New directions in the study of family names

This paper explores and explains recent radical developments in resources and methodology for studying the origins, cultural associations, and histories of family names (also called ‘surnames’). It summarizes the current state of the art and outlines new resources and procedures that are now becoming available. It shows how such innovations can enable the correction of errors in previous work and improve the accuracy of dictionaries of family names, with a focus on the English-speaking world. Developments such as the digitization of archives are having a profound effect, not only on the interpretation and understanding of traditional, ‘established’ family names and their histories, but also of names in other languages and other cultures. There are literally millions of different family names in the world today, many of which have never been studied at all. What are good criteria for selection of entries in a dictionary of family names, and what can be said about them? What is the nature of the evidence? How stable (or how variable) are family names over time? What are the effects of factors such as migration? What is the relationship between family names and geographical locations, given that people can and do move around? What is the relationship between traditional philological and historical approaches to the subject and statistical analysis of newly available digitized data? The paper aims to contribute to productive discussion of such questions

An ontology of ethnicity based upon personal names: with implications for neighbourhood profiling

Understanding of the nature and detailed composition of ethnic groups remains key to a vast swathe of social science and human natural science. Yet ethnic origin is not easy to define, much less measure, and ascribing ethnic origins is one of the most contested and unstable research concepts of the last decade - not only in the social sciences, but also in human biology and medicine. As a result, much research remains hamstrung by the quality and availability of ethnicity classifications, constraining the meaningful subdivision of populations. This PhD thesis develops an alternative ontology of ethnicity, using personal names to ascribe population ethnicity, at very fine geographical levels, and using a very detailed typology of ethnic groups optimised for the UK population. The outcome is an improved methodology for classifying population registers, as well as small areas, into cultural, ethnic and linguistic groups (CEL). This in turn makes possible the creation of much more detailed, frequently updatable representations of the ethnic kaleidoscope of UK cities, and can be further applied to other countries. The thesis includes a review of the literature on ethnicity measurement and name analysis, and their applications in ethnic inequalities and geographical research. It presents the development of the new name to ethnicity classification methodology using both a heuristic and an automated and integrated approach. It is based on the UK Electoral Register as well as several health registers in London. Furthermore, a validation of the proposed name-based classification using different datasets is offered, as well as examples of applications in profiling neighbourhoods by ethnicity, in particular the measurement of residential segregation in London. The main study area is London, UK

LORE: a model for the detection of fine-grained locative references in tweets

[EN] Extracting geospatially rich knowledge from tweets is of utmost importance for location-based systems in emergency services to raise situational awareness about a given crisis-related incident, such as earthquakes, floods, car accidents, terrorist attacks, shooting attacks, etc. The problem is that the majority of tweets are not geotagged, so we need to resort to the messages in the search of geospatial evidence. In this context, we present LORE, a location-detection system for tweets that leverages the geographic database GeoNames together with linguistic knowledge through NLP techniques. One of the main contributions of this model is to capture fine-grained complex locative references, ranging from geopolitical entities and natural geographic references to points of interest and traffic ways. LORE outperforms state-of-the-art open-source location-extraction systems (i.e. Stanford NER, spaCy, NLTK and OpenNLP), achieving an unprecedented trade-off between precision and recall. Therefore, our model provides not only a quantitative advantage over other well-known systems in terms of performance but also a qualitative advantage in terms of the diversity and semantic granularity of the locative references extracted from the tweets.Financial support for this research has been provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [grant number RTC 2017-6389-5], and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant number 101017861: project SMARTLAGOON]. We also thank Universidad de Granada for their financial support to the first author through the Becas de Iniciacion para estudiantes de Master 2018 del Plan Propio de la UGR.Fernández-Martínez, NJ.; Periñán-Pascual, C. (2021). LORE: a model for the detection of fine-grained locative references in tweets. Onomázein. (52):195-225. https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.52.111952255

Characterization of the genetic structure of the azorean population

Tese de doutoramento em Bioquímica (Genética Molecular), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Ciências, 200

Novel predictors of women\u27s surname retention at marriage

Women’s marital surname change was investigated as a potential marital commitment signal, and strategy for enhancing investment from in-laws and husband. Hyphenating or keeping premarital surname for all U.S. destination brides marrying in Hawai\u27i in 2010 was significantly correlated with a women’s income measure (r = .78, p \u3c .000) and with the analogous statistic for men (r = .64, p \u3c .000), by bride’s state of residence. The women’s measure, only, remained significant under regression of both predictors. The interaction of state Gini and the women’s income measure in a regression including the interaction components as predictors was positively predictive (adjusted-R2 = .57). None of several other predictors suggested by previous research or related to Gini or income were significant under regression, alongside the women’s income measure. The older the bride, from any jurisdiction, marrying in Hawai\u27i in 2010, the more likely to hyphenate/keep premarital surname (χ2 (1) for linear trend = 1754.65, p \u3c .000). Among all opposite-sex couples (N = 167 couples) divorcing in a Canadian county in an 8-month period, 2013-2014, marriages the women in which underwent marital surname change lasted 60% longer, controlling for wife’s age at the time of marriage. When the woman’s marital surname change/retention was used as a regression predictor of number of children of the marriage alongside marriage duration in years, only the latter was predictive. Brides-to-be from across especially western and central Canada (N = 184) were surveyed as to marital surname hyphenation/retention versus change (DV 1), and attitude towards such retention in general (DV 2). Among women engaged to men, the hypothesized predictors of income and number of future children desired were positively predictive of marital surname retention/hyphenation under univariate analysis. Under multiple regression analysis using these and other predictors from the literature also found to be predictive of this DV under univariate analysis, only some of these other predictors were predictive. An EFA factor score calculated from several attitude items concerning in-laws, conceptualizable as In-law avoidance motivation, was not predictive of general attitude toward or actual retention/hyphenation, contrary to prediction

Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference GISRUK 2010

This volume holds the papers from the 18th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK). This year the conference, hosted at University College London (UCL), from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 April 2010. The conference covered the areas of core geographic information science research as well as applications domains such as crime and health and technological developments in LBS and the geoweb. UCL’s research mission as a global university is based around a series of Grand Challenges that affect us all, and these were accommodated in GISRUK 2010. The overarching theme this year was “Global Challenges”, with specific focus on the following themes: * Crime and Place * Environmental Change * Intelligent Transport * Public Health and Epidemiology * Simulation and Modelling * London as a global city * The geoweb and neo-geography * Open GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information * Human-Computer Interaction and GIS Traditionally, GISRUK has provided a platform for early career researchers as well as those with a significant track record of achievement in the area. As such, the conference provides a welcome blend of innovative thinking and mature reflection. GISRUK is the premier academic GIS conference in the UK and we are keen to maintain its outstanding record of achievement in developing GIS in the UK and beyond

Mascaras y Trenzas: Reflexiones. Un Proyecto de Identidad y Analysis a Traves de Veinte Anos (Masks and Braids: Reflections, A Project on Identity and Analysis Over Twenty Years)

This article uses Critical Race Theory and LatCrit methodologies, vocabulary, categories, and pedagogical approaches. In this Section, titled \u27On Mascaras,\u27 I am grappling with race (and gender secondarily) in public space -- un/masking my professional persona. In using the word \u27wrestle\u27 in the subheading I am referring to this struggle over a re-allocation of the social power that inheres in racial hierarchies, namely, the back-and-forth exchanges involved in changing the racial ambiance by exposing and transforming the presumptions, especially regarding notions of inferiority, that cabin our thinking and restrain our relationships. My original paper was something of an outburst, challenging the silence all around me about my Latina reality. Thinking back, it was more oppositional than I knew. Specifically, I did not realize the extent to which I was challenging White space by just beginning the original article in Spanish. Race scholars were coming to voice, and many of us were \u27outbursting.\u27 My objective in the process of learning from the original article is to un/mask in more strategic ways to achieve complex ends: I say \u27strategic\u27 because I have explicit rationales. In the original article I was situated in the classroom as a student and my unmasking was often involuntary and fraught with the fear of being seen as inferior. My masking had to do with the negotiations that Outsiders engage in to assimilate and resist assimilation. However, in these years since I wrote M\u27ascaras, I have been in the classroom as a teacher and scholar, with significant authority over the classroom\u27s discursive protocols. I used un/masking to focus on the choices pertaining to identity expression and as an analytical tool to ferret out the silencing and coding of legal discourse. Admittedly, there have been moments of unmasking, related to those I experienced as a law student, that remind me that institutional power is denied to those who act oppositionally, especially to those who insist on advocating on issues of racial subordination within the legal academy or the legal profession. Like many other female professionals, I have struggled to integrate my obligations in the workplace with those in the home. One persistent question for me is not how to balance the workplace with the home, but rather how to close the space between, or braid, the public and private. This is of particular interest to me as a woman of color. Over time, my scholarship, and specifically the M\u27ascaras article, was read and used by my family. I do not know how common this is for other faculty of color, but it was transformational for us

Undergraduate students' perspectives on digital competence and academic literacy in a Spanish University

Recent studies show that students' digital competence is part of a process of academic literacy that requires the development of information and ICT literacies. This article attempts to analyse digital competence and the development of information and ICT literacies in relation to academic literacy practices which take place in the learning process in undergraduate studies. Data were collected through completion of self-report questionnaires asking about the writing and reading practices and the process of literacy development in university students. The survey was completed by a sample of 786 students in the School of Education. The data obtained were analysed using the techniques of principal components analysis and discriminant analysis. The results describe the ICT and information literacies in literacy practices of the participants, and their relation to the academic literacy process that takes place at university. The results have allowed us to assess the processes for the development of ICT and information literacies and their relationship to academic literacy. Our study indicates a wide gap between digital competence developed in informal learning contexts and its scarcity in university literacy practices (formal learning settings). In general, Spanish University academic practices do not incorporate ICT and information literacies processes as a part of students' academic literacy. Deficient ICT and informational literacies may lead to difficulties in the professional development of teachers