Parsing for agile modeling

Agile modeling refers to a set of methods that allow for a quick initial development of an importer and its further refinement. These requirements are not met simultaneously by the current parsing technology. Problems with parsing became a bottleneck in our research of agile modeling. In this thesis we introduce a novel approach to specify and build parsers. Our approach allows for expressive, tolerant and composable parsers without sacrificing performance. The approach is based on a context-sensitive extension of parsing expression grammars that allows a grammar engineer to specify complex language restrictions. To insure high parsing performance we automatically analyze a grammar definition and choose different parsing strategies for different parts of the grammar. We show that context-sensitive parsing expression grammars allow for highly composable, tolerant and variable-grained parsers that can be easily refined. Different parsing strategies significantly insure high-performance of parsers without sacrificing expressiveness of the underlying grammars

A geo-database for potentially polluting marine sites and associated risk index

The increasing availability of geospatial marine data provides an opportunity for hydrographic offices to contribute to the identification of Potentially Polluting Marine Sites (PPMS). To adequately manage these sites, a PPMS Geospatial Database (GeoDB) application was developed to collect and store relevant information suitable for site inventory and geo-spatial analysis. The benefits of structuring the data to conform to the Universal Hydrographic Data Model (IHO S-100) and to use the Geographic Mark-Up Language (GML) for encoding are presented. A storage solution is proposed using a GML-enabled spatial relational database management system (RDBMS). In addition, an example of a risk index methodology is provided based on the defined data structure. The implementation of this example was performed using scripts containing SQL statements. These procedures were implemented using a cross-platform C++ application based on open-source libraries and called PPMS GeoDB Manager

Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape

The goal of the Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape project was to investigate the nature and distribution of archaeological sites along the northeast shoreline of Lake Ontario while examining the environmental, political, and cultural factors that influenced the position of these sites. The primary method of investigation was a combined archaeological and historical survey of the shoreline within seven 1-km square areas. The archaeological component of the survey covered both the terrestrial and submerged portions of the shore through marine remote sensing (side-scan sonar and magnetometer), diving surveys, pedestrian surveys, and informant interviews. A total of 39 sites and 51 isolated finds were identified or further analyzed as a result of this project. These sites ranged from the Middle Archaic period (ca. 5500-2500 B.C.) through the 19th century and included habitation, military, transportation, and recreational sites. Analysis of these findings was conducted at two scales: the individual survey area and Lake Ontario as a whole. By treating each survey area as a distinct landscape, it was possible to discuss how various cultures and groups used each space and to identify instances of both dynamism and continuity in the landscapes. Results of these analyses included the continuous occupation of several locations from pre-Contact times to the present, varying uses of the same environment in response to political and economic shifts, the formation of communities around transportation nodes, and recurring settlement patterns. The survey data was also combined to explore regional-scale trends that manifest themselves in the historical Lake Ontario littoral landscape including ephemeral landscapes, permeable boundaries, danger in the lake, and factors of change

Making the ocean : global space, sailor practice, and bureaucratic archives in the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire

textThis dissertation is about the long-distance navigators who constructed a global marine world as agents of the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire. The hard-won pragmatic and empirical expertise on which they relied developed in an uneasy tension with the priorities of the bureaucracy centered at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. In the Atlantic, bureaucratic standardization driven by the Casa made commercial ocean travel increasingly routine, while exploratory sailors, particularly in the Pacific, continued to apply their expertise in unknown and unpredictable waters. The quotidian and the pragmatic defined these long-distance mariners’ relationship to their environment. They organized space into networks of knowable pathways that connected places identified by names and markers that communicated the sailors’ experience to future navigators; they interpreted local conditions based on inferences from distant stimuli and ocean-scale systems; and they introduced their natural and human surroundings to metropolitan and colonial scholars and administrators. The resources and instruments developed by the Casa informed these practices, but voyages of discovery always remained outside of direct institutional control from Seville. This relationship—between the local, individual, and contingent on the one hand and the universal, bureaucratic, and synthetic on the other—not only defined the dynamics of intellectual authority governing scientific endeavors under the Spanish monarchy, but also shaped strategies for projecting imperial claims across areas of uneven and limited physical control, whether marine or terrestrial. Reevaluating the balance between marine and terrestrial territorial claims recasts the Americas as a waypoint into the Pacific and beyond for the globally-aware westward gaze of Spanish imperial ambition. More fundamentally, it highlights the multicentric and networked arrangement of power in the early modern period by refocusing our attention on those islands, whether literal or figurative, of physical Spanish presence surrounded by spaces of hypothetical control. The Spanish empire’s maritime orientation during the sixteenth century developed the intellectual, political, and institutional strategies to balance and resolve these tensions between embodied and archival knowledges, local contingencies and universal frameworks that defined the distribution of power under the Spanish monarchy.Histor

“THE GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASS”: HISTORY, AUTHORITY AND UTILITY IN THE ENGLISH VOYAGE ACCOUNT, 1660-1730

The late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in the publication of accounts of voyages on the London book market. These publications ranged from brief extracts of romantic narratives involving shipwrecks in the East Indies to multi-volume compilations of voyages to all parts of the world, printed in folio and containing numerous maps and engravings. Existing scholarship often views such accounts as entertainment destined for a popular audience. This dissertation shows how the voyage account was used in multiple genres and multiple intellectual contexts, finding its way into debates about natural philosophy, religion, and history, and playing as important a role in the work of the Royal Society as it did in the literary practices of the period. By investigating these books as key texts in a changing intellectual and cultural climate, and understanding their relationships with other genres, “The Geographicall Compass” offers a reader’s view of empire and the world in England between 1660 and 1730. This project analyses the interaction between the narrative and paratextual elements of accounts of long-range voyages of discovery in the early-modern era, in order to investigate how ideas about the New World found their way into political, scientific and cultural spheres in seventeenth-century Europe. I argue that we can understand how the commercial market shaped knowledge of the New World by considering these books as books – written, published, bought and sold for a reading public, subject to commercial pressures and prone to failure. Focussing mainly but not exclusively on voyages to the New World, this dissertation uses Samuel Purchas’ metaphor – the voyage account as a compass – to discuss these texts in their scientific, religious, literary and political contexts. As the cartographers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used the geometrical compass to shape their maps, and seamen used the magnetic compass to find their direction in the expanse of the sea, so I use the compass as a way of understanding texts that are composite, multi-layered, and were produced in multiple, overlapping contexts

THE COMPLETE CITIZEN: THE MARINER AS CITIZEN IN ANTEBELLUM U.S. LITERARY CULTURE

Although much political discourse of the antebellum period characterized the mariner as a problem for the emerging nation and its body politic to solve, the era’s literary culture adopted a position that contrasts the expressed ideas of early U.S. political figures in its more complicated perspective of the sailor. Ultimately fickle and variable, U.S. maritime literature published before the Civil War nevertheless demonstrates an intricate, nuanced understanding of what happens when citizenship finds itself unmoored and adrift in the currents of inter- and intranational aquatic spaces. In other words, antebellum literary culture rejects the postures of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Authors like James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and J. H. Ingraham value the variegated political significance and ideals attached to their fictional sailors. They present their mariners as contributing necessary and positive features to the body politic, either by reinforcing extant civic models or proposing new ones. Of course, the representation of the sailor as citizen also emerges as a complicated, vexed topic in the literature of the era. While the common sailor might find himself an idealized civic model, other maritime figures—the pirate and the riverman—appear ultimately beyond the ken of the body politic. What we find, then, in the antebellum treatment of the mariner-citizen are two uneven strands of development: On the one hand, authors like Cooper, Ingraham, and authors of pirate narratives stake out conservative positions regarding the sailor’s civic fitness, recuperating the sailor as a political figure only by fitting him or her to extant models of citizenship and by removing the revolutionary threats embodied by the historical sailors described in work by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, and Leon Fink. On the other hand, authors like Melville, Emil Klauprecht, and the often anonymous authors of Mike Fink legends employ their maritime narratives to take more politically progressive positions—using the mariner to redefine civic ideals or underscoring the ways that rivermen, necessarily national, internal maritime figures offer a more problematic challenge to U.S. civic ideals than the socially and politically egalitarian seaman

Copper on the Northwest Coast: A Material Investigation of Cultural Entanglements Experienced During the Fur Trade and Colonial Periods

Here the processes and implications of cultural interactions occurring on the Northwest Coast of North America between the 18th and 20th centuries, ranging from brief entanglements to colonial settlement, are investigated. This is achieved by analysing assemblages of Indigenous artefacts created using copper throughout this period. These items were made and used across a period of upheaval and change punctuated by the arrival of European, Russian, and American interests, disease, the fur trade, and mounting colonial pressure. Copper is chosen as the vehicle to observe shifts in past choices as Indigenous oral histories, ethnographic records, and archaeological research show that copper was a culturally significant and powerful material within Indigenous ontologies. Its ownership could directly affect health, wealth, and social status. Through this time copper continued to be important to Indigenous lives, however the large amounts of manufactured trade metal introduced in the last 18th century changed the landscape of Indigenous copper metal procurement, value, and use forever. To investigate changes in Indigenous material choice, technological strategies, and artefact design, copper objects are analysed using a multifaceted biographical approach. A corpus of material, including daggers, bracelets, masks, beads, and the shield-shaped ‘Coppers’ are subject to a close physical inspection, documenting individual syntax of creation and use, or chaîne opératoire. Additionally, non-destructive chemical characterisation using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy facilitates interpretation of the material origins. This is possible because Indigenous metallurgists did not smelt or melt metal, and prior to the introduction of manufactured metals Indigenous resources were largely limited to geological sources of native copper, material from shipwrecks, or Indigenous trade. Here material culture is used to look beyond established histories, revealing nuanced decisions that have contributed to the formation of political power structures in place today. This research suggests that the Northwest Coast is connected by shared traditions and values spanning generations. Furthermore, a detectable patchwork of discrete personal interests and choices suggests that people were making decisions geared towards personal success. This thesis works to both acknowledge our colonised histories and argue for nuanced perspectives that contribute to the decolonisation of our past, present, and future

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 archaeological case studies that offer new perspectives on colonial period interactions in the Caribbean and surrounding areas through a specific focus on material culture and indigenous agency. Readership: Scholars in archaeology and early history, graduate students, educated public with an interest in early colonial history of the Americas

Constructing Identity: The Roman-Era Northwestern Adriatic Laced Tradition of Boatbuilding

This dissertation investigates the development of a local tradition of laced boatbuilding along the coasts and inland waterways of the northwestern Adriatic Sea during the Roman period (with definitive evidence between the second century B.C.E. and the sixth century C.E.). The primary focus of this research is to explore in particular how the preservation of this tradition reflects the existence of a local cultural identity for the community of builders in this region in the path of an expanding Roman presence as evidenced by changing material culture in the contemporaneous Mediterranean world. An environmental deterministic model has been proposed to explain the perseverance of the northwestern Adriatic laced tradition of boat-building; however, this model leaves several sociocultural and economic factors unexplored. This project is the first comprehensive study to contextualize northwestern Adriatic laced boats against the broader social, cultural, and economic background of the Mediterranean world and the local region, and to examine why a particular local boatbuilding tradition endured in a relatively small geographic region over an extended time period. It is the ultimate goal of this study to translate the technical aspects of the boat-building culture represented by northwestern Adriatic laced vessels into a broader discussion of the lifeways and identities of these ancient builders. The decision-making strategies of the ancient builders are examined in regards to the materials used and techniques employed in the construction of these vessels, how these features changed across time, space, and/or function, and what factors might have affected the stability or dynamism of these material and structural aspects of the boat-building tradition Through this approach, I identify the stable features of the construction method that define the tradition as well as dynamic features that likely represent distinct builders or groups of builders within the broader community of practice. Understanding the decision-making strategies of the ancient builders of northwestern Adriatic laced vessels adds to our understanding of this local tradition of boatbuilding and provides an example of the nuanced experiences of various groups with the processes of Roman colonialism and subsequent cultural change