Environments are increasingly becoming technologized sites of data production. From smart cities to smart forests, digital networks are analyzing and joining up environmental processes. This commentary focuses on one such understudied smart environment, smart forests, as emerging digital infrastructures that are materializing to manage and mitigate environmental change. How does the digitalization of forests not only change understandings of these environments but also generate different practices and ontologies for addressing environmental change? I first analyze smart forests within the expanding area (...) of smart environments, and then discuss five digital practices that characterize smart forests. Based on this analysis, I suggest that forests are not only becoming highly digital environments but also that forests are transforming into technologies for managing environmental change. Smart forest interventions therefore expand the scope of what could count as a technology, especially in the context of data-oriented planetary governance. (shrink)

This editorial examines how sensing practices are transforming through proliferating sensor technologies and altered sensing relations. Rather than engage with sensing as a project of the human mind or body as usually delineated within sensory classifications, this overview of sensors and sensing practices documents how sensing entities are emerging that are composed of shifting ensembles of multiple humans and more-than-humans, environments and technologies, politics and practices. By decoupling sensing from its exclusive human orientation, the editorial and collection demonstrate how reworked (...) approaches to sensing make it possible to tune in to how involvement with environmental problems unfolds and endures. The collection asks how sensing practices might be crafted that attend to the distributed and accumulative inequalities of environmental problems and to speculate toward differential collectives for addressing environmental crisis and change. (shrink)

Este artigo busca analisar o modo pelo qual a concepção de angolanidade interage com o mais recente processo de angolanização da economia angolana. É realizada uma breve abordagem histórica acerca das políticas culturais e também uma contextualização relativamente à economia política de Angola, abarcando dos anos da luta pela independência angolana até os dias atuais. O trabalho dedica especial ênfase aos anos do pós-guerra civil, quando o tema das políticas culturais, bem como o processo de angolanização, ganham maior ênfase na (...) agenda governamental e, por sua vez, encontram potencialidades e vulnerabilidades ao se relacionar com a histórica construção da angolanidade enquanto identidade nacional. O trabalho explora o modo pelo qual as concepções de angolanidade e angolanização ultrapassam os espectros das políticas públicas que visam, respectivamente, ao setor cultural e ao setor econômico, de modo que transcendem tais fronteiras e integram um complexo governativo que expõe as urgências e a dinamicidade da construção da nação angolana em um contexto pluriétnico. Palavras-chave: cultura; políticas culturais; nacionalismo; angolanidade; angolanização. (shrink)

While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation (...) to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised. (shrink)

The Arabic language has a term, “musta'rib” with a long and varied history. In the genealogical schemes of pre-Islamic antiquity, it indicated those tribes in the Peninsula (the northerners, according to the most wide-spread opinion; but there were those who instead, turning the relationship upside-down, designated southerners in this way), who, as opposed to the pure autocthomic Arabs (al-’Arab al-’âriba) were “assimilated” or “assimilating” to the Arabs, in other words “secondary Arabs” or “Arabized.” Then, in Moslem Spain, as is known, (...) the term served to designate that part of the Iberian population which remained Christian in religion, but culturally was Arabic, that is “Mozarab.” And in modern linguistic usage, mustarib along with mustashriq indicate the Orientalist, and more precisely, the Western Arabist: he who takes as object of his studies the Arabs, and in some way tries to become closer and even assimilated to them (according to the prevailing semantic value of the prefix of the tenth verbal form ista-, to which in fact the original Arabic participle refers). Common to all the evolution of the term then is the meaning of one who is not really and originally an Arab, but who wants to become one and be considered one, whether by pretending Arab blood or by assimilating Arab culture. (shrink)

The influence on the global evaluation of a person based on the perception of a single trait is a phenomenon widely investigated in social psychology. Widely regarded as Halo effect, this phenomenon has been studied for more than 100 years now, and findings such as the relationship between aesthetic perception and other personality traits—such as competence and trustworthiness—have since been uncovered. Trustworthiness plays an especially crucial role in individuals' social interactions. Despite the large body of literature published on the Halo (...) effect, and especially on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness, little is known about the overall generalizability of the effect, as almost all of the studies have been conducted on adult participants from Western countries. Moreover, little is known about the stability of the effect over time, in the event of major destabilization, such as the outbreak of a pandemic. In this work, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Halo effect is investigated before and during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the generalizability and stability over time of the Halo effect is presented. Participants have been asked to rate the aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness of a set of human faces of different ages, gender, and ethnicity. Result of our analysis demonstrated that the Halo effect is influenced by the age of presented faces, but not by their gender or ethnicity. Moreover, our results show that the strength of the effect can be affected by external events and that the volatility is higher for adults' than children's faces. (shrink)

Beschrijving van de verschillende fasen, scholen en vertegenwoordigers van de analytische filosofie, de wijsbegeerte die uitgaat van allerlei vormen van taalgebruik.

The starting point of any inquiry into the relationship between Frederick and the Arabic-Islamic culture goes back to the Arabic-Norman Sicily to which he was bound by the great Constance, by his infancy, by his early adolescence, and by his crown. Despite the fact that he was born by chance in the Marche region and had preferred to spend his adult years in the flat land of Puglia, where he died, it was in Sicily that he first formed the elements (...) of his intellectual personality and culture. The first question to be answered, therefore, is: How much of the Arabian culture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was still alive in Sicily after the survival of both the Moslem domination and the political, religious, ethnical, and social crises by which the last Mohammedan influence upon Sicily had been completely eliminated under the last Norman kings? (shrink)

Thirty-four years have passed since the Discorso de recepcion of the then young Arabist, don Miguel Asin Palacios, was presented in the Spanish Academy; and I still recall the impression of astonishment, admiration and almost alarm which the first reading of the Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia aroused in my father, one of the first to spread the ideas of Asin in Italy—such was the impact of the novelty, the audacity, and the wide range of his thesis and his (...) conclusions. I vaguely recall the discordant voices of both Orientalist and Dante criticism in the heated atmosphere of the centennial celebrations of 1921, the enthusiasm of the neophytes, the scandalised consternation of the idolators, and the profound echo of agreement and disagreement which Asin's book aroused, as surely no other publication of the centenary. Then, everywhere to some extent but above all in Italy, the voices of dissent prevailed, from those of the more or less reasoning and reasonable disbelievers to those of the early believers whose faith began to vacillate, as was the case of my father. Asin answered these, with lively and often cogent dialectic, in his Historia y critica de una polemica. Then the dispute languished and expired, leaving on both sides, as usually happens in these cases, a whole series of misunderstandings which had not been clarified. Among Asin's non-Orientalist critics—even among the most learned of them, and perhaps in the very measure of their learning—the initial prejudice against that strange world remained invincible: that world aberrant in language, custom, place, and civilisation, which the erudite Spaniard had brought into abrupt contact with the Christian-Latin world, the only background against which the figure of Dante had customarily been seen. On the other hand, the conviction was firmly planted in Asin's mind that the opposition to his theory, especially from the Italian point of view, was moved not only (as was indeed quite true) by mental laziness, by horror novi, by intellectual vitalde in the face of the bitter new truth he proposed, but also and above all, by cultural nationalism, by the set purpose of defending at any price a national glory whose originality and hitherto unquestioned greatness had been disparaged. He had been at pains to point out at the end of his book that the poetic glory of Dante was in no way compromised by the close, continuous, and fundamental dependence which he believed he had found between Dante's vision of the other world and Islamic eschatology; even so, Italian pride in the absolute originality of the sacred poem had been hurt, and this, Asin thought, more than any other motive, had inspired the Italian reaction. (shrink)

The most illustrious tradition of romantic poetry on oriental subjects, from the Westöstlicher Diwan to Rückert, Platen, Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, was inspired essentially by Indian and Persian epic, lyric and gnomic poetry, referring only to a minor degree to the ancient poetry of the Arabs—although it is precisely Rückert to whom we are indebted for a version of the Hamâsa, a famous anthology of pagan Arabic poetry. Goethe approached this anthology through the versions of Jones, described it briefly (...) in the “Notes and Commentary” to the Diwan, and among other sections retold one tale splendidly in verse: the “Song of Vengeance” of Taâbbata Sharran. Here the force of his genius lifted him well above the bristling Latin of Freytag, through whom he had come to know the song, and brought him very close in lyrical intuition to the original of this masterpiece of debated authenticity. But on the whole, the poetic heritage of the ancient Arabs was not adequately echoed in the literature of the romantic age. Rückert himself, inspired by pagan Arabic poetry, is read by few people today; and the poetry that was his model is studied rather by philologists, for its documentary value. Theodor Noeldeke, at the beginning of his classic study of the Mu'allakat, declared frankly: “It is questionable whether the aesthetic pleasure provided by the study of ancient Arabic poetry is worth the great pains required even to approach an understanding of the same.” It is difficult to stand in opposition to the authority of the “old master” of German orientalists, who confessed that “the more he studied the Semites, the more he loved the Greeks.” Even the most humble author of these lines dares to appropriate for himself the lines of Noeldeke; and yet, beyond every comparison, which cannot help resulting unfavorably for the ancient poets of the desert, he who knows how to love and seek out poetry will find in them authentic artistic values. Even the harsh pagan song can in certain passages interest us, fill us with enthusiasm, and move us. (shrink)

À l’âge de la catastrophe climatique, le « planétaire » renvoie souvent à des figures, des échelles et des approches censées être universelles de nos troubles terrestres. Les existences et subjectivités planétaires n’ont toutefois aucune évidence : ce sont des formes de responsabilité collective en train de s’inventer. À l’aide de l’analyse du planétaire proposée par Gayatri Spivak et de la reconsidération de l’humain comme praxis proposée par Sylvia Wynter, cet article esquisse la voie d’un devenir planétaire conçu comme une (...) praxis. Un tel projet appelle des articulations pluralistes du planétaire, qui aillent au-delà d’une cohabitation étendue et plus juste. (shrink)

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as (...) a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives. (shrink)