Part 1

• Java’s sugar industry: evolution, resilience, and scientific progress Tatas Hardo Panintingjati Brotosudarmo Universitas Ciputra Surabaya

  The first industrial revolution propelled by sugar’s influence on metallurgy, technology, and science shaped Java’s sugar industry. By 1885, amid an international crisis, Java’s advanced sugar factories, established between 1850s-1880s, displayed adaptability through a flexible proto-industrial matrix. Colomadu’s pioneering ‘Triple Effect’ machine in 1861 exemplified resilience in the face of economic challenges, with subsequent adoption by other factories reflecting industry-wide determination. Scientific influence in Java is evident through Dutch experimental stations, aligned with biologist Hugo de Vries’ emphasis on scientific progress, fostering sugar cane improvement and showcasing the correlation between scientific research and agricultural resilience. Examining Mangkunegara IV’s philosophy highlights the crucial role of knowledge in overcoming life’s challenges, resonating with the Javanese worldview of “numinous unity.” His emphasis on knowledge mirrors the broader theme of technology adoption for resilience in Java’s sugar industry, underscoring the intertwined nature of scientific progress and societal resilience.

• The Mangkunegaran: epitomizing modern independent Indonesian government as one of the traditional Javanese principalities Frank Dhont National Cheng Kung University

  The paper explores the transformation of the Mangkunegaran as one of the traditional
  Javanese principalities on Java and how in the 20 th century its royal house ruled and paired its
  Javanese tradition and heritage with the modernizing conceptual movement of an independent
  Indonesia. Through a careful examination of historical sources, the paper supports the project
  of social transformation of the Mangkunegaran continuing into the 21 st century by exploring
  this historical dimension of creativity and management of the Mangkunegara royal house during the Dutch, Japanese and early era of the Indonesian Republic within the framework of the national governmental reality of the different eras. From this historical approach the paper demonstrates this mentality of the Mangkunegaran to ‘stay relevant’ in an ever-changing social transformation in Indonesia’s national context despite the complex reality of administrative absorption into the province of Central Java during the era of the Indonesian independence.

• Mangkunegara VII and Claire Holt Amanda Katherine Rath Goethe University

  This paper discusses the relationship between Mangkunegara VII (1885-1944) and the American journalist and art historian Claire Holt (1901-1970). When Claire Holt arrived in Bali in 1930 on an intended journey around the world, she met the Dutch archeologist Dr. Willem F. Stutterheim (1892-1942) and became his assistant and partner. From 1930 on, Claire studied Javanese dance and culture from Mangkunegara VII in Surakarta and in Yogyakarta. As her interest grew, she started to write about the Central Javanese court dances in the media, and eventually also for an academic audience, from 1934 onward. Mangkunegara VII supported her efforts strongly. This eventually led to the great exhibition “Theater and Dance in the Dutch East Indies” at the museum of the International Archives of Danse (Archives Internationales de la Danse) in Paris, which Claire Holt organized and for which she wrote the catalog. The legacy of Mangkunegara VII is also quite present in Claire Holt’s book on Art in Indonesia (1967), which became one of the main sources of information for generations of Indonesianist scholars.

Part 2

• A Royal Branding Mix in the Republic of Indonesia: a case study of Mangkunegaran Arndt Graf Goethe University Frankfurt

  The royal house of Mangkunegaran in Surakarta, Java, is often perceived as one of the Trusted Brands of Indonesia. As such, it can serve as an important orientation mark for the people of Indonesia, including in times of social crisis, and can therefore contribute to an improved sustainability of social transformation. This paper departs from the concept of the Royal Branding Mix, as it was developed to analyze the corporate brand of the British crown (“the Firm”) by Balmer (2007/8). Its main dimensions are Royal, Regal, Relevant, Responsive, and Respected. It is demonstrated that all of these dimensions can be found on the official website of the Pura Mangkunegaran, and hence constitute an important part of the communication strategy of that court. Further analyses of the website reveal that the Puro Mangkunegaran is also engaged in innovating the curating of the physical visit, e.g. via tourist packages and a new culinary experience in the new Pracima Tuin restaurant. A comparison with curatorial innovation in the United Kingdom demonstrates that there the so-called “Downton boom” has led to a re-designing of the presentation of historic houses, opening up previously restricted quarters for tourists. The question is whether the Mangkunegaran is also already showing signs of developing its branding strategy into that direction. In addition, a comparison with the British example of the Highgrove Foundation of King Charles allows the question whether the marketing of Mangkunegaran merchandise on sites such as Topokedia might experience further intensification in the future.

• Mangkunegaran and the media. Javanese cultural modernization in the social media age Patrick Keilbart Goethe University Frankfurt

  In our contemporary “Social Media Age”, in which social media are the dominant communication technologies of our time, traditional communication practices and value systems are increasingly being called into question. While the democratic potential and participatory culture of social media remain largely an unfulfilled promise, it is unquestionable that social media technologies affect both content and symbolic form, nature and structure of communication.
  In more than 250 years since its official establishment, the royal house Kadipaten Mangkunegaran has undergone significant change, gradually shifting from a political and economic power towards a cultural authority. From the early 20th century onwards, its ruler Mangkunegara VII promoted Javanese cultural revivalism as a response to the radicalisation of Islamic discourse in Indonesia. Today’s preservation and continuation of Mangkunegaran’s cultural tradition is closely intertwined with the court’s communication practices. The commitment to traditions, rituals, norms and values, and speech codes of Javanese language constitute specific forms of cultural identity, which are partly transferred to social media. This has enabled Mangkunegaran to resolve the apparent contradiction between cultural modernization and preservation of cultural tradition, without falling back on policies of nostalgia.
  Competing with religious (Islamic) and state authorities, as well as influential forms of popular culture, the high or elite culture established by the court of Mangkunegaran faces the challenge of remaining a cultural authority and even retaining its relevance. Thus, Mangkunegaran and its specific modernization and communication practices represent a promising research field of mediatized discourses in Indonesia and cultural modernization in the social media age.

• TRAWACA: an effort of digitizing Javanese printed historical books through OCRing Aditya W. Mahastama Lucia D. Krisnawati Universitas Kristen Duta Wacana

  The inclusion of non-latin characters in the Unicode character set has opened possibilities to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for manuscripts and books written in non-alphabetic characters. Categorized as Abugida type of writing system, Javanese character, which nowadays is no longer in use, has appeared in vast collections of manuscripts and historical printed books which are prone to damage due to age and to lack of maintenance. TRAWACA project (www.trawaca.id) aims to preserve the content of such books by applying OCR. Besides, the project was also aimed at strengthening the position of Javanese language in the digital form as it is classified into a critical and under-resourced language.
  At first, the training datasets were produced by scanning and applying OCR preprocessing to Serat Mangkunegaran Part I & II. The annotation was done through self-made application called JavAnote. Since training model needs a lot of labeled data, the annotation was done in 2 different methods: crowdsourcing and in-class Javanese learning that made JavAnote to have dual functions: annotation tool and a tool for learning Javanese character. Since Serat Mangkunegaran characters are to complicated for high school students, we added pages from Mulang Waca and Kitab Rum as the source of character annotation. All annotated data were validated and corrected by hired Javanese experts or from Javanese Wikimedia community. To increase the number of labeled training data, we did data augmentation by putting some noise, character rotation, and resizing the validated characters. In total, we obtained 23.127 segments of Characters including labeled under- and over-segmentation ones.
  For recognition, we applied several Machine Learning models such as Gaussian Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis as well as Deep Learning Model - Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The precision of the recognition rate never goes beyond 0.74. This precision rate is a result of our experimental setting, and some classifier models show the overfitting. In a real use case, the precision rates are in a range of 0.2 – 0.62. Scrutinizing the recognition in each class of characters, we found out that there are 6 characters that fail to be recognized by all classifier models and few of them having very low rate of recognition. Among those characters are those which represent two different characters if they are transliterated in Latin such as number 2 and lê in Javanese characters. Besides, we perceived that character over- and under-segmentation process played a big role in the low rate of recognition.

Abstract