Chronology is an important framing mechanism in history and changes significantly based on who defines historical eras. The area studies field has recently grappled with the need to decenter perspectives and reconsider the sources that scholars use. This article uses deep learning artificial intelligence methods to process 169,634 images from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD), a major archive of photography in the region, as containing a statist chronological logic, one defined by political change in the center. By peering under the hood of the algorithm’s predictions, by thinking with the machine, it is possible to see patterns in the images that may not seem crucial to the human eye. Looking at RGAKFD as a potential source of data for AI raises parallels between algorithmic bias and the Moscow-centric bias of sources, while also providing opportunities to use such methods as a tool for exploratory research.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

The vast majority of Polish citizens lived through World War II and the Holocaust in the countryside. Nevertheless, power relations in rural communities have been largely overlooked by contemporary historiography. This study examines a profoundly liminal position of Polish village heads (sołtysi) in village communities during WWII. These lowest level clerks present in every Polish village faced intractable dilemmas and were often torn between the Nazi regime and their own communities. The case of village heads serves as a prime example of how the German occupier outsourced daily management of the occupation, exploited pre-existing structures and traditions, and used indirect rule in the communities it controlled. The paper discusses the role of village heads in creating the reality of occupation in the Polish countryside and the extent to which these village officials facilitated and participated in the Holocaust. The study is based primarily on early postwar trial documentation, Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, and village community records, most of which originate from the former Radom District of the General Government (today central Poland).

Official Ecuadorian gross domestic product (GDP) data begin in 1950. Prior, only preliminary estimates were available, based on very scattered evidence and broad assumptions. In this paper, we estimate new GDP figures for Ecuador for 1900–50. These are based on the quantitative and qualitative information available for the period, using extensive primary and secondary sources. The new data series allows analysing Ecuador’s economic growth and structural change and comparing them to industrialised core countries and other countries in the region. Unlike previous estimates, our series shows a sustained divergence of Ecuador from the core countries during the first half of the 20th century.

My examination of game play, ludic activity and being playful in immersive Gatsby shows that Gatsby is a typical example of the playification of theatre in the contemporary art scene. In using the term ‘playification’, I refer to the method of incorporating diverse play categories in theatre to motivate audience activity. While much critical attention has been devoted to the controversial nature of active spectating as a practice of audience emancipation, there has been relatively less focus on its play aspect. To develop an understanding of the idea of play in immersive theatre, I refer to the works of Johan Huizinga and Richard Schechner, and apply Schechner's language, which distinguishes play and game in immersive theatre. Moreover, in developing Schechner's vocabulary in the context of immersive theatre, I expand my scope of reference to include the insights of game theorists.