Robert-Goldwater-Library

Mapping the Worlds of 16th century Mexico

Title
Codex Reese. [left quarter]

Published/Created
n.p.
ca. 1565.

Physical Description
1 ms. map : hand col. ; 72.5 x 177.5 cm.

Call Number
WA MSS S-2533

Notes
Nahuatl map on maguey paper documenting agricultural holdings in the Valley of Mexico, probably fields of bulrush or maize under the colonial jurisdiction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, ca. 1565. [READ ON...]

via Diana Fane (thanks!):

Announcing:
MAPPING THE WORLDS
of sixteenth-century Mexico

A symposium at Yale University
September 15 & 16, 2006

The recent discovery of a sixteenth-century Mexican land map in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library provides the starting point for this Yale-sponsored symposium. Drawn by indigenous artists and probably commissioned by the Spanish colonial government, the map is one of the earliest depictions of New Spain. Symposium participants will cover a broad range of topics relevant to studies of the early colonial period in Central Mexico, including the changing politics of land usage, the role of women in society, and the place of religious institutions in the Nahua-Christian world. The symposium will also examine other related manuscripts from 16th-century Mexico and their social, cultural, and visual contexts.

Sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Council on latin American & Iberian Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and the Department of the History of Art, Yale University.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Friday September 15
A keynote lecture by Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University

Reception to follow.

Saturday September 16
Speakers scheduled to appear:

Dennis Carr, Yale University; Maria Casteñeda de la Paz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Jaime Lara, Yale Divinity School; Diana Magaloni, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Mary Miller, Yale University; Barbara Mundy, Fordham University; Matthew Robb, Yale University; Gordon Whittaker, Göttingen University.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Museums and the Web 2006 Conference

From March 22nd to 25th Albuquerque, New Mexico, will host the 2006 Museums and the Web conference. The conference "addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture and heritage on-line." According to the conference web site,

Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural and natural heritage. Together, we look ahead to the transformation of communities and organizations.

MW2006 features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional fora, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours. (See the description of Presentation Formats for more details.)

While the conference is hosting its own blog, blogger Tyler Green points on in his Modern Art Notes blog to a livelier discussion on the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives blog.

The conference includes a workshop on museums and blogs, Blogs and Blogging for Museums, featuring (what a surprise!) three speakers from the Walker Art Center. Of perhaps more-than-passing interest is a paper entitled All Weblogs Are Not Created Equal: Analyzing What Works (full text), delivered by Daniel Mosquin. Social museum web applications (aka Web 2.0) will be covered in a mini-workshop entitled Community Sites and Emerging Sociable Technology.

 

"Negotiated meaning"

And then this from Shifted Librarian:

Observations from Internet Librarian 2005 by Jenny Levine

... I really enjoyed Will Richardson’s keynote, and I’m especially intrigued by his advocacy to teach students “negotiated meaning.” Librarians are all about negotiated meaning, and I think it’s a vital role we can be aggressive in filling. It was heartbreaking to hear Will describe a scenario in which teachers and students use RSS feeds of persistent searches in Google News or Yahoo News, because he couldn’t tell them to use feeds from library resources instead. We absolutely have to change this ...

What came through loud and clear at this conference (titled, appropriately enough, “Shifting Worlds”) is that libraries need to continue shifting to where their users are and need to become part of their users’ online, trusted network. Nothing new for readers of this blog, but as I said in my five minutes on the tech trends panel, this is the year libraries finally started doing this and doing it well. Libraries can finally participate using free tools, we have some great models, let’s get to it.

Managing Digital Assets forum

From Hangingtogether.org [with emphasis added]:

In Using up our words ...  Jim Michalko, the president of RLG, summarizes the highlights of the recent Association of Research Libraries membership meeting last week and a forum titled Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries that ARL co-sponsored with CNI, CLIR and DLF:

The highlight of the ARL meeting was a valedictory speech by William Bowen, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He spoke about Portico (a Mellon initiative to create a long-term archive for e-journals and other digital resources) and other Mellon initiatives. His speech covered the history and trajectory of the Mellon initiatives that have spun off as independent entities - JSTOR, ARTstor, Ithaka, and Portico. For me the most interesting bits of the talk were his high-level concluding observations which he titled “From 36,000 feet”. I’d urge you to take a look at them. These concluding remarks are important observations for our community even without knowing the Mellon context. Read them.

The highlight of the Managing Digital Assets forum was the opening keynote by Don Waters (Program Officer, Scholarly Communications, Mellon Foundation) ... The most recent version of the talk is now on the ARL server.

Some things that struck me in hearing this version of the speech were the decisiveness with which a future for Open Access journal publishing was dismissed, the firmness in his conclusion that scholarly information resources must be aggregated to fulfill their digital potential, and the absolute conviction with which he warned institutions that they will need to get comfortable with “outsourcing” what they used to hold closely. This last point echoed some of Bill Bowen’s comments during the earlier meeting about the need to get past library and institutional thinking to consideration of system-wide issues and solutions. And as Don made his points he also made it clear that the secrecy and nature of the deals struck by the Google5 universities may represent a squandering of the public trust that they built up over many decades ...

Jim concludes that "the LAM [Libraries, Archives and Museums] community is in danger of using up all its good words. We’ve devalued (or had devalued by others) pretty much all the ones that are useful - library, archive, repository, asset, etc. Substantive interactions on these topics now need to be prefaced by a vocabulary calibration which will then be good only for the duration of that discussion." 

And on 'the need to get past library and institutional thinking', "the call for system-wide action which echoed across the meeting days does not necessarily require new organizations or institutions. There are a number already on the landscape that are, in fact, controlled by the community. With leadership, will, and perhaps a bit of funding, these organizations can effectively discharge some of the requirements for the future that the community is now identifying." [Read the complete post]

Image sources: Bowen image / Waters image

 

 

Contemporary African art forum Dec. 4-6 in Cape Town

From the CAPE: Contemporary African Culture web site:

CAPE’s first international art forum, SESSIONS eKAPA 2005, brings together artists, cultural practitioners, curators, researchers, critics and historians of contemporary African art and the diaspora in Cape Town, South Africa on 4-6 December 2005.

Cape Town is both the site of SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 and its context. Consisting of three days of discussions, workshops, interventions and site-specific mini-laboratories that take place throughout Cape Town, SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 will draw on the city’s unique urban fabric as a laboratory in which to explore and experiment with contemporary African art practice.

Local (in time and place) and global (in information flows), the meeting comes at a crucial junction. It follows a series of major exhibitions and conferences of contemporary African art at venues across the world, and precedes CAPE’s first art manifestation, set to take place in Cape Town in 2006. As such, SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 asks: where we have come from, what moment we are in and – in the words of poet Christopher Okigbo – “How we shall go?" Under the theme “Mzantsi: (re)locating contemporary African art practice” the forum explores African art practices, and interrogates their location in terms of medium, geography, their production through economic relations and practices of curation, and their relation to the everyday, the social, and the political ... [read more]

Day 1 explores alternative models of large scale curation, the problems and potentialities of the exhibition as art practice in Africa, and the framing of Africa in contemporary exhibitions and cultures of display ... Day 2 sets in motion an experiential engagement with the city itself: several mini-laboratories curated and produced by diverse cultural practitioners and activists will use site-specific or route-specific  discussions, performances, activities and interventions to provoke conversations about the nature and location of African art practice, the tactical use of urban topographies, and social and cultural practices of identity ...Day 3 interrogates art activism and the art institution, as well as the availability and comparability of African forums for conversation about art practice. The day ends with an open discussion that brings together participants from the preceding sessions ... [see the full program here [PDF file]]

To attend SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 please fill out the registration document available here, and return to Tribal Meetings at the contact details below ... Final registration is by 14 November 2005.

For any enquiries regarding registration, contact Tribal Meetings:
tel (27 21) 697 0180  |  fax (27 21) 697 0627  |  e-mail [email protected]

European Association of Mayanists Conference

Wayeb, the European Association of Mayanists, will hold their 10th annual conference December 5-10, 2005, in Leiden, the Netherlands. Co-sponsored Leiden University (Faculty of Archaeology, CNWS) and the National Museum of Ethnology at Leiden, the conference will combine a workshop on Maya hieroglyphic writing (Dec. 5-8) and a two-day long symposium (Dec. 9-10). The symposium, entitled The Maya and their Neighbours - Internal and External Contacts Through Time, will feature papers by two dozen European and North American scholars.

Programs, abstracts and papers of past conferences are available on the Wayeb web site.

Online registration is open through Nov. 30.

The uses and abuses of archaeology for Indigenous peoples

The World Archaeological Conference is sponsoring its Second Indigenous Inter-Conference on the topic of The Uses and Abuses of Archaeology for Indigenous Peoples. The conference will be held November 8-12, 2005, at the University of Auckland, Auckland.

WAC focuses on the importance of the historical and social role and the political context of archaeological inquiry, and seeks to make studies in archaeology significant to the wider community of individuals, groups, and nations. In keeping with these aims, WAC presents this Indigenous Inter-Congress as a means of providing a forum for examining a range of issues concerned with Indigenous peoples and their pasts.

Session titles (with links to the session abstracts) include:

• Who is Indigenous?
• Indigenous Paths to Archaeology
• Relationships between archaeologists, teaching institutions, heritage organisations, and Māori
• The Representation Of Indigenous Peoples In Archaeological Theory
• Museums: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Protecting Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property
• Repatriation: Issues for Communities
• Resolving The Conflicts Between Archaeological And Indigenous Significance In Heritage Assessments
• Parallel Perspectives
• The NAGPRA: Triumphs, Trials, and Tribulations Voices from Indian Country    
• Contemporary Issues in Indigenous Archaeology      
• International Repatriation: building relationships and empowering communities

The call for session paper abstracts closed Sept. 1, 2005. The programme includes an all-day mid-conference field trip. Participants may register for the conference on-line (Early-Bird registration is good until October 1). For further information on the conference, you are invited to contact either conference organizer, Caroline Phillips or Des Kahotea.                                                 

12th Panafrican Congress

The 12th Congress of the Panafrican Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related Studies was held July 3-10, 2005, in Gaborone, Botswana.

The conference programme (!) and session abstracts are available from the conference web site as downloadable Word documents. Among the topics covered were Archaeology of the Shahse-Limpopo and Adjacent Areas; Ethnoarchaeology; Heritage Management and Development; and Rock and Symbolic Behaviour.

The final papers will be published at an unspecified future date.

PAA International Symposium

The Pacific Arts Association will hold its eighth International Symposium from July 19-23, 2005, in Salem, Massachusetts. The symposium, entitled Pacific Diasporas: People, Art and Ideas on the Move, will be held at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Since the arrival of the earliest voyagers, people, art/objects, and ideas have been continually on the move within, beyond, and back to the Pacific. The extensive holdings at Peabody Essex Museum foster dialogue about collections and collecting, both historically and in the present; of repatriation issues; of strategies within the Pacific to recapture cultural traditions and histories, and encourage, collect or showcase contemporary art in new cultural centers; of the lives of Pacific Island artists, scholars, and collectors, past and present, including those transplanted to other lands in the Pacific, to North America and/or Europe; of the impact of new and expanding technologies, markets, and telecommunications, as well as cross-cultural artistic exchanges taking place around the world.

Those interested in attending the conference may register online.

Conference on Philippine Cultural Exchange

The Ayala Museum (Makati City, Philippines) will host a three-day seminar entitled Manila, World Entrepôt: 16th-19th Century Exchange of Objects Between Asia, Europe and the Americas from July 8-10, 2005, at the Ayala Museum. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Museum's inaugural exhibitions, Power + Faith + Image: Philippine Art in Ivory from the 16th to the 19th Century and Multiple Orginals, Original Multiples: 19th-Century Images of Philippine Costumes.

The three-day symposium will focus on the linkages and exchanges of objects and influences between Asia, Europe and the Americas during the 400-year Spanish colonial period and early American colonial period in the Philippines, with special reference to convergences in art and architecture, linguistics and material culture.

For inquiries contact Aprille Tijam at [email protected]