2020 IGGAD Conference Program

Program of the 2020 IGGAD Conference: Without Borders: Tracing the Cultural, Archival, and Political African Diaspora

An Intensive Archeological Survey and Testing of the Proposed Lower Dorchester County Wastewater Facilities Project Area Near Summerville, South Carolina

https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/archanth_books/1174/thumbnail.jp

REDISCOVERY OF A NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: THE CHICKASAW HOMELAND AT REMOVAL

Little information beyond generalities exists regarding the cultural landscape of the Chickasaw Indians in their ancestral homelands prior to Removal in the late 1830s. This dissertation evaluates one possible archival source for specifics of Chickasaw land use, the field notes and survey plats compiled as part of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). The process of original survey following land cession treaty divided the ceded area up into the familiar square-mile rectangular system of townships and ranges that extends from the Mississippi Territory westwards, in the so-called public land states. The research compiles all cultural observations made by the surveyors within a fourteen township area (totaling 504 square miles). This study area, generally located on the west bank of Town Creek between present-day Tupelo and Pontotoc MS, was chosen to cover the traditional center of Chickasaw settlement and elements of important roads such as the Natchez Trace. The resulting catalog of observations was compared to similar features on the township plats and to other cultural resource inventories to identify patterns of inscription and possible erasure of Native American cultural activities. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology was used to consolidate and compare these data resources. The PLSS survey documents provide a useful but not complete resource for identifying Chickasaw cultural presence within the study area. No consistent pattern of omission or erasure of Chickasaw activities was identified. The analysis identifies several opportunities and caveats for future researchers who might extend this analysis, including technical challenges in applying GIS technology to this data

Land-Cover and Land-Use Study Using Genetic Algorithms, Petri Nets, and Cellular Automata

Recent research techniques, such as genetic algorithm (GA), Petri net (PN), and cellular automata (CA) have been applied in a number of studies. However, their capability and performance in land-cover land-use (LCLU) classification, change detection, and predictive modeling have not been well understood. This study seeks to address the following questions: 1) How do genetic parameters impact the accuracy of GA-based LCLU classification; 2) How do image parameters impact the accuracy of GA-based LCLU classification; 3) Is GA-based LCLU classification more accurate than the maximum likelihood classifier (MLC), iterative self-organizing data analysis technique (ISODATA), and the hybrid approach; 4) How do genetic parameters impact Petri Net-based LCLU change detection; and 5) How do cellular automata components impact the accuracy of LCLU predictive modeling. The study area, namely the Tickfaw River watershed (711mi²), is located in southeast Louisiana and southwest Mississippi. The major datasets include time-series Landsat TM / ETM images and Digital Orthophoto Quarter Quadrangles (DOQQ’s). LCLU classification was conducted by using the GA, MLC, ISODATA, and Hybrid approach. The LCLU change was modeled by using genetic PN-based process mining technique. The process models were interpreted and input to a CA for predicting future LCLU. The major findings include: 1) GA-based LCLU classification is more accurate than the traditional approaches; 2) When genetic parameters, image parameters, or CA components are configured improperly, the accuracy of LCLU classification, the coverage of LCLU change process model, and/or the accuracy of LCLU predictive modeling will be low; 3) For GA-based LCLU classification, the recommended configuration of genetic / image parameters is generation 2000-5000, population 1000, crossover rate 69%-99%, mutation rate 0.1%-0.5%, generation gap 25%-50%, data layers 16-20, training / testing data size 10000-20000 / 5000-10000, and spatial resolution 30m-60m; 4) For genetic Petri nets-based LCLU change detection, the recommended configuration of genetic parameters is generation 500, population 300, crossover rate 59%, mutation rate 5%, and elitism rate 4%; and 5) For CA-based LCLU predictive modeling, the recommended configuration of CA components is space 6025 * 12993, state 2, von Neumann neighborhood 3 * 3, time step 2-3 years, and optimized transition rules

Graph-based approaches to word sense induction

This thesis is a study of Word Sense Induction (WSI), the Natural Language Processing (NLP) task of automatically discovering word meanings from text. WSI is an open problem in NLP whose solution would be of considerable benefit to many other NLP tasks. It has, however, has been studied by relatively few NLP researchers and often in set ways. Scope therefore exists to apply novel methods to the problem, methods that may improve upon those previously applied. This thesis applies a graph-theoretic approach to WSI. In this approach, word senses are identifed by finding particular types of subgraphs in word co-occurrence graphs. A number of original methods for constructing, analysing, and partitioning graphs are introduced, with these methods then incorporated into graphbased WSI systems. These systems are then shown, in a variety of evaluation scenarios, to return results that are comparable to those of the current best performing WSI systems. The main contributions of the thesis are a novel parameter-free soft clustering algorithm that runs in time linear in the number of edges in the input graph, and novel generalisations of the clustering coeficient (a measure of vertex cohesion in graphs) to the weighted case. Further contributions of the thesis include: a review of graph-based WSI systems that have been proposed in the literature; analysis of the methodologies applied in these systems; analysis of the metrics used to evaluate WSI systems, and empirical evidence to verify the usefulness of each novel method introduced in the thesis for inducing word senses

Research series (Chicora Foundation) 48

This study focuses attention on the large number of small planters who made up the majority of free land holders in the eighteenth century. It reveals that our understanding of plantations and planters has been based on the wealthy elite of the eighteenth century and urges exploration of the more common planter

Echoes of the lost cause : Civil War reverberations in Mississippi from 1865 to 2001

Scholars of the Lost Cause have tended to end their examinations of the Confederate commemorative movement before the 1920s. Citing a variety of indicators that range from veterans\u27 mortality rates to national reconciliation, these historians have assumed that the Lost Cause became increasingly irrelevant in southern society. Yet, veterans organizations and their auxiliaries put a great deal of energy into constructing an historical interpretation that would vindicate their actions to future generations. This dissertation therefore extends the examination of the Lost Cause movement throughout the twentieth century. Limiting the geographical scope of the research to a state study of Mississippi also highlights the extent to which the political system granted legitimacy to the Lost Cause through legal statutes and appropriations. From placenames and textbook censorship to funding memorials, the state, county, and municipal governments in Mississippi have assisted in the preservation and interpretation of Confederate memory. Despite this official endorsement which began immediately upon the war\u27s conclusion, other historical interpretations existed within the state. In fact, the U.S. Army and Reconstruction Republicans attempted to leave their own Unionist marks on Mississippi during the late 1860s and 1870s. By the 1890s when the federal government again began to play an occasional role in commemorating the Civil War within Mississippi\u27s borders, a tone of national reconciliation stressed the honor and skill of combatants on both sides. Meanwhile, the black community managed to preserve its own memories of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. As the Civil Rights Movement began to escalate, segregationists used the white South\u27s loyalty to the Lost Cause as a means of rallying support. While the federal Civil War Centennial Commission urged a program of national reconciliation, the Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States attempted to manipulate the anniversary to assist the cause of white supremacy. For both segregationists and civil rights activists, the identity of similar actors and agendas evoked rhetorical parallels between the past and the present, particularly after the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi. During the 1966 Meredith March, blacks began to publicly challenge Confederate monuments and flags as symbols of white supremacy. By the 1980s when civil rights advances had granted African Americans access to political power, their own long-held memory of the past no longer remained isolated within the black community. Indeed, controversy over Confederate symbols sparked extensive dialogue across Mississippi on the interpretation of the antebellum and Civil War past. The Lost Cause continued to influence many within the state, but its adherents could no longer prevent alternative memories from entering the public realm

Life Knots

This collection of creative nonfiction essays is framed by M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the concrete juncture of time and space. Chronotopes include technical relationships between those elements, as well as worldviews. Each essay examines a different thing or place as a chronotope, including maps, a well house, boxes, a dining room, periodical cicadas, and a sand dollar. All of the essays, however, share themes, including the search for unity (and for what actually constitutes unity), relationships between ways of knowing, and relationships between the personal, spiritual, environmental, and cultural. The essays span genres, from the personal and academically personal, to memoir and place memoir, to meditation