Visual image processing in various representation spaces for documentary preservation

This thesis establishes an advanced image processing framework for the enhancement and restoration of historical document images (HDI) in both intensity (gray-scale or color) and multispectral (MS) representation spaces. It provides three major contributions: 1) the binarization of gray-scale HDI; 2) the visual quality restoration of MS HDI; and 3) automatic reference data (RD) estimation for HDI binarization. HDI binarization is one of the enhancement techniques that produces bi-level information which is easy to handle using methods of analysis (OCR, for instance) and is less computationally costly to process than 256 levels of grey or color images. Restoring the visual quality of HDI in an MS representation space enhances their legibility, which is not possible with conventional intensity-based restoration methods, and HDI legibility is the main concern of historians and librarians wishing to transfer knowledge and revive ancient cultural heritage. The use of MS imaging systems is a new and attractive research trend in the field of numerical processing of cultural heritage documents. In this thesis, these systems are also used for automatically estimating more accurate RD to be used for the evaluation of HDI binarization algorithms in order to track the level of human performance. Our first contribution, which is a new adaptive method of intensity-based binarization, is defined at the outset. Since degradation is present over document images, binarization methods must be adapted to handle degradation phenomena locally. Unfortunately, these methods are not effective, as they are not able to capture weak text strokes, which results in a deterioration of the performance of character recognition engines. The proposed approach first detects a subset of the most probable text pixels, which are used to locally estimate the parameters of the two classes of pixels (text and background), and then performs a simple maximum likelihood (ML) to locally classify the remaining pixels based on their class membership. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time local parameter estimation and classification in an ML framework has been introduced for HDI binarization with promising results. A limitation of this method in the case with as the intensity-based methods of enhancement is that they are not effective in dealing with severely degraded HDI. Developing more advanced methods based on MS information would be a promising alternative avenue of research. In the second contribution, a novel approach to the visual restoration of HDI is defined. The approach is aimed at providing end users (historians, librarians, etc..) with better HDI visualization, specifically; it aims to restore them from degradations, while keeping the original appearance of the HDI intact. Practically, this problem cannot be solved by conventional intensity-based restoration methods. To cope with these limitations, MS imaging is used to produce additional spectral images in the invisible light (infrared and ultraviolet) range, which gives greater contrast to objects in the documents. The inpainting-based variational framework proposed here for HDI restoration involves isolating the degradation phenomena in the infrared spectral images, and then inpainting them in the visible spectral images. The final color image to visualize is therefore reconstructed from the restored visible spectral images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the inpainting technique has been introduced for MS HDI. The experimental results are promising, and our objective, in collaboration with the BAnQ (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec), is to push heritage documents into the public domain and build an intelligent engine for accessing them. It is useful to note that the proposed model can be extended to other MS-based image processing tasks. Our third contribution is presented, which is to consider a new problem of RD (reference data) estimation, in order to show the importance of working with MS images rather than gray-scale or color images. RDs are mandatory for comparing different binarization algorithms, and they are usually generated by an expert. However, an expert’s RD is always subject to mislabeling and judgment errors, especially in the case of degraded data in restricted representation spaces (gray-scale or color images). In the proposed method, multiple RD generated by several experts are used in combination with MS HDI to estimate new, more accurate RD. The idea is to include the agreement of experts about labels and the multivariate data fidelity in a single Bayesian classification framework to estimate the a posteriori probability of new labels forming the final estimated RD. Our experiments show that estimated RD are more accurate than an expert’s RD. To the best of our knowledge, no similar work to combine binary data and multivariate data for the estimation of RD has been conducted

Image registration: Features and applications

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Qualitative Analyse und Modellierung des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens

Diese Masterarbeitet bietet einen Überblick der bestehenden Literatur zum Stand der Digitalisierung des geisteswissenschaflichen Arbeitens und den Stellenwert des Exzerpierens und Notierens während der Forschung. Die Erkentnisse aus der Literatur werden durch eine Interviewreihe, ausgewertet auf Basis der Grounded Theory, bestätigt. Basierend auf elf Interviews mit Promovierenden und Masterstudierenden wird ein informelles Aktitivätenmodell des (geistes)wissenschafltichen Arbeitens erstellt. Unter Miteinbeziehung des Forschungsstands auf dem Gebiet des Personal Information Management wird anschließend ein Concurrent Task Tree Modell für digitale Assistenz im Rahmen geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung vorgestellt. Basierend darauf wurde ein Prototyp zur Evaluierung einer stillen Ausführungs- und Übersetzungsassistenz entwickelt, der im Labor getestet wurde. Die Nutzung des Prototypen führte entgegen der Erwartung zu keiner Effizienzsteigerung beim Zusammenfassen einer Textquelle. Gleichzeitig konnet aber bestätigt werden, dass die Nutzung eines Eye-Trackers und einer Webcam die Verortung von Papiernotizen im digitalen Quelltext ermöglicht. Bei die Auswertung der Interviews wurden zudem zwei Typen der Literaturverwaltung beobachtet, die den Stellenwert von Exzerpten unterstreichen und die zukünftige Entwicklung von Literaturverwaltungssoftware für Geisteswissenschaftler beeinflussen sollten

Writing with the ghost:The potential histories of Saidiya Hartman and Susan Howe

This thesis discusses and compares two different but resonant works of creative scholarship: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019) and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985). Counter to a history conscribed by captivity and criminality, Saidiya Hartman “exceeds the archive” in order to speculatively narrate the “intimate histories” of African American women at the turn of the twentieth century. Susan Howe writes through a counter-historical poetics against mis-readings of Dickinson’s literary experimentation while situating the poet in a feminine nonconformist tradition. Approaching the archive as a departure point rather than a site for answers, Hartman writes a “serial biography” of the “wayward” women who fashioned forms of freedom within constraint while Howe investigates patriarchal authority over literary history. After addressing the differences between these scholars’ archives and the terms through which their subjects “enter history,” I illustrate moments in both texts where specific resonances may be located, focusing on each writer’s close readings of history, modes of listening for affect in the archive, and methods of counter-historical fabulation. I argue that Hartman and Howe engage adjacent aesthetic modes as they read their subjects otherwise, refusing normative terms by which resistance, representation, and intelligibility have been defined. They articulate openings for “potential history” through a shared recognition of the limits of genre and language while demonstrating a commitment to “unsettling what’s settled.

The Liberal Arts on Trial: Charles H. Fisher and Red-Scare Politics at Western Washington College of Education, 1933-39

College president Charles H. Fisher’s transformation of Bellingham State Normal School, a small state teacher’s college, into Western Washington College of Education earned him the overwhelming respect of his peers, faculty, students, and much of the local community. His reward was an abrupt firing by Washington Governor Clarence Martin in 1938. Fisher’s ousting was engineered by a cabal of “anti-communist” citizens led by Frank I. Sefrit, the conservative editor of The Bellingham Herald. The group had ties to a range of “pro-American” groups, including the American Legion, several conservative women’s organizations, local churches, and the Ku Klux Klan. Sefrit called Fisher a communist sympathizer who fostered anti-Americanism, atheism, and “free love” on a campus infected by “Red” academics, many trained at Columbia University. College trustees in 1935 exonerated Fisher, but three years later, acceded to Gov. Clarence Martin’s insistence that Fisher be fired. Subsequent investigations described the firing as politically motivated, raising alarms about infringement of academic freedom during a period of social strife. Existing accounts of the Depression-era incident paint Fisher’s foes as oddball radicals. But the campaign did not occur in a political vacuum. Previously unknown documents about the Fisher case reveal varied personal motivations of Fisher’s foes in a town torn by political rancor, fomented by a vicious, decades-long media war. New evidence also reveals a link between the Fisher case and a concurrent national red-baiting campaign directed at academic institutions across the United States. Additional new evidence suggests that the Fisher dismissal might have been influenced by a separate financial scandal at the college in the 1930s. This study will explore Charles Fisher’s ousting in unprecedented detail, placing it for the first time within the context of a decade of strident, ultra-conservative activism serving as what one historian has dubbed “a bridge between the two Red Scares.”https://cedar.wwu.edu/cedarbooks/1008/thumbnail.jp

A unified framework for document image restoration

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia: How the Germans Brought Their Communism to Yemen

Radical ideologies may manifest differently at first, but they do follow a similar logic: truth claims, promises of salvation and a unifying common enemy. In Yemen's transition process today, the secessionist movement Al-Hirak has summoned the spirit of South Yemen, the only Marxist state in Arabia. This book meticulously describes how East Germany supported the implantation of this alien ideology in Yemen through its policy of »Socialist state- and nation-building«. In the same breath, the analysis captures the GDR's activities in the Middle East and their vital role in Moscow's Cold War strategy. Last but least, the study provides one of the few compact overviews of East German foreign policy in the English language of today

A Usable Collection: Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman on Collecting Social History

Established in 1935, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) is one of the world’s leading research institutes focused on social history and holds one of the richest collections in the field. This volume brings together thirty-five essays in honor of the IISH’s longtime director Jaap Kloosterman, who built the institute into a world leader in the field

A Spectre is Haunting Arabia

Radical ideologies may manifest differently at first, but they do follow a similar logic: truth claims, promises of salvation and a unifying common enemy. In Yemen's transition process today, the secessionist movement Al-Hirak has summoned the spirit of South Yemen, the only Marxist state in Arabia. This book meticulously describes how East Germany supported the implantation of this alien ideology in Yemen through its policy of #on("i")#"Socialist state- and nation-building"#off("i")#. In the same breath, the analysis captures the GDR's activities in the Middle East and their vital role in Moscow's Cold War strategy. Last but least, the study provides one of the few compact overviews of East German foreign policy in the English language of today

Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality