Migrations and Conquest: Easy Pictures for Complicated Backgrounds in Ancient and Medieval Structures
In case that only very few written sources survived this century, what will be known of our social, political, economic, cultural, or intellectual identities in a far future? Archaeologists excavating the ruins of present-day Europe in the distant future could discover structures confusing to them. The remains of our material culture could be interpreted by our future colleagues as those of a unified world in the northern and parts of the southern hemispheres. Or, as another possibility, would Europe be defined as an American colony or vice versa? Would the models generated be sophisticated enough to describe the complex structures of present-day societies? Could archaeologists or historians believe in migrations and decline, conquering westerners, and conquered, decadent easterners and southerners? Could great American invasions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become an explanation if the industrial areas and more modern city structures of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York appear mightier than those in Europe? Or would our future colleagues believe in a massive Chinese takeover at the beginning of the twenty-first century due to the millions of plastic objects with Made in China on them? Or would they have learned from our discussions and intellectual evolutions in this field of study and try to avoid simple explanations? These considerations have been inspired by Chris Wickham. Wickham tried to criticize simple ethnic identifications of archaeological material and put it like this cum grano salis: And indeed, a man or a woman with a Lombard-style brooch is no more necessarily a Lombard than a family in Bradford with a Toyota is Japanese; artefacts are no secure guide to ethnicity (Wickham 1981, 68). The famous German archaeologist Volker Bierbrauer did not like this too much and considered Wickham’s idea as a joke (Bierbrauer 2004: 48 and note 23).
Exploring visual dysphemisms in pieces of news related to immigrant minors in a Spanish newspaper
This article describes the main visual characteristics used in different multimodal pieces of news related to immigrant minors in the newspaper El País, which is one of the most important newspapers in Spain. The corpus of examples consists of all the pieces of news dealing with immigrant children published from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2011. For the framework of analysis, the study draws on visual grammar and critical discourse analysis. The study reveals that immigrant minors are represented dysphemistically in the multimodal texts analysed so that the most pejorative side of their reality is portrayed. The author thus aims to provide a visual analysis of the way in which immigrant minors are represented visually in a serious Spanish newspaper. In doing so, she aims to show visual ways of manipulation and reinforcing of stereotypes related to immigrants, in general, and immigrant minors in particular.
Time lapse photography of clouds from high altitude balloons.
Time lapse pictures of clouds taken by cameras flown at altitudes of 30 km on balloons provide valuable insights into the convection and electrification of cloud systems. Simple camera arrangements for taking such pictures are described.