Spread or Sacrifice: Dilemma for Lighting Policies

ABSTRACT

Light sensitive objects will fade on display. Collection managers and curators face the dilemma whether to spread fading over several similar objects or sacrifice one. This paper describes an experiment in which participants were asked how they would want to pass on a collection of seventeenth century hand-coloured maps to coming generations. Results show that while colour changes are hardly visible, both public and professionals do not perceive them as damage and prefer to spread fading. Once fading becomes clearly visible in all maps, the preference shifts to sacrificing one map. The tipping point lies around five just noticeable changes. This information can be used when selecting objects for exhibition. The outcome also implies it would be prudent to assess the degree of fading of much exhibited objects and consider whether and when to choose for a sacrifice strategy.     

Turning a Service Learning Experience into a Model of Student Engagement: The Lighthouse Heritage Research Connections (LHRC) Project in Hong Kong

The digital shift has provided easy access to academic library users, and yet, the usage of archival collections continues to be low. At the same time, the need for innovation in library services for cultural heritage scholarship and its advancement is emerging. This paper outlines a library-led service-learning program that connects students with lighthouse artifacts, archival collections, scholars in global academia, and wider communities. Student engagement cases are provided to illustrate the way in which the librarian utilizes the Framework of Information Literacy for Higher Education by ACRL to work closely with students. These cases also demonstrate how students can contribute to knowledge creation and preservation efforts for a specific cultural heritage topic that is not static, but which keeps receiving new contributions or additions to the depository. Thus, this paper is an answer to the ACRL's call for pilot projects to be assessed and shared with the wider community of academic librarians and support staff. It also builds on emerging roles for academic libraries like engaged learning. Librarians must move beyond simply seeing themselves as partners. Instead, librarians should see themselves as prime facilitators that co-create and co-develop cultural heritage research and historical projects by connecting actors and resources more effectively than any single actor can do alone.     

基于主题图的非物质文化遗产数字资源整合实证分析

[目的/意义]非物质文化遗产资源具有重要的社会价值,将主题图技术应用于非物质文化遗产数字资源的整合中,能够更好地实现非物质文化遗产数字资源的传承与保护。[方法/过程]在分析非物质文化遗产数字资源的主题、关联关系和资源标引的基础上,构建非物质文化遗产数字资源主题图并实现其可视化。[结果/结论]研究结果显示,主题图技术的应用可以为非物质文化遗产数字资源提供基于语义的整合,并将主题之间的关联直观地展示给用户,为用户提供可视化导航。     

The metamorphosis of medical discourse and embedded cultural rationality: a content analysis of health reporting for neurasthenia and depressive disorder in China

Neurasthenia (shenjing shuairuo) and depressive disorder are medical issues that have given rise to disputes in China for more than 20 years. Since the 1980s, the once ubiquitous diagnosis of neurasthenia in China was rapidly substituted by depressive disorder in the clinical context. Globally, the metamorphosis from neurasthenia to depressive disorder heralded the triumph of scientific rationality, which identifies neurasthenia as a categorical fallacy. In China, however, neurasthenia retained social and cultural significance; thus, it has become a contestable discourse in relation to depressive disorder. By examining the health reporting of both discourses over a decade, this study explicated how neurasthenia and depressive disorder were represented in a popular health newspaper in China. The content analysis showed that neurasthenia is a more culturally and everyday embedded discourse closely associated with Chinese medicine and laymen’s discourse, while depressive disorder is more associated with Western medicine and the professional discourse. The differentiation of two sets of medical discourse evinces that despite the ostensibly prevailing scientific rationality in media health reporting, cultural rationality is deeply embedded in communicating mental health issues with the lay public. It further suggests the significance of investigating the social and cultural expression of mental illnesses in China.     

How U.S. and Chinese journalists think about plagiarism

A comparison of 1,096 professional journalists in China and the United States on attitudes toward attribution and plagiarism reveals Chinese journalists were more likely to see attribution as a practice to be embraced regardless of career longevity and culture, suggesting journalistic norms are more important than a collectivist orientation. Attribution was more likely to be embraced by those who see principles as more important than expediency, affirming research that plagiarism is hardly a monolithic concept. Overall, journalists in the two nations did not vary significantly in their attitudes toward plagiarism, despite vast differences in culture and politics as well as evidence that in some other fields China is more accepting of reusing material without attribution. The data show that among journalists, attitudes toward plagiarism are shared across national boundaries, reinforcing related research showing that a journalism culture exists and is shared at least in part across national boundaries.     

Spaces of emergent memory: Detroit’s 8 Mile wall and public memories of civil rights injustice

This article introduces emergent memory, a conceptual extension to rhetorics of public memory, to describe memory’s genesis in sites built without commemorative commitments. Examining Detroit’s “8 Mile Wall,” a site built to reinforce segregated housing, this project argues the rhetorical tenets of emergent memory present in this space. As a relic of segregated history, the wall symbolically recalls the city’s controversial past, but has recently been the subject of a local mural project to redefine the wall’s purpose. Some consider this a step toward reclamation, as it visually repositions the disturbing remnant. For others, the murals simply cannot overwrite troubling memories of the city’s discriminatory history. This essay uses emergent memory to describe how the wall’s complicated mnemonic legacy simultaneously harkens to a difficult history and how the mural additions use that same legacy to convey an optimistic future for Detroit and those marked by this urban space.     

Worn Grooves

Drawing from visual, material and written archival sources, this article critically explores some of the functions, uses and perceived values of recorded sound during the First World War and in its aftermath. An instrument of communication as well as commemoration, the gramophone helped bridge geographical (and, in some cases, cultural) distances between the home front and the rear, providing civilians with the fleeting illusion of presence, proximity, or even sentimental communion with the front. The article analyses (a) the affective and connective, but also propagandist, values of commercial wartime recordings as they circulated between the home and the front, (b) the popular notion of gramophones as regulatory instruments of civilisation, (c) the commemorative exploitations of recorded sound in the interwar period. The article focuses on the British experience, contrasting it with examples drawn from French and German experiences.     

文学翻译中文化因素的把握——杨宪益、戴乃迭所译《儒林外史》点评

文学翻译中对文化因素的把握是一个重要问题。本文从这一角度出发,对清朝吴敬梓所著《儒林外史》和杨宪益、戴乃迭夫妇的英译本进行比较,指出译文在文化因素的把握处理方面有几个值得再加斟酌之处,并予以分析说明,以期在文学翻译中文化因素能得到进一步的重视及更为妥善的处理。     

The ‘Leeds Lake District’: Water Supply,Rural Environment,and the Cultural Landscape in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the benefits of cultural readings of the environment by showing how the reservoirs of the Washburn Valley, built by the Leeds Corporation between 1869 and 1879 and vital sources of potable water for the urban population, altered the area’s cultural landscape. An examination of Leeds-based newspapers and locally published guidebooks will show how the reservoirs positively affected Romantic depictions of the area, whilst the use of the phrase ‘the Leeds Lake District’ fabricated a sense of civic pride between the town and its hinterland, an area positively affected by the implementation of urban engineering.