Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal.

Determinedly forward-looking and optimistic, though never straying from hard facts, The Tesla Revolution paints a striking picture of our global energy future.

This book explores the future of modern higher education by looking at it on a global scale.

Presents and discusses a treasure trove of early color film images from the archives of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, bringing to life their rich hues and forgotten splendor.

With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reason--at first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the power of a particular faction or community--, the relics began to be stolen, with numerous cases documented throughout Europe. At the same time, a rich hagiographic literature flourished to describe the contexts in which the thefts occurred and to demonstrate their authenticity. Justifications, legitimations, ordeals, and supernatural interventions are dotted throughout the stories of hagiographers over the centuries. This book seeks to reconstruct the cultural history of the theft of relics in the specific context of Italy, from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, availing itself of an interdisciplinary perspective.

Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China's most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we know. Did it really start with Wu Wenguang and Bumming in Beijing in 1990, or can its roots be traced back much earlier? What are its aesthetics? And its ethics, including of gender and class? Where do audiences watch these films in China and how do they circulate? And, since the 2017 Film Law defined uncensored films as illegal, is independent Chinese cinema still alive? What does it mean today? And does it have a future? The essays in this anthology-many by exciting new scholars-explore these urgent questions.

Gentrification is extensively discussed in the media, where coverage can describe changing neighbourhoods and analyse the causes and consequences of such change. The media are also arenas in which the voices of those who advocate or resist gentrification can be heard. How can this profusion of content be examined? What methods can be used to critically address the role of the media in constructing and propagating discourses on gentrification? Central to this book is the idea that new research should engage with the theoretical and methodological issues that emerge when media products are used as a corpus to study gentrification. This edited volume considers a range of means that are used to shape and publicize representations: contributions investigate printed and online newspapers, websites, blogs, television programmes and social media. It also aims to highlight the diversity of players who produce and disseminate media discourses on gentrification.

This book charts the broad cultural impact of the medieval and early modern female performer: how she engages with her historical origins in classical drama, works within contemporary cultural and professional networks, and sets the terms for female performance in subsequent historical periods. Moving beyond the archival evidence that establishes that medieval and early modern women and girls performed, it explores how their performances resonated across national boundaries and historical periods, revealing wide patterns of influence and inspiration. This collection of original essays brings together well-established authorities with new and emerging scholars, offering innovative and ground-breaking discussions of medieval dramatic cultures, the Shakespearean stage, professional actresses in Spain and Italy, the performance of music and dance, artistic representations of the female performer, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations. Ranging from tenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century London, the chapters in this volume offer a new set of paradigms for understanding and interpreting women and girls on stage.

In China, every phase of modernization had its particular poetic forms and lyrical articulations. The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for poetical experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with entangled local and global concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental anxieties, socio-political transformations, and the return of nationalist sentiments and Cold War divisions. In search for creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes are anything but mutually disjunctive and often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jirim League witnessed a linguistic wrestle between Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian powers. The Qing Empire envisioned a trilingual educational system, with the aim of improving the Jirim Mongols' ability to read Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. Through this policy, the Qing sought to transform loyal imperial subjects into modern patriotic nationals and incorporate them into an integrated and united China under a Manchu constitutional monarchy. The late Qing's linguistic practice for ruling the Mongols of Manchuria was an attempt to cope with the enduring legacies in Qing administration and people's everyday life, growing local ethnic tensions, cross-boundary connections, imperial rivalries, and the rise of new ideas concerning nation, modern state, and international relations in East Asia. This book challenges the notion of Chinese language reform as a story of linear progress towards national monolingualism, unfolds the power of multilingualism in Chinese nationalist discourse from a peripheral, non-Han Chinese perspective, and questions the extent to which national languages dominate the writing of history.

Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony delves into the central role of music among the early modern sciences by focusing on the work of the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Although now considered more an art than a science, music was for many early modern scholars a universal science for studying the harmonies present in all beings. Music's ability to be quantified while being experienced aesthetically meant that, for Mersenne, it was the central science to approximate the sounding and inaudible harmonies present in the world and universe at large. Bringing together Mersenne's interests in the physics of sound and hearing, combinatorics, musical instruments, curiosities, and music from outside of Europe, this book shows why so many early modern scholars were drawn to music and how the discipline of music was transformed in the seventeenth century.

Tadeas Hajek of Hajek (1526-1600), Latinized as Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek/Hayek, was a key figure in early scientific debates not only in his native Bohemia. A versatile scholar and polymath, he was prolific in medicine, botany, mathematics and astronomy. Modern interpreters tended to point out his astronomical interpretations to emphasize his greatest achievements and his "modernity." However, Hajek also drew extensively on traditional arts such as alchemy, astrology and metoposcopy. In this volume, the contributors study various aspects of Hayek's thought to present a less tendentious intellectual portrait of him in the context of his times. Even from this more adequate perspective, he remains an important figure in the dialectical process of transmitting ideas whose influence extended far beyond the Czech lands.

This book traces the construction of migrant space in Israel's urban periphery with a focus on the flat that Filipino care workers co-rent for their day-off and provides insight into the migrant lives and journeys in trans-local contexts. The author selects the flat not only as the central field site for fieldwork but also as an analytical lens for grasping the various social networks and the formation of new identities. Offering a repertoire of migrants' own narratives, she shows how the flat, as a microcosm of societal constellations of networks, provides opportunities for all sorts of new experiences. The groundbreaking ethnography contributes to migration scholarship by opening up avenues of analysis for space, community, and boundary-making in displacement and provides comprehensive insight into the dynamics of transnational labor migration. This provocative volume will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, urban studies, and more broadly to anthropology and gender studies.

When he returned to the Netherlands in 2009, decades after World War II, Jefferson Wiggins realized that no one he met knew about the segregated US Army during the war, nor did they know about the contribution of Black American soldiers to the liberation of the Netherlands. They were not mentioned anywhere in Dutch history books or in archives. Together with oral historian Mieke Kirkels, Wiggins sat down to record his memories. Wiggins passed away in 2013, and his widow, Janice Wiggins-Paterson, continued the project in his memory. With newly discovered archival material, and richly illustrated, this book gives a lively account of an undocumented story of WWII, Black American, and Dutch military history.

This volume is a collective attempt on the part of a community of academics, film festival curators, and archivists to come to terms with practical and intellectual challenges of the pandemic and post-pandemic realities affecting cultures of film festivals. The collection draws contours of critical inquiry orienting current film festival research and practice to explore new directions in archiving and decolonizing practices and big data analysis in the post-Covid-19 context and beyond. The four-part study gathers the voices of academics and practitioners who engage in a dialogue to articulate critical areas for both study and practice of film festivals, and identifies conceptual tools to address them: "Archival Turn," "Decolonizing Film Festival Studies," "Post-Covid-19 and Film Festival Studies" and "Data Visualization and Film Festival Research and Practice."

European cities and towns are considered places with a particular order established by their inhabitants. This volume centres on the authorities, groups, and individuals who formed the rules for common life in urban communities. It considers the protagonists of urban order between the Middle Ages and modernity: those who were responsible for the common welfare, those who produced change, and those who caused disorder. The authors focus on the practices that shaped the order of urban communities and in particular on situations in which this order was transformed both socially and spatially. By looking at urban order through this lens, the volume sheds light on the complex interplay of interests that can bring about change.

This book provides a timely discussion of the creative practices in fandom and media culture. Within their participatory cultures, fans produce a wealth of content, data and materials. They write fan fiction, curate wikis and design costumes. This international collection offers a diverse exploration of contemporary fan practices through different cases, such as Yuri!!! On ICE, Harry Potter and Mass Effect. This book reveals how expression, emotion and agency are central to fan activity. Fans are highly adept at transmedia, as well as the critical use of different media and platforms. Fandom can apply to wider concepts within new media, the humanities and design, as the authors in this collection show. They also rely on different approaches, ranging from textual analysis to different forms of ethnography. Overall, Affect in Fandom offers a deliberately diverse exploration of exactly what contemporary fans create and curate, and how.

No Japanese leader has dominated Japan's recent political landscape more than the late Abe Shinz.. With the this as the basic premise, the main objective of this compiled volume is to examine and assess Japan's foreign and domestic polices during the 2010s, a decade which largely overlaps with Abe's tenure as prime minister. This book is much more than a mere study of Abe's leadership, however, as it ventures far beyond the traditional scope of diplomatic and political history by incorporating a multidisciplinary approach. As such, the contributors comprise not only historians and political scientists, but also sociologists, economists, legal experts, journalists, and practitioners of diplomacy. This diversity in backgrounds makes it possible to examine a much wider range of topics and themes that clearly illuminate the multitude of challenges that Japan faced in the decade as well as how it responded to those challenges, leading to a more thorough understanding of the path that Japan took in the 2010s.