Beyond Provenance

For the last 180 years, scientists have been attempting to determine the 'provenance' (geological source) of the copper used in Bronze Age artefacts. However, despite advances in analytical technologies, the theoretical approach has remained virtually unchanged over this period, with the interpretative methodology only changing to accommodate the increasing capacity of computers. This book represents a concerted effort to think about the composition of Bronze Age metal as the product of human intentionality as well as of geology. It considers the trace element composition of the metal, the alloying elements, and the lead isotopic composition, showing how a combination of these aspects, along with archaeological context and typology, can reveal much more about the life history of such artefacts, expanding considerably upon the rather limited ambition of knowing where the ore was extracted.

The World Wide Web is now deeply intertwined with our lives, and has become a catalyst for a data deluge, making vast amounts of data available online, at a click of a button. With Web 2.0, users are no longer passive consumers, but active publishers and curators of data. Hence, from science to food manufacturing, from data journalism to personal well-being, from social media to art, there is a strong interest in provenance, a description of what influenced an artifact, a data set, a document, a blog, or any resource on the Web and beyond. Provenance is a crucial piece of information that can help a consumer make a judgment as to whether something can be trusted. Provenance is no longer seen as a curiosity in art circles, but it is regarded as pragmatically, ethically, and methodologically crucial for our day-to-day data manipulation and curation activities on the Web. Following the recent publication of the PROV standard for provenance on the Web, which the two authors actively help shape in the Provenance Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium, this Synthesis lecture is a hands-on introduction to PROV aimed at Web and linked data professionals. By means of recipes, illustrations, a website at www.provbook.org, and tools, it guides practitioners through a variety of issues related to provenance: how to generate provenance, publish it on the Web, make it discoverable, and how to utilize it. Equipped with this knowledge, practictioners will be in a position to develop novel applications that can bring open-ness, trust, and accountability. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / A Data Journalism Scenario / The PROV Ontology / Provenance Recipes / Validation, Compliance, Quality, Replay / Provenance Management / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

The study of provenance—the history of the creation and ownership of an artefact, work of art, or specimen—provides insights into the history of taste and collecting, illuminating the social, economic, and historic trends in which an object was created and collected. It is as much a history of people as it is of objects, and its study often reveals intricate networks of relationships, patterns of activity and motivations. This book promotes the study of the history of collecting and collections in all their variety through the lens of provenance, and explores the subject as a cross-disciplinary activity. Perhaps for the first time in a publication, it draws on expertise ranging from art history and anthropology, to natural history and law, looking at periods from antiquity through the 18th century and the Holocaust era to the present, and materials from Europe and the Americas to China and the Pacific. The issues raised are wide-ranging, touching on aspects of authenticity, cultural meaning and material transformation and economic and commercial drivers, as well as collector and object biography. The book fills a gap in the study of collecting and provenance, taking the subject holistically and from multiple standpoints, better to reflect the widening interest in provenance from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This book will be a service to the field, from established scholars and museum professionals to students of collecting history, cultural heritage, and museum studies.

"This volume of essays offers new arguments regarding the significance of the social biography of art and the transformative power of ownership. It realigns the traditional art-historical paradigm that focuses on the moment of an object's origin and instead considers the longue durée of ownership. Whereas the term provenance may call to mind little more than a list of owners or the legal questions raised by competing entitlement claims, the essays in this book demonstrate that a nuanced approach recuperates important, even dramatic, aspects of the history of art. The authors present a broad perspective on provenance, investigating examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and from ancient archaeology to conceptual art. They explore how stories of ownership are attached to objects, analyze important distinctions between provenance and provenience, and show how provenance can be monetized, politicized, suppressed, or otherwise instrumentalized."--Page 4 of cover.

Dominic McIver Lopes articulates and defends a 'buck passing theory of art', namely that a work of art is nothing but a work in one of the arts. Having traced philosophical interest in theories of art to a reaction to certain puzzle cases of avant-garde art, he argues that none of the theories that have dominated philosophy since the 1960s adequately copes with these works. Whereas these theories have reached a dialectical impasse wherein they reiterate, and cannot resolve, disagreement over the puzzle cases, the buck passing theory illuminates the radical provocations of avant-garde art. In addition, when supplemented by a systematic framework for crafting theories of the individual arts, the buck passing theory grounds our empirical inquiries into the arts as well as our practices of appreciation and art criticism. Lopes seeks to model the diverse strategies employed by humanists and social and behavioural scientists who study the different arts. He gives the specificity of each art form a central role in our appreciative endeavours, and yet he stresses the continuity of the arts with similar, non-art activities such as fashion design, sports and games, cuisine, nature appreciation, and non-literary writing.

The 20 chapters of The Geology of Washington and Beyond�an outgrowth of a geologic symposium�present the substantial advances in recent research on the geologic history of Washington State. The 32 contributors used new conceptual developments such as sequence stratigraphy, identification and matching of terranes, and neotechtonics, as well as breakthroughs in technology such as lidar mapping, paleomagnetism, and new methods of radiometric dating, to examine the fascinating geology of Washington State and beyond. Also included is geologic mapping in areas previously known only by reconnaissance. This book will influence resource management decisions, as well as disaster and land-use planning in the region. The introductory chapters make the book accessible for undergraduate courses in geology and to the general public.

The 7 revised full papers, 11 revised medium-length papers, 6 revised short, and 7 demo papers presented together with 10 poster/abstract papers describing late-breaking work were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Provenance has been recognized to be important in a wide range of areas including databases, workflows, knowledge representation and reasoning, and digital libraries. Thus, many disciplines have proposed a wide range of provenance models, techniques, and infrastructure for encoding and using provenance. The papers investigate many facets of data provenance, process documentation, data derivation, and data annotation.

In the wake of the so-called digital revolution numerous attempts have been made to rethink and redesign what scholarly publications can or should be. Beyond the Flow examines the technologies as well as narratives driving this unfolding transformation. However, facing challenges such as the serial crisis, knowledge burying or sudoku research the discourses and practices of scholarly publishing today are mainly shaped by confusion, heterogeneity and uncertainty. By critically interrogating the current state of digital publishing in academia the book asks for how a sustainable post-digital publishing ecology can be imagined.