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Introductions by Eva Horn and Nicole Sütterlin to the workshop "Blurry Bodies – Blurry Selves: Corporeality in the Anthropocene" (5 June 2024) Organisers: Eva Horn (University of Vienna), Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard University) and Vera Thomann (University of Vienna) Hosted by the Vienna Anthropocene Network FWF-Projekt „Landschaft, Leben, Form. Die Poetik des Anthropozäns“

El proyecto XSCAPE, financiado con fondos europeos, reúne a un equipo de arqueólogos, científicos de la visión y filósofos cognitivos para explorar si los mundos que construimos alteran nuestra propia mente y la forma en que procesamos la información. El equipo financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación estudia si nuestros edificios, carreteras y artefactos cambian los patrones de pensamiento y atención. El equipo del proyecto, que tiene previsto realizar una serie de más de cuarenta estudios de casos globales, utiliza un conjunto de materiales —de diferentes culturas y entornos antiguos y nuevos— para explorar los cambios cognitivos impulsados por la materialidad. XSCAPE utiliza una nueva metodología sinérgica que combina múltiples estudios de casos del mundo real con la neurociencia visual más reciente y simulaciones simples basadas en agentes. Narradora: Regina Zaghi-Lara; Miembros del equipo XSCAPE: Arturo José Valiño, Alba Fernández-Pestonit; Fotografías: María Silva-Gago, Regina Zaghi-Lara; Realización y edición de vídeo: Rubén Vuelta-Santín; Dirección y guión: Regina Zaghi-Lara; Corrección de guion y supervisión: Alba Fernández-Pestonit, Márcia L Hattori. Peer reviewed

The beautiful focus of this film is a quilt made in c.1890 in Swaledale and its journey through the generations of a family and on to the Quilters’ Guild collection in the early twenty-first century. It conveys how textiles hold powerful emotions for their makers and the relatives who have inherited them, and communicates the pleasures of hand quilting in the past and today. It also shows how inherited objects offer insights into our history, reflecting on the way inherited quilts provide insights into changing regional patterns of women’s work and lives. With Deborah McGuire and Joanne Begiato.

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In this video, visiting fellow Chris Jones describes the Field School in Digital Humanities, offered in 2015, where students visited two medieval parish churches in Surrey containing historical objects that Jones was digitizing: a 1615 King James Bible and various medieval wall paintings. The field school’s aim was to investigate which digitizing technologies are appropriate for the artifacts. The video’s pedagogical use lies in its advocacy for site-specific research, or assessing historical artifacts in the sites they would have been originally experienced in order to understand their social and material significance. High-resolution digital photos, for instance, distort the original experience of viewing the wall paintings by candlelight and the censorship of the images during the medieval period. The video thus considers the adequacy of digital photography and videography as documentary tools, suggesting the need for contextualization through other media. It also demonstrates the need for site-specific sensitivity in digital fieldwork.

This video provides a demonstration of the process of creating a GitHub repository via the command line.

The current video presents a brief How to use Stylo, a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) text editor for writing and editing scientific articles in the social sciences and humanities. Stylo is available online for free at this address: https://stylo.huma-num.fr Stylo is designed by the Canada Research Chair on Digital textualities of the Université de Montréal, and the company PiNinja, with the support of Érudit, and Huma-Num.

Recorrido virtual por las infraestructuras del Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio (INCIPIT-CSIC) en el Edificio Fontán. La redacción del proyecto arquitectónico del edificio Fontán fue diseñada por el equipo del arquitecto Andrés Perea Ortega. En la construcción del edificio Fontán y de las infraestructuras del INCIPIT-CSIC han participado varias entidades públicas y diversas empresas. Licencia de uso: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Atribución/Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional). Vídeo producido por: INCIPIT-CSIC, Servicio de Medios Audiovisuales; Edición de vídeo: Rubén Vuelta-Santín; Imágenes aéreas cedidas por: Fundación Cidade da Cultura de Galicia; Música: Jindupe - Lauren Duski (YouTube Audio Library). Peer reviewed

This contribution reports on the collaborative effort of building an open access multilingual corpus of European novels published 1840-1920 (the European Literary Text Collection - ELTeC) within the COST Action "Distant Reading for European Literary History" (COST Action CA16204). Working at the intersection of many languages and cultures, we address practical and technical aspects of corpus design based on a theoretical discussion of pluri-cultural computational modeling of literature. In the corpus design, we adopt a metadata-based approach that allows for representing the diversity of novels published 1840-1920 across Europe. Our sampling and balancing criteria use metadata including publication date, text length, reprint counts and authors’ gender, and we deliberately focus on inclusion of non-canonical novels. While one overarching goal of the project is the distant reading of European novels, this contribution puts its main focus on the theoretical and technical dimensions of corpus creation.

Sanj talks about the history of the Torghuts in Kalmykia. According to him, there are several versions of the etymology of the ethnonym Torghut. In the view of the French scholar Paul Pelliot, it derives from the Turkic verb ‘tur’ (to stand) + the plural suffix. The Secret History of Mongols writes that in the beginning turgak kishg, who were Chingis Khan’s bodyguards during the day, consisted of 80 men. After 1206, their number grew to ten thousand. The bodyguards were divided into three groups, including turgak (day guards), keptyul (night guards) and khorchin (bowmen). Apart from providing personal security to the Khan, these guards also served as policemen. In other words, the ethnonym Torghut derives from the word turgak. The contemporary Torghut, however, are not the same as the historical Torghuts. The Torghuts joined the Oirats, which was a feeble union of tribes, in the 14-15th centuries. When the Mongol Empire was split into five khanates, the Oirats were part of a force that opposed Kublai Khan. Following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (founded by Kublai), a civil war broke out among the Mongols. Although, according to the established convention it was only the direct descendants of Chingis Khan who had the right to the throne, the Oirat lords started to challenge the status quo. In the 15-16th centuries in their struggle with the Eastern Mongols, the Oirat union suffered defeat after defeat, which prompted their leaders to call a meeting (chulgan) in order to strengthen the union. Despite internal struggles, the union had a centripetal tendency under the leadership of the lords from the Tsoros clan. Nevertheless, several tribes, or clans, left the union and moved westwards. According to Soviet sources, the first among the Oirats to arrive in the Volga region was the Torghut lord Kho-Urlyuk of the Keryad clan. Recent studies, however, dispute this view and show instead that it was the Khoshud lords who first came to this region. The Derbet lord Dalai Taishi was the next to arrive in the Volga. Various Oirat groups thus settled in the territory of today’s Astrakhan, near the Volga, displacing the indigenous Nogais whom the Russians used as a buffer force against foreign tribes. So, when the Derbets drew the Nogais out of their land, the Russians were not in a position to defend their vassals. The third wave of Oirat arrival took place when the Torghuts headed by Kho-Urlyuk’s older son, Luuzang, came to the Volga. Once settled, Luuzang carried out a policy to attract into his dominion various Turkic tribes, including the Tatars, Nogais and Tomuts. According to Nikita Bichurin, the Tomuts were a mix of Tatars and Bashkirs who had a religion that was also a mix of various religions, including shamanism, Buddhism and Islam. During the Oirat/Kalmyk settlement, half of the Tomuts dissolved among the Oirats, while the other half left for Crimea, becoming the Crimean Tatars. Sanj Khoyt says he wrote an article about hybridization, or ethnic mixing in Kalmykia. According to his research, the Kalmyks mixed with many ethnic groups, including Russians, Kazakhs, and peoples from the Caucasus. Hybridization took place among all social strata, including the aristocracy and ordinary people alike. Ordos (China) is the motherland of the Torghuts. According to available genetic and ethnographic data, they were most likely Eastern Mongols. After joining the Oirat union, the Torghuts, who consisted of Mongol and Turkic tribes, were headed by the Keryad clan. The Torghuts reached the Volga region through Central Asia while incorporating on their way various clans and tribes. Hence their colorful composition. The Torghuts differ from the Derbets both in terms of their dialect and customs. In the Volga region all these groups – the Torghuts, Khoshuds, Zyungar, Khoit, etc. – came to be known under the umbrella term of Kalmyk. Owing to widespread Russification, today the difference among various Kalmyk groups is negligible. With the passage of time, some Kalmyks, especially impoverished individuals, engaged in fishing. Those Kalmyks who lived close to the Volga and the Caspian Sea became good fishermen. Historically, the majority of Kalmyks were Torghuts, which means that the Kalmyk Khanate was in fact a Torghut Khanate. Hence, the Kalmyk Khan Ayuka described himself in his letters as a Torghut Khan. When in 1771 the majority of the Kalmyks, or Torghuts, set out on a return journey to Dzungaria, the number of the Torghuts that remained in Kalmykia diminished accordingly. When the Khanate was abolished by the Russian government as a consequence of this exodus, the Tundutov family of the Choros clan of the Derbet were appointed as representatives of the Russian administration among the Kalmyks. Historically, the Torghuts participated in religious wars. When Kagyu and Gelug schools of Buddhism fought with each other in Tibet, the Oirats supported Gelug, while the Khalkhas, or Mongols, supported Kagyu. It is known that a contingent of Torghut soldiers from the Volga reached Zungaria and Tibet. After their military campaign, they returned home. Sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Part 1At the intersections of history, memory, and trauma are confluences; spaces that offer opportunities for growth and understanding to occur. Engaging in this process does not diminish the individual traumas and injustices of particular events. Rather, our panel discussion, moderated by Naveen Girn, introduced storytelling as a tool through which the shared memorialization and remembrance of past events can gain a deeper resonance. Sharing their work, thoughts, and practice were Kamal Arora, Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty, Gurpreet Singh, and Dr. Milan Singh. Delving into the larger implications of silenced histories and redacted traumas, our panel shed light onto the cultural memory of our shared experience in being not just Canadian, but citizens of this fractured world. The evening included readings of poetry by Renee Saklikar.Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle that includes poetry, fiction, and essays. Published work from the project appears in many journals and anthologies. The first completed book from thecanadaproject is children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) winner of the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for poetry and a finalist for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. Trained as a lawyer at the University of British Columbia, with a degree in English Literature, Renée was called to the British Columbia Bar in 1991. A graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, Renée is currently a mentor and instructor for the university and co-founder of a new poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU.Part 2A discussion of the artistic process related to the development of air india [redacted], an artistic collaboration between Canadian and Irish artists, which premiered at SFU on November 6th. This discussion revolved around how artists can revisit and reframe traumatic and historically significant events though the creative process, and how art creates a space to explore emotions that can be difficult to talk about. Panelists included Owen Underhill, Music Director, Turning Point Ensemble; Jürgen Simpson, scholar and composer; and Renée Saklikar, poet. Hosted/moderated by Michael Boucher, Director of SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs.