The establishment of Camden in 1840 was a private venture of James and William Macarthur, sons of colonial patriarch John Macarthur, at the Nepean River crossing on the northern edge of the family’s pastoral property of Camden Park. The town’s site was enclosed on three sides by a sweeping bend in the Nepean River and has regularly flooded the…[Read more]

The Cowpastures was a vague area south of the Nepean River floodplain on the southern edge of Sydney’s Cumberland Plain. The Dharawal Indigenous people who managed the area were sidelined in 1796 by Europeans when Governor Hunter named the ‘Cow Pasture Plains’ in his sketch map. He had visited the area the previous year to witness the escaped…[Read more]

Circular Quay was one of the first points of contact between First Nations people and Europeans, and to this day, it is one of the busiest localities on Sydney Harbour. The quay’s history is rich as it is still a busy transport hub, government administration area and commercial zone. In more recent decades, it’s expanded to include thriving…[Read more]

Taxes and dying. Two certainties in life, and that was certainly the case in colonial Sydney. For more than 150 years Customs House has provided the means of collecting taxes on the movement of goods

Journalist Jeff McGill recently wrote an opinion piece in the Campbel/town Macarthur Advertiser with the heading ‘Nothing “yucky” about fibro cottages’. He continued that ‘Macarthur’s first big housing development was Campbelltown’s St Elmo Estates of the 1950s, guided by Neil McLean, a much-loved developer’.1 The McLean St Elmo land releases were…[Read more]

Early European settlers were the key actors in a place-making exercise that constructed an English-style landscape aesthetic on the colonial stage in the Cowpastures district of New South Wales. The aesthetic became part of the settler colonial project and the settlers’ aim of taking possession of territory involved the construction of a c…[Read more]

My CHASE-funded PhD in Classical Studies at the Open University, in which this survey played a crucial role, investigated Linked Ancient World Data usability. The survey took place during April-May 2018 and was aimed at anyone involved in Ancient World research, with any level of digital expertise. Questions related to participants’ experiences of…[Read more]

लक्ष्मी नगर के मेट्रो स्टेशन से उत्तर की ओर बढ़ते ही शकरपुर का ‘स्कूल ब्लॉक’ मोहल्ला आता है। कुछ समय पहले तक इसकी एक गली पर एक हैरतअंगेज साइन-बोर्ड लगा था, जिस पर बड़े अक्षरों में लिखा था – ‘जाति जरूरी है’। बोर्ड में जाति के फायदों का उल्लेख करते हुए इसे हर जगह के लिए आवश्यक बताया गया था। बोर्ड एकदम मुख्य सड़क पर था। आते-जात…[Read more]

The Gothic clings to Irish and Welsh coasts and finds voice through strange stories. Centuries of accumulated death and tragedy forms a dense web of sorrow with particularly prolific roots in the literature, songs, and stories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These traditions resonate within the longer history of lives and vessels lost…[Read more]

In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place‐making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi‘i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban pla…[Read more]

This paper examines the influence of urban fashion ideas disseminated worldwide from France and how they impacted the Romanian ideas of style and beauty, as well as the nature of the communication between Paris and the so-colled ”Little Paris”. My aim is to decode the interwar Romanian interpretation of the new woman notion and assess what typ…[Read more]

This article provides a short history of the methods and tools developed by the Pelagios initiative: a series of seven projects dedicated to linking digital historical resources based on the geographic places to which they relate and refer. The first section of the article situates the work within the wider field of semantic and geospatial…[Read more]

Reflections on artist Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The article contains a historical account and commentary on Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford’s unauthorized use of the JAFFE dataset.

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they…[Read more]

In this paper, I explore organisational space through the analogy of the hedgerow. This is a locale of difference that signifies the boundary it simultaneously enacts; a trickster landscape of ‘semiotic uncertainty’; a place of unease but also one of congregation and exchange. I report on my research into the liminal spaces of organisational…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

El presente artículo es un sucinto repaso del devenir histórico y tecnológico de PhiloBiblon, uno de los proyectos pioneros en las Humanidades Digitales aplicadas al estudio de las fuentes primarias de las literaturas hispánicas e ibéricas escritas durante la Edad Media y el Renacimiento. La historia del proyecto tiene como hilo conductor las dife…[Read more]

Review of Charleston Belles Abroad in Journal of American History

The historical view of Switzerland’s nature and landscape has been defined by artworks describing a ‘visual topography’ of the Alpine country long before the emergence of a broader touristic interest for Switzerland across Europe. Paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs depicting alpine landscapes, natural monuments, picturesque villa…[Read more]