Millions Of Pages Research Articles

Understanding the social construction of juvenile delinquency: insights from semantic analysis of big-data historical newspaper collections

Massive historical newspaper collections contain rich information about the historical development of social issues and constitute a unique resource for studying the social construction of issues such as juvenile delinquency. However, manual analysis of millions of pages of newspaper articles is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a suite of computational methods, including cross-context lexical analysis, dynamic semantic analysis, and valence analysis, to facilitate the study of historical social construction. We apply these methods to ProQuest Historical NewspapersTM\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^{\ extrm{TM}}$$\\end{document} collection in the period of 1790–2006 to study the social construction of juvenile delinquency over this period. Our results show that the proposed methods are effective in revealing insights regarding the social construction of juvenile delinquency, leading to a better understanding of this complex issue and specific hypotheses for further study. Overall, our study shows the great promise of leveraging natural language processing techniques for analyzing historical news data to study social construction of societal issues.

Cascaded transformer-based networks for wikipedia large-scale image-caption matching

With the increasing importance of multimedia and multilingual data in online encyclopedias, novel methods are needed to fill domain gaps and automatically connect different modalities for increased accessibility. For example, Wikipedia is composed of millions of pages written in multiple languages. Images, when present, often lack textual context, thus remaining conceptually floating and harder to find and manage. In this work, we tackle the novel task of associating images from Wikipedia pages with the correct caption among a large pool of available ones written in multiple languages, as required by the image-caption matching Kaggle challenge organized by the Wikimedia Foundation. A system able to perform this task would improve the accessibility and completeness of the underlying multi-modal knowledge graph in online encyclopedias. We propose a cascade of two models powered by the recent Transformer networks able to efficiently and effectively infer a relevance score between the query image data and the captions. We verify through extensive experiments that the proposed cascaded approach effectively handles a large pool of images and captions while maintaining bounded the overall computational complexity at inference time. With respect to other approaches in the challenge leaderboard, we can achieve remarkable improvements over the previous proposals (+8% in nDCG@5 with respect to the sixth position) with constrained resources. The code is publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/wiki-imcap.

Archives of Mass Violence: Understanding and Using ICTY Trial Records

Abstract The most relevant collection for studying the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia, which resulted in over 130,000 dead or missing, is the archive of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The Tribunal established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes indicted 161 people and had accumulated millions of pages of testimony, military and police reports, and videos when it closed in late 2017. This invaluable record details the massacres and includes well-known incidents, such as the mass executions after the fall of Srebrenica, but also killings and torture elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. This article investigates the history of this archive, analyzes its contents, and argues that the collection has two important features which present both a huge opportunity and a significant challenge for research—the immense volume of the archive, and a lack of access to important parts of it.

Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil

In this volume, 12 North American and Brazilian scholars explore the evolution of the press during Brazil's imperial period (1822–89). Addressing both content and form, they interpret the press from multiple perspectives: as sources of political and commercial news, as businesses, as vehicles for socioeconomic mobility, as platforms for political and social agendas, as arbiters of taste, and as a rapidly changing genre that incorporated emerging literary and artistic features. The diverse contributors embed their essays within a broader Atlantic world framework and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship produced by Brazilian researchers.The Brazilian press got a relatively late start due to crown prohibitions that remained in effect through 1808. Newspapers and pamphlets dealt primarily with political matters in the eras preceding and immediately following independence in 1822. The volume's contributors show that through the 1830s and 1840s, the press largely lived up to its reputation as a domain that was largely elite, male, and contentious. Most periodicals were ephemeral due to slim profit margins, the vicissitudes of rancorous postindependence politics and patronage, and the occasional sacking of opposition presses, as the essays by Marcello Basile and Hendrik Kraay show. By midcentury, as Brazil entered a period of relatively greater political stability, editors began to move away from overtly partisan approaches. Journalistic neutrality increasingly was seen as emblematic of respectable modernity. While politicians did not cease bickering or critiquing their rivals, they tended toward highbrow humor and competition through poetic flourishes, learned citations, and Latin phrases, as Kraay points out.By the 1850s, genres adapted from French and Anglo press culture gained popularity in Brazilian newspapers and helped to generate sales. These included crônicas, short features that bridged fiction and nonfiction (discussed by Ludmila de Souza Maia); galerias (galleries), illustrated capsule biographies of illustrious figures (addressed by Celso Thomas Castilho); illustrated magazines (the subject of Arnaldo Lucas Pires Jr.’s essay); and apedidos, public letters for which contributors paid a per-line fee (analyzed by Teresa Cribelli). These features also allow glimpses into more quotidian existence as they included representations of popular culture and relatively unfiltered communications from people from all walks of life. Brazilian newspapers also afford glimpses into topics that are otherwise difficult to reconstruct.Some of the contributions will be of particular interest to scholars of race, slavery, and the slave trade. Three particularly deal with slavery and race in novel ways. Alain El Youssef challenges the long-standing view that the press remained silent on slavery and the slave trade by uncovering press debates about the possibility of revising the slave trade after 1831. Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi explores the ambiguities of slave literacy. While less than 1 percent of slaves were literate according to Brazil's 1872 census, elites both feared literate slaves and highlighted slave literacy as a valuable skill in ads for slave sales and rentals. Godoi also reveals that slave labor was employed extensively in printshops and contributed to reducing production costs and prices for Brazilian periodicals. Castilho brings to light an ephemeral paper (of just 12 issues), edited by a self-proclaimed man of color, law school graduate, and teacher who had the temerity to call out racial discrimination in the city of Recife. Finally, José Juan Pérez Meléndez and Roberto Saba show how the slave trade and abolition were embedded in broader debates about free migration and transnational comparisons with the United States.This collection was made possible through the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira (Brazilian Digitized Periodicals) site launched by Brazil's National Library in 2012. The authors are careful to note that the sudden availability of millions of pages of searchable texts offers both opportunity and liability. Particularly, Zephyr Frank and Matthew Nestler examine the limits of searching antiquated and broken typeface and offer methodological guidance and sampling techniques. Kraay and others observe that Rio's papers are overrepresented but find creative work-arounds, for example by examining contributions by provincial correspondents or reprinted items from regional periodicals that appear in Rio's dailies.There is little to quibble about in this volume. While a contribution about the female press would have been welcome, the existence of such a press is well substantiated throughout. A fuller explanation of the central concept of “public opinion” as a frame for authorial legitimacy is warranted before chapter 9, where Cribelli defines it admirably. Overall, editors Kraay, Castilho, and Cribelli are to be commended for bringing together myriad contributions that both stand on their own and create a coherent whole. The volume covers the economics of printing presses, press legislation, the implications of press anonymity, and limits to press independence. The contributors reconstruct audience with reference to literacy rates, the cost of newspapers, and possible ancillary forms of oral transmission. Finally, they demonstrate how the press's evolution over the course of the nineteenth century contributed to Brazilian ideas of modernity, nationhood, race, and citizenship.

Characterizing top ranked code examples in Google

Developers often look for code examples on the web to improve learning and accelerate development. Google indexes millions of pages with code examples: pages with better content are likely to be top ranked. In practice, many factors may influence the rank: page reputation, content quality, etc. Consequently, the most relevant information on the page, i.e., the code example, may be overshadowed by the search engine. Thus, a better understanding of how Google would rank code examples in isolation may provide the basis to detect its strengths and limitations on dealing with such content. In this paper, we assess how the Google search engine ranks code examples. We build a website with 1,000 examples and submit it to Google. After being fully indexed, we query and analyze the returned examples. We find that pages with multiple code examples are more likely to top ranked by Google. Overall, single code examples that are higher ranked are larger, however, they are not necessarily more readable and reusable. We predict top ranked examples with a good level of confidence, but generic factors have more importance than code quality ones. Based on our results, we provide insights for researchers and practitioners.

Response

Response Pamela S. Nadell (bio) I thank Doron S. Ben-Atar, Jonathan Judaken, Sharon Musher, Shari Rabin, and Kenneth Stern for thoughtfully reflecting on my congressional testimony on the proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. I certainly never anticipated that what Doron Ben-Atar has called my "fifteen minutes of fame" would extend into the pages of this historic journal, where, for a decade, I edited the book reviews. One day, when a future historian updates Jeffrey Gurock's terrific history of this journal, my words and those of these respondents will be taken into account, whereas my testimony has already faded into obscurity in the millions of pages of the Congressional Record.1 Four of the respondents join me in opposing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act; one abstains. This small sample of colleagues adds their names to the long list of those sharing my opposition to the bill whom I consulted before agreeing to testify. I wrote my testimony early in November 2017. As Sharon Musher has pointed out, and I agree, antisemitism, as well as "other forms of hate, including racism and Islamophobia, [have] been growing both on our campuses and in our broader society." Were I to testify today after Pittsburgh and Poway—the cities already metonyms in the Jewish world for the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue (October 27, 2018) and Chabad of Poway (April 27, 2019)—I would have noted the tragedies and emphasized the dangers of online proliferation of white supremacy spreading communities of hate.2 Shari Rabin's historical lens deepens our understanding of the phenomenon of "anti-semitism awareness acts." A recent book substantiates her speculation that far more rabbis than Jewish studies scholars have ever appeared before Congress.3 She reminds us of the legal bases of discrimination against Jews, African Americans, and other minorities. [End Page 231] Quoting Ibram X. Kendi, who succeeded Elie Wiesel as Boston University's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, she reiterates that education cannot obliterate racist ideas because what has driven them are racist policies. This leads to Jonathan Judaken's brilliant assessment of the politics of anti-antisemitism at the core of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. I appreciate Judaken's critique of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, whose lead author was Kenneth Stern. Since testifying, I have joined colleagues around the country, including Michael Brenner, Paola Tartakoff, and Britt Tevis, in developing new courses on antisemitism. When we teach, we scrutinize multiple definitions of the term, and I include Judaken's scholarship.4 Nevertheless, I presumed that the busy members of Congress, who flitted in and out of that three-hour long hearing, are little interested in semantics and scholarly debates. But Judaken has raised a very important issue, which I did not address, about the shifting conceptions of the term "racism" and how they have led to "the exclusion of Jews from the struggle against racism." Just this academic year (2020–2021) while in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my American University colleagues Michael Brenner, Lauren Strauss, and I organized the virtual lecture series, "Antisemitism since the Holocaust: America, Israel, and Europe."5 When I asked our campus Antiracist and Research Policy Center to co-sponsor the series, my request was politely declined. Disturbingly, educating about antisemitism, even if such education cannot eradicate it, is not seen as anti-racist work. I appreciate Kenneth Stern's bringing me into this conversation, even if Doron Ben-Atar suggests that I was a puppet doing "his bidding." Stern's recent book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, provides the fullest account I have seen of this history.6 Jewish advocacy groups sitting at the Judiciary Committee's hearing table, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, would learn much by reading it. But mostly I am grateful because we never know what conversation, event, or chance encounter will spark an idea. While I had long taught [End Page 232] about antisemitism, it was primarily through the lens of the Holocaust. Now, looking back, I see that entering into the fray over the AntiSemitism Awareness Act at the same time that I was finishing...

Liberating the Richness of Facts implicit in taxonomic Publication: The Plazi Workflow

The growing corpus of hundreds of millions of pages of taxonomic literature reporting research results based on specimens is very rich in facts. In order to make them reusable, Plazi, Pensoft and Zenodo are building and maintaining the Biodiversity Literature Repository which includes a workflow to discover, describe, store, in order to making these facts open access, findable, accesible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Currently, 43,000 articles have 406,000 material citations, and around 50% of annually new described species are made accessible and immediately reused by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). All the images are deposited at the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), as well as the taxonomic treatments. For each of these deposits enriched metadata is added and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is minted. Through this process, Plazi is the single largest data set provider to GBIF and continues to provide ca. 45,000 unique taxonomic names at GBIF. The workflow is optimized for born digital portable data format (PDF) based publications, but other formats can also be ingested, including TaxPub, a taxonomy specific version of the Journal Article Tag Suit (JATS) XML. After ingestion, the PDF is readily converted to an open-access, proprietary format called Image Markup File (IMF). IMF is a compressed file format that consists of the enhanced information contained in the PDF, with figures and tables properly extracted. The IMFs are then housed at TreatmentBank, with associated exported files, including DwC-A for each parent article and their respective taxonomic treatments, XMLs of treatments and GBIF datasets of their parent articles. Taxonomic treatments, in addition to figures and the original PDFs, are also deposited on Zenodo, where a DOI is minted if none is already available. These Zenodo deposits include in the metadata links back to the different data and file formats, including the treatments XMLs, maintaining the system connected and up-to-date. Third-party players, like GBIF, Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI), Ocellus, OpenBiodiv and Synospecies are constantly fed by system hookups, which guarantees data consistency after further edits. The PDF-IMF conversion and data enhancement is possible due to Plazi’s open-source software called GoldenGate Imagine. Ingested XMLs, that are validated against the TaxPub scheme, follow a similar path into the system and the many third-party applications. This operation is supported by the Arcadia Fund as well by service contracts from publishers to disseminate their data. In addition, the workflow has been contributing treatments, images from numerous publications relevant to understanding the virus spillover as part of the CETAF COVID19 task force. In this lecture this workflow is described and explained, including the associated infrastructure and its ongoing changes and upcoming steps of development.

Archives, Open Government and National Security Balancing Concepts of Public Ownership with Security and Intelligence in Canada

ABSTRACT Starting in 1967, with the issuance of an Order-in-Council by Canada’s Privy Council, the concept of providing Canadians access to their Federal Government Records was promulgated through their National Archives (now Library and Archives Canada - LAC). In the intervening decades, LAC has reviewed millions of pages of Security and Intelligence Records and, whenever possible, released them. Now, as the Canadian Federal Government examines changes to the Access to Information Act, as well as changes to Canada’s National Security systems, there is a new commitment to National Security Transparency. The intent of this paper is to examine the historic provision of archival access to the records of Canada’s Federal Security and Intelligence Records, in particular to the archival records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Through a proper application of the terms of the Access to Information Act to the Canada’s Federal Security and Intelligence files, carried out in consultation with Canada’s intelligence community, Library and Archives Canada has embraced its responsibilities to Governmental Openness and the needs and requirements of National Security. In doing so, LAC has worked to balance  legislatively mandated commitment to chart a course between desirable accessibility and the operational needs of Canada’s Security/Intelligence community.

Three Key Issues for Managing Discovery in Global Merger Investigations. Coordinating Multijurisdictional Antitrust Reviews in Light of New Developments in UK and EU Merger Control Investigations

For counsel charged with securing antitrust clearances in multijurisdictional transactions, the conventional wisdom long has held that US, UK, and European regulators follow different paths for investigating the same M&A deal. In the US, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division (‘DOJ’) and the Federal Trade Commission (‘FTC’) rely heavily on gathering ordinary-course internal documents and data from the transaction parties and other industry participants, often amassing millions of pages of records in ‘Second Request’ investigations of strategic transactions. The UK and European Union processes, in contrast, historically have placed greater emphasis on detailed written submissions from the parties and other industry participants, while issuing comparatively few requests for ordinary-course company documents. These conventions are changing. In recent years, both the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK (‘CMA’) and the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission (‘EC’) have placed greater emphasis on evaluating internal documents and data to aid their analysis of strategic transactions. Both Agencies have called on transaction parties (and third parties) to provide more of these materials during the merger review process. In certain complex cases, the CMA and EC have made ‘Second Request-like’ requests for information, requiring the merger parties to apply agreed-upon search terms against the parties’ email and other electronic data systems, capturing hundreds of thousands, even millions of documents in the process.1

Large-scale Optical Character Recognition of Pre-modern Chinese Texts

Optical character recognition (OCR) - the fully automated transcription of text appearing in a digitized image - offers transformative opportunities for the scholarly study of written materials produced prior to the digital age. Digitization, in the sense of photographic reproduction, is now a well-established and efficiently performable mechanical process, and one with significant value in its own right for purposes of preservation as well as access to rare materials. As a result, hundreds of millions of pages of pre-modern Chinese works have already been digitized by libraries and academic institutions around the world - a significant portion of this increasingly being made freely available online.BR To make use of this material efficiently, transcriptions of the textual content of these images are needed. Given the enormous volume of image data in existence - and its ongoing production as digitization continues - this task is only feasible if it can be fully automated: performed by software without manual human intervention. Individually, reliable transcriptions produced by OCR offer enormous time savings to researchers, enabling efficient navigation of materials in ways not possible without digital transcription. In aggregate, however, these transcriptions facilitate entirely new ways of exploring historical materials - for example, rapidly identifying material that one suspects might exist somewhere, without knowing in advance where that might actually be. It is also a prerequisite also to virtually any type of statistical analysis of these materials - the potential utility of which continues to increase as a larger and larger proportion of the extant corpus is transcribed.BR This paper introduces a procedure for OCR of pre-modern Chinese written materials, both printed and handwritten, describing the complete process from digitized image through to automated transcription and manual correction of remaining errors, with particular attention to issues arising in this domain. The process described has been applied to over 25 million pages of pre-modern Chinese works, and the paper also introduces the Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org) platform used to both make these results available to scholars as well as provide a distributed, crowdsourced mechanism for facilitating manual corrections at scale as well as further analysis of the materials.

Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives

Contemporary and future historians need to grapple with and confront the challenges posed by web archives. These large collections of material, accessed either through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine or through other computational methods, represent both a challenge and an opportunity to historians. Through these collections, we have the potential to access the voices of millions of non-elite individuals (recognizing of course the cleavages in both Web access as well as method of access). To put this in perspective, the Old Bailey Online currently describes its monumental holdings of 197,745 trials between 1674 and 1913 as the “largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published.” GeoCities.com, a platform for everyday web publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, amounted to over thirty-eight million individual webpages. Historians will have access, in some form, to millions of pages: written by everyday people of various classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages. While the Web was not a perfect democracy by any means – it was and is unevenly accessed across each of those categories – this still represents a massive collection of non-elite speech. Yet a figure like thirty-eight million webpages is both a blessing and a curse. We cannot read every website, and must instead rely upon discovery tools to find the information that we need. Yet these tools largely do not exist for web archives, or are in a very early state of development: what will they look like? What information do historians want to access? We cannot simply map over web tools optimized for discovering current information through online searches or metadata analysis. We need to find information that mattered at the time, to diverse and very large communities. Furthermore, web pages cannot be viewed in isolation, outside of the networks that they inhabited. In theory, amongst corpuses of millions of pages, researchers can find whatever they want to confirm. The trick is situating it into a larger social and cultural context: is it representative? Unique? In this paper, “Lost in the Infinite Archive,” I explore what the future of digital methods for historians will be when they need to explore web archives. Historical research of periods beginning in the mid-1990s will need to use web archives, and right now we are not ready. This article draws on first-hand research with the Internet Archive and Archive-It web archiving teams. It draws upon three exhaustive datasets: the large Web ARChive (WARC) files that make up Wide Web Scrapes of the Web; the metadata-intensive WAT files that provide networked contextual information; and the lifted-straight-from-the-web guerilla archives generated by groups like Archive Team. Through these case studies, we can see – hands-on – what richness and potentials lie in these new cultural records, and what approaches we may need to adopt. It helps underscore the need to have humanists involved at this early, crucial stage.

Student to Scholar: Coming of Age at the GSA

Student to Scholar:Coming of Age at the GSA1 Suzanne Brown-Fleming (bio) In October 2001, for the German Studies Association’s twenty-fifth annual conference held in Washington, DC, I delivered my first professional paper on what would become my first book. I remember feeling extremely nervous as I gave my paper on “Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany,” for, as is often the case at the GSA, one of the most respected senior scholars in the field of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust, Michael Phayer, would deliver the response to my paper in front of a full and engaged audience. Still a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Maryland-College Park at that time, very green, and in the midst of what is still a fractious scholarly debate on the role the church played in the Nazi and postwar era, I could not imagine that over the next dozen years, I would finish my dissertation, find employment, write a book, write another, and become completely comfortable in the network of scholars serious about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The German Studies Association annual meetings were integral to these developments. Over the next decade, each year at the German Studies Association, in wonderful cities like San Diego, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Kansas City, I participated in panels and roundtables with scholars whose work I had read in graduate school and whom I never dreamed would be accessible to me. But accessible they were, and it became a typical pattern to deliver papers with other younger scholars trying to establish themselves and always benefitting from the graciousness of more seasoned figures in the field to chair the panel or deliver the comment. In 2002, Doris Bergen commented on my panel and it is through that relationship that I became connected with the press that published my first book. In 2003, Gerhard Besier and Robert Ericksen invited me to be part of a panel, and through those relationships I became part of the editorial board of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. So many other meaningful professional relationships with scholars of Nazi Germany grew and were cultivated at the German Studies Association annual meeting, and I could always count on Gerhard Weinberg’s postbanquet gathering to be sure I engaged with them all. [End Page 679] Over the last fifteen years, I have looked forward to those amazing four days during which I could connect with colleagues, hear about fresh new work on the Holocaust, the Nazi era, and the churches, and, as the years roll by, provide to younger scholars some of the important mentoring that was so freely given to me. The German Studies Association annual meeting has always been a sort of oasis and crucible to test new ideas. Most recently, I have been a participant on panels and roundtables related to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, which was, until November 2007, the largest closed Holocaust-related archival collection in the world. Recently inscribed into the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register, the size and scope of the collection staggers the imagination. The ITS holdings contain information about millions of people subject to incarceration, forced labor, displacement, or death as a result of World War II; their persecutors; witnesses and accomplices; and the countries and agencies who addressed their needs at war’s end. The German Studies Association itself played a role in opening this critical archive, calling for access to scholars in an official brief issued by the GSA archives committee. As I look forward to the next fifteen years and many more new cities and fresh faces at the German Studies Association annual meeting, I know I will have a receptive audience with which to explore this new trove of documents, numbering in the millions of pages, and will be able to entice others to do the same. I hope that I can offer future generations what was offered to me at each annual meeting: friendship, collegiality, intellectual generosity, curiosity, and fresh ideas for our field going forward into the twenty-first century...

Fictions of Speculation: Introduction

There are plenty of texts in which one might not be surprised to find an alien invasion on only the second page, but The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (2010) – the seven-hundred-page document produced by the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – is hardly one of them. The Inquiry Report opens by invoking the dizzying difficulty of its own task: from “millions of pages of documents,” the Inquiry Report begins by noting, its authors have attempted to understand events compared, just in the Inquiry Report's first two pages, to “mass delusion,” “a hurricane,” a “perfect storm,” a “train wreck,” and, finally, an “alien event.” This proliferation of metaphors suggests an encounter with a set of historical conditions whose magnitude and complexity render them recalcitrant to representation. What overwhelms the authors of the Inquiry Report is not simply the complexity – the length and breadth – of the story to be told, but the question of what sort of story it should be: if the crisis was described even by those who should have been in the know as “dramatic and mystifying,” how could one render it legible while at the same time doing justice to its singularity?

The eigenvectors corresponding to the second eigenvalue of the Google matrix and their relation to link spamming

Google uses the PageRank algorithm to determine the relative importance of a website. Link spamming is the name for putting links between websites with no other purpose than to increase the PageRank value of a website. To give a fair result to a search query it is important to detect whether a website is link spammed so that it can be filtered out of the search result.While the dominant eigenvector of the Google matrix determines the PageRank value, the second eigenvector can be used to detect a certain type of link spamming. We will describe an efficient algorithm for computing a complete set of independent eigenvectors for the second eigenvalue, and explain how this algorithm can be used to detect link spamming. We will illustrate the performance of the algorithm on web crawls of millions of pages.

The myth of the new: Mass digitization, distant reading, and the future of the book

This article presents the theoretical background to a wider project that is attempting to increase our understanding of the impact and uses of large-scale digitization, being undertaken by the first author at University College London with the working title ‘What is the impact of large-scale digitization upon researchers and the information sector?’ It discusses the controversy surrounding the emergence of mass digitization: the creation and collection of huge resources containing millions of pages of textual cultural content. It demonstrates that the polarized nature of the literature about this technological development is far from unprecedented, and in fact can be traced through the theory of a number of varied fields: the debate surrounding mechanization and digital technologies, our understanding of the role of the sublime in modern representations of technology, the similarities between the sociology of city life and digital information overload, and the way in which innovations are diffused throughout society. It proposes that these theories explain why debates around technological innovation often become so hyperbolic, creating an almost mythological view of technological determination. It concludes that, as a result of the processes outlined in this theory, mass digitization has become stuck between two conflicting rhetorical movements, and that it is therefore necessary to begin working to increase our understanding of this technology and to move the debate onwards using evidence from the real world.

Ramping Up Policy Measures in the Area of Physical Activity

The American population weighs too much. That is so well documented; it does not even need a citation. And for all the millions of pages of research and gray literature devoted to the topic and all the complex reasons for American obesity, we know that Americans tend to eat too much, and too much of the wrong things, while not exercising nearly enough. With the girth of America growing, taking off fatty pounds and, more importantly, keeping them off will go a long way toward mitigating personal and family health catastrophes and future health care costs. Our propensityforexcessweightis,tobesure,relatedtodecisions by individuals. But these decisions are shaped and guided by what we encounter in the places where we work, learn, and play. A new environment around each of us, one less blessed with empty calories and more encouraging to movement and activity, will become us. In the past few years, policy attempts to influence the inputs have been highly visible, from the recent success in reducing sodium in processed foods to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to place calories on menu boards and the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which promoted healthier meals in schools and in childcare centers. While the output side of the equation has not been ignored in research or in our culture, the role of policy in affecting physical activity is nowhere near as visible as the policy focus on nutrition. This issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice is a welcome examination of policy’s role in altering the output side of the equation.

Patron Privacy in the "2.0" Era

In today's information ecosystem, libraries are at a crossroads: several of the services traditionally provided within their walls are increasingly made available online, often by non- traditional sources, both commercial and amateur, thereby threatening the historical role of the library in collecting, filtering, and delivering information. For example, search engines provide easy access to millions of pages of information; online databases provide convenient gateways to news, images, videos, as well as scholarship; and large- scale book digitization projects appear poised to make roaming the stacks seem an antiquated notion. Further, the traditional authority and expertise enjoyed by librarians has been challenged by the emergence of automated information filtering and ranking systems, such as Google's algorithms and Amazon's recommendation system, as well as amateur, collaborative, and peer- produced knowledge projects, such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Delicious. Meanwhile, the professional, educational, and social spheres of our lives are increasingly intermingled through online social networking spaces such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, providing new interfaces for interacting with friends, collaborating with colleagues, and exchanging information. Libraries face a critical question in this new information environment: what roles might libraries play in providing access to information in today's digitally networked world?One strategy to address this has been to actively incorporate the increasingly interactive, collaborative, and user- centered features of the so- called Web world into traditional library services, thereby creating (Casey & Savastinuk, 2006; Courtney, 2007; Maness, 2006). Examples include providing patrons with the ability to evaluate and comment on particular items in a library's collection through discussion forums or comment threads; creating dynamic and personalized recommendation systems (other patrons who checked out this book also borrowed these items); using blogs, wikis, and related user- centered platforms to encourage communication and interaction among/between library staffand patrons; and interfacing various library collections and services with relevant 2.0 platforms, such as Delicious, GoodReads, and Facebook.Launching such Library 2.0 features, however, poses a unique dilemma in the realm of information ethics, particularly in relation to protecting patron privacy. Traditionally, the context of the library brings with it specific norms of information flow that protect patron privacy (American Library Association, 2012b; Foerstel, 1991; Gorman, 2000; Morgan, 2006). Library 2.0 threatens to disrupt these ethical norms, since the 2.0 world introduces competing norms that lean toward the open flow and sharing of personal information. Despite these concerns, many librarians recognize the need to pursue Library 2.0 initiatives as the best way to serve the changing needs of their patrons and to ensure the library's continued role in providing professionally guided access to knowledge. Longitudinal studies of library adoption of 2.0 technologies reveal a marked increase in the use of blogs, sharing plugins, and social media between 2008 and 2010 (Lietzau & Helgren, 2011; Lietzau, 2009). In this short amount of time, Library 2.0 has taken hold in hundreds of libraries, and the question before us is not whether libraries will move towards Library 2.0 services, but how they will do it, and, from an ethical perspective, whether they can maintain their professional norms and their long- standing concerns for patron privacy in the process.The late cultural critic Neil Postman (1990) warned:[A]nyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. …

Reading Newspapers: Cultural Histories of the Popular Press in Modern Britain

AbstractPopular newspapers have not, in general, featured prominently in histories of modern Britain. In recent years, however, a number of scholars, many inspired by the ‘cultural turn’ and the increased scholarly focus on language, meaning and identity, have reassessed the value of the popular press as a historical source. Newspapers provide one of the most effective ways of exploring the representations and narratives that circulated throughout British society. The ‘spectacular heterogeneity’ of their contents, moreover, ensures that newspapers are a potentially rich source of information on a wide range of subjects. This growing interest in the popular press as a historical source has been dramatically reinforced in the last decade by the digitisation of a vast number of newspapers and periodicals from the seventeenth to the 21st centuries. Millions of pages of content, rapidly searchable by keyword, are now available, at least for those fortunate enough to have individual or institutional subscriptions. The revolution in the accessibility and usability of newspaper archives has transformed scholars’ enthusiasm for them. This article assesses how these developments have affected the writing of modern British history, and suggests likely future directions for the field.

Ensemble of Decision Tree Classifiers for Mining Web Data Streams

The World Wide Web (www or w3 commonly known as the web) is the largest database available with growth at the rate of millions of pages a day and presents a challenging task for mining web data streams. Currently extraction of knowledge from web data streams is getting more and more complex, because the structure of data doesn’t match the attribute-values when considering the large volume of web data. In this paper, an ensemble of decision tree classifiers is presented, which is an efficient mining method to obtain a proper set of rules for extracting knowledge from a large amount of web data streams. We built a web server using Model 2 Architecture to collect the web data streams and applied the ensemble classifier for generating decision rules using several decision tree learning models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in decision making and predicting the class value of new web data streams.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: the Georgia years, 1924-1974

This dual biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the thirty-ninth President of the United States and his wife, chronicles the unique political and business relationship of a couple who together rose from obscurity to national and international power. His life in an isolated, prosperous, locally powerful, Baptist farm family prepared him for a career in public service and business. Rosalynn came from a more modest, but well-connected and intelligent, Methodist family in the town of Plains. Each was the oldest of four children, ambitious, eager to learn, able to shoulder heavy responsibilities, and committed to humanitarian interests. Together, they compromised their religious and career differences, enjoyed a short career in the United States Navy, built a small agribusiness empire, plotted political strategy, won the governorship of Georgia in 1970, and announced his candidacy for President of the United States on December 12, 1974. This volume, which covers the years from his birth to the end of his governorship, offers substantial, detailed information about their childhoods, marriage, personal lives, Navy career, business success and entry into politics. In a racially-charged atmosphere, Carter won a contested state senate seat in 1962 but lost the governor's race to Lester Maddox in 1966. In 1970 he won a stunning victory over the old Georgia politics, revealing that Rosalynn was so emotionally and professionally close to her husband that his career often seemed inseparable from hers. Carter shocked the state of Georgia and the entire country with his statement in 1971 that the time for racial discrimination was over, thus launching a national political race. Godbold's research has spanned two decades, much of it in rarely seen documents in the Georgia Department of Archives and History and the better-known Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, both in Atlanta. Working from millions of pages of primary sources, he has added contemporary scholarship, oral histories, and new interviews. From academic and military records, the governor's correspondence, the memories of the Carters, the accounts of Georgia and national politicians, and public documents, this volume details how the Carters rose to power, managed their private and public lives, governed Georgia, and seized control of the national Democratic party. It is a blueprint for what they would do on the national and international stages after 1975. The cast of characters ranging from Jimmy, Rosalynn, Miss Allie Smith, Mr. Earl, Miss Lillian, Brother Billy, Rachel Clark, Admiral Rickover, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Richard Nixon, Baby Amy, Charles Kirbo, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, and many more is set in a true Faulknerian tale that has changed the image of the South in the national mind and the role of the South in the presidency. The Carters were ordinary people whose dramatic and colourful story resonates with human life, defeat, courage, inspiration, hope, and extraordinary accomplishments.