Trading stories: An oral history conversation between Geoffrey Rockwell and Julianne Nyhan

Purpose – Digital humanities (DH) has become a much discussed topic among both humanities scholars and library professionals. The library and information science (LIS) community has taken efforts in providing new facilities and developing new services to meet humanities scholars’ changing research behaviors and needs employing digital tools and methods. How to effectively collaborate with the DH community has been a challenging task to LIS in their digital library (DL) development endeavors. The purpose of this paper is to discover productive ways for LIS to support DH scholarship, specifically, what DL components, including content, technology, and service, should and could be developed for digital humanists. Design/methodology/approach – As an initial effort of the Digital Humanities Interest Group at University of California, Irvine Libraries, the examination is primarily based on a cross-boundary environmental scan in both DH and DL fields. The environmental survey includes both a literature review and web and physical site visits. The survey results, especially a gap analysis between the behaviors and needs of humanities scholars and the digital content, technologies, and services currently offered by the DL community, are used to shape the proposed roles of DH librarianship. Findings – First, DH’s innovative approach to research and teaching practices brings opportunities and challenges. Second, DH research is collaborative work. Third, major channels are established for the DH community. Fourth, various tools and data sets are developed to support different types of projects. Fifth, DH community has unbalanced geographical and disciplinary distribution. Sixth, DH research output still lacks attention, integration, and sustainability. Finally, LIS professionals play unique roles in DH projects. Overall, the communities of DH and DL share common goals and tasks. Practical implications – This paper proposes these present and future roles of LIS professionals: creator and contributor; curator; messenger and liaison; educator; mediator and interpreter; host; partner; innovator; “hybrid scholar”; advocate; consultant. At the organizational level, libraries should demonstrate higher efficiency and effectiveness in the services by revamping organizational culture or structure to stimulate and realize more and deeper cross-boundary conversations and collaborations. On a larger scale, the DL community should strive to become more visible, valuable, and approachable to the DH community; and even better, become part of it. Originality/value – This paper examines both DH and DL fields critically and connects the two communities by discovering gaps and commonalities. Based on the findings, the authors recommend roles and actions to be taken by LIS professionals, libraries, and the DL community. This paper is valuable to both humanities scholars who are seeking support in their research using digital methods and LIS professionals who are interested in providing more effective and suitable services. The paper also helps library administrators and aspiring librarians better understand the concept of DH and grasp insight on the present and future of DH librarianship.

In addition to drawing upon content experts, librarians, archivists, developers, programmers, managers, and others, many emerging digital projects also pull in disciplinary expertise from areas that do not typically work in team environments. To be effective, these teams must find processes-some of which are counter to natural individually oriented work habits-which support the larger goals and group-oriented work of these digital projects. This article will explore the similarities and differences in approaches within and between members of the Digital Libraries (DL) and Digital Humanities (DH) communities by formally documenting the nature of collaboration in these teams. While there are many similarities in approaches between DL and DH project teams, some interesting differences exist and may influence the effectiveness of a digital project team with membership that draws from these two communities. Conclusions are focused on supporting strong team processes with recommendations for documentation, communication, training, and the development of team skills and perspectives.

<i>De</i>Groove Is in<i>de</i>Move

The article presents the observations of a live participant of the “Digital Humanities -2023”, held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2023. The “Digital Humanities” Congress is held annually by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Digital Humanities (DH) are at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It involves the development and use of digital resources and methods in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH scholarship means collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. The annual ADHO Conference on Digital Humanities is the central and largest event of the international Digital Humanities community and brings together scholars from around the world, providing them with a unique opportunity to exchange ideas and research results, and to promote future collaboration. Particular attention is paid to historical issues presented at the congress, both in workshops and at section meetings and poster presentations. Statistical observations are presented, and a frequency analysis of the occurrence of keywords is carried out. The main conclusion of the study is the observed trend towards an increase in historical reports, posters and workshops. A noticeable increase in interest in historical sources, historical databases and geographic information systems, and virtual reconstruction of the past using a wide range of digital humanities research tools is noticeable (in comparison with the programs and publications of past Digital Humanities congresses). The 2023 conference theme, “Collaboration as an Opportunity,” is about the transdisciplinary and transnational collaboration, showing how increased cross-national collaboration—across continents and geopolitical locations—can transform regional knowledge hubs into international networks of excellence in research for the benefit of the global digital humanities community. Historians have firmly taken their place in contemporary digital humanities research.

As digital humanities (DH) continues to embrace its global dimensions, community members struggle to ascertain frames of reference for understanding and interpreting local contexts for scholarship. This article intervenes in that effort by distinguishing between the local and global contours of DH. It analyzes two projects that map the geographies of DH and identifies the challenge of recognizing DH work. Drawing on postcolonial and linguistic theories of language, this article then proposes that the concept of a 'DH accent' provides a lens for mediating between local and global definitions of DH and resolving the ethical challenge of misrecognition. In seeking a global vision, the article suggests, the DH community must begin with the question, 'What is your DH accent?'

In Memoriam: Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm, 1934–2016

Bustan's commitment to scholarly review in the fields of Middle East and Islamic studies makes it important to stop and reflect on the passing of important scholars and intellectuals who have shaped these ever-broadening fields over the past few decades. The following short essay about Sadiq al-ʿAzm was written by Professor Itamar Rabinovich—one of Bustan's founders and editors, and a historian of modern Syrian history. It honors a Middle Eastern intellectual whose ideas have been woven into the fabric of a large body of scholarship over the past four decades. Many contemporary scholars continue to use specific terms and quotes that Sadiq al-ʿAzm formulated over the years, including during the brutal war that has devastated Syria since 2011. In a recent edited collection, for example, Raymond Hinnebusch used al-ʿAzm's concept of a “military-mercantile complex” to describe the rise of a nexus of army and business interests in Syria. Then in the same volume, another contributor, Reinoud Leenders, writes, “Syria's pre-eminent intellectual and philosopher Sadiq al-Azm explained [in reference to 2011 uprising] it was the in the very act of mobilization against the regime that Syrians discovered that they could overcome their ‘inferiority complex … in the face of this military regime's overall power.’”1Several other contemporary works continue to build on the legacy of al-ʿAzm for his contributions to understanding the Middle East from within and because of the impact of his writings on various important discourses that continue to attract new works of scholarship. The editors of Bustan: Middle East Book Review believe that the short essay in memory of Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm that follows reflects our ambition, as a journal based in the Middle East, to reflect critically on contemporary scholarship about the Middle East produced in the region.It was one of those ironies of history. The news of Sadiq al-ʿAzm's death as an exile in Berlin reached us at the same time as the stream of news and horrific descriptions of Bashar al-Asad's troops conquering Eastern Aleppo with help of his Russian and Iranian patrons, and the Shiʿi militias assembled by them. Al-ʿAzm, the leading Syrian intellectual, a man who had to a great extent represented older Syria, died on the eve of the Asad regime's military achievement, which appears to be a significant step toward preserving, and possibly restoring, the regime's rule over Syria as an ʿAlawi-Shiʿi hegemony under Russian and Iranian patronage.Al-ʿAzm was a scion of Damascus' most prominent notable family. In the eighteenth century, the al-ʿAzms founded and maintained a dynasty that governed Damascus under the loose sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. It was part of two larger phenomena—the rise of local autonomies under Ottoman rule, and the emergence of a class of notables who served as mediators between the Ottoman central government and the Arab population in the Empire's Arab provinces. During the twentieth century, the al-ʿAzm family played a role in Syrian politics under the French Mandate and after independence in the 1950s. Most prominent among them was Khaled al-ʿAzm, who served as interim president and as prime minister in several governments.Sadiq al-ʿAzm was a philosopher, professor of philosophy, and, most importantly, public intellectual. He received his PhD in philosophy at Yale University, became a professor of philosophy at the University of Damascus, and as the political climate in Damascus grew harsher, moved to Beirut. Al-ʿAzm was at that time a Marxist, and a harsh critic of Syrian and Arab public and political life. In the late 1960s, two books made him famous, as well as one of the Arab World's most prominent public intellectuals.Self-Criticism after the Defeat was published in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. It was the most important critical essay published in the Arab World in the shadow of the Six-Day War and it resonated in the Arab World as well as in Israel. When Yehoshafat Harkabi published a Hebrew-language collection titled The Arabs' Lesson from Their Defeat, his translations from al-ʿAzm's book constituted the most important portion of al-ʿAzm's volume. Al-ʿAzm took Arab society and the pseudo-revolutionary regimes that had emerged in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq in the 1950s and early 1960s to task. These regimes were expected to transform Arab society and politics after ridding them of the corruption and inefficacy of the anciens regimes. Shortly thereafter, he published his Critique of Religious Thought. It was a powerful assault written from a Marxist perspective and directed mostly at Islam. The book was too bold even for liberal Beirut. The Lebanese political system rested on an uneasy balance between Christians and Muslims, and al-ʿAzm's criticism of Islam, though written by a Muslim, was too much of a challenge for the Lebanese status quo and al-ʿAzm was briefly put in jail. Over the following decades, Al-ʿAzm spent his life in exile at universities and think tanks in Europe and the United States or in efforts to find a modus vivendi with the Baʿth regime that would enable him to live and teach in Damascus, a city that he always saw as home. During these decades, his Marxism and radicalism were blunted but he remained critical, productive, and brave. In a 2013 interview, Al-ʿAzm addressed the issue of his relationship with the regime and said, among other things, that This reality constituted a type of inferiority complex (in me and in others) due to my impotence in the face of this military regime's overall power, as well as due to the impossibility of pronouncing a possible “no” against it (individually or collectively). I dealt with this inferiority complex by adapting slowly to this stressful tyrannical reality, and through the careful introspection of the rules and principles of interacting with it, with all that's required of hypocrisy and pretending to believe and accept, secrecy, word manipulation and circumvention of the regime's brute force. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to either continue with my normal life and do my routine work and daily errands, or preserve my mental and physical health. Al-ʿAzm was part of an elitist group of Arab intellectuals who chose, or were forced to, live and publish in the West, beyond the reach of the military officers and politicians who ruled the Arab World. It included, for example, the poet Adonis, Edward Said, and Fouad Ajami. Typically for the politics of exiled intellectuals, this group was divided by ideological controversies and personal rivalries. Each member of the group saw himself as the senior Arab intellectual. Al-ʿAzm fought in public with Adonis and was recently critical of the latter's position with regard to the current Syrian revolt. His rivalry with Said was particularly bitter. In 1978, Said published Orientalism, his sharp criticism of the fashion in which European orientalism saw and interpreted the orient. It was, Said argued, a patronizing and condescending view of the other, serving and legitimizing Western colonialism, whose impact went so far as to shape the manner by which people of the orient came to see themselves. The book enjoyed immediate and massive success and influence that transformed Middle Eastern studies in the academy as well as the discourse on the Middle East in both the academy and the media.But Said's Orientalism also met with significant criticism, part of which was written by Sadiq al-ʿAzm. In 1980, Al-ʿAzm published “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” taking Said to task for among other things creating a linear view of orientalism from the traditional European view of the East to the academic cultural orientalism of modern times. Also, as a Marxist, Al-ʿAzm criticized Said for putting the emphasis on the power of ideas rather than on the material forces at work in history. Said accused orientalism and orientalists as being in the service of the colonial powers, but for Said, according to Al-ʿAzm, ideas preceded the quest for material interest. Al-ʿAzm did not exonerate orientalists of serving their governments, but for him the governments' quest for territories, political control, and economic interest preceded the intellectual justification. “Orientalism in Reverse” as such was not a critique of Said but of the tendency of Arab intellectuals to see Islam as a liberating force in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution.Said was not receptive to criticism, and his relationship with al-ʿAzm deteriorated into a bitter and open rivalry. In 1980, al-ʿAzm submitted “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” to the Arab Studies Quarterly, edited at the time by Said and Fouad Moughrabi. It was rejected and published a year later in the journal Khamsin. The episode led to an angry exchange of letters between al-ʿAzm and Said. In his letter to al-ʿAzm, Said told him that his essay was too long and had to be cut significantly in order to be published by the Arab Studies Quarterly. He then added that contrary to his decision not to respond to criticism of Orientalism, he would respond to al-ʿAzm's critique. While referring to him as “a friend, who as you know admires and loves you,” he had to tell him candidly that in his recent writing he “detected an unfortunate narrowness and dogmatism which has weakened your work: This is the case of your reading of my book … The worst thing about your writing is how really badly you read … When you quote you misquote and when you construe you misconstrue.” Needless to say, al-ʿAzm responded to Said's response with equal force. “As you know,” he wrote, “I have been to many bitter debates, and controversies before, and I have succeeded in maintaining a reasonably detached attitude throughout. Therefore, I bypass your abusive accusation and take in stride the point by point comparison you draw between the qualities and virtues of yourself and those of my humble person, all leading, predictably enough, to the inevitable conclusion of your superiority.”Said clearly displayed a considerable degree of obtuseness when he allowed himself, from the safety and comfort of the Columbia University campus in New York City, to needle al-ʿAzm, who felt that as a Syrian intellectual and patriot, it was his duty to try to return to Damascus and to promote high level teaching of philosophy under the Baʿth regime. Al-ʿAzm himself spoke openly about his complex relationship with Asad's regime in an interview he granted in 2016 to A Syrious Look, published by Syrian exiles. He described the period in the mid-1990s when he found a modus vivendi of sorts with the Asad regime that enabled him to serve as the head of the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Damascus. With the help of the Dean of Faculty of Humanities, who knew how to deal with the authorities, he managed to survive in his position for five years as well as to hold a successful and prestigious “culture week.” His coexistence, like that of other intellectuals, with the regime was predicated on not crossing certain red lines. Hafez al-Asad took pride in well-publicized meetings that he occasionally held with Syrian intellectuals, and his coterie made sure to remind the intellectuals that it was proper to thank the enlightened ruler from time to time. But this fragile coexistence ended in 1999. Al-ʿAzm was allowed to leave Syria, but he was told that he would not be allowed to come back. He chose exile.Over the years, al-ʿAzm softened his attitude toward Israel. He was originally a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause and worked for the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut. But in later years, he maintained relations with Israeli academics and supported the Syrian–Israeli peace process in the second half of the 1990s. In June 2000, he published an intriguing essay in the New York Review of Books titled “The View from Damascus.” He described how Damascene society had come to terms with the idea of peace with Israel. Ironically, the essay was published shortly after the collapse of the Syrian–Israeli peace process and Hafez al-Asad's death.When the Syrian revolt broke out in the spring of 2011, al-ʿAzm became one of its early and prominent supporters, but his support was not free of reservations. He was worried by the significant role played by Islamists and Jihadi elements, but he kept hoping that the revolt would become a revolution that would lead to the emergence of a more democratic Syria. As time went by, and the magnitude of the calamity affecting Syria became more apparent, he became more pessimistic. When asked in the course of the interview whether an entity called Syria would exist in the future, he responded with what seems in retrospect to be a last will and testament: Al-ʿAzm:“On the map, yes.Interviewer:“And on your personal map?”Al-ʿAzm:“I am loyal to Syria. Once, I was not allowed to leave the country. I had to go repeatedly to secret police stations to get permission to travel. The officer used to give me permission to leave the country one time only. That meant it was a one-way ticket, or in other words, they were telling me go and not come back. If you come back, you are coming back to us. I told the officer that the al-ʿAzm family is in Damascus, and I want to return. I don't know if I will be able to go back to Syria. I don't think I will live to see it. My health … But I will defiantly return. I do not want to be an intellectual in exile, with all my respect to intellectuals in exiles. I could have been an intellectual in exile a long time ago. I kept on returning to Syria. Intellectuals in exile took their decisions and made compromises, and I took my decision and made other compromises, too.”

The capture, modelling and visualisation of uncertainty has become a hot topic in many areas of science, such as the digital humanities (DH). Fuelled by critical voices among the DH community, DH scholars are becoming more aware of the intrinsic advantages that incorporating the notion of uncertainty into their workflows may bring. Additionally, the increasing availability of ubiquitous, web-based technologies has given rise to many collaborative tools that aim to support DH scholars in performing remote work alongside distant peers from other parts of the world. In this context, this paper describes two user studies seeking to evaluate a taxonomy of textual uncertainty aimed at enabling remote collaborations on digital humanities (DH) research objects in a digital medium. Our study focuses on the task of free annotation of uncertainty in texts in two different scenarios, seeking to establish the requirements of the underlying data and uncertainty models that would be needed to implement a hypothetical collaborative annotation system (CAS) that uses information visualisation and visual analytics techniques to leverage the cognitive effort implied by these tasks. To identify user needs and other requirements, we held two user-driven design experiences with DH experts and lay users, focusing on the annotation of uncertainty in historical recipes and literary texts. The lessons learned from these experiments are gathered in a series of insights and observations on how these different user groups collaborated to adapt an uncertainty taxonomy to solve the proposed exercises. Furthermore, we extract a series of recommendations and future lines of work that we share with the community in an attempt to establish a common agenda of DH research that focuses on collaboration around the idea of uncertainty.

Mapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical DH collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. However, there is still no general and useful person‐oriented ontology in DH community. Many practical DH projects have developed their own ontologies by DH experts, but these ontologies are not interoperable. Therefore, it is important to explore existing biographical ontologies and develop a comprehensive person‐oriented ontology for DH. Using the metadata crosswalk method, we examined the ontologies provided for persons in three DH collections to analyze how they map onto standard ontologies such as FOAF (friend of a friend). This paper uncovers a significant and consistent gap between standard biographical ontologies and those used in practical DH collections, arriving at a set of heterogeneous problems, including different granularities of metadata. Consequently, we propose three key person‐oriented ontological types of elements, drawing on this metadata crosswalk: basic biographical elements, relational elements, and explanatory elements (such as career, connected with role and time). This metadata crosswalk provides a foundation for future matching between person‐oriented ontologies and facilitates semantic interoperability between DH collections.

Combining computational technologies and humanities is an ongoing effort aimed at making resources such as texts, images, audio, video, and other artifacts digitally available, searchable, and analyzable. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNN) dominate the field of automatic text analysis and natural language processing (NLP), in some cases presenting a super‐human performance. DNNs are the state‐of‐the‐art machine learning algorithms solving many NLP tasks that are relevant for Digital Humanities (DH) research, such as spell checking, language detection, entity extraction, author detection, question answering, and other tasks. These supervised algorithms learn patterns from a large number of “right” and “wrong” examples and apply them to new examples. However, using DNNs for analyzing the text resources in DH research presents two main challenges: (un)availability of training data and a need for domain adaptation. This paper explores these challenges by analyzing multiple use‐cases of DH studies in recent literature and their possible solutions and lays out a practical decision model for DH experts for when and how to choose the appropriate deep learning approaches for their research. Moreover, in this paper, we aim to raise awareness of the benefits of utilizing deep learning models in the DH community.

<i>HSR</i>: A History of New Beginnings and a Tribute to Founding Editor Nándor F. Dreisziger

A 2008 article by Patrick Juola describes the digital humanities community as marginal to mainstream academic discussions and suggests that its work has little scholarly impact. At the same time, mainstream humanities scholars are using digital resources more and more, but these resources are chiefly produced by libraries and commercial organizations rather than digital humanities specialists. How can the digital humanities achieve its promise and transform humanities scholarship? It is suggested that the digital humanities community is too inward-looking and needs to reach out to wider constituencies. In particular, digital humanities specialists should urgently engage with the wider theoretical concerns that characterize humanities scholarship. Projects such as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 engage new audiences because they are grounded in a strong research vision.

This article reports on a study of interfaces to long-lived digital humanities (DH) resources using an innovative combination of research methods from book history, interface design, and digital preservation and curation to investigate how interfaces to DH resources have changed over time. To do this, we used the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine to investigate the original presentation and all subsequent changes to the interfaces of a small sample of projects. The study addresses the following questions: What can we learn from a study of interfaces to DH material? How have interfaces to DH materials changed over the course of their existence? Do these changes affect the way the resource is used, and the way it conveys meaning? Should we preserve interfaces for future scholarship? We show that a valuable information may be derived from the interfaces of long-lived projects. Visual design can communicate subtle messages about the way the resource was originally conceived by its creators and subsequent changes show how knowledge of user behaviour developed in the DH community. Interfaces provide information about the intellectual context of early digital projects. They can also provide information about the changing place of DH projects in local and national infrastructures, and the way that projects have sought to survive in challenging funding environments.

This keynote address for the 2014 Digital Humanities conference is a practitioner's talk, and—though the abstract belies it—an optimistic one. I take as given the evidence that human beings are irrevocably altering the conditions for life on Earth and that, despite certain unpredictabilities, we live at the cusp of a mass extinction. What is the place of digital humanities (DH) practice in the new social and geological era of the Anthropocene? What are the DH community's most significant responsibilities, and to whom? This talk positions itself in deep time, but strives for a foothold in the vital here-and-now of service to broad publics. From the presentist, emotional aesthetics of Dark Mountain to the arms-length futurism of the Long Now, I dwell on concepts of graceful degradation, preservation, memorialization, apocalypse, ephemerality, and minimal computing. I discuss digital recovery and close reading of texts and artifacts once thought lost forever, and the ways that prosopography, graphesis, and distant reading open new vistas on the longue durée. Can DH develop a practical ethics of resilience and repair? Can it become more humane while working at inhuman scales? Can we resist narratives of progress, and still progress? I wish to open community discussion about the practice of DH, and what to give, in the face of a great hiatus or the end of it all.

Previous article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreELIZABETH BUCKNER ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. She studies how global trends affect higher education, with a focus on privatization and internationalization. Her recent publications have appeared in Sociology of Education and Higher Education.ROSWITA DRESSLER ([email protected]) is an associate professor and director of Teaching Across Borders in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary (Canada). Her research interests include second-language teaching and learning in a variety of contexts, including K–12 settings and study abroad.COLLEEN KAWALILAK ([email protected]) is a full professor and associate dean international and chair of Educational Studies Adult Learning in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary (Canada). She holds a PhD in adult, community, and higher education. Her current research focuses on internationalization in higher education, fostering intercultural capacity, adult learning, and relationality as pedagogy and practice.TARO KOMATSU ([email protected]) is a professor in the Department of Education at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. He previously worked as an education specialist for the UNESCO Sarajevo office. His research focuses on education and social cohesion in postconflict contexts. Recent publications include Education and Peace, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (Oxford University Press, 2017).LUANA MAROTTA ([email protected]) is a consultant in the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Her work focuses on issues of teacher contracts and teacher sorting in Latin America.WILSON ALVES DE PAIVA ([email protected]) is a full professor at the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil). He holds a PhD in philosophy of education, with postdoctoral work in cultural identity at the University of Calgary, Canada. He develops research in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy for children, culture and education, as well as multiculturalism.FRANCESCA SALVI ([email protected]) is a sociologist focusing on transitions between childhood and adulthood. She has worked prevalently in sub-Saharan Africa and Lusophone countries. Her research looks at how global discourses of teenage pregnancy are constructed in opposition to education and employment imperatives. Through her case study of Mozambique secondary schools, she argues for a disruption of the education-pregnancy binary.DAVID M. SCOTT ([email protected]ca) is an assistant professor and director of student experiences for the community-based program in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary (Canada). His research explores how educators interpret and pedagogically respond to officially mandated curriculum shifts.JANA STRAKOVA (jana.[email protected]cuni.cz) works at the Institute for Research and Development of Education, Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague. Her research interests include education inequalities and education policy. She has been involved in numerous large-scale assessment surveys, both national and international.ARNOST VESELY ([email protected]cuni.cz) is a head of the Centre for Social and Economic Strategies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. His research interests include educational policy and governance, public administration, and policy design. He has been involved in numerous research-oriented and practice-oriented projects in education policy. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 63, Number 3August 2019 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704104 © 2019 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.