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Abstract Wood has been used by mankind since prehistory; therefore the presence of wood in cultural heritage is huge. The dendrochronological dating is considered one of the principal techniques for the study of wood of historical and architectural interest. When the traces left by the history make a correct reading of the context impossible, the results given by dendrochronology are often the only certain data useful as a reference. Wood species identification and tree-ring analysis allow far more than just dating: often it is possible to identify the provenance of the woods, closely studying some technical aspects, detecting major or minor interventions of restoration, substitution, and reuse, and, in some fields of study, verifying the attribution of the artifact to a certain artist or school. The power of dendrochronology is based on the rigorous scientific approach and the complete independence from other stylistic or historical considerations.

Joyce regarded the Swiss Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957) as one of the most important contemporary composers, standing “head and shoulders over Stravinsky and Antheil as composer for orchestra and voice anyhow”. He was deeply impressed by a performance of Schoeck’s Lebendig Begraben on 14 January 1935 at the Tonhalle, conducted by the composer himself. He went to see Schoeck immediately afterwards and came to see him as one of Zurich’s most important assets.

In October 1881, the “Gunfight at the O.K. (‘Old Kindersley’) Corral,” a combat between lawmen and members of a group of outlaws, the so-called “Cowboys”, took place in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Tombstone was a booming mining town near the Mexican border. The gunfight is widely regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the Wild West. It was the result of a feud between five of the Cowboys and four representatives of the town’s authorities, in particular Special Policeman Wyatt Earp and Temporary Policeman Doc Holliday, a gambler, gunfighter and dentist.

Although published in close temporal proximity to one another, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist provide markedly different outlooks on the impact of the 11 September 2001 attacks. As these two novels illustrate, 9/11 fiction actively partakes in contemporary public discourse, employing the mode of fiction to both reiterate and interrogate prevailing narratives about 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Whereas American Ground Zero novels tend to support the master narrative of 9/11 as a cultural trauma, postcolonial War on Terror novels assume a counter-discursive position by offering different narrative contextualizations of the event. Thus, the Anglophone “novel after 9/11” can be shown to make diverse, sometimes conflicting contributions to the meaning-making processes surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror.

This chapter applies Roland Barthes’ analysis of the mythical accounts that underpinned the belief system of the bourgeois ideology in France during the Cold War period to the contemporary narratives that unite anti-globalization movements today. They have in common a tendency to reduce the complexity of local stories to timeless motives and stereotypes associated with different actors that are either in favor or against the ‘good cause’.

Michael Stolz shows how reading processes were enacted and practised in early Italian and German humanism by referring to the contrasting Latin terms otium (‘rest’ and ‘leisure’) and negotium (‘activity’, but also ‘practice’, ‘negotiation’, ‘circulation of social energy’). After analysing paradigmatic scenes in St Augustine’s Confessions and in Petrarch’s letters, he concentrates on the transmission of Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s writings in South German humanist circles. He particularly investigates reading practices retraceable in the Schedel and Gossembrot manuscripts in Nuremberg, Augsburg and Strasbourg, once part of coherent libraries, nowadays spread all over Europe. The concluding case study of former tradesman and mayor Sigmund Gossembrot discloses practices related to his complex habits of annotating and cross-referencing his manuscript library, throwing new light on manuscripts as cultural objects.

Early ideas about the origin of the cosmos and of life on Earth can be found in the myths of different nations and in religions. A number of these reflections are reviewed. The myths are based on imagination and form impressive pieces of literature.

Astrophysics deals with important questions characterizing human nature. Most of our knowledge was obtained in the last century. The data resulting from these explorations, collected in space or on ground, are of great value, encoding our knowledge of the Universe, of our past and of our future. With the emergence of clouds and deep learning, high level interfaces to these data could evolve towards providing direct access to knowledge. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs can play a role towards a consensus in establishing a code of conduct on data handling and promoting the data and knowledge on the Universe as an intangible world cultural heritage.

The current gold standard for interpreting patient tissue samples is the visual inspection of whole–slide histopathology images (WSIs) by pathologists. They generate a pathology report describing the main findings relevant for diagnosis and treatment planning. Searching for similar cases through repositories for differential diagnosis is often not done due to a lack of efficient strategies for medical case–based retrieval. A patch–based multimodal retrieval strategy that retrieves similar pathology cases from a large data set fusing both visual and text information is explained in this paper. By fine–tuning a deep convolutional neural network an automatic representation is obtained for the visual content of weakly annotated WSIs (using only a global cancer score and no manual annotations). The pathology text report is embedded into a category vector of the pathology terms also in a non–supervised approach. A publicly available data set of 267 prostate adenocarcinoma cases with their WSIs and corresponding pathology reports was used to train and evaluate each modality of the retrieval method. A MAP (Mean Average Precision) of 0.54 was obtained with the multimodal method in a previously unseen test set. The proposed retrieval system can help in differential diagnosis of tissue samples and during the training of pathologists, exploiting the large amount of pathology data already existing digital hospital repositories.

The actor Claud Sykes (1883–1963), who had come to Zurich in 1915, met Joyce in 1917. Together they founded the English Players, an English language theatre company that was active in Zurich between April 1918 and late 1919. Sykes moved back to England after the war. He continued to produce plays at first, but later worked as an author and translator of books about World War I aviation. From the mid-1930s onwards he worked for MI5.