This response essay engages with the themes of space, sociality, and sources (of pleasure and of scholarship) in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article in this issue, “The Hidden Face of Surat.” I reflect on how the Persianate adab that was a dominant cultural form in this port city might cause us to mitigate our analytical concepts when approaching phenomena from different historical contexts. I propose historical inquiry as a form of translation, to look for ways of...

The database constitutes a comprehensive set of settlement polygons nationwide. It is in geodatabase format and consists of three feature classes for built up areas (BUA), small settlement areas (SSA), and hamlets (hamlets). This work has been undertaken as part of the Geo-referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development (GRID3) initiative in Malawi. GRID3 works with countries to generate, validate and use geospatial data on population, settlements, infrastructure, and subnational boundaries. For more information, see...

India is the second-worst affected country in the world by COVID-19 pandemic. Although the Government of India took various initiatives to curb the spread of coronavirus in the country which included a 3-week nation-wide lockdown to begin with (from March 25 to April 14) and which later was extended thrice up until May 31, 2020, increasing testing, setting up quarantine facilities, COVID-19 treatment facilities, contact tracing through Aarogya Setu application and many more, but these...

New York City continues to face an unprecedented affordable housing crisis in the recent years as a result of contextual, ideological, and economic variables which have long influenced its development and expansion over the years. In this study, focus is placed on the contextual background of housing policies which subsequently paved the way for the urban affordable landscape we have today. Three neighborhoods are picked to perform closer case study analysis, those of Bensonhurst, Borough...

More than any other period in the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages were informed by translation. Practices of translation pervaded and underlay every aspect of medieval culture and politics. Yet, our understanding of how medieval writers thought about translation remains profoundly lacking. Most contemporary histories of translation theory choose to neglect the Middle Ages entirely, or to turn them into a footnote to Jerome’s distinction between “sense-for-sense” and “word-for-word” translation. Consuming the Word...

Data-driven discovery of dynamics, where data is used to learn unknown dynamics, is witnessing a resurgence of interest as data and computational tools have become widespread and increasingly accessible. Advances in machine learning, data science, and neural networks are fueling new data-driven studies and rapidly changing the landscape in almost every field. Meanwhile, classical numerical analysis remains a steady tool to analyze these new problems. This thesis situates emerging works coupling machine learning, neural networks,...