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I recently worked on a project with Ms Jael Silliman on the last Jews of Calcutta. The Baghdadi Jewish community came to India during the British Raj. Over the years, many of them have emigrated to different parts of the world.

Recently, I was asked to create a map with geolocations for the various South Asian digital humanities projects across the globe. We agreed to use WordPress as the backend for our website, and I got to work on how to display a map on a WordPress page.

Consider the caption from the perspective of the archivist — its value is related to its provenance. The first is created by the archivist at the point it is committed to the digital space. The second — the inherited caption — is inserted at some intermediary point between the creation of the photograph and its commitment to the archive.

In his essay “Magic, Science and Religion”, Bronisław Malinowski contends that every person, no matter how primitive, uses both magic and science. To make this distinction he breaks up this category into the “sacred” and the “profane” or “magic/religion” and science. He theorizes that feelings of reverence and awe rely on observation of nature and a dependence on its regularity.

It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited word of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of any generality (but not outside any transcendence).[1]