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TextDescriptives is a Python package for calculating a large variety of statistics from text. It is built on top of spaCy and can be easily integrated into existing workflows. The package has already been used for analysing the linguistic stability of clinical texts, creating features for predicting neuropsychiatric conditions, and analysing linguistic goals of primary school students. This paper describes the package and its features.

By examining a singular case – the Rua Joaquina party in Lisbon (Portugal) – this chapter raises questions about the role of small-scale and locally based events in shaping feelings of togetherness, musical attachment and family affiliation. In particular, it explores how such events are meaningful settings for families, neighbours and their guests to meet up, jointly appreciate or perform music they value, and engage beginners in musical pathways. Accordingly, an approach of this kind also seeks to illustrate and understand the living aspects of cultural heritage. The used data came from long-term fieldwork conducted in Lisbon’s fado scenes.

This book is part of the Travelling Communiqué, a project that fosters a trans-disciplinary way of working together towards the idea of political friendship. At work since 2012, Travelling Communiqué has been initiating its own conditions of production within current globalising forces. Studying practices of decolonial thinking through the Presidential photo archive of Josip Broz Tito, at the Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade. With contributions by Fabian Bechtle, Radovan Cukić, Kodwo Eshun, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Armin Linke, Mirko Lovrić, Ivan Manojlović, Olga Manojlović Pintar, Doreen Mende, Fred Moten, Sarah Poppel, The Otolith Group, Branimir Stojanović, Miki Stojanović, Milica Tomić, Vanessa Vasić-Janeković, Françoise Vergès, Jelena Vesić and Rachel O’Reilly, and students of the Dutch Art Institute as well as artists from Netsa Art Village in Addis Ababa. N.B. Hello fellow-authors: let me know your appearance on academia, and I will add you as co-author, if you wish, in case that you are not yet visible there.

Marine and lacustrine archaeological aterlogged wood encounters serious problems after xcavation due to the accumulation of sulfur and iron compounds during burial. Exposure of these compounds to oxygen results in precipitation of salts and acidification, which can lead to serious structural damage, and ultimately the loss of important cultural heritage. In this study, we evaluated the capacity of the bacterium hiobacillus denitrificans to transform sulfur compounds commonly found in waterlogged wooden objects, to more readily extractable compounds thereby eliminating the threat of degradation. Oak samples, impregnated with a solution containing iron(II) and sulfides, were used to assess the efficiency of the bacterial treatment. The model wood samples were characterized before and after treatment using different techniques such as ESEM-EDS, micro-Raman spectroscopy, XRD and Sy-XRF mapping. Before treatment, mackinawite (FeS) and mineral sulfur (α-S8) were detected in the impregnated wood. After treatment with T. denitrificans, even though some mineral sulfur remained in the samples, the predominant phase corresponded to oxidized sulfur. This demonstrates that T. denitrificans was able to use the reduced sulfur compounds present in the wood samples as an energy source, thereby producing more soluble oxidized sulfur compounds. In addition, non-invasive techniques such as Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, were carried out to assess the consequences of the biological treatment on the wood structure. No negative effect on the wood was detected after the treatment in comparison with the referenceimpregnated wood. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a biotechnological procedure for the preventive extraction of sulfur species from archaeological waterlogged wood.

Metal conservators confronted with unknown artefacts rely on previous literature to develop treatment protocols. This search can be tedious given the dissemination of information across corpus of unstructured texts, mainly in the form of research papers and semi-structured databases of artefacts. In order to improve the search of artefacts sharing similar characteristics (metal composition and structure, conservation condition, etc.), this project proposes a hybrid search engine based on a domain ontology. Using a database populated with information resulting from comprehensive investigations of historic and archaeological artefacts, we extracted and selected key concepts and their relations through the use a various lexical analysis tools. Based on this corpus and frequency analysis, we were able to build an ontology of the domain, opening new perspective on information retrieval. Conservators are able to leverage the power of the hybrid search engine to compare their observations on a specific artefact with objects already stored in the database or with indexed research papers. Using keywords to describe corrosion forms they are confronted with, conservators can retrieve artefacts showing similar corrosion phenomena and assess the conservation condition of their artefacts, e.g. diagnosing the stability of metals or determining the location of the limit of the original surface in corrosion product crusts.

The essay departs from an image that was taken in a room in the Hotel Beau Rivage in Beirut in 1980 while the East-German photographer Horst Sturm and his Palestinian-Lebanese bodyguard Khaled ‘Mein Sandokan’ took a rest. It was taken in a political moment when the Palestinian struggle for the people changed from armed resistance against Israel’s occupation towards the continuation of the militant struggle by the means of photography. It is a moment when the Palestinian press agency searched for a new image strategy for the internationalization of the Cause while the Cold War fought its last territorial combats in proxy battles. It is the same moment when the term ‘solidarity’ equated the declaration of socialist internationalism during the global Cold War exactly in a situation when the Human Rights discourse became a declared objective of United Nation’s rhetoric. It is a moment when the revolutionary image, that portrayed the strength of the people’s struggle, changed towards a humanitarian image that exposed the people’s defeat as an economy of suffering. It is a moment when ‘Showing solidarity had become a bureaucratic act’ as the East-German filmmaker Iris Gusner concludes. Within the double-bind of the informal and the official, or the micro-political and the macro-political, it will become possible to discuss solidarity in struggle between the act of political (socialist) friendship and the beginning of humanitarian violence.

The early history of leukemia reaches back 200 years. In 1811, Peter Cullen defined a case of splenitis acutus with unexplainable milky blood. Alfred Velpeau defined the leukemia associated symptoms, and observed pus in the blood vessels (1825). Alfred Donne detected a maturation arrest of the white blood cells (1844). John Bennett named the disease leucocythemia, based on the microscopic accumulation of purulent leucocytes (1845). That same year, Rudolf Virchow defined a reversed white and red blood cell balance. He introduced the disease as leukamie in 1847. Henry Fuller performed the first microscopic diagnose of a leukemic patient during life (1846). This gradual process brought us towards our current understanding of this complex disease. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ebifananyi at The Uganda Museum, an exhibition relating to my doctoral research, following up on an earlier exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium and in Kampala part of KLAART18, a ‘public art festival which celebrates public art for and in the city’. The visitors of the show in Antwerp were welcomed with a letter from co-curators of the exhibition Bas Vroege and Joachim Naudts. Here they were welcomed by me: Dear Visitor, You are most welcome to a temporary exhibition about photographs. ‘Ebifananyi’, the Luganda word that is used to signify photographs as well as other likenesses, gives you the opportunity to see a variety of historical photographs made in Uganda. It also invites you to reflect on what you see. In 2011 Canon Griffin and I set up History In Progress Uganda, a platform that digitizes and shares historical photographs. With the help of numerous Ugandan photographers, history enthusiasts and artists I produced eight books with the same title of the exhibition. Each book presents a collection of historical photographs and contemporary responses to it. Last year an exhibition took place in FoMu, the photo museum in Antwerp, Belgium. It presented the content of these books to the Belgian audience. The conditions of this museum cannot be reproduced in Uganda. We here present to you both two- and three dimensional documentation of that show. Photographs are always made from a particular viewpoint and the way they look depends on the technology that was available to the photographer. It is not unusual for photographs to show what someone wants someone else to see rather than to be neutral documentation. They can be used as tools of identification and to estrange people from each other. It is my hope that the photographs that were added to the permanent museum display will make you wonder, cause recognition, show beauty and give you a valuable experience, Andrea Stultiens [See]