Digital history and the specimen database: Mohamed Haniff (1872–1930) and colonial ethnobotany in the Singapore Herbarium

With projected lifespans of many decades, infrastructure initiatives such as Europe’s Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), USA’s Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) of China and Australia’s digitisation of national research collections (NRCA Digital) aim at transforming today’s slow, inefficient and limited practices of working with natural science collections. The need to borrow specimens (plants, animals, fossils or rocks) or physically visit collections, and absence of linkages to other relevant information represent significant impediments to answering today’s scientific and societal questions. A logical extension of the Internet, Digital Object Architecture (Kahn and Wilensky 2006) offers a way of grouping, managing and processing fragments of information relating to a natural science specimen. A ‘digital specimen’ acts as a surrogate in cyberspace for a specific physical specimen, identifying its actual location and authoritatively saying something about its collection event (who, when, where) and taxonomy, as well as providing links to high-resolution images. A digital specimen exposes supplementary information about related literature, traits, tissue samples and DNA sequences, chemical analyses, environmental information, etc. stored elsewhere than in the natural science collection itself. By presenting digital specimens as a new layer between data infrastructure of natural science collections and user applications for processing and interacting with information about specimens and collections, it’s possible to seamlessly organise global access spanning multiple collection-holding institutions and sources. Virtual collections of digital specimens with unique identifiers offer possibilities for wider, more flexible, and ‘FAIR’ (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) access for varied research and policy uses: recognising curatorial work, annotating with latest taxonomic treatments, understanding variations, working with DNA sequences or chemical analyses, supporting regulatory processes for health, food, security, sustainability and environmental change, inventions/products critical to the bio-economy, and educational uses. Adopting a digital specimen approach is expected to lead to faster insights for lower cost on many fronts. We propose that realising this vision requires a new TDWG standard. OpenDS is a specification of digital specimen and other object types essential to mass digitisation of natural science collections and their digital use. For five principal digital object types corresponding to major categories of collections and specimens’ information, OpenDS defines structure and content, and behaviours that can act upon them: Digital specimen: Representing a digitised physical specimen, contains information about a single specimen with links to related supplementary information; Storage container: Representing groups of specimens stored within a single container, such as insect tray, drawer or sample jar; Collection: Information about characteristics of a collection; Organisation: Information about the legal-entity owning the specimen and collection to which it belongs; and, Interpretation: Assertion(s) made on or about the specimen such as determination of species and comments. Digital specimen: Representing a digitised physical specimen, contains information about a single specimen with links to related supplementary information; Storage container: Representing groups of specimens stored within a single container, such as insect tray, drawer or sample jar; Collection: Information about characteristics of a collection; Organisation: Information about the legal-entity owning the specimen and collection to which it belongs; and, Interpretation: Assertion(s) made on or about the specimen such as determination of species and comments. Secondary classes gather presentation/preservation characteristics (e.g., herbarium sheets, pinned insects, specimens in glass jars, etc.), the general classification of a specimen (i.e., plant, animal, fossil, rock, etc.) and history of actions on the object (provenance). Equivalencing concepts in ABCD 3.0 and EFG extension for geo-sciences, OpenDS is also an ontology extending OBO Foundry’s Biological Collection Ontology (BCO) (Walls et al. 2014) from bco:MaterialSample, which has preferred label dwc:specimen from Darwin Core, thus linking it also with that standard. OpenDS object content can be serialized to specific formats/representations (e.g. JSON) for different exchange and processing purposes.

Herbarium records in Arctic dwarf shrub dendrochronology: Methodological approach and perspectives

International mass digitization efforts through infrastructures like the European Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), the US resource for Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (iDigBio), the National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) of China, and Australia’s digitization of National Research Collections (NRCA Digital) make geo- and biodiversity specimen data freely, fully and directly accessible. Complementary, overarching infrastructure initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) were established to enable mutual integration, interoperability and reusability of multidisciplinary data streams including biodiversity, Earth system and life sciences (De Smedt et al. 2020). Natural Science Collections (NSC) are of particular importance for such multidisciplinary and internationally linked infrastructures, since they provide hard scientific evidence by allowing direct traceability of derived data (e.g., images, sequences, measurements) to physical specimens and material samples in NSC. To open up the large amounts of trait and habitat data and to link these data to digital resources like sequence databases (e.g., ENA), taxonomic infrastructures (e.g., GBIF) or environmental repositories (e.g., PANGAEA), proper annotation of specimen data with rich (meta)data early in the digitization process is required, next to bridging technologies to facilitate the reuse of these data. This was addressed in recent studies (Younis et al. 2018, Younis et al. 2020), where we employed computational image processing and artificial intelligence technologies (Deep Learning) for the classification and extraction of features like organs and morphological traits from digitized collection data (with a focus on herbarium sheets). However, such applications of artificial intelligence are rarely—this applies both for (sub-symbolic) machine learning and (symbolic) ontology-based annotations—integrated in the workflows of NSC’s management systems, which are the essential repositories for the aforementioned integration of data streams. This was the motivation for the development of a Deep Learning-based trait extraction and coherent Digital Specimen (DS) annotation service providing “Machine learning as a Service” (MLaaS) with a special focus on interoperability with the core services of DiSSCo, notably the DS Repository (nsidr.org) and the Specimen Data Refinery (Walton et al. 2020), as well as reusability within the data fabric of EOSC. Taking up the use case to detect and classify regions of interest (ROI) on herbarium scans, we demonstrate a MLaaS prototype for DiSSCo involving the digital object framework, Cordra, for the management of DS as well as instant annotation of digital objects with extracted trait features (and ROIs) based on the DS specification openDS (Islam et al. 2020). Source code available at: https://github.com/jgrieb/plant-detection-service

The establishment of Management & Organizational History (MOH) emerged out of earlier calls for a ‘historic turn’ in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) and a (somewhat mooted) critique of existing approaches to the study of history in the field. While MOS was seen as universalist, presentist, and scientistic, attempts at historical analysis were seen by some, in the words of Alfred Kieser, as generally “myopic fact collecting without a method.” The inaugural editorial of Management & Organizational History went on to call for greater exploration of the different methodological (and philosophical) approaches to the study of history. Central to the first issue of MOH was a renewed call for a ‘historic turn.’ Ten years later, there is some question if the ‘historic turn’ has been fully realized or even adequately conceptualized. Nonetheless, a growing consensus around the need for a historical turn has arguably served to paper over some potentially significant differences and debates. In this special issue, we revisit the idea and progress of the notion of the historic turn in MOS through the eight contributing articles. We frame our discussion of the papers through a focus on the notion of the historic turn itself, the issue of critically rethinking MOS from an historical perspective, new turns and developments, MOH and contemporary thinking about the past and history, the performance of history, polyphonic constitutive historicism, fusions of methods and theoretical framing, and tales from the field.

The billions of specimens housed in natural science collections provide a tremendous source of under–utilized data that are useful for scientific research, conservation, commerce, and education. Digitization and mobilization of specimen data and images promises to greatly accelerate their utilization. While digitization of natural science collection specimens has been occurring for decades, the vast majority of specimens remain un–digitized. If the digitization task is to be completed in the near future, innovative, high–throughput approaches are needed. To create a dataset for the study of global change in New England, we designed and implemented an industrial–scale, conveyor–based digitization workflow for herbarium specimen sheets. The workflow is a variation of an object–to–image–to–data workflow that prioritizes imaging and the capture of storage container–level data. The workflow utilizes a novel conveyor system developed specifically for the task of imaging flattened herbarium specimens. Using our workflow, we imaged and transcribed specimen–level data for almost 350,000 specimens over a 131–week period; an additional 56 weeks was required for storage container–level data capture. Our project has demonstrated that it is possible to capture both an image of a specimen and a core database record in 35 seconds per herbarium sheet (for intervals between images of 30 minutes or less) plus some additional overhead for container–level data capture. This rate was in line with the pre–project expectations for our approach. Our throughput rates are comparable with some other similar, high–throughput approaches focused on digitizing herbarium sheets and is as much as three times faster than rates achieved with more conventional non–automated approaches used during the project. We report on challenges encountered during development and use of our system and discuss ways in which our workflow could be improved. The conveyor apparatus software, database schema, configuration files, hardware list, and conveyor schematics are available for download on GitHub.

This chapter reviews the major methodological and theoretical approaches used in Mining Language, at once concluding the book and gesturing toward future research directions in the fields of history of colonial science and technology and Indigenous Studies. Specifically, it reflects on the relationship between history and literary studies within these intersecting fields. By reflecting on what colonial archives say and do not say, the conclusion argues for the importance of research ethics and methods that confront, acknowledge, and respond to historical silences.

Focus groups as counterspaces for Black girls and Black women: A critical approach to research methods

Digital twin technology is considered as a key technology to realize cyber-physical systems (CPS). However, due to the complexity of building a digital equivalent in virtual space to its physical counterpart, very little progress has been achieved in digital twin application, especially in the complex product assembly shop-floor. In this paper, we propose a framework of digital twin-based smart production management and control approach for complex product assembly shop-floors. Four core techniques embodied in the framework are illustrated in detail as follows: (1) real-time acquisition, organization, and management of the physical assembly shop-floor data, (2) construction of the assembly shop-floor digital twin, (3) digital twin and big data-driven prediction of the assembly shop-floor, and (4) digital twin-based assembly shop-floor production management and control service. To elaborate how to apply the proposed approach to reality, we present detailed implementation process of the proposed digital twin-based smart production management and control approach in a satellite assembly shop-floor scenario. Meanwhile, the future work to completely fulfill digital twin-based smart production management and control concept for complex product assembly shop-floors are discussed.

In 2018, the Deep Blue Repositories and Research Data Services (DBRRDS) team at the University of Michigan Library began working with the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) to provide a persistent and sustainable (i.e., non-grant funded, institutionally supported) solution for their part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) openVertebrate (oVert) initiative. The objective of oVert is to the digitize scientific collections of thousands of vertebrate specimens stored in jars on museum shelves and make the data freely accessible to researchers, students, classrooms, and the general public anywhere in the world. The University of Michigan (U-M) is one of five scanning centers working on oVert and will contribute scans of more than 3,500 specimens from the UMMZ collections (Erickson 2017). In addition to ingesting scans, the project involved developing methods to work around several significant system constraints: Deep Blue Data’s file structure (flat files only, no folders) and the closed use of Specify, UMMZ’s specimen database, for specimen metadata. DBRRDS had to create a completely new workflow for handling batch deposits at regular intervals, develop scripts to reorganize the data (according to a third-party data model) and augment the metadata using a third-party resource, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This paper will describe the following aspects of the UMMZ CT Scanning Project partnership in greater detail: data generation, metadata requirements, workflows, code development, lessons learned, and next steps.

Digitalisation transforms practically all areas of the modern life: everything that can, will be digitalised. Especially the everyday routines and consumption practices are under continual change. New digital products and services are introduced at an accelerating pace. Purpose of this article is two-fold: the first aim is to explore the influence of digitalisation on consumption, and secondly, to canvas reasons for these digitalisation-driven transformations and possible future progressions. The transformations are explored through recent consumer studies and the future development is based on interpretations about digitalisation. Our article recounts that digitalisation of consumption have resulted in new forms of e-commerce, changing consumer roles and the digital virtual consumption. Reasons for these changes and expected near future progressions are based on assumptions drawn from data-driven, platform-based and disruption-generated visions. Challenges of combining consumption and the digital humanities approach are discussed in the conclusion Section of the article.

Digital humanistic knowledge production emphasises the importance of a strong knowledge production community and differentiates from traditional knowledge production models, which include aspects such as online and cooperative knowledge development. The digital humanities knowledge production community model is already widely acknowledged. However, the features and characteristics of digital humanistic knowledge production under natural language processing are controversial. This research presents a wordVEA digital humanistic knowledge production feature mining approach based on a word2vec and variational self-encoder (VAE). The knowledge production characteristics of digital humanistic are primarily defined by the coexistence of a knowledge production structure and boundary blurring, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration thematic cohesiveness and broad horizon, as determined by the research results which effectively address the question of the characteristics of digital humanistic knowledge production through application of the word VAE method.

Plant-diversity hotspots on a global scale are well established, but smaller local hotspots within these must be identified for effective conservation of plants at the global and local scales. We used the distributions of endemic and endemic-threatened species of Myrtaceae to indicate areas of plant diversity and conservation importance within the Atlantic coastal forests (Mata Atlântica) of Brazil. We applied 3 simple, inexpensive geographic information system (GIS) techniques to a herbarium specimen database: predictive species-distribution modeling (Maxent); complementarity analysis (DIVA-GIS); and mapping of herbarium specimen collection locations. We also considered collecting intensity, which is an inherent limitation of use of natural history records for biodiversity studies. Two separate areas of endemism were evident: the Serra do Mar mountain range from Paraná to Rio de Janeiro and the coastal forests of northern Espírito Santo and southern Bahia. We identified 12 areas of approximately 35 km(2) each as priority areas for conservation. These areas had the highest species richness and were highly threatened by urban and agricultural expansion. Observed species occurrences, species occurrences predicted from the model, and results of our complementarity analysis were congruent in identifying those areas with the most endemic species. These areas were then prioritized for conservation importance by comparing ecological data for each.

Straipsnyje analizuojamas R. Descartes'o ir I. Kanto ontologijos gnoseologinės kritikos metodologinis turinys. R. Descartes'o filosofijoje gnoseologijos pagrindų problema siejama su žmogaus proto ribotumu, kurį žmogus siekia įveikti, ši problema keliama kaip būties mąstymą generuojančio faktoriaus problema – jame remiamasi ne vidinės struktūrinės, o išorinės genetinės mąstymo determinacijos sąlygomis. I. Kantas nustatė, kad būties sąvoka iš principo negali tarnauti filosofavimo pamatu. Kiekvienas bandymas remtis filosofijoje būties sąvoka reiškia atvirą jos dogminimą. Ši sąvoka filosofijoje gali funkcionuoti tik kaip proto galios struktūrinės analizės rezultatas. I. Kanto filosofijoje gnoseologijos pagrindų problema iš ontologijos, kaip objektyviosios būties teorijos, perkeliama į transcendentalinio subjektyvumo sferą, bet ji nėra deontologinama. Ontologinė prielaida funkcionuoja kaip transcendentalinio proto taikymo sisteminio vienumo principas, išreiškiantis struktūriškai nustatomą proto poreikį ir atliekantis mąstymo procese reguliatyvinę funkciją. Gnoseologija organiškai apima tam tikrą būties, kaip pažinimo objekto, sampratą, kurios pagrindai glūdi genetinėse būties mąstymo sąlygose.

Engagement in public relations discipline: Themes, theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches

A critical orientation towards management and organizational history has at least three aspects: first, a historical critique of mainstream management and organizational research and teaching; second, a critical view of mainstream business history and management history; and finally, an assessment and critique of the treatment of history in critical management studies (CMS). This article argues that a critical and historical approach to management and organizations would entail a reorientation, or an ‘historic turn’. It discusses the three aspects of a critical historical orientation to management and organizations, outlines what a historic turn would entail, and assesses the extent to which it can be said to be underway.