Take Animated Virtual Reality Tours of Ancient Rome at Its Architectural Peak (Circa 320 AD)

in Architecture, History | December 11th, 2018

Maybe you, too, were a Latin geek who loved sword and san­dal flicks from the gold­en age of the Hol­ly­wood epic? Quo Vadis, The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Robe, Demetrius and the Glad­i­a­tors, and, of course, Spar­ta­cus…. Nev­er mind all the heavy reli­gious pre­text, con­text, sub­text, or ham­mer over the head that suf­fused these films, or any pre­tense toward his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy. What thrilled me was see­ing ancient Rome come alive, bustling with togas and tunics, cen­tu­ri­ons and char­i­ots. The cen­ter of the ancient world for hun­dreds of years, the city, nat­u­ral­ly, retains only traces of what it once was—enormous mon­u­ments that might as well be tombs.

The incred­i­bly detailed 3D ani­ma­tions here don’t quite have the same rous­ing effect, grant­ed, as the “I am Spar­ta­cus!” scene. They don’t star Charl­ton Hes­ton, Sophia Loren, or Kirk Dou­glas. They appeal to dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ties, it’s true. But if you love the idea of vis­it­ing Rome dur­ing one of its peak peri­ods, you might find them as sat­is­fy­ing, in their way, as Peter Ustinov’s Nero speech­es.

Dat­ing not from the time of Mark Antony or even Jesus, the painstak­ing­ly-ren­dered tours of ancient Rome depict the city as it would have looked—sans humans and their activity—during its “archi­tec­tur­al peak,” as Realm of His­to­ry notes, under Con­stan­tine, “cir­ca 320 AD.”

The VR trail­er at the top from His­to­ry in 3D, devel­oped by Dani­la Logi­nov and Lasha Tskhon­dia, depicts, in Loginov’s words, “the Forums area, and also Pala­tine and Capi­toli­um hills.” The two addi­tion­al trail­ers for the project show the “baths of Tra­jan and Titus, the stat­ue of Colos­sus Solis, arch­es of Titus and Con­stan­tine, Ludus Mag­nus, the tem­ple of Divine Claudius. Our team spent some time and recre­at­ed this area along with all minor build­ings as a com­plex and added it to the mod­el which has been already done.” This means, he says, “we have now almost the entire cen­ter of ancient impe­r­i­al Rome already recre­at­ed!”

We glide gen­tly over the city with a low-flying-bird’s eye view, tak­ing in its real­is­tic sky­line, tree-lined streets, and gur­gling foun­tains. The lack of any human pres­ence makes the expe­ri­ence a lit­tle chilly, but if you’re moved by clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, it also presents a refresh­ing lack of distraction—an impos­si­ble request in a vis­it to mod­ern Rome. Anoth­er project, Rome Reborn, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here, takes a dif­fer­ent approach to the same impe­r­i­al city of 320 AD. The trail­ers for their VR app don’t pro­vide the seam­less flight expe­ri­ence, but they do con­tain equal­ly epic music. (They also have a few peo­ple in them, block­i­ly-ren­dered gawk­ing tourists rather than ancient Romans.)

Instead, these clips give us fas­ci­nat­ing glimpses of the inte­ri­ors of such splen­did struc­tures as the Basil­i­ca of Maxentius—tiled floors, domed ceil­ings, columned walls—from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. We also get to fly above the city, drone-style, or hot air bal­loon-style, as it were. In the clip below, we cruise over Rome in that vehi­cle, with ****************@***il.com”>Bernard Frisch­er, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, serv­ing as the app’s “vir­tu­al archae­ol­o­gist” in an audio tour.

“The ambi­tious under­tak­ing,” of the Rome Reborn app, writes Meilan Sol­ly at Smith­son­ian, “painstak­ing­ly built by a team of 50 aca­d­e­mics and com­put­er experts over a 22-year peri­od, recre­ates 7,000 build­ings and mon­u­ments scat­tered across a 5.5 square mile stretch of the famed Ital­ian city.” The three mod­ules of the Rome Reborn app demoed here are all avail­able at their web­site. Geeks—and his­to­ri­ans of ancient Roman archi­tec­ture and city planning—rejoice.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Huge Scale Mod­el Show­ing Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

In 1964, Isaac Asimov Predicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Driving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

in History, Sci Fi, Technology | December 6th, 2018

Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Isaac Asi­mov’s read­ers have long found some­thing prophet­ic in his work, but where did Asi­mov him­self look when he want­ed to catch a glimpse of the future? In 1964 he found one at the New York World’s Fair, the vast exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cat­ed to “Man’s Achieve­ment on a Shrink­ing Globe in an Expand­ing Uni­verse” that his­to­ry now remem­bers as the most elab­o­rate expres­sion of the indus­tri­al and tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mism of Space Age Amer­i­ca. Despite the fan­ci­ful nature of some of the prod­ucts on dis­play, vis­i­tors first saw things there — com­put­ers, for instance — that would become essen­tial in a mat­ter of decades.

“What is to come, through the fair’s eyes at least, is won­der­ful,” Asi­mov writes in a piece on his expe­ri­ence at the fair for the New York Times. But it all makes him won­der: “What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” His spec­u­la­tions begin with the notion that “men will con­tin­ue to with­draw from nature in order to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that will suit them bet­ter,” which they cer­tain­ly have, though not so much through the use of “elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els” that will make “ceil­ings and walls will glow soft­ly, and in a vari­ety of col­ors that will change at the touch of a push but­ton.” Still, all the oth­er screens near-con­stant­ly in use seem to pro­vide all the glow we need for the moment.

“Gad­getry will con­tin­ue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs,” Asi­mov pre­dicts, and so it has, though our kitchens have yet to evolve to the point of prepar­ing “ ‘automeals,’ heat­ing water and con­vert­ing it to cof­fee; toast­ing bread; fry­ing, poach­ing or scram­bling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on.” He hits clos­er to the mark when declar­ing that “robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.” He notes that IBM’s exhib­it at the World’s Fair had noth­ing about robots to show, but plen­ty about com­put­ers, “which are shown in all their amaz­ing com­plex­i­ty, notably in the task of trans­lat­ing Russ­ian into Eng­lish. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such com­put­ers, much minia­tur­ized, that will serve as the ‘brains’ of robots.”

“The appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords,” Asi­mov writes, and in the case of our all-impor­tant mobile phones, that has turned out to be at least half-true. But we still lack the “long-lived bat­ter­ies run­ning on radioiso­topes” pro­duced by “fis­sion-pow­er plants which, by 2014, will be sup­ply­ing well over half the pow­er needs of human­i­ty.” The real decade of the 2010s turned out to be more attached to the old ways, not least by cords and cables, than Asi­mov imag­ined. Even the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca has­n’t quite mas­tered the art of design­ing high­ways so that “long bus­es move on spe­cial cen­tral lanes” along them, let alone forms of ground trav­el that “take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”

But one advance in trans­porta­tion Asi­mov describes will sound famil­iar to those of us liv­ing in the 2010s: “Much effort will be put into the design­ing of vehi­cles with ‘Robot-brains,’ vehi­cles that can be set for par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tions and that will then pro­ceed there with­out inter­fer­ence by the slow reflex­es of a human dri­ver.” Indeed, we hear about few report­ed­ly immi­nent tech­nolo­gies these days as much as we hear about self-dri­ving cars and their poten­tial to get us where we’re going while we do oth­er things, such as engage in com­mu­ni­ca­tions that “will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the per­son you tele­phone,” on a screen used “not only to see the peo­ple you call but also for study­ing doc­u­ments and pho­tographs and read­ing pas­sages from books.”

Con­ver­sa­tions with the moon colonies, Asi­mov need­less­ly warns us, “will be a tri­fle uncom­fort­able” because of the 2.5‑second delay. But imme­di­ate­ly there­after comes the much more real­is­tic pre­dic­tion that “as for tele­vi­sion, wall screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set.” Still, “all is not rosy” in the world of 2014, whose pop­u­la­tion will have swelled to 6,500,000,000 — or 7,298,453,033, as it hap­pened. This has many impli­ca­tions for devel­op­ment, hous­ing, and even agri­cul­ture, though the “mock-turkey” and “pseu­dosteak” eat­en today has more to do with lifestyle than neces­si­ty. (“It won’t be bad at all,” Asi­mov adds, “if you can dig up those pre­mi­um prices.”)

Final­ly, and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, “the world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done bet­ter by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will there­fore have become large­ly a race of machine ten­ders.” Asi­mov fore­sees the need for a change in edu­ca­tion to accom­mo­date that, one hint­ed at even in Gen­er­al Elec­tric’s exhib­it in 1964, which “con­sists of a school of the future in which such present real­i­ties as closed-cir­cuit TV and pro­grammed tapes aid the teach­ing process.” His envi­sioned high-school cur­ricu­lum would have stu­dents mas­ter “the fun­da­men­tals of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy” and get them “trained to per­fec­tion in the use of the com­put­er lan­guage.”

But even with all these devel­op­ments, “mankind will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom, a dis­ease spread­ing more wide­ly each year and grow­ing in inten­si­ty.” The “seri­ous men­tal, emo­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences” of that will make psy­chi­a­try an impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty, and “the lucky few who can be involved in cre­ative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.” Though Asi­mov may have been sur­prised by what we’ve come up with in the quar­ter-cen­tu­ry since his death, as well as what we haven’t come up with, he would sure­ly have under­stood the sorts of anx­i­eties that now beset us in the future-turned-present in which we live. But even giv­en all the ways in which his pre­dic­tions in 1964 have proven more or less cor­rect, he did miss one big thing: there was no World’s Fair in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States: A Short, Scathing Essay from 1980

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By Decem­ber 31, 2100

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Anatomy of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Painting by Jackson Pollock (or Any Other Artist)

in Art, Chemistry, History, Science, Technology | December 3rd, 2018

In the old days, deter­min­ing an art forgery was most­ly a mat­ter of nar­ra­tive deduc­tion, a la Sher­lock Holmes.

Thi­a­go Piwowar­czyk and Jef­frey Tay­lor, founders of New York Art Foren­sics, employ such tech­niques to estab­lish prove­nance, trac­ing the chain of own­er­ship of any giv­en work back to its orig­i­nal sale by research­ing cat­a­logues, title trans­fers, and cor­re­spon­dence.

But they also bring a num­ber of high tech tools to the table, to fur­ther prove—or in the case of the alleged Jack­son Pol­lock drip paint­ing above, disprove—a work’s authen­tic­i­ty.

In the WIRED video above, these experts, whose pedi­gree includes degrees in Chem­istry, Foren­sic Sci­ence, and Com­par­a­tive His­to­ry, a Visu­al Arts Man­age­ment text­book, and two Frick Col­lec­tion Fel­low­ships, break the sleuthing process down to five crit­i­cal steps:

1. Estab­lish prove­nance

Obso­lete tech­nol­o­gy has a place in the process too, in the form of a high­ly unre­li­able fax, alleged­ly sent in 1997. It pur­ports to be a pho­to­copy of a type­writ­ten let­ter from 1970, writ­ten by a gallery own­er who talked one of the artist’s for­mer girl­friends into part­ing with a num­ber of works after his death.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the painting’s cur­rent own­er, Piwowar­czyk and Tay­lor could find no proof that the gallery or its own­er ever exist­ed. The let­ter also botch­es Pollock’s death date and odd­ly, there’s a blank where the sender’s num­ber would nor­mal­ly be.

Due dili­gence reveals noth­ing resem­bling this paint­ing in the cat­a­logue raison­né of Pollock’s work.

2. Close up visu­al analy­sis

This can be accom­plished with tools as sim­ple as the flash­light and plas­tic caliper Tay­lor uses to exam­ine the sta­ple holes found at reg­u­lar inter­vals along the unsigned can­vas’ edges. In the 1940s, artists start­ed grav­i­tat­ing toward sta­ples over tacks as a method for secur­ing their can­vas­es to stretch­er bars, but would Pol­lock have done so? Like­ly not, to hear him tell it:

I hard­ly ever stretch my can­vas before paint­ing. I pre­fer to tack the unstretched can­vas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resis­tance of a hard sur­face.

Piwowar­czyk and Tay­lor draw on their oth­er sens­es, too, when per­form­ing this in-depth visu­al inspec­tion. A deep sniff reveals that teabags were used to dis­col­or the can­vas, in hope of mak­ing it appear old­er than it is.

3. Pho­tog­ra­phy with a mul­ti­spec­tral imag­ing cam­era 

This camera’s abil­i­ty to see the Ultra-Vio­let spec­trum allows our foren­sic experts to spot restora­tions, under­draw­ing, and pen­ti­men­ti. Here, the cam­era revealed an under­ly­ing paint­ing whose geo­met­ric lay­out is unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of Pol­lock, as well as a sus­pi­cious­ly ama­teur­ish patch job on the back of the can­vas, anoth­er attempt to make the paint­ing appear old­er than it is.

4. Exam­i­na­tion with an X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­ter

It looks like a cool Star Wars prop, and allows the exam­in­ers to iden­ti­fy ele­ments in the pig­ment. Here, our “Pol­lock” gets a pass. There’s tita­ni­um (as in Tita­ni­um White) in evi­dence, but that’s per­mis­si­ble for any­thing paint­ed from the 30s onward.

5. Mol­e­c­u­lar Imag­ing and Analy­sis by Raman Spec­troscopy

The forg­er might have got­ten away with it if it weren’t for those med­dling kids and their Raman Spec­tro­scope! The minus­cule sam­ples of paint Piwowar­czyk har­vests from the can­vas reveal all sorts of organ­ic debris that have no place in a Pol­lock, such as dry­wall dust and an acrylic that didn’t come into use ‘til the 1960s.

In con­clu­sion, exer­cise cau­tion and con­sult the experts before pur­chas­ing a high val­ue drip paint­ing this hol­i­day sea­son! Accord­ing to Piwowar­czyk, the fakes—over 100 and pre­sum­ably still counting—outstrip the num­ber of drip paint­ings Pol­lock cre­at­ed through­out his life­time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edi­tion of Galileo’s Sci­en­tif­ic Work, and Almost Pulled it Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC from Decem­ber 6 — 20 for the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta, and the next month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Peter Jackson Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

in Education, Film, History, K-12 | November 29th, 2018

There are very few work­ing direc­tors today who can do what Peter Jack­son does so well—create extra­or­di­nary spec­ta­cles on the grand­est of scales while also stay­ing tight­ly focused on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and emo­tion­al depth. He’s made mis­steps. His Hob­bit tril­o­gy felt bloat­ed, busy and unnec­es­sary, but one rea­son it so dis­ap­point­ed was because he’d already shown him­self a mas­ter of fan­ta­sy film­mak­ing with what many con­sid­ered the unfilm­ma­ble Lord of the Rings.

Of course non-Tolkien-relat­ed Jack­son films like Heav­en­ly Crea­tures also show­case these strengths, on a small­er scale: the abil­i­ty to retain the human dimen­sion amidst cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cles and inhu­man dark­ness (a qual­i­ty he mined explic­it­ly in his years as a hor­ror direc­tor). All of these sen­si­bil­i­ties, includ­ing a pro­nounced streak of dark humor and tal­ent for manip­u­lat­ing his audi­ences, make him the ide­al direc­tor for a doc­u­men­tary on World War I.

It’s a con­flict that makes lit­tle his­tor­i­cal sense to most of us, that unfold­ed on a scale few of us can imag­ine, with few iden­ti­fi­able heroes and vil­lains and a com­pli­cat­ed geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion that can feel out of our grasp.

Many doc­u­men­taries on the war are infor­ma­tive but, frankly, quite dull. In striv­ing for objec­tiv­i­ty, they lose sight of human­i­ty. Rather than adopt the voice of god and news­reel look that char­ac­ter­izes the usu­al fare, Jack­son has tak­en an active role in shap­ing the nar­ra­tive for us with cut­ting-edge block­buster cin­e­mat­ic tech­niques. He gives us char­ac­ters to care about in show­ing the hor­ror of trench war­fare, the con­fu­sion and cama­raderie of war. Though he uses orig­i­nal footage, it is dig­i­tal­ly enhanced and col­orized, screened in 3D, with record­ings of remem­brances from the sol­diers them­selves dra­mat­i­cal­ly over­laid to cre­ate the sense that the fig­ures we see onscreen are speak­ing to us.

The result, as Guy Lodge writes at Vari­ety, “is a tech­ni­cal daz­zler with a sur­pris­ing­ly humane streak…. So daz­zling­ly trans­for­ma­tive is the restora­tion of this footage that it may as well be the prod­uct of a movie shoot.” Indeed, once the cred­its roll, view­ers see the same “ver­i­ta­ble army of mag­ic-work­ing tech­ni­cians’ names” as they would on any big-bud­get action movie. Jack­son has, in effect, pro­duced “the world’s most state-of-the-art edu­ca­tion­al film,” apply­ing all the emo­tion­al levers and pul­leys of fea­ture film­mak­ing to a his­tor­i­cal archive.

Like most of us, stu­dents have trou­ble under­stand­ing the scale of the war and con­nect­ing with the lives of peo­ple so indis­tinct­ly pho­tographed and far away in time. Jack­son makes sure that they can do both, and his film will be sent to every high school in the U.K. Those schools will not, of course, be able to repro­duce the 3D effects. Yet even these, though they sound “gim­micky on the face of it,” writes Lodge, prove “to have an expe­ri­en­tial pur­pose, con­vey­ing the jud­der­ing move­ment and chaos of a con­flict many of us have large­ly viewed through cal­ci­fied still images.”

In the inter­views and behind the scenes videos here, we learn how Jack­son and his team solved the film speed prob­lem to make the old reels look nat­ur­al, how they cre­at­ed a col­or palette and removed blur­ri­ness and blem­ish­es. Jack­son also talks about his own per­son­al stake in the project, imag­in­ing what his grand­fa­ther endured in the Great War. This con­nec­tion seems to have spurred him all the more in the effort.

“To memo­ri­al­ize these sol­diers a hun­dred years lat­er,” he says, “is to try to bring some of their human­i­ty back into the world again, to stop them being a black and white cliché.” In cre­at­ing this mov­ing memo­r­i­al, Jack­son goes far beyond the man­date of an edu­ca­tion­al film. He has used all the tech­niques at his dis­pos­al to make good on the promise in Robert Lau­rence Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fall­en,” from which the doc­u­men­tary takes its title:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years con­demn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morn­ing
We will remem­ber them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

The Great War: Video Series Will Doc­u­ment How WWI Unfold­ed, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Inca Used Intricately-Knotted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their Histories, Send Messages & Keep Records

in Harvard, History | November 28th, 2018

Those of us who learned to write in a (most­ly) pho­net­ic lan­guage learned to take it for grant­ed that writ­ing should cor­re­spond (rough­ly) to sound. Then we learned of the pic­tographs, ideo­graphs, and logograms of the Chi­nese alpha­bet, or of Ancient Egypt­ian or Mayan, or of oth­er non-phone­mic orthogra­phies, and we were forced to revise ear­li­er assump­tions. Those who pur­sue the study of sym­bol­ic sys­tems even fur­ther will even­tu­al­ly come to meet khipu, the Incan sys­tem of record-keep­ing that uses intri­cate­ly knot­ted rope.

Khipu, long thought an aba­cus-like means of book­keep­ing, has recent­ly been acknowl­edged as much more than that, coun­ter­ing a schol­ar­ly view Daniel Cossins sum­ma­rizes at New Sci­en­tist as the belief that the Incas, despite their tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal “sophis­ti­ca­tion… nev­er learned to write.” This Euro­pean logo­cen­trism (in the Der­ridean sense), per­sist­ed for cen­turies despite some evi­dence to the con­trary four hun­dred years ago.

For exam­ple, the poet Gar­cila­so de la Vega, son of an Incan princess and Span­ish con­quis­ta­dor, wrote in 1609 that the Incas “record­ed on knots every­thing that could be count­ed, even men­tion­ing bat­tles and fights, all the embassies that had come to vis­it the Inca, and all the speech­es and argu­ments they had uttered.” There may be some hyper­bole here. In any case, the point “was moot,” notes Cossins, “because no one could read any of them.”

Like most­ly illit­er­ate cul­tures in the West and East that relied on scribes for record-keep­ing, Incan civ­i­liza­tion relied on khipumayuq, “or the keep­ers of the khi­pus, a spe­cial­ly trained caste who could tie and read the cords.” As explor­er Ale­jan­dro Chu and Patri­cia Lan­da, Con­ser­va­tor of the Inc­ahuasi Arche­o­log­i­cal Project, explain in the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic video at the top, these spe­cial­ists died, or were killed off, before they could pass their knowl­edge to the next gen­er­a­tions.

But the lin­guis­tic code, it seems, may have been cracked—by an under­grad­u­ate fresh­man eco­nom­ics major at Har­vard named Man­ny Medra­no. As Atlas Obscu­ra report­ed last year, Medra­no, work­ing under his pro­fes­sor of Pre-Columbian stud­ies, Gary Urton, spent his spring break match­ing a set of six khipu against a colo­nial-era Span­ish cen­sus doc­u­ment. He was able to con­firm what schol­ars had long assumed, that khipu kept track of cen­sus and oth­er admin­is­tra­tive data.

More­over, though, Medra­no “noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to cor­re­spond to the social sta­tus of the 132 peo­ple record­ed in the cen­sus doc­u­ment. The col­ors of the strings also appeared to be relat­ed to the people’s first names.” (Now a senior, Medrano’s find­ings have been pub­lished in the jour­nal Eth­no­his­to­ry; he is first author on the paper, “indi­cat­ing that he con­tributed the bulk of the research”).

This research shows how khipu can tell sto­ries as well as record data sets. Medra­no built upon decades of work done by Urton and oth­er schol­ars, which Cossins sum­ma­rizes in more detail. Oth­er ethno­g­ra­phers like St. Andrews’ Sabine Hyland have had sim­i­lar epipha­nies. Hyland chanced upon a woman in Lima who point­ed her to khi­pus in the vil­lage of San Juan de Col­la­ta. The vil­lagers “believe them to be nar­ra­tive epis­tles,” writes Cossins, “cre­at­ed by local chiefs dur­ing a rebel­lion against the Span­ish in the late 18th cen­tu­ry.”

After care­ful analy­sis, Hyland found that the khi­pus’ pen­dant cords “came in 95 dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of colour, fibre type and direc­tion of ply. That is with­in the range of sym­bols typ­i­cal­ly found in syl­lab­ic writ­ing sys­tems.” She has since hypoth­e­sized that khipu “con­tain a com­bi­na­tion of pho­net­ic sym­bols and ideo­graph­ic ones, where a sym­bol rep­re­sents a whole word.”

Hyland grants it’s pos­si­ble that lat­er khi­pus made after con­tact with the Span­ish may have absorbed an alpha­bet from Span­ish writ­ing. Nev­er­the­less, these find­ings should make us won­der what oth­er arti­facts from around the world pre­serve a lan­guage West­ern schol­ars have nev­er learned how to read.

Attempts to deci­pher khi­pus use all sorts of com­par­a­tive meth­ods, from com­par­ing them with each oth­er to com­par­ing them with con­tem­po­rary Span­ish doc­u­ments. But one inno­v­a­tive method at MIT began by com­par­ing Incan khipu with stu­dent attempts to cre­ate their own rope lan­guage, in a 2007 course led by the “Khipu Research Group,” a col­lec­tion of schol­ars, includ­ing Urton, from arche­ol­o­gy, elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, and com­put­er sci­ence.

“To gain insight into this ques­tion” of how the code might work, the syl­labus notes, “this class will explore how you would record lan­guage with knots in rope.” Maybe you’d rather skip the guess­work and learn how to make a khipu the way the Inca may have done? If so, see the series of six videos above by Har­vard Ph.D. stu­dent in arche­ol­o­gy, Jon Clin­daniel. And to learn as much about khipu as you might ever hope to know, check out the Khipu Data­base Project at Har­vard, whose goal is to col­lect “all known infor­ma­tion about khipu into one cen­tral­ized repos­i­to­ry.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Machu Pic­chu, One of the New 7 Won­ders of the World

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Trigonom­e­try Dis­cov­ered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Baby­lon­ian Tablet

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

In 17th-Century Japan, Creaking Floors Functioned as Security Systems That Warned Palaces & Temples of Approaching Intruders and Assassins

in Architecture, History | November 26th, 2018

Offer a cut­ting-edge secu­ri­ty sys­tem, and you’ll suf­fer no short­age of cus­tomers who want it installed. But before our age of con­cealed cam­eras, motion sen­sors, reti­nal scan­ners, and all the oth­er advanced and often unset­tling tech­nolo­gies known only to indus­try insid­ers, how did own­ers of large, expen­sive, and even roy­al­ty-hous­ing prop­er­ties buy peace of mind? We find one par­tic­u­lar­ly inge­nious answer by look­ing back about 400 years ago, to the wood­en cas­tles and tem­ples of 17th-cen­tu­ry Japan.

“For cen­turies, Japan has tak­en pride in the tal­ents of its crafts­men, car­pen­ters and wood­work­ers includ­ed,” writes Sora News 24’s Casey Baseel. “Because of that, you might be sur­prised to find that some Japan­ese cas­tles have extreme­ly creaky wood­en floors that screech and groan with each step. How could such slip­shod con­struc­tion have been con­sid­ered accept­able for some of the most pow­er­ful fig­ures in Japan­ese his­to­ry? The answer is that the sounds weren’t just tol­er­at­ed, but desired, as the noise-pro­duc­ing floors func­tioned as Japan’s ear­li­est auto­mat­ed intrud­er alarm.”

In these spe­cial­ly engi­neered floors, “planks of wood are placed atop a frame­work of sup­port­ing beams, secure­ly enough that they won’t dis­lodge, but still loose­ly enough that there’s a lit­tle bit of play when they’re stepped on.” And when they are stepped on, “their clamps rub against nails attached to the beams, cre­at­ing a shrill chirp­ing noise,” ren­der­ing stealthy move­ment near­ly impos­si­ble and thus mak­ing for an effec­tive “coun­ter­mea­sure against spies, thieves, and assas­sins.”

Accord­ing to Zen-Garden.org, you can still find — and walk on — four such uguisub­ari, or “nightin­gale floors,” in Kyoto: at Daikaku-ji tem­ple, Chio-in tem­ple, Toji-in tem­ple, and Nino­mu­ra Palace.

If you can’t make it out to Kyoto any time soon, you can have a look and a lis­ten to a cou­ple of those nightin­gale floors in the short clips above. Then you’ll under­stand just how dif­fi­cult it would have been to cross one with­out alert­ing any­one to your pres­ence. This sort of thing sends our imag­i­na­tions straight to visions of high­ly trained nin­jas skill­ful­ly out­wit­ting palace guards, but in their day these delib­er­ate­ly squeaky floors floors also car­ried more pleas­ant asso­ci­a­tions than that of immi­nent assas­si­na­tion. As this poem on Zen-Garden.org’s uguisub­ari page says says:

 

鳥を聞く

歓迎すべき音

鴬張りを渡る

 

A wel­come sound

To hear the birds sing

across the nightin­gale floor

via @12pt9/Sora News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Omoshi­roi Blocks: Japan­ese Memo Pads Reveal Intri­cate Build­ings As The Pages Get Used

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Japan’s Inflat­able Con­cert Hall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

These Four Manuscripts Contain All of the Literature Written in Old English–and Beyond That, There’s Nothing More

in English Language, History, Literature | November 21st, 2018

Book his­to­ri­ans and rare man­u­script librar­i­ans do not have the most glam­orous jobs by the usu­al stan­dards. They deal with weath­ered, tat­tered, frag­men­tary scraps of text in archa­ic lan­guages and let­ter­ing. It’s work unlike­ly to receive the Hol­ly­wood (or Net­flix) treat­ment unless wiz­ards, witch­es, or occult detec­tives are involved. But the rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty of these pro­fes­sions does not make the work any less valu­able. With­out ded­i­cat­ed archivists and preser­va­tion­ists, a slow col­lec­tive amne­sia, or worse, can set in.

One might call this atti­tude pre­cious. Spe­cial­ists are use­ful, art is great, but with sophis­ti­cat­ed machine learn­ing, we can make, store, and print copies of every his­tor­i­cal arti­fact in the world, along with all of the accu­mu­lat­ed knowl­edge about them. What need to dote on crum­bling man­u­scripts? Why the spe­cial sta­tus of the orig­i­nal? The ques­tion, tak­en up by Wal­ter Ben­jamin in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion,” comes down in part to some­thing he called “aura.”

Take the case of four man­u­scripts, all of which recent­ly appeared togeth­er at the British Library’s exten­sive exhi­bi­tion Anglo-Sax­on King­doms: Art, Word, War: The Ver­cel­li Book, the Junius Man­u­script, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf Man­u­script con­tain rid­dles, reli­gious texts, ele­gies, and the old­est man­u­script of the old­est known poem in Eng­lish. These rep­re­sent the sum total of extant orig­i­nal lit­er­ary man­u­scripts in Old Eng­lish, a tongue sev­er­al cen­turies dis­tant from our own but still embed­ded deep with­in the struc­ture of every mod­ern ver­sion of the lan­guage.

Each man­u­script has what, as Ben­jamin wrote, “even the most per­fect repro­duc­tion of a work of art is lack­ing… its pres­ence in time and space, its unique exis­tence at the place where it hap­pens to be.” Josephine Liv­ing­stone puts the mat­ter more plain­ly at The New Repub­lic.

Why are these four books so spe­cial? It has to do, I think, with the con­cept of the original—a con­cept we have almost entire­ly lost touch with. The Beowulf Man­u­script… is not mere­ly a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a sto­ry; it is the sto­ry…. The man­u­scripts con­front us with a for­mer ver­sion of our lit­er­ary selves; iden­ti­ties that we bare­ly rec­og­nize, and which estrange us from our­selves.

We can repro­duce his­to­ry infi­nite­ly, but the only way to expe­ri­ence the hum­bling oth­er­world­li­ness that dwarfs our cramped ideas about it is through its phys­i­cal remain­ders. Liv­ing­stone doesn’t clar­i­fy whom she includes in the phrase “our lit­er­ary selves,” but we might as well say, at min­i­mum, this means every speak­er of Eng­lish and every­one who has read Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture in trans­la­tion or felt the influ­ence of Eng­lish words and phras­es in oth­er lan­guages.

We acquire the lan­guage we hear and read from lit­er­ary sources, how­ev­er remote; they are con­sti­tu­tive, the threads that weave togeth­er cul­tur­al nar­ra­tives into a larg­er pat­tern. The orig­i­nal work of art, Ben­jamin argued, like the rel­ic, has reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance. And where the rel­ic grounds the cult, art grounds mate­r­i­al cul­ture in such a way, he thought, that it repels fas­cis­m’s aes­thet­ic obses­sion with destruc­tion.

Orig­i­nal arti­facts “must restore the instinc­tu­al pow­er of the human bod­i­ly sens­es,” lit­er­ary schol­ar Susan Buck-Morss elab­o­rates, “for the sake of humanity’s self-preser­va­tion.” The state­ment may sound less grandiose in the con­text of Europe in 1936, or we might con­sid­er it just as rel­e­vant today (and expand it to include not only art but nature).

We can rely on the fact that, should the Beowulf Man­u­script be destroyed, Liv­ing­stone grants, “the poem would still sur­vive,” as would the image of the man­u­script in very fine detail. That is “the hope con­tained in Benjamin’s dirge.” But what is lost can nev­er appear in the world again. You can view most of these rare texts—The Ver­cel­li Book, the Junius Man­u­script, and the Beowulf Manuscript—in high res­o­lu­tion scans at the British and Bodleian Libraries.

The texts are a minus­cule sam­pling of the num­ber of cul­tur­al arti­facts around the world wor­thy of preser­va­tion, and pub­lic­i­ty. And they are a tiny sam­pling of the lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion of Old Eng­lish. But on them rests a great deal of our under­stand­ing about the lin­guis­tic ances­tors of the lan­guage, with more to learn, per­haps, as scan­ning tech­nol­o­gy becomes even more advanced, illu­mi­nat­ing rather than replac­ing the orig­i­nal.

via The New Repub­lic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of Beowulf Dig­i­tized and Now Online

Europe’s Old­est Intact Book Was Pre­served and Found in the Cof­fin of a Saint

One of the Best Pre­served Ancient Man­u­scripts of The Ili­ad Is Now Dig­i­tized: See the “Bankes Homer” Man­u­script in High Res­o­lu­tion (Cir­ca 150 C.E.)

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Cre­ate a Dig­i­tal Archive of 20 Mil­lion Arti­facts Lost in the Brazil­ian Muse­um Fire

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Hear the Sounds of World War I: A Gas Attack Recorded on the Front Line, and the Moment the Armistice Ended the War

in History | November 20th, 2018

The world recent­ly com­mem­o­rat­ed the 100th anniver­sary of end of World War I, which came to its close on Novem­ber 11th, 1918. The last vet­er­ans of that unprece­dent­ed­ly large-scale mil­i­tary con­flict, all of them cen­te­nar­i­ans or super­cente­nar­i­ans, died in the late 2000s and ear­ly 2010s. Though his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship on the sub­ject con­tin­ues, the Great War, as it was wide­ly known at the time, has now well and tru­ly passed out of liv­ing mem­o­ry. No one alive saw World War I for them­selves, though we do have pho­tographs, some of them in col­or; and no one alive heard World War I for them­selves, though we do have a lit­tle record­ed audio: in the clip above, you can hear the sounds of a gas shell bom­bard­ment in the war’s final year.

“Just before the end of the Great War, William Gais­berg, a sound recordist of the pre-elec­tric era, took record­ing equip­ment to the West­ern Front in order to cap­ture the sound of British artillery shelling Ger­man lines with poi­son gas,” writes media his­to­ri­an Bri­an Han­ra­han at Sound­ing Out!. The “Gas Shell Bom­bard­ment” record, “a 12-inch HMV shel­lac disc, just over 2 min­utes at 78 rpm,” came out just as the war end­ed, a few weeks after Gais­berg’s own death (prob­a­bly of Span­ish flu) and just after the end of the war itself. “Ini­tial­ly intend­ed to pro­mote War Bonds,” Han­ra­han explains, ulti­mate­ly the record was used to raise mon­ey for dis­abled vet­er­ans.”

Long billed as one of the first “actu­al­i­ty record­ings” (the kind “doc­u­ment­ing a real loca­tion and event beyond the per­for­ma­tive space of the stu­dio, imprint­ed with the audi­ble mate­r­i­al trace of an actu­al moment in space and time”), the record lat­er came under scruti­ny, which Han­ra­han writes about in detail: “Close lis­ten­ing at slow speeds – just care­ful atten­tion and nota­tion, noth­ing more elab­o­rate – revealed incon­sis­ten­cies and odd­i­ties in the fir­ing nois­es.” These and oth­er qual­i­ties sug­gest lay­ers of sound added after the fact, on top of the ini­tial record­ing in the field, much like live con­cert record­ings now get “sweet­ened” with addi­tion­al lay­ers of instru­men­ta­tion (and even audi­ence enthu­si­asm).

But we can hard­ly expect per­fect fideli­ty from audio record­ings of the events of a cen­tu­ry ago, a time when audio record­ing itself was still in its infan­cy. You can hear anoth­er approach to the task of hear­ing World War I in the clip just above, an “inter­pre­ta­tion” of the sound of the armistice caus­ing the guns to fall silent. This real­is­tic minute of sound was based on sound infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the field, using a tech­nique called “sound rang­ing” in which, as Smith­son­ian’s Jason Daley explains, “tech­ni­cians set up strings of micro­phones — actu­al­ly bar­rels of oil dug into the ground — a cer­tain dis­tance apart, then used a piece of pho­to­graph­ic film to visu­al­ly record noise inten­si­ty,” much as “a seis­mome­ter records an earth­quake.”

As part of its com­mem­o­ra­tion of the armistice’s cen­ten­ni­al, London’s Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um “com­mis­sioned the sound pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Coda to Coda to use the film strip of the guns fir­ing away at 10:58 A.M. on Novem­ber 11, 1918, then going silent when the clock strikes 11, the sym­bol­ic moment politi­cians deter­mined the war would end, to try and recre­ate what that instant may have sound­ed like.” Though you can hear the result on the inter­net, you can also go to the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um exhi­bi­tion Mak­ing a New World in per­son and more intense­ly expe­ri­ence it through the “sound­bar” installed there, on which “vis­i­tors to the exhib­it lean their elbows on the bar and place their hands on their ears. The sound is then con­duct­ed through their arms to their skulls where they can both hear and feel the moment,” the moment that birthed that “New World” — in not just the polit­i­cal sense but the tech­no­log­i­cal one, and many oth­ers besides — in which we still live today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

The Great War: Video Series Will Doc­u­ment How WWI Unfold­ed, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years

The First Col­or Pho­tos From World War I: The Ger­man Front

British Actors Read Poignant Poet­ry from World War I

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast