Traces Of The Past

An innovative multidisciplinary study of the relationship between visual perception and temporal meaning in ancient Greek literature and history writing

Have you ever wondered what left behind those prints and tracks on the seashore, or what made those marks or dug those holes in the dunes? Life Traces of the Georgia Coast is an up-close look at these traces of life and the animals and plants that made them. It tells about how the tracemakers lived and how they interacted with their environments. This is a book about ichnology (the study of such traces) and a wonderful way to learn about the behavior of organisms, living and long extinct. Life Traces presents an overview of the traces left by modern animals and plants in this biologically rich region; shows how life traces relate to the environments, natural history, and behaviors of their tracemakers; and applies that knowledge toward a better understanding of the fossilized traces that ancient life left in the geologic record. Augmented by illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically grounded book that will serve as source both for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast.

In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not. Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls "guided serendipity" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.

This collection consists of eight essays that examine the way narratives determine our understanding of old age and condition how the experience is lived. Contributors to this volume have based their analysis on the concept of »narrative identity« developed by Paul Ricoeur, built upon the idea that fiction makes life, and on his definition of »trace« as the mark of time. By investigating the traces of aging imprinted in a series of literary and filmic works they dismantle the narrative of old age as decline and foreclosure to assemble one of transformation and growth.

The world is full of traces of the past, ranging from things as different as monuments and factories to farms, eco-museums, landscapes, mountaineering and even woven-grass bridges. These traces must be protected and passed on to future generations. Communicational analysis shows that these traces have acquired the status of heritage by becoming communicative beings imbued with a new social life. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, granting this status was the prerogative of the state. New modes then emerged, increasingly involving social actors and the publicization of knowledge. Today, the heritage recognition of these traces also depends on interpretative schemes that circulate in society, notably through the media. Heritage Traces in the Making is aimed at anyone – researchers, professionals and students – who is interested in how heritage is created and how it evolves.

'The universe began shrinking,' wrote Elie Wiesel of his Holocaust experiences in Hungary, 'first we were supposed to leave our towns and concentrate in the larger cities. Then the towns shrank to the ghetto, and the ghetto to a house, the house to a room, the room to a cattle car...' Adopting an innovative multi-perspectival approach framed around a wide variety of material traces - from receipts to maps, name lists to photographs - Tim Cole tells stories of journeys into and out of Hungarian ghettos. These stories of the perpetrators who oversaw ghettoization and deportation, the bystanders who witnessed and aided these journeys, and the victims who undertook them reveal the spatio-temporal dimensions of the Holocaust. But they also point to the visibility of these events within the ordinary spaces of the city, the importance of an economic assault on Jews and the marked gendering of the Holocaust in Hungary.

This book presents a close look at the vestiges of twentieth-century medical work at five key sites in Africa: Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania. The authors aim to understand the afterlife of scientific institutions and practices and the "aftertime" of scientific modernity and its attendant visions of progress and transformation. Straightforward scholarly work is juxtaposed here with altogether more experimental approaches to fieldwork and analysis, including interview fragments; brief, reflective essays; and a rich photographic archive. The result is an unprecedented view of the lingering traces of medical science from Africa's past.

From Digital Traces to Algorithmic Projections describes individual digital fingerprints in interaction with the different algorithms they encounter throughout life. Centered on the human user, this formalism makes it possible to distinguish the voluntary projections of an individual and their systemic projections (suffered, metadata), both open (public) and closed. As the global algorithmic projection of an individual is now the focus of attention (Big Data, neuromarketing, targeted advertising, sentiment analysis, cybermonitoring, etc.) and is used to define new concepts, this resource discusses the ubiquity of place and the algorithmic consent of a user. Proposes a new approach Describes an individual's fingerprint Focuses on the human user Defines the new concepts