On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments, and academic malpractices in Italy – and how someone disagreed (Isis, Vol. 110, n. S1, pp. 15-17 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/707594)

This article examines the description of Persepolis, one of the capital cities of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550–330 BCE), by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725) in his illustrated travelogue Giro del mondo (1699–1700). Gemelli Careri’s extensive description of the site—some twenty pages of text accompanied by two plates en…[Read more]

The two books of Robert M. Pirsig have been milestones for Design Theory through the development of a Metaphysics of Quality. This article analyses the design history of his two books that have been in print for more than 40 years. The editions range from cheap mass-market paperbacks to gilded collectors’ hardcovers. The underlying challenge for a…[Read more]

Identifying trends is an important element of archaeology, but there is often a lack of regional and inter-regional analyses with regard to the available evidence. This paper attempts to shed light on one aspect of burial practice in Scotland by investigating geographical trends in Bronze Age burials that contain bronze artifacts.

The relationship between the ‘Two Brothers’ Nakhtankh and Khnumnakht has been heavily debated since the discovery of their mummies in 1907. Re-examining the coffin inscriptions of these two individuals reveals that Nakhtankh and Khnumnakht were likely uncle and nephew.

A brief technical re-examination of a paper by George Mann on the Qau skeletons in the Duckworth collection is undertaken. Taking into account the original data and technical aspects of skeletal sexing, it is shown that old data on skeletal sexing may not always be as unreliable as previously thought. Factors that may introduce errors into this…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the textual and archaeological evidence for imperial involvement in the Corinthia provides faint traces of what Jas Elsner has called “internal friction” in the manifestation of imperial and Corinthian authority in the region.

A short paper on legacy data, flow, and time in archaeology based on my experiences at Polis on Cyprus.

The articles are about noble ideas and thoughts evinced in Tamil Literature.

This article provides a response to a target article by Jäger (2019), in which an alternative method for the comparison of linguistic reconstruction systems is proposed that is not based on the edit distance.

This commentary takes advantage of the provenance established by Hoffman, et al.2018 to explore exclusionary symbol sets in Art, Astrology, and Myth within La Pasiega Gallery C in Spain. Using the One Godz paradigm plus the added parameter of U-TH dating this commentary ascribes meaning to two proximate rock art panels, one homo sapien and the…[Read more]

This essay topic models Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an act of computational deformance in order to propose that word clouds are poems. The Sonnets have never been topic modeled: while there are legitimate mathematical objections to doing so, yet there are good reasons to bring together a highly useful tool and a canonical text, both to learn what t…[Read more]

In this paper we offer an update on the study and imaging of the administrative documents from Pylos in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens from 2013 to 2015, directed by Dimitri Nakassis and Kevin Pluta as part of the full publication of the Pylos tablets in the Palace of Nestor series.

Efforts on language documentation have been increasing in the past. While the amount of digital data of the world’s languages is increasing, only a small amount of the data is sustainable, since data reuse is often exacerbated by idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data.…[Read more]

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2018. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2018, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

A review of: PORTELA, Manuel; SILVA, António Rito [orgs.] (2017). LdoD Archive / Arquivo LdoD / Archivo LdoD [a collaborative digital archive of the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa]. Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra.