Av. Duque d’Avila 28-30 LISBOA PORTUGAL Photographed by Ph.G. de MENDONCA (Wikidata Q98462938). 6 September 2020. This photograph was created by Philippe Gil de Mendonça to document the architecture of Portugal at the request of wikipedia.org and commons.wikimedia.org. The copyright and usage rights of the original (16MP) picture remain…[Read more]

Av. Duque d’Avila 26 LISBOA PORTUGAL Photographed by Ph.G. de MENDONCA (Wikidata Q98462943). 6 September 2020. This photograph was created by Philippe Gil de Mendonça to document the architecture of Portugal at the request of wikipedia.org and commons.wikimedia.org. The copyright and usage rights of the original (16MP) picture remain exclusively…[Read more]

In this paper, I interview Dr Helen Wickstead, director of Recycle Archaeology about the reuse of usually discarded archaeological materials as an alternative to disposal. I explain through recent pilot projects partnered with Recycle Archaeology, how archaeological materials can be used by students, researchers, artists and the public to create…[Read more]

This chapter analyses Global Byzantium by situating the medieval empire of New Rome in the history of statehood’s generalisation worldwide. Arguing that statehood remains the implicit mental furniture of History at a macro-civilizational scale, and so more or less at the micro too, the chapter proposes the dual concepts of hegemony and c…[Read more]

Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important, if…[Read more]

manual guide for the annotation of biographies

This paper proposes a novel source for – or at least influence on – the iconography of the Moon trump in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, which preserves the design from the Tarot de Marseille. In fact, the Moon template appears to date back to the earliest days of the Tarot. The proposed source or prototype is a Greco-Roman talismanic design aga…[Read more]

Syllabus for ISS 222D Introduction to Digital Humanities, a survey course that introduces students to the many debates and methods of digital humanities and adjacent fields. Particular focus is on visualization.

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

Reflections on 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.

The paper proposes that the Egyptian-style design on a 5-6th century CE magical amulet discovered at Nea Paphos in Cyprus (Inv. no. PAP/FR 44/2011) draws upon an apotropaic design against the Evil Eye known as the “All-Suffering Eye,” which dates back to the time of the early Roman Empire and is common on Byzantine “Holy Rider” medallions. [No…[Read more]

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]

This is a gut-reaction response to the recent article “The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts” by Melissa Terras, et al, published in Big Data and Society on April 6, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211006165. My main argument is that exploiting labor and appropriating cultural heritage are int…[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]

Review of The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000, by Timothy Power (American University in Cairo, 2012).

An extensive Digital Humanities bibliography with over 1,500 citations covering a variety of disciplines and topics.

This chapter examines the eleventh-century Arabic translation of Basil of Caesarea’s Homilies on the Hexaemeron by the translator and theologian ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl of Antioch. It begins by surveying other late antique and medieval translations of Basil’s Hexaemeron, then lists all manuscripts known to me which are reported to contain an Arabic…[Read more]