Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 31, 2018

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks [IIIF + Topic Maps]

Filed under: Archives,Art,History,IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework),Image Processing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:02 pm

Victoria and Albert Museum brings Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks to life online by Gareth Harris.

From the post:

Scholars and digital experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London have posted online the contents of two notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci, enabling devotees of the Renaissance polymath to zoom in and examine his revolutionary ideas and concepts.

…

On the technical front, the use of IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) to present a digital version of the notebooks is an innovation. “It’s our use of the IIIF standard that has enabled us to present the codex in a new way. The V&A digital team has been doing a lot of work in the last 18 months using IIIF. We’ve used the deep-zoom functionality enabled through IIIF to present some of the most spectacular and detailed items in our collection,” says Kati Price, the V&A’s head of digital media and publishing.

Crucially, IIIF also lets scholars compare similar objects across several institutions’ collections. “Researchers can easily see the images together with Leonardo da Vinci items held by other institutions using IIIF, for side-by-side digital comparison,” Yvard says.

These two notebooks, not to mention those to be posted next year for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, are important in their own right.

However, I want to draw your attention to the use of International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in this project.

From the IIIF FAQ:

What is IIIF?

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of shared application programming interface (API) specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories. The IIIF is comprised of and driven by a community of libraries, museums, archives, software companies, and other organizations working together to create, test, refine, implement and promote the IIIF specifications. Using JSON-LD, linked data, and standard W3C web protocols such as Web Annotation, IIIF makes it easy to parse and share digital image data, migrate across technology systems, and provide enhanced image access for scholars and researchers. In short, IIIF enables better, faster and cheaper image delivery. It lets you leverage interoperability and the fabric of the Web to access new possibilities and new users for your image-based resources, while reducing long term maintenance and technological lock in. IIIF gives users a rich set of baseline functionality for viewing, zooming, and assembling the best mix of resources and tools to view, compare, manipulate and work with images on the Web, an experience made portable–shareable, citable, and embeddable.

What are the benefits of IIIF?

….

Advanced, interactive functionality for end users

  • Fast, rich, zoom and pan delivery of images
  • Manipulation of size, scale, region of interest, rotation, quality and format.
  • Annotation – IIIF has native compatibility with the W3C annotation working group’s Web Annotation Data Model, which supports annotating content on the Web. Users can comment on, transcribe, and draw on image-based resources using the Web’s inherent architecture.
  • Assemble and use image-based resources from across the Web, regardless of source. Compare pages, build an exhibit, or view a virtual collection of items served from different sites.
  • Cite and Share – IIIF APIs provide motivation for persistence, providing portable views of images and/or regions of images. Cite an image with confidence in stable image URIs, or share it for reference by others–or yourself in a different environment.

…

If you are looking to enhance your topic map with images, this sounds like the right way to go. Ping me with your examples of your uses of IIIF with topic maps.

BTW, the Draft IIIF v.3.0 Specifications have been released for review.

October 26, 2017

What’s New in the JFK Files? [A Topic Map Could Help Answer That Question]

Filed under: Government,Government Data,History,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 9:07 pm

The JFK Files: Calling On Citizen Reporters

From the webpage:

The government has released long-secret files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and we want your help.

The files are among the last to be released by the National Archives under a 1992 law that ordered the government to make public all remaining documents pertaining to the assassination. Other files are being withheld because of what the White House says are national security, law enforcement and foreign policy concerns.

There has long been a trove of conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, including doubts about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, as the Warren Commission determined in its report the following year.

Here’s where you come in. Read the documents linked here. If you find news or noteworthy nuggets among the pages, share them with us on the document below. If we use what you find, we’ll be sure to give you a shoutout!

Given the linear feet of existing files, finding new nuggets or aligning them with old nuggets in the original files, is going to be a slow process.

What more, you or I may find the exact nugget needed to connect dots for someone else, but since we all read, search, and maintain our searches separately, effective sharing of those nuggets won’t happen.

Depending on the granularity of a topic map over those same materials, confirmation of Oswald’s known whereabouts and who reported those could be easily examined and compared to new (if any) whereabouts information in these files. If new files confirm what is known, researchers could skip that material and move to subjects unknown in the original files.

A non-trivial encoding task but full details have been delayed pending another round of hiding professional incompetence. A topic map will help you ferret out the incompetents seeking to hide in the last releases of documents. Interested?

October 22, 2017

Comparative Presidential Corruption

Filed under: Government,History,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:48 pm

Reporters wanting to add a historical flavor to their accounts of corruption and investigations of corruption in the Trump regime, will be glad to see: Papers of Ulysses S. Grant Now Online.

From the post:

The Library of Congress has put the papers of Ulysses S. Grant online for the first time in their original format at https://www.loc.gov/collections/ulysses-s-grant-papers/about-this-collection/.

The Library holds a treasure trove of documents from the Civil War commander and 18th president of the United States, including personal correspondence, “headquarters records” created during the Civil War and the original handwritten manuscript of Grant’s memoir— regarded as one of the best in history—among other items. The collection totals approximately 50,000 items dating from 1819-1974, with the bulk falling in the period 1843-1885.

The collection includes general and family correspondence, speeches, reports, messages, military records, financial and legal records, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, memorabilia and other papers. The collection relates to Grant’s service in the Mexican War and Civil War, his pre-Civil War career, and his postwar service as U.S. secretary of war ad interim under President Andrew Johnson, his 1868 presidential campaign and two-term presidency, his unsuccessful 1880 presidential bid, his extensive international travels and the financial difficulties late in life that spurred the writing of his memoir, which he completed just days before his death from tongue cancer in July 1885.
…

If you think the IRS has an unsavory reputation now, one tax collector (liquor taxes) was hired with a 50% commission on his collections. The Sanborn incident.

There have been a number of deeply corrupt American presidencies but this collection crossed my desk recently.

Enjoy!

July 11, 2017

The Classical Language Toolkit

Filed under: Classics,History,Humanities,Natural Language Processing — Patrick Durusau @ 4:26 pm

The Classical Language Toolkit

From the webpage:

The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) offers natural language processing (NLP) support for the languages of Ancient, Classical, and Medieval Eurasia. Greek and Latin functionality are currently most complete.

Goals

  • compile analysis-friendly corpora;
  • collect and generate linguistic data;
  • act as a free and open platform for generating scientific research.

You are sure to find one or more languages of interest:

Collecting, analyzing and mapping Tweets can be profitable and entertaining, but tomorrow or perhaps by next week, almost no one will read them again.

The texts in this project survived by hand preservation for thousands of years. People are still reading them.

How about you?

June 19, 2017

Key DoD Officials – September 1947 to June 2017

Filed under: Government,History,Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 8:20 pm

While looking for a particular Department of Defense official, I stumbled on: Department of Defense Key Officials September 1947–June 2017.

Yes, almost seventy (70) years worth of key office holders at the DoD. It’s eighty (80) pages long, produced by the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense.

One potential use, aside from giving historical military fiction a ring of authenticity, would be to use this as a starting set of entities to trace through the development of the military/industrial complex.

Everyone, including me, refers to the military/industrial complex as though it is a separate entity, over there somewhere.

But as everyone discovered with the Panama Papers, however tangled and corrupt even world-wide organizations can be, we have the technology to untangle those knots and to shine bright lights into obscure corners.

Interested?

June 8, 2017

Roman Roads (Drawn Like The London Subway)

Filed under: History,Humanities,Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 8:20 pm

Roman Roads by Sasha Trubetskoy.

See Trubetskoy’s website for a much better rendering of this map of Roman roads, drawn in subway-style.

From the post:

It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.

Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. Huge shoutout to: Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary (found a full PDF online but lost the url).

The lines are a combination of actual, named roads (like the Via Appia or Via Militaris) as well as roads that do not have a known historic name (in which case I creatively invented some names). Skip to the “Creative liberties taken” section for specifics.

How long would it actually take to travel this network? That depends a lot on what method of transport you are using, which depends on how much money you have. Another big factor is the season – each time of year poses its own challenges. In the summer, it would take you about two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.

However, no sane Roman would use only roads where sea travel is available. Sailing was much cheaper and faster – a combination of horse and sailboat would get you from Rome to Byzantium in about 25 days, Rome to Carthage in 4-5 days. Check out ORBIS if you want to play around with a “Google Maps” for Ancient Rome. I decided not to include maritime routes on the map for simplicity’s sake.
…

Subway-style drawing lose details but make relationships between routes clearer. Or at least that is one of the arguments in their favor.

Thoughts on a subway-style drawing that captures the development of the Roman road system? To illustrate how that corresponds in broad strokes to the expansion of Rome?

Be sure to visit Trubetskoy’s homepage. Lot’s of interesting maps and projects.

June 7, 2017

Where the Greeks and Romans White Supremacists?

Filed under: Art,Bias,Diversity,History,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 3:02 pm

Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color by Sarah E. Bond.

From the post:

Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted. Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors.

A number of fantastic museum shows throughout Europe and the US in recent years have addressed the issue of ancient polychromy. The Gods in Color exhibit travelled the world between 2003–15, after its initial display at the Glyptothek in Munich. (Many of the photos in this essay come from that exhibit, including the famed Caligula bust and the Alexander Sarcophagus.) Digital humanists and archaeologists have played a large part in making those shows possible. In particular, the archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, whose research informed Gods in Color, has done important work, applying various technologies and ultraviolet light to antique statues in order to analyze the minute vestiges of paint on them and then recreate polychrome versions.

Acceptance of polychromy by the public is another matter. A friend peering up at early-20th-century polychrome terra cottas of mythological figures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art once remarked to me: “There is no way the Greeks were that gauche.” How did color become gauche? Where does this aesthetic disgust come from? To many, the pristine whiteness of marble statues is the expectation and thus the classical ideal. But the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe. Where this standard came from and how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today are often ignored.

Most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi. This has an impact on the way we view the antique world. The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region. The Romans, in fact, did not define people as “white”; where, then, did this notion of race come from?

…

A great post and reminder that learning history (or current events) through a particular lens isn’t the same as the only view of history (or current events).

I originally wrote “an accurate view of history….” but that’s not true. At best we have one or more views and when called upon to act, make decisions upon those views. “Accuracy” is something that lies beyond our human grasp.

The reminder I would add to this post is that recognition of a lens, in this case, the absence of color in our learning of history, isn’t overcome by our naming it and perhaps nodding in agreement, yes, that was a short fall in our learning.

“Knowing” about the coloration of familiar art work doesn’t erase centuries of considering it without color. No amount of pretending will make it otherwise.

Humanists should learn about and promote the use of colorization so the youth of today learn different traditions than the ones we learned.

December 25, 2016

A people’s history of the United States [A Working Class Winter Is Coming]

Filed under: Government,History,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 8:34 pm

A people’s history of the United States by Howard Zinn.

From the webpage:

The full text of Howard Zinn’s superb people’s history of the United States, spanning over 500 years from Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492 to the Clinton presidency in 1996.

I think this is the first edition text (1980), which has been updated and can be purchased here.

Be sure to visit/use (either personally or for teaching): Teaching A People’s History:

…
Its goal is to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of United States history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. The empowering potential of studying U.S. history is often lost in a textbook-driven trivial pursuit of names and dates. People’s history materials and pedagogy emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history. Students learn that history is made not by a few heroic individuals, but instead by people’s choices and actions, thereby also learning that their own choices and actions matter.
…

Buy the book, share it and the website as widely as possible.

A working class winter is coming.

November 22, 2016

Egyptological Museum Search

Filed under: History,Museums,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 5:06 pm

Egyptological Museum Search

From the post:

The Egyptological museum search is a PHP tool aimed to facilitate locating the descriptions and images of ancient Egyptian objects in online catalogues of major museums. Online catalogues (ranging from selections of highlights to complete digital inventories) are now offered by almost all major museums holding ancient Egyptian items and have become indispensable in research work. Yet the variety of web interfaces and of search rules may overstrain any person performing many searches in different online catalogues.

Egyptological museum search was made to provide a single search point for finding objects by their inventory numbers in major collections of Egyptian antiquities that have online catalogues. It tries to convert user input into search queries recognised by museums’ websites. (Thus, for example, stela Geneva D 50 is searched as “D 0050,” statue Vienna ÄS 5046 is searched as “AE_INV_5046,” and coffin Turin Suppl. 5217 is searched as “S. 05217.”) The following online catalogues are supported:
…

The search interface uses a short list of aliases for museums.

Once you see/use the interface proper, here, I hope you are interested in volunteering to improve it.

November 19, 2016

The Postal Museum (UK)

Filed under: Government,History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:00 pm

The Postal Museum

Set to open in mid-2017, the Postal Museum covers five hundred years of “Royal Mail.”

It’s Online catalogue has more than 120,000 records describing its collection.

Which includes this gem:

uk-postal-museum-460

Registering for the catalogue will enable you to access downloadable content, save searches, create wish-lists, etc. Registration is free and worth the effort.

The site is in beta and my confirmation email displayed as blank in Thunderbird but viewing source gave the confirmation URL.

A terminology issue. Where the tabs for an item say “Ordering and Viewing,” they mean requesting an items to be retrieved for you to view on a specified day.

I was confused because I thought “ordering” meant obtaining a copy, print or digital of the item in question.

The turnpike road map above is available in a somewhat larger size but not nearly large enough for actual use.

Very high resolution images of maps and similar materials would be a welcome addition to the resources already available.

Enjoy!

PS: I didn’t look but the Postal Museum has resources on stamps as well. 😉

July 20, 2016

The History of Cartography

Filed under: Cartography,History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:02 pm

The History of Cartography

From the webpage:

The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right column) are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.

On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first three volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of all the PDFs that make up the first six books.
…

Links to the parts, which are then divided into separate PDF files of each chapter:

Volume One: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean

Volume Two: Book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies

Volume Two: Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies

Volume Two: Book 3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies

Volume Three: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 1

Volume Three: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 2

Unless you want to index the parts for yourself, remember the search box at this site that searches across all six volumes.

This can be a real time sink, deeply educational but a time sink none the less.

June 15, 2016

Judicial Decision Making, Pulling Back the Curtain (Miranda v. Arizona)

Filed under: Government,History,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 1:11 pm

Miranda v. Arizona: Exploring Primary Sources Behind the Supreme Court Case by Stephen Wesson.

From the post:

You have the right to remain silent….” These words, and the rest of the legal warning that follows, are so well-known that they’ve almost become a synonym for “You’re under arrest.” They occupy such a familiar place in popular culture that it might seem as though they’d been part of U.S. law for centuries. However, the now-ubiquitous Miranda warning only came into being fifty years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled that the rights of a criminal suspect, Ernesto Miranda, had been violated because he had not been informed of his Constitutional protections against self-incrimination.

The Library of Congress is marking this landmark anniversary with the launch of Miranda v. Arizona: The Rights to Justice, an online presentation of historical documents that shed light on the arguments around, and the reaction to, the Miranda ruling of 1966. These documents, which include papers written by and for several Supreme Court justices, allow students to explore the issues discussed by the justices as they considered the ramifications of the case. In addition, letters from law enforcement officers and members of the public illuminate the contentious public debate that erupted after the ruling.

One particularly powerful document for students to analyze is a page from a memorandum that associate justice William Brennan sent to chief justice Earl Warren about the case. Acknowledging that his 21-page response is lengthy, Brennan explains, “this will be one of the the most important opinions of our time…”

He then focuses on two words from Warren’s opinion that he says go “to the basic thrust of the approach to be taken.” He expounds,
…

An important collection of documents, not only as background to Miranda v. Arizona but also as insight into decision making in the Supreme Court.

Decisions are announced by the media in sound-bite sized chunks, which fail to portray the complexity of Court opinions, much less the process by which they are created.

I can think of any number of cases that merit this sort of treatment or even deeper, inter-linked collections of documents.

Enjoy!

April 28, 2016

Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (+ XQuery)

Filed under: Government,History — Patrick Durusau @ 3:28 pm

Office of the Historian (website) : Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (Github).

All of the XQuery code and data from the website is available at Github.

You will find such goodies as:

Office of the Historian Subject Taxonomy of the History of U.S. Foreign Relations (XML)

Foreign Relations of the United States

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series is published in print and online editions at the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian website.

Encoded using TEI with additional tools for quality checking.

Impressive but perhaps not as immediately useful as:

A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, by Country, since 1776

I checked and there is an entry for Texas that will need to be updated depending on who you listen to in Texas.

There are XML, Schematron, XQuery files galore so there is plenty of production and/or practice material, depending upon your interests.

April 12, 2016

History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust [Editors/Asst. Editors?]

Filed under: Crowd Sourcing,History,News — Patrick Durusau @ 6:34 pm

History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust

From the webpage:

What did American newspapers report about the Holocaust during World War II? Citizen historians participating in History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust will help the US Holocaust Memorial Museum answer this question.

Your Role

Participants will explore their local newspapers for articles about the Holocaust, and submit their research into a centralized database. The collected data will show trends in American reporting.

Citizen historians like you will explore Holocaust history as both an American story and a local story, learn how to use primary sources in historical research, and challenge assumptions about American knowledge of and responses to the Holocaust.

Project Outcomes

Data from History Unfolded: U.S. Newspapers and the Holocaust will be used for two main purposes:
to inform the Museum’s upcoming exhibition on Americans and the Holocaust, and to enhance scholarly research about the American press and the Holocaust.

Our Questions

  • What did people in your community know about the event?
  • Was the information accurate?
  • What do the newspapers tell us about how local and national leaders and community members reacted to news about the event?

Historical Background

During the 1930s, a deeply rooted isolationism pervaded American public opinion. Americans were scornful of Europe’s inability to organize its affairs following the destruction of WWI and feared being drawn into European matters. As a result, news about the Holocaust arrived in an America fraught with isolation, cynicism, and fear of being deceived by government propaganda. Even so, the way the press told the story of the Holocaust—the space allocated, the location of the news in the paper, and the editorial opinions—shaped American reactions.

U.S. Press Coverage of the Holocaust

The press has influence on public opinion. Media attention enhances the importance of an issue in the eyes of the public. The U.S. press had reported on Nazi violence against Jews in Germany as early as 1933. It covered extensively the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the expanded German antisemitic legislation of 1938 and 1939. The nationwide state-sponsored violence of November 9-10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, made front page news in dailies across the U.S.

As the magnitude of anti-Jewish violence increased in 1939-1941, many American newspapers ran descriptions of German shooting operations, first in Poland and later after the invasion of the Soviet Union. As early as July 2, 1942, the New York Times reported on the operations of the killing center in Chelmno, based on sources from the Polish underground. The article, however, appeared on page six of the newspaper.

During the Holocaust, the American press did not always publicize reports of Nazi atrocities in full or with prominent placement. For example, the New York Times, the nation’s leading newspaper, generally deemphasized the murder of the Jews in its news coverage. Although the Times covered the December 1942 statement of the Allies condemning the mass murder of European Jews on its front page, it placed coverage of the more specific information released on page ten, significantly minimizing its importance. Similarly, on July 3, 1944, the Times provided on page 3 a list by country of the number of Jews “eradicated”; the Los Angeles Times places the report on page 5.

How did your hometown cover these events?

I first saw this in What did Americans know as the Holocaust unfolded? Quite a lot, it turns out. by Tara Bahrampour, follow @TaraBahrampour.

I have registered for the project and noticed that although author bylines are captured, there doesn’t seem to be a routine to capture editors, assistant editors, etc. Newspapers don’t assemble themselves.

The site focuses on twenty (20) major events, starting with “Dachau Opens,” March 22, 1933 and ending with “FDR Delivers His Forth Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1945.

The interfaces seem very intuitive and I am looking forward to searching my local newspaper for one or more of these events.

PS: Anti-Semites didn’t and don’t exist in isolation. Graphing relationships over history in your community may help explain some of the news coverage you do or don’t find.

April 7, 2016

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Filed under: BigData,Data Science,Ethics,History,Mathematics — Patrick Durusau @ 9:19 pm

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil.

math-weapons

From the description at Amazon:

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this shocking book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his race or neighborhood), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Tracing the arc of a person’s life, from college to retirement, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. Models that score teachers and students, sort resumes, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health—all have pernicious feedback loops. They don’t simply describe reality, as proponents claim, they change reality, by expanding or limiting the opportunities people have. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for how their algorithms are being used. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.

Even if you have qualms about Cathy’s position, you have to admit that is a great book cover!

When I was in law school, I had F. Hodge O’Neal for corporation law. He is the O’Neal in O’Neal and Thompson’s Oppression of Minority Shareholders and LLC Members, Rev. 2d.

The publisher’s blurb is rather generous in saying:

Cited extensively, O’Neal and Thompson’s Oppression of Minority Shareholders and LLC Members shows how to take appropriate steps to protect minority shareholder interests using remedies, tactics, and maneuvers sanctioned by federal law. It clarifies the underlying cause of squeeze-outs and suggests proven arrangements for avoiding them.

You could read Oppression of Minority Shareholders and LLC Members that way but when corporate law is taught with war stories from the antics of the robber barons forward, you get the impression that isn’t why people read it.

Not that I doubt Cathy’s sincerity, on the contrary, I think she is very sincere about her warnings.

Where I disagree with Cathy is in thinking democracy is under greater attack now or that inequality is any greater problem than before.

If you read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist:

half-history

carefully, you will leave it with deep uncertainty about the relationship of American government, federal, state and local to any recognizable concept of democracy. Or for that matter to the “equality” of its citizens.

Unlike Cathy as well, I don’t expect that shaming people is going to result in “better” or more “honest” data analysis.

What you can do is arm yourself to do battle on behalf of your “side,” both in terms of exposing data manipulation by others and concealing your own.

Perhaps there is room in the marketplace for a book titled: Suppression of Unfavorable Data. More than hiding data, what data to not collect? How to explain non-collection/loss? How to collect data in the least useful ways?

You would have to write it as a how to avoid these very bad practices but everyone would know what you meant. Could be the next business management best seller.

March 10, 2016

1,000 Hours of Early Jazz

Filed under: History,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 8:28 pm

1,000 Hours of Early Jazz Recordings Now Online: Archive Features Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington & Much More

From the post:

David W. Niven spent his life amassing a vast record collection, all dedicated to the sounds of Early Jazz. As a kid during the 1920s, he started buying jazz records with money earned from his paper route. By World War II, Niven, now a college student, had thousands of LPs. “All the big names of jazz, along with lesser legends, were included,” Niven later said, and “I found myself with a first class treasure of early jazz music.” Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, and much, much more.

…

For the sake of his children, Niven started transferring his record collection to cassette tapes during the 1980s and prefacing them with audio commentaries that offer background information on each recording. Now, years after his death (1991), his collection of “Early Jazz Legends” has made its way to the web, thanks to archivist Kevin J. Powers. If you head over to Archive.org, you can stream/download digitized versions of 650 cassette tapes, featuring over 1,000 hours of early jazz music. There’s also scans of liner cards for each recording.
…

Every recitation of history is incomplete but some are more incomplete than others.

Imagine trying to create a recitation about the mid to late 1960’s without examples of the music, posters, incense, body counts, napalm, etc.

Here’s one slice of the early 20th century for your listening enjoyment.

February 13, 2016

‘You Were There!’ Historical Evidence Of Participation

Filed under: History,Verification,Video — Patrick Durusau @ 3:53 pm

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube by Jonathan Crow.

From the post:

British Pathé was one of the leading producers of newsreels and documentaries during the 20th Century. This week, the company, now an archive, is turning over its entire collection — over 85,000 historical films – to YouTube.

The archive — which spans from 1896 to 1976 – is a goldmine of footage, containing movies of some of the most important moments of the last 100 years. It’s a treasure trove for film buffs, culture nerds and history mavens everywhere. In Pathé’s playlist “A Day That Shook the World,” which traces an Anglo-centric history of the 20th Century, you will find clips of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the bombing of Hiroshima and Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, alongside footage of Queen Victoria’s funeral and Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile. There’s, of course, footage of the dramatic Hindenburg crash and Lindbergh’s daring cross-Atlantic flight. And then you can see King Edward VIII abdicating the throne in 1936, Hitler’s first speech upon becoming the German Chancellor in 1933 and the eventual Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 (above).

But the really intriguing part of the archive is seeing all the ephemera from the 20th Century, the stuff that really makes the past feel like a foreign country – the weird hairstyles, the way a city street looked, the breathtakingly casual sexism and racism. There’s a rush in seeing history come alive. Case in point, this documentary from 1967 about the wonders to be found in a surprisingly monochrome Virginia.

…

A treasure trove of over 85,000 historical films!

With modern face recognition technology, imagine mining these films and matching faces up against other photographic archives.

Rather than seeing George Wallace, for example, as a single nasty piece of work during the 1960’s, we may identify the followers of such “leaders.”

Those who would discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, language, etc. are empowered by those of similar views.

One use of this historical archive would be to “out” the followers of such bigots.

To protect “former” fascists supporters on the International Olympic Committee, the EU will protest any search engine that reports such results.

You should judge the IOC by their supporters as well. (Not the athletes, but the IOC.)

February 6, 2016

Finding Roman Roads

Filed under: History,LiDAR — Patrick Durusau @ 8:15 pm

You (yes, you) can find Roman roads using data collected by lasers by Barbara Speed.

Barbara reports that using Lidar data available from the UK Survey portal, David Rateledge was able to discover a Roman road between Ribchester and Lancaster.

She closes with:

…
The Environment Agency is planning to release 11 Terabytes (for Luddites: that’s an awful lot of data) worth of LIDAR information as part of the Department for Engironment, Food and Rural Affairs’ open data initiative, available through this portal. Which means that any of us could download it and dig about for more lost roads.

That seems a bit thin on the advice side, if you are truly interested in using the data to find Roman roads and other sites.

An article posted under ‘Lost’ Roman road is discovered, doesn’t provide more on the technique but does point to Roman Roads in Lancashire. Interesting site but no help on using the data.

I can’t comment on the ease of use or documentation but LiDAR tools are available at: Free LiDAR tools.

See also my post on the OpenTopography Project.

February 3, 2016

Unpublished Black History Photos (NYT)

Filed under: History,Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 4:09 pm

The New York Times is unearthing unpublished photos from its archives for Black History Month by Shan Wang.

From the post:

In this black and white photo taken by a New York Times staff photographer, two unidentified second graders at Princeton’s Nassau Street Elementary School stand in front of a classroom blackboard. Some background text accompanies the image, pointing to a 1964 Times article about school integration and adding that the story “offered a caveat that still resonates, noting that in the search for a thriving and equal community, ‘good schooling is not enough.’”

Times readers wrote in to ask specifically about the second graders in the photo, so the Times updated the post with a comment form asking readers to share anything they might know about the girl and boy depicted.
…

Great background on the Unpublished Black History project at the Times.

Public interfaces enable contribution of information on selected images along with comments.

Unlike the US Intelligence community, the Times is willing to admit that its prior conduct may not reflect (then) or current values.

If a private, for-profit organization can be that honest, what’s the deal with government agencies?

Must be that accountability thing that Republicans are always trying to foist off onto public school teachers and public school teachers alone.

No accountability for elected officials and/or their appointees and cronies.

February 2, 2016

How to Build a TimesMachine [New York Times from 1851-2001]

Filed under: History,News,Search Engines — Patrick Durusau @ 1:59 pm

How to Build a TimesMachine by Jane Cotler and Evan Sandaus.

From the post:

At the beginning of this year, we quietly expanded TimesMachine, our virtual microfilm reader, to include every issue of The New York Times published between 1981 and 2002. Prior to this expansion, TimesMachine contained every issue published between 1851 and 1980, which consisted of over 11 million articles spread out over approximately 2.5 million pages. The new expansion adds an additional 8,035 complete issues containing 1.4 million articles over 1.6 million pages.

the_time_machine

Creating and expanding TimesMachine presented us with several interesting technical challenges, and in this post we’ll describe how we tackled two. First, we’ll discuss the fundamental challenge with TimesMachine: efficiently providing a user with a scan of an entire day’s newspaper without requiring the download of hundreds of megabytes of data. Then, we’ll discuss a fascinating string matching problem we had to solve in order to include articles published after 1980 in TimesMachine.
…

It’s not all the extant Hebrew Bible witnesses, both images and transcription, or all extant cuneiform tablets with existing secondary literature, but if you are interested in more recent events, what a magnificent resource!

Tesseract-ocr gets a shout-out and link for its use on the New York Times archives.

The string matching solution for search shows the advantages of finding a “nearly perfect” solution.

January 28, 2016

Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus

Filed under: Corporate Memory,History,Language,Memory — Patrick Durusau @ 5:53 pm

The video is very cool and goes along with:

Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus by Ron Cowen.

sn-babylonians

What could have happened if a forerunner to calculus wasn’t forgotten for 1400 years?

A sharper question would be:

What if you didn’t lose corporate memory with every promotion, retirement or person leaving the company?

We have all seen it happen and all of us have suffered from it.

What if the investment in expertise and knowledge wasn’t flushed away with promotion, retirement, departure?

That would have to be one helluva ontology to capture everyone’s expertise and knowledge.

What if it wasn’t a single, unified or even “logical” ontology? What if it only represented the knowledge that was important to capture for you and yours? Not every potential user for all time.

Just as we don’t all wear the same uniforms to work everyday, we should not waste time looking for a universal business language for corporate memory.

Unless you are in the business of filling seats for such quixotic quests.

I prefer to deliver a measurable ROI if its all the same to you.

Are you ready to stop hemorrhaging corporate knowledge?

January 7, 2016

New York Public Library – 180K Hi-Res Images/Metadata

Filed under: History,Library,Public Data — Patrick Durusau @ 2:29 pm

NYPL Releases Hi-Res Images, Metadata for 180,000 Public Domain Items in its Digital Collections

from the post:

JANUARY 6, 2016 — The New York Public Library has expanded access to more than 180,000 items with no known U.S. copyright restrictions in its Digital Collections database, releasing hi-res images, metadata, and tools facilitating digital creation and reuse. The release represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves. Online users of the NYPL Digital Collections website will find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content; while more technically inclined users will also benefit from updates to the Library’s collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL’s GitHub account. These changes are intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds. All subsequently digitized public domain collections will be made available in the same way, joining a growing repository of open materials.

“The New York Public Library is committed to giving our users access to information and resources however possible,” said Tony Marx, president of the Library. “Today, we are going beyond providing our users with digital facsimiles that give only an impression of something we have in our physical collection. By making our highest-quality assets freely available, we are truly giving our users the greatest access possible to our collections in the digital environment.”

To encourage novel uses of its digital resources, NYPL is also now accepting applications for a new Remix Residency program. Administered by the Library’s digitization and innovation team, NYPL Labs, the residency is intended for artists, information designers, software developers, data scientists, journalists, digital researchers, and others to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data,and the public domain assets in particular. Two projects will be selected, receiving financial and consultative support from Library curators and technologists.

To provide further inspiration for reuse, the NYPL Labs team has also released several demonstration projects delving into specific collections, as well as a visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale. These projects — which include a then-and-now comparison of New York’s Fifth Avenue, juxtaposing 1911 wide angle photographs with Google Street View, and a “trip planner” using locations extracted from mid-20th century motor guides that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, and other destinations where black travelers would be welcome — suggest just a few of the myriad investigations made possible by fully opening these collections.

The public domain release spans the breadth and depth of NYPL’s holdings, from the Library’s rich New York City collection, historic maps, botanical illustrations, unique manuscripts, photographs, ancient religious texts, and more. Materials include:

Visit nypl.org/publicdomain for information about the materials related to the public domain update and links to all of the projects demonstrating creative reuse of public domain materials.

The New York Public Library’s Rights and Information Policy team has carefully reviewed Items and collections to determine their copyright status under U.S. law. As a U.S.-based library, NYPL limits its determinations to U.S. law and does not analyze the copyright status of an item in every country. However, when speaking more generally, the Library uses terms such as “public domain” and “unrestricted materials,” which are used to describe the aggregate collection of items it can offer to the public without any restrictions on subsequent use.

…

If you are looking for content for a topic map or inspiration to pass onto other institutions about opening up their collections, take a look at the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections.

Content designed for re-use. Imagine that, re-use of content.

The exact time/place of the appearance of seamless re-use of content will be debated by future historians but for now, this is a very welcome step in that direction.

January 5, 2016

Jane, John … Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction [Gatekeeping]

Filed under: History,R,Text Mining — Patrick Durusau @ 7:43 pm

Jane, John … Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction by Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen.

Abstract:

This article describes a new method for inferring the gender of personal names using large historical datasets. In contrast to existing methods of gender prediction that treat names as if they are timelessly associated with one gender, this method uses a historical approach that takes into account how naming practices change over time. It uses historical data to measure the likelihood that a name was associated with a particular gender based on the time or place under study. This approach generates more accurate results for sources that encompass changing periods of time, providing digital humanities scholars with a tool to estimate the gender of names across large textual collections. The article first describes the methodology as implemented in the gender package for the R programming language. It goes on to apply the method to a case study in which we examine gender and gatekeeping in the American historical profession over the past half-century. The gender package illustrates the importance of incorporating historical approaches into computer science and related fields.

An excellent introduction to the gender package for R, historical grounding of the detection of gender by name, with the highlight of the article being the application of this technique to professional literature in American history.

It isn’t uncommon to find statistical techniques applied to texts whose authors and editors are beyond the reach of any critic or criticism.

It is less than common to find statistical techniques applied to extant members of a profession.

Kudos to both Blevins and Mullen for refinement the detection of gender and for applying that refinement publishing in American history.

December 23, 2015

Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, Volume 15, Richard II

Filed under: History,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 10:59 am

Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, Volume 15, Richard II by By M. C. B. Dawes, A. C. Wood and D. H. Gifford. (Covers the years 1 to 7 in the reign of Richard II.).

From the homepage for the series:

An inquisition post mortem is a local enquiry into the lands held by a deceased individual, in order to discover any income and rights due to the crown. Such inquisitions were only held when people were thought or known to have held lands of the crown. The records in this series relate to the City of London for the periods 1485-1561 and 1577-1603.

I admit that some of my posts have broader audiences than others but only British History Online could send this tweet:

BHO at the IHR ‏@bho_history 2h hours ago
One final new publication to keep you busy over the holiday: Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem vol 15. Enjoy! http://www.british-history.ac.uk/inquis-post-mortem/vol15 …
0 retweets 0 likes


Be sure to explore the British History Online (BHO). With a goal of creating access to printed primary and secondary sources from 1300 to 1800, the BHO site promises to be a rich source of historical data.

October 30, 2015

Amateur Discovery Confirmed by NASA

Filed under: Google Earth,History,Image Recognition — Patrick Durusau @ 1:45 pm

NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks by Ralph Blumenthal.

From the post:

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.

Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.

The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101 raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent counterclockwise.

Described last year at an archaeology conference in Istanbul as unique and previously unstudied, the earthworks, in the Turgai region of northern Kazakhstan, number at least 260 — mounds, trenches and ramparts — arrayed in five basic shapes.

Spotted on Google Earth in 2007 by a Kazakh economist and archaeology enthusiast, Dmitriy Dey, the so-called Steppe Geoglyphs remain deeply puzzling and largely unknown to the outside world.

Two weeks ago, in the biggest sign so far of official interest in investigating the sites, NASA released clear satellite photographs of some of the figures from about 430 miles up.
…

More evidence you don’t need to be a globe trotter to make major discoveries!

A few of the satellite resources I have blogged about for your use: Free Access to EU Satellite Data, Planet Platform Beta & Open California:…, Skybox: A Tool to Help Investigate Environmental Crime.

Good luck!

July 16, 2015

Mapping the Medieval Countryside

Filed under: History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 am

Mapping the Medieval Countryside – Places, People, and Properties in the Inquisitions Post Mortem.

From the webpage:

Mapping the Medieval Countryside is a major research project dedicated to creating a digital edition of the medieval English inquisitions post mortem (IPMs) from c. 1236 to 1509.

IPMs recorded the lands held at their deaths by tenants of the crown. They comprise the most extensive and important body of source material for landholding in medieval England. Describing the lands held by thousands of families, from nobles to peasants, they are a key source for the history of almost every settlement in England and many in Wales.

This digital edition is the most authoritative available. It is based on printed calendars of the IPMs but incorporates numerous corrections and additions: in particular, the names of some 48,000 jurors are newly included.

The site is currently in beta phase: it includes IPMs from 1418-1447 only, and aspects of the markup and indexing are still incomplete. An update later this year will make further material available.

The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is a collaboration between the University of Winchester and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. The project uses five volumes of the Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, gen. ed. Christine Carpenter, xxii-xxvi (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2003-11) with kind permission from The Boydell Press. These volumes are all in print and available for purchase from Boydell, price £195.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the project is the list of eighty-nine (89) place types, which can be used for filtering. Just scanning the list I happened across “rape” as a place type, with four (4) instances recorded thus far.

The term “rape” in this context refers to a subdivision of the county of Sussex in England. The origin of this division is unknown but it pre-dates the Norman Conquest.

The “rapes of Sussex” and the eighty-eight (88) other place types are a great opportunity to explore place distinctions that may or may not be noticed today.

Enjoy!

July 9, 2015

Royal Albert Hall – Performance History & Archive

Filed under: History,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 3:19 pm

Royal Albert Hall – Performance History & Archive

From the webpage:

THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL’S HISTORY IS NOW AT YOUR FINGERTIPS!

Search our Performance Database to find out about your favourite artist or explore 30,000+ events from 1871 to last night.

Search the Archive to discover items in the Hall’s unique archive collections which chart the history of the building, organisation and events.

Another extraordinary resource from the UK. It is almost enough to make you forget that David Cameron is also a product of the UK.

Digital Bodleian

Filed under: History,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 2:20 pm

I know very little of what there is to be known about the Bodleian Library but as soon as I saw Digital Bodleian, I had to follow the link.

As of today, there are 115,179 images and more are on their way. Check the collections frequently and for new collections as well.

One example that is near and dear to me:

Exploring Egypt in the 19th Century

The popup reads:

A complete facsimile of publications from the early-nineteeth-century expeditions to Egypt by Champollion and Rosellini.

The growth of “big data” isn’t just from the production of new data but from the digitization of existing collections as well.

Now the issue is how to collate copies of inscriptions by Champollion in these works with much later materials. So that a scholar finding one such resource will be automatically made aware of the others.

That may not sound like a difficult task but given the amount of material published every year, it remains a daunting one.

July 7, 2015

Ancient [?] Craft of Information Visualization

Filed under: History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:35 pm

Vintage Infodesign [125]: More examples of the ancient craft of information visualization by Tiago Veloso.

From the post:

To open this week’s edition of Vintage InfoDesign, we picked some of the maps published in the 1800s/early 1900’s about the Battle of Waterloo . As we showed you before, on June 18th several newspapers marked with stunning pieces of infographic design the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s final attempt to rule Europe, and since we haven’t feature any “oldies” related to this topic, we thought it would be interesting to do some Internet “digging”.

Hope you enjoy our findings, and feel free to leave the links to other charts and maps about Waterloo, in the comments section.

I’m not entirely comfortable with using the term “ancient” to describe maps depicting the Battle of Waterloo. I think of the fall of the New Kingdom of Egypt, in about 343 BCE as the beginning of “ancient” history.

July 4, 2015

Our World in Data

Filed under: History,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:03 pm

Our World in Data by Mike Roser.

Visualizations of War & Violence, Global Health, Africa, World Poverty and World Hunger & Food Provision.

An author chooses their time period but I find limiting the discussion of world poverty to the last 2,000 years problematic. Obtaining even projected data would be problematic but we know there were civilizations, particularly in the Ancient Near East and in Pre-Columbian America that had rather high standards of living. For that matter, for the time period given, the poverty map skips over the Roman Empire at its height, saying “we know that every country was extremely poor compared to modern living standards.”

The Romans had public bath houses, running water, roads that we still use today, public entertainment, libraries, etc. I am not sure how they were “extremely poor compared to modern living conditions.”

It is also problematic (slide 12) when Max says that:

Before modern economic growth the huge majority lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed a better standard of living.

There are elites in every society that live better than most but that doesn’t automatically imply that over 84% to 94% of the world population was living in poverty. You don’t sustain a society such as the Aztecs or the Incas with only 6 to 16% of the population living outside poverty.

I am deeply doubtful of Max’s conclusion that in terms of poverty the world is becoming more “equal.”

Part of that skepticism is from being aware of statistics like:

“With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports. “Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.”
Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment

Considering that many of those resources are not renewable, there is a natural limit to how much improvement can or will take place outside of the United States. When renewable resources become more practical than they are today, they will only supplement the growing consumption of energy in the United States, not replace it.

Max provides access to his data sets if you are interested in exploring the data further. I would be extremely careful with his World Bank data because the World Bank does have an agenda to show the benefits of development across the world.

Considering the impact of consumption on the environment, the World Bank’s pursuit of a global consumption economy may be one of the more ill-fated schemes of all time.

If you are interested in this type of issue, the National Geographic’s Greendex may be of interest.

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