1.
Tartu
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Tartu is the second largest city of Estonia, following Estonias political and financial capital Tallinn. Tartu is often considered the centre of the country, especially since it is home to the nations oldest and most renowned university. The city also houses the Supreme Court of Estonia, the Ministry of Education and Research and it is the birthplace of Estonian Song Festivals. Situated 186 kilometres southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres northeast of Riga, Tartu lies on the Emajõgi, the city is served by Tartu Airport. Since 1918 the Estonian name Tartu has been used, but as the town has come under control of rulers throughout its history. Most of them derive ultimately from the earliest attested form, the Estonian Tarbatu, in German, Swedish and Polish the town has been known and is sometimes still referred to as Dorpat, a variant of Tarbatu. In Russian, the city has known as Юрьев and as Дерпт. Similarly, the city has known as Tērbata in Latvian. Archaeological evidence of the first permanent settlement on the site of modern Tartu dates to as early as the 5th century AD, by the 7th century, local inhabitants had built a wooden fortification on the east side of Toome Hill. The first documented record of the area was made in 1030 by chroniclers of Kievan Rus, yaroslav I the Wise, Prince of Kiev, invaded the region that year, built his own fort there, and named it Yuryev. Kievan Rus again controlled Tartu from 1133 for an unknown period, in the 12th century Tartu was the most notable Slavic settlement in Chud territory. His views have been criticized by historian Ain Mäesalu, subsequently, known as Dorpat, Tartu became a commercial centre of considerable importance during the later Middle Ages and the capital of the semi-independent Bishopric of Dorpat. In 1262 the army of Prince Dmitri of Pereslavl, son of Alexander Nevsky launched an assault on Dorpat and his troops did not manage to capture the bishops fortress on Toome Hill. In medieval times, after the Livonian Order was subsumed into the Teutonic Knights in 1236, in the 1280s Dorpat joined the Hanseatic League. For example, the hall of Dorpat was designed by an architect from Rostock in Mecklenburg, while the university buildings were designed by Johann Wilhelm Krause. Most Germans left during the first half of the 20th century, in particular as part of the Heim ins Reich program of the Nazis, in 1558 the forces of Muscovy led by tsar Ivan the Terrible invaded the region in what became known as the Livonian War. Dorpat was captured without a fight and the bishop was imprisoned in Moscow. In the effect of the Truce of Jam Zapolski of 1582 the city along with southern regions of Livonian Confederation became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1598 it became the capital of the Dorpat Voivodeship of the Duchy of Livonia
2.
Representation (arts)
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Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements, Signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations. Representation has been associated with aesthetics and semiotics, mitchell says representation is an extremely elastic notion, which extends all the way from a stone representing a man to a novel representing the day in the life of several Dubliners. The term representation carries a range of meanings and interpretations, in literary theory, representation is commonly defined in three ways. A representation is a type of recording in which the information about a physical object is described in a medium. The degree to which an artistic representation resembles the object it represents is a function of resolution, since ancient times representation has played a central role in understanding literature, aesthetics and semiotics. Plato and Aristotle are key figures in literary theory who considered literature as simply one form of representation. Aristotle for instance, considered each mode of representation, verbal, visual or musical, therefore, what distinguishes humans from other animals is their ability to create and manipulate signs. Aristotle deemed mimesis as natural to man, therefore considered representations as necessary for learning and being in the world. Plato, in contrast, looked upon representation with more caution and he recognised that literature is a representation of life, yet also believed that representations create worlds of illusion leading one away from the real things. For Plato, representation, like contemporary media, intervenes between the viewer and the real, creating illusions that lead one away from real things, Aristotle went on to say it was a definitively human activity. From childhood man has an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the animals that he is far more imitative. Aristotle discusses representation in three ways— The object, The symbol being represented, manner, The way the symbol is represented. Means, The material that is used to represent it, the means of literary representation is language. An important part of representation is the relationship between what the material and what it represents, the questions arising from this are, A stone may represent a man but how. And by what and by agreement, does this understanding of the representation occur. One apprehends reality only through representations of reality, through texts, discourses, images, consequently, throughout the history of human culture, people have become dissatisfied with languages ability to express reality and as a result have developed new modes of representation. It is necessary to construct new ways of seeing reality, as people only know reality through representation, from this arises the contrasting and alternate theories and representational modes of abstraction, realism and modernism, to name a few
3.
Algirdas Julien Greimas
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Algirdas Julien Greimas, was a French-Lithuanian literary scientist, known among other things for the Greimas Square. He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticians, with his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimass major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the model, the narrative program. He also researched Lithuanian mythology and Proto-Indo-European religion, and was influential in literary criticism. Greimass father, Julius Greimas, 1882-1942, a teacher and later school inspector, was from Liudvinavas in the Suvalkija region of present-day Lithuania and his mother Konstancija Greimienė, née Mickevičiūtė, 1886-1956, a secretary, was from Kalvarija. They lived in Tula, Russia, when he was born and they returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names are Algirdas Julius but he used the French version of his name, Julien. In 1944 he enrolled for study at the Sorbonne in Paris and specialized in lexicography, namely taxonomies of exact. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion, for which he received a PhD in 1949, early on, he also met Roland Barthes, with whom he remained close for the next 15 years. In 1959 he moved on to universities in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, in 1965 he became professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he taught for almost 25 years. He co-founded and became Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Greimas died in 1992 in Paris, and was buried at his mothers resting place, Petrašiūnai Cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania. He was survived by his wife, Teresa Mary Keane, the first work of direct significance to his subsequent research was his doctoral thesis La Mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d après les journaux de modes de lépoque and he published three dictionaries throughout his career. During his decade in Alexandria, the discussions in his circle of friends helped broaden his interests, Greimas proposed an original method for discourse semiotics that evolved over a thirty-year period. His starting point began with a profound dissatisfaction with the linguistics of the mid-century that studied only phonemes and morphemes. These grammatical units could generate a number of sentences, the sentence remaining the largest unit of analysis. Such a molecular model did not permit the analysis of units beyond the sentence, the descriptive procedures of narratology and the notion of narrativity are at the very base of Greimassian semiotics of discourse. His initial hypothesis is that meaning is only if it is articulated or narrativized
4.
Budapest
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Budapest is the capital and most populous city of Hungary, one of the largest cities in the European Union and sometimes described as the primate city of Hungary. It has an area of 525 square kilometres and a population of about 1.8 million within the limits in 2016. Budapest became a single city occupying both banks of the Danube river with the unification of Buda and Óbuda on the west bank, the history of Budapest began with Aquincum, originally a Celtic settlement that became the Roman capital of Lower Pannonia. Hungarians arrived in the territory in the 9th century and their first settlement was pillaged by the Mongols in 1241–1242. The re-established town became one of the centres of Renaissance humanist culture by the 15th century, following the Battle of Mohács and nearly 150 years of Ottoman rule, the region entered a new age of prosperity, and Budapest became a global city after its unification in 1873. It also became the co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a power that dissolved in 1918. Budapest was the point of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, the Hungarian Republic of Councils in 1919, the Battle of Budapest in 1945. Budapest is an Alpha- global city, with strengths in arts, commerce, design, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, services, research, and tourism. Its business district hosts the Budapest Stock Exchange and the headquarters of the largest national and international banks and it is the highest ranked Central and Eastern European city on Innovation Cities Top 100 index. Budapest attracts 4.4 million international tourists per year, making it the 25th most popular city in the world, further famous landmarks include Andrássy Avenue, St. It has around 80 geothermal springs, the worlds largest thermal water system, second largest synagogue. Budapest is home to the headquarters of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, the European Police College, over 40 colleges and universities are located in Budapest, including the Eötvös Loránd University, Central European University and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Budapest is the combination of the city names Buda and Pest, One of the first documented occurrences of the combined name Buda-Pest was in 1831 in the book Világ, written by Count István Széchenyi. The origins of the names Buda and Pest are obscure, according to chronicles from the Middle Ages, the name Buda comes from the name of its founder, Bleda, brother of the Hunnic ruler Attila. The theory that Buda was named after a person is also supported by modern scholars, an alternative explanation suggests that Buda derives from the Slavic word вода, voda, a translation of the Latin name Aquincum, which was the main Roman settlement in the region. There are also theories about the origin of the name Pest. One of the states that the word Pest comes from the Roman times. According to another theory, Pest originates from the Slavic word for cave, or oven, the first settlement on the territory of Budapest was built by Celts before 1 AD
5.
Kingdom of Hungary
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The Kingdom of Hungary was a monarchy in Central Europe that existed from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century. The Principality of Hungary emerged as a Christian kingdom upon the coronation of the first king Stephen I at Esztergom in about the year 1000, by the 12th century, the kingdom became a European middle power within the Western world. The House of Habsburg held the Hungarian throne after the Battle of Mohács until 1918, from 1867 territories connected to the Hungarian crown were incorporated into Austria-Hungary under the name of Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen. The monarchy ended with the deposition of the last king Charles IV in 1918, the kingdom was nominally restored during the Regency of 1920–46, ending with the Soviet occupation in 1946. From 1102 it also included Croatia, being in union with it. Today, the feast day of the first king Stephen I is a holiday in Hungary. The Latin forms Regnum Hungariae or Ungarie, Regnum Marianum, or simply Hungaria, were the used in official documents in Latin from the beginning of the kingdom to the 1840s. The German name Königreich Ungarn was used officially from 1784 to 1790, the Hungarian name was used in the 1840s, and then again from the 1860s to 1946. The non-official Hungarian name of the kingdom was Magyarország, which is still the colloquial, in Austria-Hungary, the unofficial name Transleithania was sometimes used to denote the regions of the Kingdom of Hungary. Officially, the term Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen was included for the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, the Hungarians led by Árpád settled the Carpathian Basin in 895, established Principality of Hungary. The Hungarians led several successful incursions to Western Europe, until they were stopped by Otto I, the principality was succeeded by the Christian Kingdom of Hungary with the coronation of St Stephen I at Esztergom on Christmas Day 1000. The first kings of the kingdom were from the Árpád dynasty and he fought against Koppány and in 998, with Bavarian help, defeated him near Veszprém. The Catholic Church received powerful support from Stephen I, who with Christian Hungarians, Stephen I of Hungary was canonized as a Catholic saint in 1083 and an Orthodox saint in 2000. After his death, a period of revolts and conflict for supremacy ensued between the royalty and the nobles, in 1051 armies of the Holy Roman Empire tried to conquer Hungary, but they were defeated at Vértes Mountain. The armies of the Holy Roman Empire continued to suffer defeats, before 1052 Peter Orseolo, a supporter of the Holy Roman Empire, was overthrown by king Samuel Aba of Hungary. This period of revolts ended during the reign of Béla I, Hungarian chroniclers praised Béla I for introducing new currency, such as the silver denarius, and for his benevolence to the former followers of his nephew, Solomon. The second greatest Hungarian king, also from the dynasty, was Ladislaus I of Hungary. He was also canonized as a saint, however, kingship over all of Croatia would not be achieved until the reign of his successor Coloman
6.
Indiana
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Indiana /ɪndiˈænə/ is a U. S. state located in the midwestern and Great Lakes regions of North America. Indiana is the 38th largest by area and the 16th most populous of the 50 United States and its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th U. S. state on December 11,1816, before becoming a territory, varying cultures of indigenous peoples and historic Native Americans inhabited Indiana for thousands of years. Indiana has an economy with a gross state product of $298 billion in 2012. Indiana has several areas with populations greater than 100,000. The states name means Land of the Indians, or simply Indian Land and it also stems from Indianas territorial history. On May 7,1800, the United States Congress passed legislation to divide the Northwest Territory into two areas and named the section the Indiana Territory. In 1816, when Congress passed an Enabling Act to begin the process of establishing statehood for Indiana, a resident of Indiana is officially known as a Hoosier. The first inhabitants in what is now Indiana were the Paleo-Indians, divided into small groups, the Paleo-Indians were nomads who hunted large game such as mastodons. They created stone tools made out of chert by chipping, knapping and flaking, the Archaic period, which began between 5000 and 4000 BC, covered the next phase of indigenous culture. The people developed new tools as well as techniques to cook food, such new tools included different types of spear points and knives, with various forms of notches. They made ground-stone tools such as axes, woodworking tools. During the latter part of the period, they built mounds and middens. The Archaic period ended at about 1500 BC, although some Archaic people lived until 700 BC, afterward, the Woodland period took place in Indiana, where various new cultural attributes appeared. During this period, the people created ceramics and pottery, an early Woodland period group named the Adena people had elegant burial rituals, featuring log tombs beneath earth mounds. In the middle portion of the Woodland period, the Hopewell people began developing long-range trade of goods, nearing the end of the stage, the people developed highly productive cultivation and adaptation of agriculture, growing such crops as corn and squash. The Woodland period ended around 1000 AD, the Mississippian culture emerged, lasting from 1000 until the 15th century, shortly before the arrival of Europeans. During this stage, the people created large urban settlements designed according to their cosmology, with mounds and plazas defining ceremonial
7.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
8.
Bloomington, Indiana
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Bloomington is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County in the southern region of the U. S. state of Indiana. It is the seventh-largest city in Indiana and the fourth-largest outside the Indianapolis metropolitan area, according to the Monroe County History Center, Bloomington is known as the Gateway to Scenic Southern Indiana. The city was established in 1818 by a group of settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, the population was 80,405 at the 2010 census. The citys population was estimated at 84,067 as of July 2016 by the U. S. Census Bureau, Bloomington is the home to Indiana University Bloomington. Established in 1820, IU Bloomington has 42,630 students, as of September 2014, most of the campus buildings are built of Indiana limestone. Bloomington has been designated a Tree City for 32 years, as of 2015, the city was also the location of the Academy Award-winning 1979 movie Breaking Away, featuring a reenactment of Indiana Universitys annual Little 500 bicycle race. Monroe Countys famous limestone quarries are also featured in the movie, a post office has been in operation at Bloomington since 1825. According to the 2010 census, Bloomington has an area of 23.359 square miles. Bloomington is the sixth largest city in Indiana, based on population, Southern Indiana receives an abundance of rain, with a yearly average of nearly 45 inches. Bloomington is an area of irregular limestone terrain characterized by sinks, ravines, fissures, underground streams, sinking streams, springs and it is situated in the rolling hills of southern Indiana, resting on the intersection of the Norman Uplands and the Mitchell Plain. The relatively varied topography of the city provides a sharp contrast to the terrain more typical of central to northern portions of Indiana. Bloomington is located on a high ground, the summit of the divide between the basins of the West Fork and East Fork of Indianas White River. Accordingly, there are no major watercourses within the city, nor is much groundwater available for wells, the largest stream within the city itself is Clear Creek, with its eastern branch known on the Indiana University campus as Jordan River. Early 20th century damming projects occurred at a number of locations southwest of the city, unfortunately, due to the limestone formations underlying the reservoirs and the dams, water kept seeping from the reservoirs through naturally developing underground channels. Despite all efforts, the city was never able to stop the leakage. By the 1920s, a radical solution was needed to deal with the water crisis. A new reservoir, known as Griffy Lake, was constructed in a more geologically suitable area north of the city, later, in the 1950s, two much larger reservoirs, Lake Lemon and Lake Monroe were created in the northeastern and southeastern parts of Monroe County. Monroe Lake was created by the US Army Corps of Engineers for flood control, but has since used to supply the city
9.
Umberto Eco
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Umberto Eco OMRI was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and he later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault and Lisola del giorno prima. His novel Il cimitero di Praga, released in 2010, topped the charts in Italy. Eco also wrote texts, childrens books, and essays. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont in northern Italy and his father, Giulio, one of thirteen children, was an accountant before the government called him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, Eco received a Salesian education and made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus, during his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Catholic Church. After that, Eco worked as an editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana. A group of artists, painters, musicians and writers. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso and this also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. In September 1962 he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he had a son and he divided his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino. He had a 30,000 volume library in the former and he was a visiting professor at Columbia University several times in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992–1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University, six books that were authored, co-authored, or co-edited by Eco were published by the Indiana University Press. He frequently collaborated with his friend Thomas Sebeok, semiotician and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University and he became Satrap of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 2001. On 23 May 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, in 2009, the University of Belgrade in Serbia awarded him an honorary doctorate. Eco was a member of the Italian skeptic organization Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze CICAP, Eco died at his Milanese home of pancreatic cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years, on the night of 19 February 2016. At the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, in 1959 Eco published his second book, Sviluppo dellestetica medievale, on medieval philosophy. After 18 months military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan
