DocuSky is a personal digital humanities platform for humanities scholars, which aims to become a platform on which a scholar can satisfy all her digital needs with no direct IT assistance. To this end, DocuSky provides tools for a scholar to download material from the Web and prepare (annotating, building metadata) her material, a one-click function to build a full-text searchable database, and tools for analysis and visualization. DocuSky advocates the separation of digital content and tools. Being an open platform, it encourages IT developers to build tools to suit scholars’ needs, and it has already incorporated several popular Web resources and external tools into its environment. Interoperability is ensured through the format DocuXML. In addition to describing the design principles of DocuSky, we will show its main features, together with several important tools and examples. DocuSky was originally developed for Sinological studies. We are enriching it to work in other languages.

A variety of databases, tools and platforms have created the foundation for digital scholarship in Chinese studies. The creators of some open-access projects introduce their work below, but first I offer some notes on the kinds of utilities that make up the expanding digital universe.

The Shiji (史記 Records of the Grand Historian) is of great value for Chinese history before 90 BCE. Many online databases provide character-based search of the Shiji. We go beyond simple search by creating an word-based open-access database of the Basic Annals (本纪) of the Shiji that allows the exploration of relationships between persons and the relationships between persons and named places.

Biographies constitute the main historical record of China. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is an important project that tackles this vast biographical material with digital technologies. With both online and offline versions, CBDB is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis, as well as serving as biographical reference. Through the wide range of data it collects through mining historical texts and reference sources, CBDB offers multiple ways to examine the lives of past groups and individuals in Chinese history. The use of CBDB data for prosopographical and other types of analysis has generated important work that interprets Chinese history in new ways, and has also fostered new forms of digital humanities collaborations. This article introduces the history of the CBDB project and its methods for populating its biographical data. It also presents the ways that historians and other scholars could utilize its data for research and teaching.

This study brings the voices of Chinese Muslim modernists back into discussions on polygamy in the Republican era. Starting from the late nineteenth century, abolishing the practice of polygamous marriage became a vital component of Chinese modernizing elites’ vision of modern Chinese society, as they saw polygamy as an obstacle to modernization. Chinese Muslim modernists actively engaged in China's struggle with polygamy. Their dynamic discussions on polygamy were not insignificant and peripheral. On the contrary, when the Republican law promoting monogamy was hard to implement, some Chinese Muslim modernists pushed their fellow Muslims to set examples for other Chinese to obey the law. The Chinese translations of Arabic scholarly work even helped some Chinese Muslim modernists take a different approach to the issue of polygamy by arguing that polygamy, if properly regulated, could be beneficial to modern societies.

The turbulent years around c. 1200 BC in the eastern Mediterranean are known as a period of the collapse of states and empires. Yet by zooming in on three important royal cities, Tiryns, Hattusa and Carchemish, we can question this collapse narrative whilst at the same time exploring the now popular concept of resilience, in this case urban and cultural resilience. First these ancient cities are presented as interactive and meaningful spaces in which architecture and art were used to shape people's experience of them and the world in which they lived, before their urban fabric and functions are examined in turn. It will become clear that they had radically different fates through c. 1200 BC. Some of the difficulties in applying ideas from resilience thinking and how it might or might not be useful as an approach in studying these and other examples are then discussed.

How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms such had/’d better, would/’d rather or might (as) well are seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly, will probably) or not (could also, might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv) is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types of mod + adv is a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.

In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Britain, and, most importantly, his perspectives on British society, institutions, goods, and forms of leisure. I argue that Dikko, though constrained by serving as a prop in a colonial performance of power, used travel to Britain as a platform to advance metropolitan modernity as an aspirational if distant model of socioeconomic advancement and to give his peers and subjects in Northern Nigeria a textual reference for navigating colonial culture in relation to their own natal Islamo-Hausa cultural norms.

In 1962 a team of scientists conducted their first joint fieldwork in a Xavante village in Central Brazil. Recycling long-standing notions that living Indigenous people represented human prehistory, the scientists saw Indigenous people as useful subjects of study not only due to their closeness to nature, but also due to their sociocultural and political realities. The geneticists’ vision crystalized around one subject – the famous chief Apöwẽ. Through Apöwẽ, the geneticists fixated on what they perceived as the political prowess, impressive physique, and masculine reproductive aptitude of Xavante men. These constructions of charismatic masculinity came at the expense of recognizing how profoundly colonial expansion into Mato Grosso had destabilized Xavante communities, stripping them of their land and introducing epidemic disease. The geneticists’ theorizing prefigured debates to come in sociobiology, and set up an enduring research programme that Apöwẽ continues to animate even four decades after his death.

Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.

This article deals with marriage as mobilized by the Ethiopian Empire as part of its consolidation processes after 1941. It particularly concentrates on post-liberation anxiety and how the Ethiopian Empire envisioned tackling this disquiet by reforming marriage. Within the context of (re)building the empire, policies, laws, and discourses around monogamous marriage instilled normative ideas to produce the imperial subjects — procreative and productive — that a modernizing empire required. Sex was articulated within the confines of a heterosexual union, not only as a legitimate act but also as a responsibility of couples who were accountable for the consolidation of the empire. Sexual relations out of marriage were condemned as a source of degeneracy and the ensuing danger that confronted the empire. New laws were introduced to legislate sex to tackle the unease the empire felt about non-normative sex and associated pleasure(s). What started out as a battle against the Italian legacy continued more forcefully in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of ‘new problems’ that educated young women and men posed. The article relies on a range of sources such as policy, legal, religious, and travel documents; newspapers; and novels, as well as self-help books produced between the 1940s and 1960s.

This article uses Czechoslovakia as an example of the process of transition following the end of the First World War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. It analyzes the military context of the transition itself, showing how difficult, violent, and prolonged a process it was, in contrast to the traditional assumption of a quickly emergent successor state built on the ethnic-based enthusiasm of its Czech-speaking population. In the second part, it goes on to analyze the memory of the transition and the position it came to hold in the overall narrative of this period of the interwar years, with specific attention given to the way Czech-speaking veterans of Austro-Hungarian service tried to retell the story of the transition, and why their proposed narratives ill-fitted the official discourse of the war as the “national struggle for independence” of Czechoslovakia.

Yod-coalescence involving alveolar consonants before Late Modern English /uː/ from earlier /iu > juː/ is still variable and diffusing in Present-day English. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives both (/tj dj/) and (/ʧ ʤ/) British English pronunciations for tune (/tjuːn/, /tʃuːn/), mature (/mǝˈtjʊǝ/, /mǝˈʧʊǝ/), duke (/djuːk/, /dʒuːk/) and endure (/ᵻnˈdjʊə/, /ɛnˈdjʊə/, /ᵻnˈdʒʊə/, /ɛnˈdʒʊə/, /ᵻnˈdjɔː/, /ɛnˈdjɔː/, /ᵻnˈdʒɔː/, /ɛnˈdʒɔː/). Extensive variability in yod-coalescence and yod-dropping is not recent in origin, and we can already detect relevant patterns in the eighteenth century from the evidence of a range of pronouncing dictionaries. Beal (1996, 1999) notes a tendency for northern English and Scottish authors to be more conservative with regard to yod-coalescence. She concludes that we require ‘a comprehensive survey of the many pronouncing dictionaries and other works on pronunciation’ (1996: 379) to gain more insight into the historical variation patterns underlying Present-day English.

This article presents some results from such a ‘comprehensive survey’: the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP). Transcriptions of all relevant words located are compared across a range of eighteenth-century sources in order to determine the chronology of yod-coalescence and yod-dropping as well as internal (e.g. stress, phoneme type, presence of a following /r/) and external (e.g. prescriptive, geographical, social) motivations for these developments.

Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

This article explores some aspects of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision on Nevsun Resources v Araya in the light of its exposition on the act of state doctrine and application of core human rights as an integral aspect of international customary law and common law. It examines the Nevsun decision in the context of recent statutory developments in France and the Netherlands, the promised law reform in the European Union, and the proposed business and human rights treaty. I argue that it is high time to abandon the doctrinal fossil that human rights obligations do not apply to corporate governance and operations. It is hoped that COVID-19 contexts, and a post-pandemic world, will expeditiously result in the willing adoption of a treaty on business and human rights.