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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.

From a semio-pragmatic perspective and drawing on an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, this book analyses how the audiovisual thinking process manifests itself in essay films. It explores how issues of subjectivity and identity, whether individual, social, political or cultural, prompt thought through the medium of cinema. The volume discusses the European Francophone essay film from its first appearance in cinematic modernity to the present. The study is developed in three stages. The first analyses the intermedial forms that are used: the letter, the (self-)portrait, the dialogue, the diptych, etc. The second examines the audiovisual materials that are mobilised. The third addresses the audiovisual procedures that are generated. In its analysis of works by Marker, Godard, Akerman, Varda and others, this book offers a new and detailed understanding of the production, evolution and achievements of the essay film in Francophone Europe.

This book explores early modern Italian women as agents of doubt. While women were often considered prone to doubt as a result of their natural "weakness," the essays gathered here reverse this view, demonstrating how women were able to embrace doubt as a means to expand their agency. Using doubt to contest both official narratives as well as religious and civil practices, women were able to carve out a space of their own in contemporary culture and society. The volume covers a period from the late fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, offering critical insight into early modern doubt and investigating how doubt, like other categories of thought, could be gendered. Contributors address the topics of doubt and the Querelle des Femmes, religion, writing, and social networks. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to early modern doubt, combining gender studies with religious history, the history of literature, social history, and the history of science.

Digital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies still be effectively governed? This book brings together insights from various disciplines to address the pressing question: "How can we develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies that are organized democracies?" Governing the Digital Societypresents a range of governance approaches, focusing on online platforms, artificial intelligence, and the public values that underpin these technologies. The authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media. Expert interviews provide additional insights into ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of governing digital societies. The book demonstrates that governance is not just a technical or legal process but a complex societal one, embedding norms, values, and morality into our institutions and daily lives.

This volume examines the emerging exhibition complex on Chinese art in early twentieth-century China, and from the mid-1950s onwards, the cultural politics involved in Asia with the exhibitions of traditional and modern Chinese art in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also scrutinizes the curatorial practices that have influenced the interpretation and display of Chinese art amidst the advance of media technology and heritage engagement in the twenty-first century. Situated within ongoing debates on global art history, the volume is inclusive of multiple geo-cultural perspectives, and the dynamic practices that relate art tradition or heritage to more universal spatiotemporal art experience and engagement. It extends the understanding of exhibitions of Chinese art not only as multiple historical processes culturally and politically negotiated and contested by contending forces and diverse actors in the region, but also as creative interventions to engage people around the globe in the present.

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the tenth to the fourteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

The identification of ceramic imports within prehistoric and historic assemblages has long been the primary indicator for identifying connections between different sites and regions. Yet this has fostered a presence/absence diagnosis for contact between different communities. Approaches such as post-colonial perspectives and network analysis, which focus on the nature of the connections, are now beginning to offer more meaningful ways of considering past interactions. These approaches can bridge the traditional divide between "prehistoric" and "historic" and offer a valuable contribution to the wider study of past interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. The geographical or topographical setting of an archaeological site is often acknowledged as an important factor in their significance or how well connected the community was within the cultural landscape. But to what extent do geographical categories such as "island," "coast," "mainland" or "hinterland" influence modern ideas on the dynamics of these ancient communities? This volume uses ceramic studies across multiple spatial and diachronic scales to provide new insights into the connectivity of ancient Mediterranean communities.

Human beings have always been concerned with fundamental questions about their selves, including the deeply personal nature of human experience, the persistence of the self over time, the relation between mind and body, and the interdependence between self and community. The goal of this volume is to rethink these questions against the backdrop of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering the ideas of major thinkers from Classical to late imperial China, with a particular focus on the fact that human experience is necessarily characterized by the first-person perspective. The contributors to this volume employ different methods (historical, comparative, phenomenological), but they all aim at bringing the rich resources of Chinese philosophy to life in our global present.

In the context of modern global exchanges, an imagined and essentialised notion of 'East Asia' has served as both a source of inspiration and a catalyst for new connections, extending beyond the geographic boundaries of China, Japan, and Korea. This volume explores the global circulation of practices, technologies, and ideas identified as 'East Asian' in alternative therapies and spiritual practices since the 1970s. Case studies range from the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into Brazilian naturopathy to self-development seminars promoting Korean national identity. Rather than focusing on questions of authenticity, the book uniquely interrogates how and why the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea have been invoked over the last fifty years to promote specific therapeutic, spiritual, and political agendas worldwide.

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.

This book provides a thorough revision of the image of the public church under the Dutch Republic after the Peace of Westphalia and before the onset of the 'high Enlightenment'. Traditional church history considers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of decline. Yet this was the high tide of Dutch expansion when Dutch society was extremely rich. In its five universities and its highly literate population internationally acknowledged scholarship, arts and sciences flowered. Did really nothing of all this vitality rub off on the public religion? Rather than the traditional static image of a rather joyless and ossified orthodoxy, an exploration of the interface between the Reformed church and Dutch society at large reveals a religious culture that had much to offer to various audiences, in the sphere of knowledge production as well as in the form of spiritual solace and everything in between.