Content about humanities

Image - Separating the real from the fake

“Return of the Hunters,” an image known to be made by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Dutch master active during the region’s ‘golden era’ in the 1500s. Oxford University art historian Martin Kemp described the painting in Nature as “testimony to the scientific observation of light and geographical features.” Original image in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

 
Pieter Breugel the Elder was a very popular painter, with a huge body of work that was closely imitated — so, there are a lot of outright forgeries.
Now, however, researchers at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, have found a new way to separate the real from the fake, by mathematically analyzing images that are known to be genuine, such as “Return of the Hunters,” and comparing to images whose authenticity is questionable.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Daniel Rockmore describe

Feature - Predicting burglary with the grid

Photo courtesy Andy Fox, stock.exchng

Superheroes like Batman are not the only ones who can make use of sophisticated technology to fight crime. Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, has designed an intricate computer model to forecast burglary rates, which relies on the UK’s National Grid Service (NGS) to provide the necessary computing power.
Predicting crime is a tricky business, because the likelihood of a burglary can depend upon numerous human and environmental factors, all of which affect one another. In an attempt to forecast general trends, Malleson’s model simplifies the complexities surrounding crime prediction by using an “agent-based” model — one in which largely autonomous individuals, or “agents,” make decisions and perform actions which are influenced by the multiple individual factors within their environment.
In his model, potential burglars make decisions a

Feature - The digital story behind the mask

Mak Yong dancer in a 3D body scanner. Courtesy Info Com Development Centre (IDeC) of Universiti putra Malaysia.

Capturing culture in digital form can lead to impressive demands for storage and processing. And grid technology has a role to play in providing those resources. For instance, a 10-minute recording of the movements of a Malay dancer performing the classical Mak Yong dance, using motion-capture equipment attached to the dancer’s body, can take over a week to render into a virtual 3D image of the dancer using a single desktop computer. Once this is done, though, every detail of the dance movement is permanently digitized, and hence preserved for posterity.
The problem, though, is that a complete Mak Yong dance carried out for ceremonial purposes could last a whole night, not just ten minutes. Rendering and storing all the data necessary for this calls for grid computing.
Faridah Noor, an associate professor at the University of

Feature - Grid makes a SPLASH in underwater archaeology

Up to 3.2 million square kilometers of the European continental shelf (about 40 per cent of Europe’s land mass) was exposed as dry land during the periods of lower sea level that persisted throughout the Ice Ages. These now-submerged coastal regions probably played a key role in the survival and dispersal of Europe’s earliest Stone Age inhabitants, the extinction of the last Neanderthals, their replacement by modern humans originating from Africa, and the initial dispersal of agriculture from the Near East. (Insets show local river patterns on the shelf.) Image courtesy Nic Flemming/SPLASH

Submerged beneath the waves lies a large part of human history. For our ancestors, the ancient coastlines were attractive places to settle and experiment with what became the foundations of civilization. As the major glaciers melted between sixteen and six thousand years ago, these sites — where people first began to make fishin

Link of the Week - The Epigonion is heard once more

Music historians believe that the Epigonion's closest relative, was a "psaltery," shown above, a musical instrument that was plucked or hammered. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Image.

As we reported last September in "Ancient musical instrument comes back to life," a harp-like instrument from ancient Greece can now be heard again for the first time in centuries, due to the grid and a computer modelling project known as ASTRA (Ancient Instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application).In the first week of March, after the EGEE User Forum in Catania, Sicily, BBC Radio 4 treated its listeners to an interview with Domenico Vicinanza of ASTRA, in which he described the process of reconstructing this long-lost instrument. 
And you can now hear a full-blown “concert” done in Naples, using virtual epigonions on the grid.  (Note: This may be slow to load, depending on software configuratio

Feature - DANTE dances to the volcano

Doin’ the volcano dance. Image this page and previous page courtesy CityDance Ensemble

In late March, an American modern dance company on tour in Cambridge, England, performed to some truly “earth-shaking” music, created by DANTE engineer Domenico Vicinanza. His collaborators in creating the music were  . . . volcanoes from Italy, Ecuador and the Philippines.Researchers have long sought to predict a volcano’s eruptions by looking for patterns in its seismic behavior. With the use of complex sonification algorithms, Vicinanza found he could take recordings of a volcano’s seismic behavior and translate what he found into audible sound waves, thereby transforming the raw seismic data into something easier to use for predicting eruptions.  Intrigued, Vicinanza went one step further, using the computational power of the grid to convert audible sound waves from multiple volcanoes — Mount Etna, Mount Tungu

  Image of the week - An up-Lift-ing conference Image courtesy of Lift09 Geneva, Switzerland's, upcoming "Lift09 Conference" sounds like Woodstock but with a 21st century twist: Three days of "change, solidarity, love . . . and intense networking . . ."Running from 25 to 27 February, and featuring entrepreneurs, artists, managers, researchers, investors, CEOs, designers and ethnologists (and speakers such as iSGTW contributor Francois Grey and CERN's James Gillies), the conference's goal is to explore the social consequences of new technologies — such as the grid. This year's theme is 'Where did the future go?" The organizers ask: "We were told the future would be about mechanization, computerization, 1984-like nightmares or robots. What did and did not happen? What can we learn from the predictions that never materialized to better look at the future?" Among other items, the agenda features sessions on the relationship between science fiction

Feature - Ancient musical instrument comes back to life

Image courtesy of Seer, scx.hu

An ancient musical instrument can now be heard for the first time in centuries, due to the grid and a computer modelling project.
ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) has recreated the sounds of the Epigonion, a harp-like  musical instrument from ancient Greece.
Most of our knowledge of the Epigonion is based on archaeological finds, historic pictures and ancient literature. It was apparently a wooden stringed  instrument with a sound that modern musicians guess sounded like a modern harp or a harpsichord. The ASTRA team members compiled the sounds of four Epigonion instruments to recreate a medieval musical piece, making this the first time that these instruments have been heard performing together.
Using archaeological data as a starting point, ASTRA team members created a virtual model of the instrument, and then reproduced the sound the instrument ma

Feature - DARIAH: finding love on a grid Love on the wing: digitized pages from 27 Dutch love emblem books are now accessible via the Web. Image courtesy of the Emblem Project UtrechtIn the early 17th century, at the beginning of the Golden Age, elaborately illustrated secular and religious books began appearing on the Dutch market.  They were a hit.Was it the quality artwork? Did people read them for the articles? Or did their popularity stem from their subject matter, everyone’s favorite topic: love. With intriguing images and provocative text, the books helped young readers quickly learn about the many aspects of romance: choosing a partner, marital fidelity and the possible pangs of love.Must modern readers miss out on such wisdom? No!A digital database powered by gridsThe Emblem Project Utrecht, a digital humanities project out of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, is digitizing these books so they can be accessed via the Web.The resource is a welcome asset to scholars from all over the world: just as pa

Feature - Claim jumping through scientific literature Image courtesy of karnatakaforest.gov.in Finding relationships in texts from diverse fields Researchers in search of higher productivity and more effective cross-disciplinary collaboration can add a new tool to their kit. Catherine Blake, an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina , has developed a method for retrieving, analyzing and finding relationships in published research texts from multiple disciplines. Claim Jumping through Scientific Literature, as it is called, enables researchers in a given field to collect relevant published information from other fields of study. Blake’s team analyzed 162,000 documents from a variety of scientific fields using a process called dependency parsing, which analyzes the grammatical structure of sentences to find meaningful relationships among words in different documents. “Generating these results on a high-end desktop computer would h

Image of the week - An environmental activist on the Web The above image shows the minimum pathways (via hyperlinks) from the Web site of an environmental activist organization to other Web sites. Web sites are given initial random positions and modeled as electrostatic charges; hyperlinks between Web sites are modeled as springs.   Image courtesy of VOSON How do we form online networks? How does that influence social interaction and political participation?The Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks, or VOSON, is interested in finding out. VOSON is a Linux-based software that combines web services, data visualization and traditional empirical social science methods to delve in to the patterns we create through online networks. Examples of VOSON research so far includes analysis of environmental activist networks, to better understand the role of emerging issues such as the contestation of nanotechnologythe .au domain, to provide insights into Australian online life as part of the .au Census

Link of the week - Kung Fu Panda digs grids Using grid computing, digital artists working on Kung Fu Panda are performing 75,000 to 100,000 batch-processing jobs each night, each ranging from a few minutes per frame to 15 hours per frame, depending on the rendering complexity of the digital frame sequence.Image courtesy of DreamworksGrid computing isn’t always about saving the world. It can be about creating a new world, in this case, the world of the Kung Fu Panda, a new animation feature by Dream Works to be released in June.Creating animation films like Kung Fu Panda typically requires around 25 million render hours from start to finish. The Dream Works computer farm comprises a 4000-processor Linux cluster, but when their digital artists are all simultaneously pinging the compute cluster to retrieve digital frame data, the system’s input-output comes under a lot of strain.Enter grid computing, in the form of Ibrix parallel file server software. DreamWorks added Ibrix to its animation system about six months ago,