy process and advisory roles. Disciplined inquiry cannot be left only to technicians whose professional interests are far removed from political, economic, social and other human sciences. To promote better policy and better social science, we should encourage serious, professionally grounded inquiry into social values, the directions of policy, and the role and proper limits of state power. In the clamour of American politics, there is little danger that policy will be monopolised by an elite group, but considerable danger that debate on policy will be impoverished by the absence of those most knowledgeable about social and economic reality.A revised and expanded version of the first Dael L. Wolfle Lecture given on 6 October, 1987, at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle. Don K. Price was dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and is the author ofGovernment and Science (1954),The Scientific Estate (1965) andAmerica's Unwritten Constitution (1983). He has held senior posts in the United States Bureau of the Budget, the Defense Research and Development Board, and the Ford Foundation, and was an adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.     

Re-thinking Copyright Through the Copy in Russia

How one copy of a film or a single is made illegal, while its identical twin is treated as legitimate? By drawing from the material collected in Russia on the illegal copying and distribution of video and musical contents, this paper moves beyond the definition of media piracy in legal terms, and instead examines practices of copying, the properties of copies, and the motivations that drive their circulation, color laws and their continuous application. It approaches the copy not as an isolated, individual unit but part of an assemblage, and demonstrates the existence of a specific culture of circulation which brings together its diverse components as one ‘catchment’. In Russia, the legal and pirate media markets do not stand in opposition to one another but co-exist and even enable each other. Media goods have social value that extends beyond commercial, and which is strongly associated with the cultural reproduction of audiences who are cosmopolitan in character and partake in the transnational circuits of culture. Finally, the very definition of what is ‘legal’ in Russian is an outcome of the unstable process of authentication in which experts test, guess and create material trails of evidence to stabilize elusive digital substances. On the basis of these findings, the paper problematizes the social imaginary around the digital copy and with it, the widely circulating notion of ‘piracy’.     

The FarmBuiLD model (farm building landscape design): First definition of parametric tools

The paper presents a set of synthetic architectural parameters dealing with the morphological aspects of rural buildings. The definition of these parameters represents a fundamental step of the FarmBuiLD research model (farm building landscape design), proposed by the authors as a tool for the analysis of the architectural characteristics of both historical and contemporary rural buildings, as well as the meta-design of new construction and transformation of contemporary rural buildings. The FarmBuiLD's module of physiognomical characterization of rural buildings allows to define the analytical-design parameters through the following phases: a critical analysis of the international scientific literature, a preliminary identification of the essential physiognomical characteristics of rural buildings, and an in-depth study of validation and calibration focusing on specific study cases. This work presents the preliminary definition of the parameters and a discussion about their experimental application through illustrative examples. Given their numeric value and strictly instrumental, thematic and complementary nature, the proposed parameters do not have any geometric, formal or stylistic characterization, and thus can be considered as capable of leaving an appropriate level of freedom within the design of solutions aimed at meeting both contemporary and future functional and aesthetic needs.     

城市废墟遗产的价值与保护研究

城市废墟既是城市过往发出的遥远呼唤,承载民族伤痛、灿烂文明的文化象征,也是面向现实和未来,散发独特美学意义、怀旧情绪的公共空间.而现实情况中,历史废墟陷入了情感脱离、价值输出有限的困境,现代废墟遗址、空间仍在拆与建中徘徊.废墟需要现代科技、当代媒介、政策规划、多元化功能利用等保护手段的综合作用,才有机会呈现其文化、美学...     

Diagnostic investigations and statistical validation of EDXRF mapping of the burial monument of Pope Sixtus IV by Antonio Pollaiolo (1493) in the Vatican

It has become a common practice to include diagnostics and archaeometric studies during a masterpiece restoration. The advantages and limits of this approach are now topic of discussion in the community of researchers that is growing up quickly. The bronze burial monument of Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) by Antonio del Pollaiolo, now in the Treasure Museum in the Vatican was intended to be located at the center of a chapel, this explains its apparent asymmetry: lack of height and large base. The restoration of the burial monument started in May 2007, it was carried out by first fulfilling a series of non-invasive analyses using a transportable EDXRF to map the composition of the alloy and evaluate the diagnostic capabilities for deterioration processes of the bronze surface. As a consequence of the first non-invasive diagnostic campaign, a second campaign of micro invasive tests was planned and carried out. The samples were analysed with SEM-EDS and XRF techniques. In this article some of the results of the EDXRF tests will be shown together with the procedures set up to maximize the diagnostic information obtained and minimize the need of microsampling from the artefact. The results and the statistical analysis of data show that a straightforward planning of the measurements can give several, sometimes unexpected, results in the definition of the state of conservation of the monument and also from an archaeometric point of view. With a high amount of data, the use of statistical analysis is necessary, for example in our case, the analysis of the variance confirmed the hypothesis of the use of different alloys for the elements of the panels.     

集体记忆视角下移民村落共同体的形成过程

易地扶贫搬迁是中国扶贫的重要方式。因为地理空间的改变,扶贫移民面临生计资本、社会网络资本、社会文化资本的断裂,远距离扶贫移民尤其明显。移民新村建成后,村民为了更好地生活,主动寻找以往生活的痕迹,重建自己的舒适区,并在这一过程中逐渐形成对新村的认同。以甘肃D村为例,移民村充分发挥主体性,以集体记忆的传承和延续重构了新村社会关系网络、居住空间和仪式习俗,形成了共同的身份话语,达成了一致的生活方式与价值认同,促进了这一村落共同体的形成。     

Mechanical properties of adobe walls in a Roman Republican domus at Suasa

Adobe is a construction technique that uses raw earth mixed and moulded to form sun-dried blocks to realize a bearing wall. The recent discovery of adobe walls belonging to a Republican domus sited in Suasa (Ancona, Italy) was the starting point of the present work. The research was developed through an experimental approach, in order to characterize the mechanical behavior of this type of walls: firstly some adobe blocks similar to the original ones were reproduced by using the soil directly came from the archaeological site near the adobe walls and adding straw to reduce hygrometric shrinkage and coarse sand, taken from a local quarry, as a stabilizer, as Romans were used to do. Then, after a seasoning period of 4 months, four adobe walls were produced to be tested by compression and shear. From compression tests, maximum strength, first cracking compression stress, Young modulus and breaking manner were evaluated. As well, compression results show a possible two-storey structure of the earthen Republican domus. In fact, it appears that the stress from the two-storey load analysis is lower than the first cracking compression stress. From the shear tests, a proportional law seems to regulate the relation between the maximum value of the mean tangential tensions and the vertical compression the sample is subjected to. This could be the starting point for a future seismic analysis.     

文化旅游型特色小镇乡土景观价值及其整体保护策略探析--以云南大理沙溪古镇为例

文化旅游型特色小镇饱含丰富的乡土景观资源与深厚的历史文化内涵,对特色小镇乡土景观的保护有助于与之关联的自然生态保育、文化遗产保护以及社会、经济发展等多维价值的实现。在对乡土景观价值构成内容进行分析的基础上,选取文化旅游型特色小镇--沙溪古镇为研究对象,着重对沙溪古镇乡土景观价值及其对古镇旅游发展和特色小镇建设的重要意义展开分析,并对其保护策略进行了探讨。认为古镇乡土景观包含了自然生态、民居聚落等物质实体以及日常生活图景、民俗活动氛围等人文环境,并具有传统人居智慧体现、文化传承、社群关系塑造、生态保护以及产业发展等多元价值,同时认为对乡土景观的保护应从整体观的视角出发,实现其多元价值的呈现。     

(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles

Self-service bicycle systems are today being set up in a number of cities across the world. Seen as a means to promote a sustainable city and new forms of ecology, and valued for their ‘planet friendly’ character, these systems have become a hallmark for cities that want to become part of the so-called green culture. Drawing from the experience of the Vélib’ programme in Paris and adopting a pragmatist perspective, this paper analyses the controversies which developed as this transportation infrastructure was implemented, as well as the definitions of ‘ecology’ which were at the centre of the dispute. In doing so it shows the capacity of the private firm involved in the system, JCDecaux, to ‘hijack’ and integrate the ecological critique, its rather powerful capacity to persuade other actors, and the popularity that the project achieved through a hard-won process of justification. At the same time, this paper argues that the mobility turn played a performative role in the justification and the definition of this new transport project.     

Something new: value and change in finance*

ABSTRACT

Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, meta-commentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as meta-pragmatically begins to outline a useful theory of culture change within the world of investment banking.     

RESOCIALIZING FINANCE? OR DRESSING IT IN MUFTI?

Critical accounts of the financialization of the world economy decry the depersonalization and abstraction effected by finance in the service of extraction, expropriation and dispossession. Analysts and activists alike seek to re-socialize finance so that those whose interests it serves can be identified and so that new, socially embedded forms of exchange can emerge. They also seek to re-ground finance in a ‘real’, presumably material and social, fabric so that its excesses can be tamed and the sources of value made apparent. My essay questions these paired critiques and their supposed aims. It will argue that the continual attempt to reassert the social in economy points to a limit to the critical imagination, and that the critique of calculative rationality misses some of the other functions and practical effects of numbers besides commensuration and abstraction.     

Responses of American research universities to issues posed by the changing environment of higher education

Conclusions This study clearly reveals that the benefits ascribed to strategic planning typically are achieved through a variety of means. A formal process that seeks to plan in a comprehensive, linear fashion is likely to be too complicated, politically divisive, expensive and inflexible, and to ignore how decisions are made in a complex, highly decentralised university. While many approaches to planning are used, universities must ensure they provide periodically opportunities for university staff—freed from daily responsibilities—to consider strategic concerns. Accurate and relevant information must be available to all who make and carry out decisions. Planning should be viewed as a learning process rather than a document producing exercise. Extensive communication among university staff and faculty is needed to ensure informed debate and substantial acceptance of decisions—otherwise they are unlikely to be implemented. Perhaps most important is not the process employed but the decision-maker's breadth of perspective and sophistication. No process will overcome lack of competent leadership. The importance of daily decision-making in various councils and committees on issues such as cost containment and budgetary priorities is underestimated in the literature on planning.Critics have doubted whether universities' structures and processes permit them, or their leaders have the resolve, to confront the emerging issues. However, in many respects, the universities' decentralised, multiple decision-making practices may suit them well. They face the same challenging societal changes as other sectors of society. Their staff include some of the most capable individuals in the United States, and in the past they have been highly adaptable during periods of profound social change.Universities do not appear to be less aware of the need to adapt, nor more constrained in adapting to new conditions, than other sectors of society. In fact, university research and scholarship will be highly important in pointing the way for the whole of society to meet this era's challenges. If pessimistic predictions about current trends turn out to be accurate, universities no doubt will adapt at least as well as other kinds of institutions. The travails of business in this environment are daily news! There will be occasional casualties among the universities, as frequently occurs during major social transitions, but institutions that have grown in importance for over 1,000 years, will doubtless emerge from this period perhaps somewhat changed but still performing their historic social functions.     

Rankings as coordination games: the Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking

The Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking has been broadcast each year since 1999 between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. As a nationwide event, it receives cult status in the Netherlands. In this paper, it is argued that rankings are coordination games. To demonstrate this, statistical methods are applied, first to analyze the extent to which competition prevails between pop songs. While conventional charts collect pop song rankings on a commercial basis, the Top 2000 ranking is voted on once a year. Moreover, a very wide range of songs is allocated to 2000 positions. The ranking displays tremendous stability among the top five songs over the years and demonstrates the importance of superstardom. Moreover, a detailed statistical analysis provides evidence that there is hardly any competition among the most liked 100–150 songs. The empirical distribution of these songs follows a Pareto distribution, whereas the songs up to rank 1500 are exponentially distributed. These different distributions may be explained by two different voting strategies, namely voting for the individually most liked songs and voting to maximize the social value of the Top 2000 by taking account of the assumed preferences of other voters. In this manner, superstardom acts as a coordination device in a large-scale coordination game.