Humanities

6542 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Regular Routes: Deep Mapping a Performative Counterpractice for the Daily Commute ¹

by Laura Bissell and David Overend

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 476-499; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030476 - 23 Sep 2015

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 6045

This article offers a textual “deep map” of a series of experimental commutes undertaken in the west of Scotland in 2014. Recent developments in the field of transport studies have reconceived travel time as a far richer cultural experience than in previously utilitarian [...] Read more.

This article offers a textual “deep map” of a series of experimental commutes undertaken in the west of Scotland in 2014. Recent developments in the field of transport studies have reconceived travel time as a far richer cultural experience than in previously utilitarian and economic approaches to the “problem” of commuting. Understanding their own commutes in these terms—as spaces of creativity, productivity and transformation—the authors trace the development of a performative “counterpractice” for their daily journeys between home and work. Deep mapping—as a form of “theory-informed story-telling”—is employed as a productive strategy to document this reimagination of ostensibly quotidian and functional travel. Importantly, this particular stage of the project is not presented as an end-point. Striving to develop an ongoing creative engagement with landscape, the authors continue this exploratory mobile research by connecting to other commuters’ journeys, and proposing a series of “strategies” for reimagining the daily commute; a list of prompts for future action within the routines and spaces of commuting. A range of alternative approaches to commuting are offered here to anyone who regularly travels to and from work to employ or develop as they wish, extending the mapping process to other routes and contexts. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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2558 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Glas Journal: Deep Mappings of a Harbour or the Charting of Fragments, Traces and Possibilities

by Silvia Loeffler

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 457-475; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030457 - 18 Sep 2015

Viewed by 7308

Abstract

With reference to a hybrid ethnographic project entitled Glas Journal (2014–2016), this article invites readers to reflect on the cultural mapping of spaces we intimately inhabit. Developed with the participation of local inhabitants of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Ireland, Glas Journal seeks to explore [...] Read more.

With reference to a hybrid ethnographic project entitled Glas Journal (2014–2016), this article invites readers to reflect on the cultural mapping of spaces we intimately inhabit. Developed with the participation of local inhabitants of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Ireland, Glas Journal seeks to explore the maritime environment as a liminal space, whereby the character of buildings and an area’s economic implications determine our relationship to space as much as our daily spatial rhythms and feelings of safety. Deep mapping provides the methodological blueprint for Glas Journal. In order to create a heteroglossic narrative of place and belonging, I will contextualise the project with references to seminal works in the visual arts, literature, film and geography that emotionally map spaces. Chronotopes of the threshold will be used to elaborate on spatial and cultural phenomena that occur when crossings from public to private and interior to exterior take place. Touching upon questions such as “What is a space of protection?”, “Who am I in it?”, and “Who is the Other?”, this article traces forms of liquid mapping that do not strive to conquer but rather to gain insight into the inner landscapes that are reflected in outer space. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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1286 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Long Street: A Map of Post-Apartheid Cape Town

by Giovanni Spissu

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 436-456; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030436 - 11 Sep 2015

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5271

Abstract

No map fully coincides with the territory it represents. If the map and territory do not coincide, what can the map capture of the territory? According to Bateson, the answer is its differences. Drawing from Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we can envision an ethnographic [...] Read more.

No map fully coincides with the territory it represents. If the map and territory do not coincide, what can the map capture of the territory? According to Bateson, the answer is its differences. Drawing from Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we can envision an ethnographic representation of the city through which we can represent the urban territory through the different ways its inhabitants perceive it. In this article, I describe the process that led me to build a map of post-apartheid Cape Town from Long Street. I took inspiration from Bateson’s book Naven and compared it with the District Six Museum map in Cape Town with the objective of representing post-apartheid Cape Town through its differences. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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3102 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Material and “Inner Life” in Music: Beethoven, Psychological Coherence, and Meaning

by Sara Eckerson

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 418-435; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030418 - 11 Sep 2015

Viewed by 8539

Abstract

Current studies on Adolph Bernhard Marx generally focus on Marx’s seminal texts in music theory and pedagogy, such as Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch theoretisch (1837–1847) and Marx’s theory of sonata form, but they infrequently explore the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions [...] Read more.

Current studies on Adolph Bernhard Marx generally focus on Marx’s seminal texts in music theory and pedagogy, such as Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch theoretisch (1837–1847) and Marx’s theory of sonata form, but they infrequently explore the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of Marx’s criticism. The present essay will analyze a series of statements Marx wrote that address the aesthetic principles one should employ in descriptions of musical meaning, including “spiritual guidelines” (die geistigen Lenkfäden) and psychological coherence (des psychologischen Zusammenhangs). We will investigate Hegel’s influence on Marx’s thought, in addition to other contemporary philosophical positions, in relation to the themes of musical content, form, and the creative process. The study will aim to reveal the function of “spiritual guidelines” and specifically psychological coherence in aesthetics as the basis of a fresh look into musical meaning and ideal content in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Op. 125. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue “Reading the beat”—Musical Aesthetics and Literature)

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9266 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Archaeological Excavation and Deep Mapping in Historic Rural Communities

by Carenza Lewis

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 393-417; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030393 - 10 Sep 2015

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 6053

Abstract

This paper reviews the results of more than a hundred small archaeological “test pit” excavations carried out in 2013 within four rural communities in eastern England. Each excavation used standardized protocols in a different location within the host village, with the finds dated [...] Read more.

This paper reviews the results of more than a hundred small archaeological “test pit” excavations carried out in 2013 within four rural communities in eastern England. Each excavation used standardized protocols in a different location within the host village, with the finds dated and mapped to create a series of maps spanning more than 3500 years, in order to advance understanding of the spatial development of settlements and landscapes over time. The excavations were all carried out by local volunteers working physically within their own communities, supported and advised by professional archaeologists, with most test pits sited in volunteers’ own gardens or those of their friends, family or neighbors. Site-by-site, the results provided glimpses of the use made by humans of each of the excavated sites spanning prehistory to the present day; while in aggregate the mapped data show how settlement and land-use developed and changed over time. Feedback from participants also demonstrates the diverse positive impacts the project had on individuals and communities. The results are presented and reviewed here in order to highlight the contribution archaeological test pit excavation can make to deep mapping, and the contribution that deep mapping can make to rural communities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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Open AccessArticle

The Question of “Solidarity” in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle

by Hamish Dalley

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 369-392; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030369 - 07 Sep 2015

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 8779

Abstract

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to [...] Read more.

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature. It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians. It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts, including those to which it is not usually applied. The analysis further reveals tensions between different texts’ appeals for recognition, and suggests that these tensions problematize the claim that solidarity will emerge from sympathetic engagement with trauma victims. As such, the paper makes three key arguments: first, that trauma offers a productive ground for comparing postcolonial fiction; second, that comparison uncovers problems for theorists attempting to “decolonize” trauma studies; and third, that trauma theory needs to be supplemented with systemic material analyses of particular contexts if it is not to obfuscate what makes postcolonial traumas distinct. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism)

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Open AccessArticle

“More Hands” Means “More Ideas”: Collaboration in the Humanities

by Lynne Siemens

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 353-368; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030353 - 31 Aug 2015

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 5505

Abstract

Like those in the Sciences and Social Sciences, humanities researchers are turning to collaborations to explore increasingly complex questions and implement new forms of methodologies. Granting agencies are supporting this trend with specific programs focused on highly collaborative research. While researchers and other [...] Read more.

Like those in the Sciences and Social Sciences, humanities researchers are turning to collaborations to explore increasingly complex questions and implement new forms of methodologies. Granting agencies are supporting this trend with specific programs focused on highly collaborative research. While researchers and other associated team members welcome these collaborations as a way to undertake projects that would not be otherwise possible, work needs to be done to prepare individuals for team research. This becomes especially important for those in the Humanities who have been trained in single author work patterns and rewarded for those. Given this, what does collaboration look like in Humanities research? This paper will explore the experience of a large scale Humanities collaboration to understand the nature of collaboration, benefits and challenges and conclude with best practices for individuals and teams considering collaborative research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Challenges of the Humanities, Past, Present, and Future - Volume 2)

396 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hair, Death, and Memory: The Making of an American Relic

by Abigail Heiniger

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 334-352; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030334 - 20 Aug 2015

Viewed by 5079

Abstract

This article traces the transformation of hairworks in America during the mid-nineteenth-century. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin transformed the meaning of hair and hairworks in the American cultural imaginary by endowing Little Evangeline St. Clare’s hair with sacred, moralizing power. Likewise, [...] Read more.

This article traces the transformation of hairworks in America during the mid-nineteenth-century. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin transformed the meaning of hair and hairworks in the American cultural imaginary by endowing Little Evangeline St. Clare’s hair with sacred, moralizing power. Likewise, after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s hair achieved nationwide, relic-like significance. The Abraham Lincoln Papers contains six hair requests; these letters demonstrate that the cultural meaning of Lincoln’s hair resembles the fictional power of Eva’s hair in Stowe’s novel. Analyzing this phenomena of relic-like hair modifies our understanding of the unprecedented sentimental reaction to Lincoln’s assassination and particularly the fascination with seeing and approaching the president’s body. Full article

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5502 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Deep Mapping and Screen Tourism: The Oxford of Harry Potter and Inspector Morse

by James Cateridge

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 320-333; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030320 - 19 Aug 2015

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 9305

Abstract

This article proposes that the experiences of screen tourists in Oxford help to create a theoretical “deep map” of the city which explores place through narrative. Building on the travel writing of William Least Heat-Moon and other recent work in the spatial humanities, [...] Read more.

This article proposes that the experiences of screen tourists in Oxford help to create a theoretical “deep map” of the city which explores place through narrative. Building on the travel writing of William Least Heat-Moon and other recent work in the spatial humanities, two case studies of major screen tourism drivers are considered and analyzed. The British television drama Inspector Morse (1987–2000) explores the ambiguity of Oxford intellectualism through its central character. Morse’s love of high culture, especially music, provides suggestive additional layers for multimedia mapping, which are realized online through user-adapted Google Maps and geolocated images posted on the Flickr service. Harry Potter fans may not be “pure” or independent screen tourists, but they provide a wealth of data on their interactions with filming locations via social media such as Instagram. This data provides emotional as well as factual evidence, and is accumulating into an ever richer and deeper digital map of human experience. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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Open AccessEditorial

Goal and Purposes of the Journal Humanities Open Access—An Introduction by the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Albrecht Classen

by Albrecht Classen

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 319; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030319 - 19 Aug 2015

Viewed by 2855

Abstract

Humanities Open Access is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that aims for the highest research standards.[...] Full article

6025 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mapping Deeply

by Denis Wood

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 304-318; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030304 - 06 Aug 2015

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 8649

Abstract

This is a description of an avant la lettre deep mapping project carried out by a geographer and a number of landscape architecture students in the early 1980s. Although humanists seem to take the “mapping” in deep mapping more metaphorically than cartographically, in [...] Read more.

This is a description of an avant la lettre deep mapping project carried out by a geographer and a number of landscape architecture students in the early 1980s. Although humanists seem to take the “mapping” in deep mapping more metaphorically than cartographically, in this neighborhood mapping project, the mapmaking was taken literally, with the goal of producing an atlas of the neighborhood. In this, the neighborhood was construed as a transformer, turning the stuff of the world (gas, water, electricity) into the stuff of individual lives (sidewalk graffiti, wind chimes, barking dogs), and vice versa. Maps in the central transformer section of the atlas were to have charted this process in action, as in one showing the route of an individual newspaper into the neighborhood, then through the neighborhood to a home, and finally, as trash, out of the neighborhood in a garbage truck; though few of these had been completed when the project concluded in 1986. Resurrected in 1998 in an episode on Ira Glass’ This American Life, the atlas was finally published, as Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, in 2010 (and an expanded edition in 2013). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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883 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Anticipating Deep Mapping: Tracing the Spatial Practice of Tim Robinson

by Jos Smith

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 283-303; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030283 - 21 Jul 2015

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 6460

Abstract

There has been little academic research published on the work of Tim Robinson despite an illustrious career, first as an artist of the London avant-garde, then as a map-maker in the west of Ireland, and finally as an author of place. In part, [...] Read more.

There has been little academic research published on the work of Tim Robinson despite an illustrious career, first as an artist of the London avant-garde, then as a map-maker in the west of Ireland, and finally as an author of place. In part, this dearth is due to the difficulty of approaching these three diverse strands collectively. However, recent developments in the field of deep mapping encourage us to look back at the continuity of Robinson’s achievements in full and offer a suitable framework for doing so. Socially engaged with living communities and a depth of historical knowledge about place, but at the same time keen to contribute artistically to the ongoing contemporary culture of place, the parameters of deep mapping are broad enough to encompass the range of Robinson’s whole practice and suggest unique ways to illuminate his very unusual career. But Robinson’s achievements also encourage a reflection on the historical context of deep mapping itself, as well as on the nature of its spatial practice (especially where space comes to connote a medium to be worked rather than an area/volume). With this in mind the following article both explores Robinson’s work through deep mapping and deep mapping through the work of this unusual artist. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)

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458 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Idea of a University: Rethinking the Malaysian Context

by Chang Da Wan, Morshidi Sirat and Dzulkifli Abdul Razak

Humanities 2015, 4(3), 266-282; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030266 - 13 Jul 2015

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 7428

Abstract

This article explores the idea of a university with a specific focus in the Malaysian context. We begin the article guided by these questions—“What is a university?” and “What are universities for?”—in examining the historical and conceptual development of universities. This is followed [...] Read more.

This article explores the idea of a university with a specific focus in the Malaysian context. We begin the article guided by these questions—“What is a university?” and “What are universities for?”—in examining the historical and conceptual development of universities. This is followed by asking a more specific question—“What are Malaysian universities for?”—in which we discussed the overarching roles of public and private universities in this developing country. Having examined the roles of public and private universities, and taken into context the complexity and challenges surrounding these important societal institutions, we discuss two “experimental” initiatives in Malaysia: the APEX University (Accelerated Program for Excellence) focusing on sustainability and the “humanversity”. On the one hand, these initiatives are intended to prepare and transform Malaysian universities to address not only the needs of society today, but critically, of tomorrow. On the other hand, they have implications and contributions to frame our thinking about the future ideas of a university not only in Malaysia, but regionally and globally. Full article

(This article belongs to the Collection Idea of the University)

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Humanities, Volume 4, Issue 3 (September 2015) – 13 articles , Pages 266-499

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