The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an unprecedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand…[Read more]

A close reading of a video collaboration by two citizen journalists, one from Libya, the other from the US, as a form of audiovisual solidarity. This article draws in particular on concepts developed by Laura Marks and Hito Steyerl.

This article considers the use of semantic web technologies in the context of everyday historians. It deduces from theoretical considerations needs for the actual implementation of a digital edition. It explains some of the basic concepts of the semantic web more extensively than necessary for the digital humanities scholar already familiar with…[Read more]

Preprint, to be published in: Historische Editionen im digitalen Zeitalter. Les éditions historiques à l’ère numérique : Bestandesaufnahme und Ausblick. État des lieux et perspectives, hg. v. Pascale Sutter u. Sacha Zala, Basel (Schwabe) The essay discusses the consequence of digital methods in scholarly editing of historical sources. It come…[Read more]

A group editorial from the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

En este artículo, tras analizar el sistema de transcripción electrónico semipaleográfi- co del Hispanic Seminar of Medieval Studies (HSMS) de la Universidad de Madison, diseñado para un fin específico, la redacción de un diccionario del español medieval, se presenta el lenguaje XML y sus posibilidades para la codificación digital de texto…[Read more]

Household sacrifice is a common feature of the ancient Mediterranean. While offerings are made in temples, a home altar is a frequent sacrificial site. This raises an intriguing question for scholars of Judaism in antiquity: do Jews also sacrifice on household altars? While Judaism in antiquity is riotously diverse, it often looks very much like…[Read more]

A discussion of rabbinic meal practices.

Josephus attests several times to a Jewish aversion to the use of Gentile olive oil. In m. ‘Abod. Zar. 2:6, this practice is first advocated and then immediately reversed by Rabbi and his court. What is the rationale for this sudden leniency with regard to Gentile olive oil? In a well-known article entitled “Kosher Olive Oil in Antiquity,” Marti…[Read more]

In the tannaitic corpus, a novel innovation appears: sharing bread is understood to lead to sharing a bed. As such, the Tannaim problematise and marginalise commensal interactions between Jews and non-Jews. In several instances, commensality with non-Jews is equated with idolatry, the binary opposite of Jewishness in rabbinic literature. While…[Read more]

Justifications for foodways are too often ignored in the academic study of commensality. In seeking to understand how a particular group constructs the rules around the table – what, how, and with whom one will or will not eat – the rationales for these rules must be factored into any scholarly analysis. In this essay, I use the example of anc…[Read more]

Explores the connections between Jews, Romans, pork, and identity.

When Jackie Chan was introduced to Japanese audiences in the early 1980s, he was promoted as the answer to the void that popular martial arts star Bruce Lee had left upon his death in 1975. The mischievous ‘monkey’ to Lee’s more ferocious ‘dragon’, Chan’s films were aggressively marketed to an audience of male martial arts fans; yet this…[Read more]

Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

La primera edición de Libro de la caza de las aves (1869) fue encomendada a Lafuente Alcántara pero fue finalizada, con dificultades, por Gayangos. Más de un siglo después aparecen las primeras ediciones críticas. Aunque los estudios de Cummins (1986) y Montoto Delgado (1999) son de indudable valía, se han detectado errores tanto en su metod…[Read more]

This paper examines two documentary essays focusing on landmark architecture in the transnational Øresund region comprising Copenhagen and Malmö. I argue that the motif of construction and deconstruction is congruous to our understanding of the ways identities are negotiated vis-à-vis spatial experience. In the lms, the multiple trajectories of…[Read more]