Virtual Editing Research Articles

Twenty-five years of breast-feeding research in Midwifery

This paper explores some of the significant changes that have taken place with regard to the protection, promotion and support of breast feeding during the past three decades. The period covered since the first issue of Midwifery in 1985, has been marked by some dramatic reversals of harmful discourses and detrimental practices with regard to infant and young child feeding and more specifically breast feeding. Midwifery has spanned this period with the publication of 80 papers on breast feeding. This collection of papers has both influenced and reflected upon changes in international and national breast-feeding strategies and practices. Six papers have been selected for a special virtual edition of Midwifery to reflect the diversity of breast-feeding research in terms of issues explored, methodology and country of origin ( www.midwiferyjournal.com). Considerable progress is reflected in these papers. However, there are still enormous challenges ahead in working towards the optimisation of infant and young child feeding. In addition to continuing to conduct and collate robust scientific and epidemiological research we need further studies that explore the political, economic, socio-cultural and psychological factors influencing women's infant feeding practices. Our professional practice needs to continue to improve in order to provide women and families with appropriate support, encouragement and resources to enable them to breastfeed effectively. Finally, we need to continue to challenge the systems and approaches at organisational and community levels that impede women in their endeavours to feed their infants in optimum ways.

Child development and disability in resource poor settings.

This virtual edition of Child: care, health and development brings together a series of eight papers published over the last five years reporting a rich mix of studies addressing important issues for child disability and developmental impairment in culturally diverse, resource poor settings. Whilst raising fascinating issues relating to the cultural context of childhood they point the way ahead towards common standards for our efforts to address the needs of ALL children. If we are to recognize, assess and provide intervention for developmentally impaired children families first need an understanding of typical early development. Ertem and colleagues (2007) use a 20-item Knowledge of Child Development Inventory to demonstrate this knowledge is lacking among urban Turkish mothers. Gladstone and colleagues (2010) use qualitative data from Malawi to take a culturally relativist position suggesting what is valued in the developing child is culturally variable and proceed to the development of a more culturally appropriate developmental assessment tool. This in turn begs the question is there a single norm for human child development? It would appear from the work of Reyes and colleagues (2010) in the Philippines that ‘language’ and ‘performance’ norms among Philippine 0- to 2-year-olds do differ from UK counterparts using the Griffiths Development scales. Readers wishing to explore this fascinating area further are directed to the excellent ‘cross-cultural reader’ in Anthropology and Child Development recently published by Robert Levine (Levine & New 2008). Ascertaining developmentally impaired children is a challenge. Most methods under-report impairment. Mung'ala-Odera and Newton (2007) provide a useful overview of the pros and cons of different approaches and urge us to validate better ways of estimating the size of the problem. As the second child survival revolution progresses we urgently need more data to ensure child development is recognized to be the next priority. Perhaps incorporating validated markers into Demographic Health Surveys is the way forward. No matter where children live families experience stress. Khan and colleagues (2008) in Bangladesh use a Self-Report Questionnaire to investigate the stress experienced by mothers attending their child development centre. Interestingly, stress levels reported by mothers of children with impairments were little different from a control group of those typically developing – and did not appear to have any simple relationship with child development centre attendance. Clearly, the determinants of maternal stress are multifactorial. Saloojee and colleagues (2009) adapt the Measure of Processes of Care to a South African setting and find that respectful and supportive care along with the provision of information and advice to families of children with impairments is as highly valued in Southern Africa as in North America. How care is delivered is important: de Souza and colleagues (2006) in India demonstrate limited coverage of a centre-based developmental support programme despite the support of the Anganwadi community health workers. They recommend home visiting programmes, the mode of delivery adopted by a ‘Learning through Play’ programme evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in Pakistan by Rahman and colleagues (2009). This programme was universal (rather than targeted for children with identified impairments) and found increases in mothers' knowledge and attitudes about infant development, but no difference in maternal stress. A common theme seems to be the need for more emphasis in families and health systems on understanding and facilitating preschool child development . . . readers of this virtual issue of Child: care, health and development can help to make up this deficit, aided by the evidence presented in these papers.

Schicksale einer Handschrift. Der »Codex Sinaiticus« aus dem 4. Jahrhundert ersteht neu im Internet

Since 2005 the Codex Sinaiticus has been the focus of a project which will come to completion in 2010 when all available leaves of the book will be available in an electronically accessible edition. Due to the Codex's history the original leaves are found today in four locations: Leipzig, London, St. Petersburg, and in the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai. All 400 leaves of this manuscript of the Bible, which dates from the 4 th century and contains the first complete copy of the NewTestament, have been digitized, assessed in terms of conservation criteria, and transcribed. The virtual edition of the codex is now the highest quality reconstruction of a manuscript from the Antiquity and provides for both scientists and the general public with a work whose original state is no longer a unified whole. Hence, this project is of great significance for the field of cultural history.

Towards the electronic <i>Esposizioni</i>: the challenges of the online commentary

This article provides a brief introduction to Brown University's Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL)'s major new project: the electronic Esposizioni. The Esposizioni, like other texts available on Brown University's Decameron Web, is a major vernacular work by Boccaccio, and is the text of his unfinished lecture series on Dante's Commedia. The electronic Esposizioni project is fundamentally concerned with the definition of the relationship between two canonical medieval authors, Dante and Boccaccio, as expressed through the primary (commented) text and the secondary (commentary) text.The first part of the article provides an overview of the historical and literary contexts of Boccaccio's commentary on Dante. A great demand for explication and analysis of Dante's poem sprang up in Italy immediately after Dante's death in 1321, and Boccaccio's Esposizioni forms part of this tradition. However, unlike other Dante commentaries, the Esposizioni was not written with the intention of becoming a published book: it is instead the notes for the public lectures on Dante which Boccaccio gave in Florence in 1373-74. The oral intention and nature of this text is one of the elements upon which the electronic Esposizioni project focuses. One of the major benefits of the electronic medium is that we are able to distance the text from the material format of the bound book, which fixes the oral text as a canonical and immutable object.The second part of the article provides further information about how humanities computing has developed in the Italian Studies Department at Brown. Following a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the famous Decameron Web now forms part of the VHL, which has a dual role: to provide information about the civic, literary, and intellectual culture of Early Modern Italy to a broad audience of students and specialists alike; and to develop a variety of electronic tools for collaborative teaching and research. This section also considers the potential audience for the electronic Esposizioni project within the popular field of Dante studies, and compares the project to the already-established Dartmouth Dante Project, which is also concerned with Dante commentary.The final section of the paper presents the electronic edition of the Esposizioni, with a technical description of the commented and commentary texts, a discussion of the structural and semantic encoding principles, and some examples of the encoding in practice. Due to its nature as a hybrid medieval text, of which no autograph manuscript survives, Boccaccio's Esposizioni inevitably contains uncertainties. Rather then try to create a definitive online edition, we are thus constructing a Virtual Editing House which will allow scholars with privileged access the opportunity to comment and add their own annotations to the work. The project thus does not only present the commentary and commented text together for the first time in the digital medium, but will allow the creation of a new and ongoing commentary to Dante's poem.

VideoZapper: A System for Delivering Personalized Video Content

Given the huge amounts of audiovisual materials that are broadcasted every day there is considerable interest in applications that are able to fulfill our need for selecting information. In this paper, we propose a system, VideoZapper, which can personalize and help to select audiovisual content based on its properties (represented as metadata descriptors) and mainly on the past experience of other users with that material. The content is selected based on the user profile and the description of each of the segments to be presented. A second level of selection is based on a “virtual edition” of the content, taking into account what previous users/viewers did. The paper presents related personalization and metadata approaches, the rational and principles for continuous media personalization, our current architecture and system, and preliminary experiences.

Virtual editing of MPEG-2 streams

The introduction of disc based video recorders for consumers brings the possibility to support virtual editing, that is editing without making a copy of the underlying A/V data. To support frame accurate virtual editing, we propose a solution that involves generating a new segment of MPEG-2 multiplex called a bridge sequence. Within the bridge sequence, some video is re-encoded and remultiplexed to ensure that the edited sequence can be played back seamlessly. The bridge sequence is stored on disc separately from the original sequences, which remain unchanged.

A video retrieval and sequencing system

Video is an effective medium for capturing the events in the real world around us, and a vast amount of video materials exists, covering a wide range of applications. However, widespread use of video in computer applications is often impeded by the lack of effective tools to manage video information systematically. This article discusses the design and implementation of a frame-based video retrieval and sequencing system (VRSS). The system is designed to support the entire process of video information management: segmenting, indexing, retrieving, and sequencing of video data. A semiautomatic tool is developed to divide video sequences into meaningful shots. Each video shot is logged using text descriptions, audio dialogue, and cinematic attributes. A two-layered, concept-based model is used as the basis for accurately retrieving relevant video shots based on users' free-text queries. A cinematic, rule-based, virtual editing tool is also developed to sequence the video shots retrieved for presentation within a specified time constraint. The system has been tested on a video documentary on the NUS (National University of Singapore) engineering faculty. The results of video retrieval experiments are encouraging.

Virtual Editing

This is the second half of a two-part report on Virtual Editing. In the first paper, virtual editing was defined and its implementation described. In this paper, a user interface to the editor is described and some of the problems of introducing a new form of communication which conceptually merges various media are discussed. The aim is acceptance by the office worker, or eventual end user. Possible applications for this technology are suggested. In addition, the use of a mouse in the system as a way of entering the user commands is explained.