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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.

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.

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.

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 paper outlines the design of a research that would focus on the Brandberg National Monument Area, in Namibia, Southern Africa. The project seeks to find solutions by use of co-design action research with the local communities within the vicinity of the site and in the country. While an open online database is already available, with an extensive collection of archeological materials found within the site, the project will explore how to re-use and re-purpose such materials to present them not only to researchers and experts, but also to locals and to (international) tourists. In order to do so, local voices are to be fully integrated within the presentation(s), and locals’ involvement will be of the utmost importance to manage communication practices as well as travelers’ flows. The ultimate goal is not only to come up with different digital engagement tools, but also to end up with a digital engagement and governance framework for heritage sites, which could work in the African context.

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.

After the success of the two first editions of the “Arabic Text in Videos Competition—AcTiVComp”, we are proposing to organize a new edition in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR’20). The main objective is to contribute in the research field of text detection and recognition in multimedia documents, with a focus on Arabic text in video frames. The former editions were held in the framework of ICPR’16 and ICDAR’17 conferences. The obtained results on the AcTiV dataset have shown that there is still room for improvement in both text detection and recognition tasks. Four groups with five systems are participating to this edition of AcTiVComp (three for the detection task and two for the recognition task). All the submitted systems have followed a CRNN-based architecture, which is now the de facto choice for text detection and OCR problems. The achieved results are very interesting, showing a significant improvement from the state-of-the-art performances on this field of research.

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.

This chapter tells the story of Joyce’s grave in Fluntern Cemetery; it describes other physical memorials to Joyce throughout the city ranging from a pub named after him to two challenging works of conceptual art by Hannes Vogel. It also tells the story of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, the institution which keeps Joyce’s memory alive for visiting Joyceans throughout the world, for students and young researchers and for an interested general public.