Parallel Narratives? Photographs in Boer Women’s Wartime Testimonies
Discussion here draws on our wider joint research about women’s testimonies of the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 South African War.1 Our research has focused, amongst other things, on a network of women cultural entrepreneurs whose activities in ‘working up’ Boer women’s testimonies as ‘the facts’ played an important part in the politics of Afrikaner proto-nationalism until the late 1930s. The research shows that these Boer women’s testimonial narratives, while presented as entirely factual, cannot be classed straightforwardly as either fact or fiction, but instead inhabit an ‘in-between’ area, with their factual claims – claims which may but sometimes may not be ‘true facts’ – often supported by what Eakin (1985) calls fictive devices.
Simulacrum Diaries: Time, the “moment of writing,” and the diaries of Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo
Abstract Diary writing is popularly defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin the kind of knowledge diaries are often understood to “hold.” The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to “entries” in them.This article explores “what happens” to the knowledge a diary is seen to hold when its ontological basis is disturbed by its assumed “present-ness” being shown to be an artful (mis)representation. The case study discussed concerns the published diary Het Concentratie-Kamp van Irene (The Irene Concentration Camp, 1905), as well as the manuscript diary, and the letters written concurrently with the preparation of the former for publication, of a South African woman, Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo. The diary deals with the author's experiences during six weeks spent as a volunteer worker in Irene concentration camp during the 1899–1902 South African War. In the secondary literature, knowledge claims about the Van Warmelo-Brandt diary not only assume referentiality but also the temporal synonymity of “the moment of writing” with “the scene of what is written about.” In particular, the assumption is that the time of its writing, narrative time in each diary entry, and the temporal location of the writer in relation to the diary entries, are all “of the moment.” However, important temporal disjunctures exist between the Brandt manuscript and published diary. Detailed examples are examined by unpacking the “moments of writing” of the manuscript and the published diary, by reference to family letters written by Brandt-Van Warmelo over the period the diary was being prepared for publication. In doing so, we develop the idea of a “simulacrum diary” in thinking about the relationship between the published and manuscript diaries and the complexities of their moments of writing.
Effect of spray nozzle design on liquid-solid contact in fluidized beds
Abstract In industrial fluid cokers the feedstock, consisting of heavy bituminous hydrocarbons, is atomized with steam and injected into a hot fluidized bed of coke. Good and uniform contact of the liquid droplets with the solid particles is required to provide heat for the cracking reactions while minimizing mass transfer effects. Experiments in a pilot plant coker have suggested that the initial particle/liquid mixing, in the spray jet, is rather poor. Experiments in a X-ray scanner showed that liquid droplets and entrained particles accumulate just below the tip of the jet plume to form agglomerates. An experimental technique was used to quantitatively determine the quality of mixing with a variety of nozzle configurations including several novel designs. By improving spray stability, redistributing liquid droplets to the solids-rich region of the jet and increasing the surface area of the gas–liquid jet-fluidized bed interface, liquid/solid contact is improved.