Category Archives: Methodology

Circumventing Silences in the Archives of Renaissance Florence

European Renaissance, Methodology

We all know that one scene from many adventure movies. The charismatic explorer, wizened wizard, or inquisitive secret agent – often, but not always, accompanied by a variety of plucky sidekicks and love interests – visits an archive to further their quest. And almost without exception, though seldom without great effort, they do find the log of a person from the (distant) past – preferably a family member or ancestor of one of the available main characters – which tells them exactly what they needed to know.1 Such plot devices may be necessary to help a film move along and they regularly serve relevant themes of ancestry, cooperation, and responsibility. But if we want to understand the past through actual archives, we often learn as much from what the documents and objects therein do not tell us as from what do tell. And the same, rather uncinematically approach will help us today to get to know more about the Italian city of Florence during the European Renaissance.

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On Broken Links and Lost Knowledge

Methodology

Scholarly and scientific research today is in large part dependent on our access to previous research, primary sources, and databases.1 As many of these resources are to a significant extent – if not primarily – consulted through computers, it is no wonder why many learned references are to a web address linking the reader with a location in cyberspace.2 This is not without its drawbacks of course. Books and journals smell infinitely better, for instance, than a toiling hard drive. And have you ever tried penning down notes on a computer screen? You run out of space almost instantly! But those are not the problems we are discussing today – however compelling they might be. Because we are going to talk about the potential loss of knowledge when a link changes after a reference has already been published or, even worse, when the information referenced is no longer available online.

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How One Word Enriched Our Understanding of the Gilgamesh Epic

Ancient Mesopotamia, Antiquity, Methodology

Much of our current knowledge is merely provisional. Specifically in the humanities, we can always encounter new evidence, construct unique theoretical frameworks that support novel interpretations, or make use of the progress in other scientific disciplines.1 And such fresh insights in the humanities can subsequently help us to find even more new evidence, to construct further unique theoretical frameworks, and to aid other scientific disciplines in turn.2 These developments do not always entail that scholars had been wrong before, though – quite the contrary! Our understanding may also be merely expanded or enriched. And this can happen for the most pedestrian of reasons. Even one word can suffice! So today we will discuss how one newly discovered word of the Epic of Gilgamesh ushered in a better understanding of this famous tale from ancient West-Asia.

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In Praise of Secondary Literature

Methodology

Nobody can learn everything. Not only because of the limited storage capacity and processing capabilities of the internal hardware that most call the human brain, but also because it is impossible for most of us to find enough time and (affordable) teachers for any and all subject.1 If one aims to bravely defy such seemingly immovable limitations – something that I am a big fan of, as you can imagine – and go on a never-ending quest for knowledge, it is important to find an entry point into new subjects that fall outside the scope of your earlier education or readings in your spare time. And that is where the specific genres of secondary literature that we will discuss today become useful.

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Where Was Ancient Mesopotamia? The Case for Microecologies

Ancient Mesopotamia, Antiquity, Environmental Humanities, Methodology

That most people do not spend every waking hour contemplating the ultimate origins and regularly shifting meaning of everyday words – especially those of us who are not writing blogs for other’s infotainment – does not mean that this isn’t a very rewarding activity.1 Especially when it comes to area designations which are so ingrained that we hardly think about them, like the ancient Mediterranean or ancient Mesopotamia. Because it can be interesting to work out under which circumstances such large regions during such long eras can fruitfully be denoted with a single label and when this would obscure important subdivisions or local developments. For instance. if one studies people’s relationship to their immediate environment – be it ideologically, economically, or in any other conceivable way – it may be rewarding to break up familiar areas into what is called microecologies.2 And it is this useful methodological tool that I want to discuss with you today. Through this discussion we will also discover the ultimate origins of the label ‘Mesopotamia’ and encounter some of the conspicuous environmental differences within this region in ancient times.

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The Themes of My Favorite Video Games of 2024

Ancient Mesopotamia, Antiquity, Environmental Humanities, Methodology, Philosophy, Video Games

After we discussed my twenty favorite albums of the previous calendar year last week, today I want to introduce you to three games that came out in 2024 and which may be of interest to the readers of this blog. Because the themes present in these products of digital entertainment harken back to subjects that we discussed on Bildungblocks in the past and provide, I hope, a new perspective on them. These are, in my opinion, also the best games of last year. As such, the following discussion doubles as a list with my favorite video games of 2024.

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Scholarship as an Art Form

Methodology

Scholarship, from the hard sciences to the insightful humanities, has been characterized in many different ways since we started to think about this important human activity as an object of study in its own right.1 To name two acclaimed examples: in the early twentieth century BCE, Max Weber denoted science as a vocation, and a few decades afterwards, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized our theoretical notions about the trajectory of the scientific endeavor with his idea of progress in this regard as the shift from and towards different paradigms instead of incremental steps toward a delineated goal that hardly changes.2 All such grand theories about the pursuit of knowledge in a systematic way through communities of dedicated scholars and scientists have their defenders and detractors, and – as with most bold ideas – we can point to many necessary nuances.3 And this is perhaps what makes the works of theorists like Weber and Kuhn so well-known, that we can endlessly debate them. But today, I want to discuss one adjacent idea which is less famous, that of scholarship as an aesthetic or even an art form.

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A.I. and Assyriology

Ancient Mesopotamia, Antiquity, Methodology, Translation Studies

To study Assyriology is both an intellectual joy and an exercise in sadness. The latter may come as a surprise to those who have read my breezy blogs about the fascinating world of the ancient Near East. Because, while it is true that we possess many useful sources from which we have learned a lot over the decades, we still lack a lot of essential information.1 For example, to use the story-based methodologies that can be found within the environmental humanities, with which we aim to establish how the people back then used to think about and deal with nature, we do need some stories.2 When these specific sources have been lost to time, such as with respect to ancient Elam – roughly the southwest and east of modern Iran – applying such methodologies is quite impossible.3 But we should not abandon all hope! Not only are there probably still clay tablets and other documents preserved in undiscovered archeological find spots across the Near East, but there are also thousands of unread fragments of clay tablets, papyri, and the other media just waiting to be studied, which sometimes haven’t been read since they were taken out of the ground. Extensively celebrating the latter reassurance would be premature, though. Because, there are at the moment simply not enough experts to study all these documents – even if they can be read.4 Luckily, we came into some good news recently: A.I., an abbreviation of the term ‘artificial intelligence,’ can be of service! Or can it?

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The Minutiae of Scientific Integrity

Methodology

Scientific integrity might seem obvious and uncomplicated at the surface. You should not commit fraud, plagiarize, or mishandle those involved in your research, be it animals, human beings, or ancient clay tablets.1 Right? But when I was an aspiring young researcher myself, eagerly awaiting whether that new-fangled light bulb-fad would go anywhere, I found myself rather intrigued by some of the aspects of this necessary building block of any academic endeavor. During a course on the subject, I was struck by the heartbreaking and curious stories that were told, as well as by the fascinating questions that could still be asked and would probably not soon get an answer that might satisfy any and all moral intuitions. And today we are going to explore some of these stories and discuss a number of those questions!

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