Authority and Judgement in the Digital Archive

The transformative promise of the digital humanities is not without problems. This paper looks at digital archive curation using a database of 19th-century London concerts as a case study. We examine some of the barriers faced in its development, related to expertise, volume and complexity, the gap between cost and benefit, and the desire for an authoritative and complete dataset that forces a particular linear process of curation. We explore the potential for more radical approaches where curation and use are interleaved, and where digitally maintained provenance allows professional judgement to be applied to incomplete, crowdsourced, or automatically processed data

Introduction

This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice in the emerging field of cultural heritage crowdsourcing. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-­‐provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves

Passing judgement: credit rating processes as regulatory mechanisms of governance in the emerging world order

This article argues that certain knowledge-producing institutions located in the American financial industry- debt security or bond rating agencies -are significant forces in the creation and extension of the new, open global political economy and therefore deserve the attention of international political economists as mechanisms of 'governance without government'. Rating agencies are hypothesized to possess leverage, based on their unique gate-keeping role with regard to investment funds sought by corporations and governments. The article examines trends in capital markets, the processes leading to bond rating judgements, assesses the form and extent of the agencies' governance powers, and contemplates the implications of these judgements for further extension of the global political economy and the form of the emerging world order

A study of the information needs of the users of a folk music library and the implications for the design of a digital library system

A qualitative study of user information needs is reported, based on a purposive sample of users and potential users of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a small specialist folk music library in North London. The study set out to establish what the user’s (both existing and potential) information needs are, so that the library’s online service may take them into account with its design. The information needs framework proposed by Nicholas (2000) is used as an analytical tool to achieve this end. The demographics of the users were examined in order to establish four user groups: Performer, Academic, Professional and Enthusiast. Important information needs were found to be based on social interaction, and key resources of the library were its staff, the concentration of the collection and the library’s social nature. A collection of broad design requirements are proposed based on the analysis and this study also provided some insights into the issue of musical relevance, which are discussed

Risk: a fiction

Uncertainty creates anxiety so attempts have been made to reduce it using mathematical techniques. In the electronics industry the very large quantities of devices processed have provided reliable statistics and the opportunity to employ statistical methods. However, in fields such as decision-making and risk assessment there are strong criticisms of the probability calculus that have been triggered by discrepancies between the analysis of experts and non-experts. A radically different alternative is to view risk assessment and decision-making as exercises in rhetoric centred on storytelling language games. And to see the risk assessors as part of a political network attempting to influence action

Touching the void: affective history and the impossible

In order to understand the persistence of History, we need to understand the appeal of historical work, its pleasures. Without such an understanding, theory and research will continue to talk at cross purposes, the one insisting that the past is unknowable; the other unable to ignore the vitality of its sources. The contention of this essay is that historical research is an affective experience of such intensity that it has been able to withstand the challenges of post-structuralism and postmodernism and so continue with ‘business as usual’ (Jenkins 2003, 15). While the intensity of the archival encounter is not often admitted in print, it continues to motivate the efforts of individual historians. The abstractions of theory cannot intrude upon the physical experience of holding a piece of the past. It demands our attention. But the intellectual consequences of the physicality of the archival encounter need to be effectively theorised: what is the role of touching and feeling in the pursuit of knowing? The archive is the place where historians can literally touch the past, but in doing so are simultaneously made aware of its unreachability. In a maddening paradox, concrete presence conveys unfathomable absence. In the archive, researchers are both confronted with the absolute alterity of the past and tempted by the challenge of trying to overcome it. It is suggested that this impossibility underpins the powerful attraction of the historical endeavour

Rethinking transparency and accountability in medicines regulation in the United Kingdom

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The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays. However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti-Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal