Lillian Larsen

The Spatially Interactive Literature Analysis System Study Tool: A GIS-Based Approach to Interpreting History in the Classroom

The integration of spatial technologies with humanistic approaches to scholarship is expanding and creating new opportunities and challenges for students. Documenting information about source material is a fundamental step of the historical research process. Traditional geospatial data documentation is maintained within standardized metadata forms, but these are not well suited for documenting historical sources and are cumbersome for people new to GIS and metadata. The Spatially Interactive Literature Analysis System Study Tool (SILAS.ST) addresses this and other usage issues for students in undergraduate humanities courses. Through customized toolbars and map templates designed to be used with Esri software, SILAS.ST lowers the barriers to understanding the parameters of spatial datasets while at the same time models the processes of historical inquiry, documentation, and communication of research results. The use of natural language and focused prompts help students begin to understand complex mapping topics such as authorship, relevance, purpose, and uncertainty. This prototype tool aids in the introduction of digital mapping technologies to humanities students.

Mapping Religiously, or Religiously Minding the Map?

This essay explores the programmatic pedagogy that has long linked religion and maps. Through comparative juxtaposition of contemporary surfaces, it underscores the degree to which disciplinary constructs continue to shape cartographic representation of religiously defined space. It then examines this contemporary phenomenon in light of the historical role that religion has played in iteratively naming particular geographic landscapes authoritative. Extending the work of Catherine Delano-Smtih on “Maps as Art and Science” (1990; Cf. Maps in Bibles, 1991), it demonstrates the particular merits of melding “change” with “tradition” in a manner that troubles common cartographic nomenclature. Following Harley (in Cartographica 26:1–25, 1989), it simultaneously affirms the importance of deconstructing authoritative surfaces with more mindful utilization of contemporary cartographic tools. As religiously defined landscapes are here ‘re-drawn’ in ways that combine critical historical engagement with sophisticated digital artistry, both the most malleable, and the most stable maps are rendered less emphatic. Re-shaped and re-purposed, these surfaces no longer serve as static harbingers of hegemonic ‘truth’—or malleable registers of cultural idiosyncrasy—but symbolically supple interfaces that temper certainty. Absent an ideological agenda aimed at culturally affirming inherent authority, they effectively demonstrate the usefulness of inverting established pedagogies. As the traditional tactics that have dictated ‘mapping religiously’ are re-deployed, they serve as tools for ‘religiously minding the map.’ Persuasive influence, however, is contingent. Even as ‘the authority inherent in all mapped surfaces’ is re-defined, effective re-configuration remains grounded in shared cartographic assumptions.

Monastic Meals: Resisting a Reclining Culture

Interpretive renderings have long viewed the mundane details of early monastic life through hagiographical lenses. In discourse where demonology has proved decidedly more interesting than dining norms, almost every analysis is residually informed by scholarly trajectories that have construed early monastic practice as uniformly distinctive. A persistent habit of reading hagiography as history, and derivatively, framing the habits of the earliest monks as unprecedented, retains a stubborn influence on even the most critical approaches.2 Scholars Cornelia Romer and Stephen Emmel note that for any who seek to re-create a less-idealized picture of early monastic life, the residual effect of the dismemberment and dispersal of monastic texts and artifacts into museum collections around the world must be taken into account. Just as the fragmentary nature of extant sources has left ample room for far-ranging, mythic reconstructions, so competing economic and academic interests have often dictated what is preserved, and/or disseminated. Discussing the re-assemblage of material and manuscript evidence that derives just from the White Monastery in Upper Egypt, Romer and Emmel describe the work as akin to putting together “a large puzzle.”3 Although studies that recognize the importance of linking text and context have grown decidedly more nuanced, larger than life constructs grounded in historically persuasive hagiography, and at best, fragmentary material remains, have proved surprisingly difficult to dismantle.

Probing Water Mobility in Human Dentine with Neutron Spectroscopy

The aim of this study was to investigate hydrogen mobility within innate and demineralized human dentine. Dentine sections from extracted human molars, demineralized or not, were analyzed by combining neutron spectroscopy with thermal analysis. For the thermal analysis of the samples, differential scanning calorimetry and thermal gravimetric analysis, coupled with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, were performed. The hydrogen dynamics of water, collagen, and hydroxyl groups present in the samples were investigated via neutron spectroscopy. From the mass loss observed from the thermogravimetric analysis curves up to 600 °C, the same amount of organic content is identified in the samples. From the differential scanning calorimetry curves, a higher change in enthalpy associated with the denaturation of collagen is registered in the demineralized dentine; that is, a structural change occurs in the collagen subsequent to demineralization. Since the intensity measured by neutron spectroscopy is dominated by the signal from hydrogen, in our samples—coming mostly from the bulk-like and loosely bound water as well as from the collagen itself—higher proton mobility within the demineralized dentine was detected when compared with innate dentine. In the demineralized dentine, this proton mobility amounts to 80%, while the remaining hydrogen accounts for a combination of 1) structural hydroxyls, as a result of the incomplete dissolution of the mineral phase by acid etching, and 2) hydrogen tightly bound in the collagen structure. By combining neutron spectroscopy with the calorimetry data, our findings support the idea that hydroxyapatite protects the collagen in innate dentine. Demineralized dentine, however, acts as a sponge where free bulk-like water is trapped.

Early Christian Meals and Slavery

In introducing her groundbreaking study of Slavery in Early Christianity, Jennifer Glancy emphasizes that while scholars of early Christianity have historically relied on constructing “a seamless picture of ancient life that disguises the jagged edges of the documentation,” it is in fact a harsher reality that best reflects the contours of lived experience.2 Asserting that “any description of slavery in antiquity is the product of multiple scholarly decisions,” Glancy argues that “whether one can discern links among miscellaneous sources to tell a connected story” remains a question.3 She reminds her readers that although “the earliest Christian writings are laced with images and metaphors borrowed from the rhetorical domain of chattel slavery, [concrete] evidence concerning Christian slaves and Christian slaveholders is typically fragmentary.”4 In seeking to hear voices that echo in silence, to catch glimpses of bodies that remain invisible, one must read around the edges and between the lines.