LEVERAGING TEXT MINING FOR THE DESIGN OF A LEGAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

In today’s globalized world, companies are faced with numerous and continuously changing legal requirements. To ensure that these companies are compliant with legal regulations, law and consulting firms use open legal data published by governments worldwide. With this data pool growing rapidly, the complexity of legal research is strongly increasing. Despite this fact, only few research papers consider the application of information systems in the legal domain. Against this backdrop, we pro-pose a knowledge management (KM) system that aims at supporting legal research processes. To this end, we leverage the potentials of text mining techniques to extract valuable information from legal documents. This information is stored in a graph database, which enables us to capture the relation-ships between these documents and users of the system. These relationships and the information from the documents are then fed into a recommendation system which aims at facilitating knowledge transfer within companies. The prototypical implementation of the proposed KM system is based on 20,000 legal documents and is currently evaluated in cooperation with a Big 4 accounting company

Comparative Policy Agendas

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) brings together data on government activities in over twenty countries, and provides a consistent categorizing system to understand when a given institution of government in a particular country took action on any issue of public policy. All topics are covered, comprehensively, over several decades, in some countries going back to World War II. Because of the open-data philosophy that animates the international network of scholars involved in the project and their meticulous attention to comparability and common data coding conventions, the databases of the CAP represent an unprecedented resource for the study of public policy across national borders. In this major new book, leaders of each national team provide the background and information needed for anyone to understand how best to make use of these newly available historical databases. Interested users will range from novice students of public policy to accomplished scholars, from interested citizens to professional journalists, political or partisan activists, and professional staff of legislative assemblies or national administrative agencies. The book’s sections include chapters introducing the CAP to a new audience, describing each national project, illustrating various cross-national uses and analyses that the CAP data allow, and concluding with ideas for further practical and research uses

Comparative Policy Agendas

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) brings together data on government activities in over twenty countries, and provides a consistent categorizing system to understand when a given institution of government in a particular country took action on any issue of public policy. All topics are covered, comprehensively, over several decades, in some countries going back to World War II. Because of the open-data philosophy that animates the international network of scholars involved in the project and their meticulous attention to comparability and common data coding conventions, the databases of the CAP represent an unprecedented resource for the study of public policy across national borders. In this major new book, leaders of each national team provide the background and information needed for anyone to understand how best to make use of these newly available historical databases. Interested users will range from novice students of public policy to accomplished scholars, from interested citizens to professional journalists, political or partisan activists, and professional staff of legislative assemblies or national administrative agencies. The book’s sections include chapters introducing the CAP to a new audience, describing each national project, illustrating various cross-national uses and analyses that the CAP data allow, and concluding with ideas for further practical and research uses

The politics of struggle in a state–civil society partnership: a case study of a South Korean workfare partnership programme

This research investigates the dynamics of the on-going conflict in the state–civil society partnership in South Korea. In recent decades, partnership has become a central strategy for welfare provision worldwide. In accordance with this trend, the Korean government has invited numerous civil society organisations to become local welfare agencies. The workfare programme (called the SSP) is a typical example of such partnerships. Because a large number of anti-poverty organisations have become frontline SSP Centres, the SSP is widely regarded as an icon of participatory welfare. However, contrary to the ideals of democratic governance, some critical studies have argued that collaboration with the state can render civil society agencies susceptible to state demands, gradually undermining their role as advocates for disadvantaged people. In light of such claims, this study has explored the actual politics of the SSP partnership by: 1) analysing policy documents; 2) conducting interviews with 42 actors in the SSP system; and 3) observing a Centre. This research confirms that partnership does not always guarantee a democratic relationship. SSP Centres have gradually been subjected to state intervention, and their open confrontation with the state has evidently abated. Yet SSP Centres have not completely lost their autonomy and spirit of resistance: rather, they have adopted informal and unofficial forms of resistance while maintaining apparent conformity with the state. These street-level activities constitute SSP Centres’ emancipatory role in defending the life-world of poor people against the capitalist state. The implication of this study for the politics of partnership is that current forms of state–civil society partnership need not entail the ‘mutual coproduction’ or the ‘complete co-option’ of civil society to the state. Partnership can be a site of ‘complex struggles’ where civil society actors continue to counteract the control of the dominant system in inflected ways

Informality, Infrastructure and the State in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg

The central argument of this thesis is that the spatiality of encounter between state and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa is unequal and discontinuous. Although the developmental postapartheid state remains a powerful political narrative, the existence of what have been called 'informal' modes of association and organisation suggests that this imagination has not completely permeated post-apartheid society. Based on a case study of 'informal' street traders in inner city Johannesburg, I argue in this thesis that in fact a very particular state geography is emergent in post-apartheid South Africa: using a theoretical literature that includes state theory, govemmentality studies and critical post-colonial geography I suggest that mutual imaginations of state and citizenship intersect in particular nodes of encounter. In a context where the institutions of state have neither a coherent nor a singular view of everyday associational life in the city, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality has developed a strategy of building formal market places in an attempt to intersect the informal networks that most street traders are implicated into. Markets such as the high-profile Metro Mall in the inner city of Johannesburg therefore serve as nodes of encounter between state and citizens, or what Law (2004) might refer to as Obligatory Points of Passage. Through these markets, the municipality has attempted to encourage traders to imagine themselves as responsible entrepreneurs, and to therefore implicate traders into new networks of association that allow traders to share in an imagination of the post-apartheid developmental state. However, these encounters do not always produce predictable outcomes, and I demonstrate how the Metro Mall serves also as a context for traders to represent to the municipality different expectations of citizenship

Writing the railway: biosemiotic strategies for enforming meaning and dispersing authorship in site-specific text-based artworks

This practice-led PhD is concerned with the subject matter of contemporary art. It proposes methods by which a writer-maker’s authorship can be dispersed throughout reticulated networks of interpretation, and tests the limits of detail articulable in an artwork. To counter the literary and discursive turns that have dominated art theory and practice since the 1970s, the thesis demands a reassessment of the privileging of the viewer and of the adoption of indeterminacy as a generic style. It proposes instead a turn to biosemiotics as a means to situate the artwork materially, bodily, historically. That ambiguity and pluralism can consequently be deployed strategically, affectively and to critical effect is tested and evaluated in the accompanying practice. The thesis gives an account of the theorising and devising of text-based artworks which take the UK railway as site, and considers site-specificity a particular sort of engagement with subject matter. The railway is approached as a complex technical object consisting in multiple entangled intentions and interpretations – social, emotional and political valences, diffracted by a spectrum of practices, knowledges and semiotic ontologies – all of which are available to the writermaker as immanent materials of the artwork. Part One of the thesis presents a transdisciplinary argument that draws on biosemiotics, linguistic anthropology, philosophy of time and socio-psychology as well as art history and critical theory. Part Two performs an analysis of paradigmatic descriptions of the railway, speculates on the social dynamics of a train carriage interior and empirically tests the bureaucratic structures of London Underground. Part Three is an exegesis of three pieces submitted as documentation in the practice portfolio: an audio work, a guided tour and a live performance on a train carriage tabletop

Oldest-old partner’s experiences of providing end-of-life care: a narrative study

Background Population ageing has rapidly increased the number of people requiring end-of-life care across the globe. Governments have responded by promoting end-of-life in the community. Partly as a consequence, older partners are frequently providing for their partner’s end-of-life care at home, despite potentially facing their own health issues. Little is known about people aged 75 and over who are providing end-of-life care. In order to prepare our health and social care systems for rapidly ageing populations, we need to understand more about this group’s experiences of end-of-life care. Aim To explore the experiences of oldest-old partners looking after their partner approaching end-of-life care. Method First, I conducted a systematic review of the extant literature published since 1985 on the topic. Second, I conducted a longitudinal narrative interview study with 17 couples (19 participants in total). Findings A systematic review of the literature identified a small and only medium quality evidence-base with important empirical and theoretical gaps that require further research. Drawing on interview data, the first key finding was that older partners navigated the carer identity in relation to external and internal factors with not all subsequently embracing the carer identity for themselves. A second key finding is that older partners are actively engaged in integrating care in their capacity as home- keepers, networkers and vigilant visitors. A third key finding highlights the creative ways in which older partners engaged with a pill organizer called a dosette box to make their daily end-of-life caring and medical management bearable. Conclusions The overarching contributions of this thesis challenge notions of the fourth age as merely comprising “decline, passivity and frailty” by emphasizing the activity and creativity of older partners providing end-of-life care. Second, by thinking about oldest-old partners needs and experiences as interconnected, I suggest that policy-makers and health and social care providers will be able to more effectively design services that meet the needs of both oldest-old partners.Woolf Fisher Doctoral Scholarshi

Strange New Canons: The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20th Century American Experimental Poetics.

American experimental poets after modernism turned to Greek and Latin texts as pretexts to explode the ideal of the classical tradition, and to explore, instead, the radical discontinuity and linguistic alterity of the classics. Focusing on divergent but related modes of classical reception in American avant-garde poetry, this dissertation asks why and how “the classical” is a key site for poetic experiments by several generations of poets, including Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. Though heterogeneous in many respects, their poetics demonstrate the irreconcilability of classical texts—in all their graphic, phonic, and material particularity—with an idea of classics at the center of Anglo-American culture. They create “strange new canons” through epitextual, paratextual, and metatextual engagements with classicism, demonstrating how canon becomes anti-canon, and opening up alternative models for canonical revision. After a theoretical introduction about literary canonicity and poetic innovation, each of the dissertation’s three chapters pairs two authors according to the dual criteria of literary period and mode of classical reception, tracing a line from late modernist Objectivism to the New American Poetry and Language Writing. Chapter One analyzes homophonic translation in Zukofsky’s Catullus and Melnick’s Homer, as two examples of “epitextual” poetics that foreground the material text. Chapter Two turns to Ginsberg and Spicer to compare different “paratextual” strategies of adaptation through the figures of Catullus and Orpheus, simultaneously critiquing hegemonic classicism and adapting “classics” for their own poetic purposes: while Ginsberg usurps and transposes classical authority for alternative texts and social identities, Spicer responds critically to Ginsberg by offering up an even more potent critique in his self-cancelling classical poetics. Chapter Three contrasts Bernstein’s poetics of citation with Howe’s poetics of luminous fragments (in Pythagorean Silence) with Bernstein’s poetics of citation (in The Sophist and elsewhere) as two examples of “metatextual” reception, creating classical simulacra divorced from Greek and Latin texts for ironic critique or historical transformation. The conclusion reflects further on the implications of American experimental poetics for rethinking the past and future of classical reception studies, and extends its implications into contemporary canon debates and avant-garde poetics.PHDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100079/1/mpfaff_1.pd

Justifying school- and self :an ethnography on race recognition and viability in Ireland

This study draws on theorisation of ethnographic data generated in a suburban Dublin\ud community school, during the 2007/2008 school year. `Dromray', the pseudonym for\ud the school, is situated in a region of county Dublin fictitiously named `Termonfort'.\ud Termonfort has experienced some of the highest levels of change in population terms in\ud Ireland in the past decade. Twenty-two percent of Termonfort's inhabitants are 'non-\ud Irish nationals' according to the 2006 Census, which is double the country average.\ud Between one and two days per week were spent in the school, particularly with Junior\ud Certificate (3rd year, usually 15 year-old) students. Time was spent observing lessons\ud and chatting with staff and students in the staffroom, on the corridor, on the yard and\ud while going for lunch. Recorded interviews were also conducted with students and staff,\ud and records of 3rd year student achievement on school-set tests were taken.\ud The study analyses key school-social and global-local discursive relations that render\ud institutional racism as a highly mobile process in meritocratic times. It puts forward the\ud concept of racist effects as a means of analysing how 'race' (hierarchy), school and peer\ud practices may be co-constructed in overt, but also oblique and contradictory ways.\ud Concepts of global-state-school-exigency, subjectivation and identity performance,\ud recognition and viability underpin these processess. The notion of (respectable) white-\ud Irishness is put forward as an ambiguous normative core which is often re-effected both\ud in oblique relations, but also directly through national/newcomer, good/bad migrant\ud dichotomies. The study encourages a praxis which interrupts 'racist effects' with and\ud beyond 'cause-effect' models of marginalised identities. This praxis requires the\ud deployment of deconstructive strategies, which interrupt the privileging of white-\ud Irishness co-constructed via self (e.g. class, gender, subculture) and school shifts (e.g.\ud mixed ability banding and language support). The approach fundamentally\ud demonstrates how Self and Other are situated, vulnerable and mutually implicated in\ud processes of recognition and viability

Fuelling Culture: Art, Race, and Capitalism on the Arabian Peninsula

This thesis is about how racial capitalism and empire have enabled the creation of the Gulf’s cultural infrastructure, which includes Saadiyat Cultural District, Art Dubai, and Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. Some studies of high culture have illustrated how museum collections are rooted in colonial plunder and ordered by colonial epistemologies. Others have examined the effects of neoliberalisation on contemporary art, showing how capitalism eventually assimilates even counter-hegemonic art. Drawing on ethnographic and interview material collected among cultural milieus in the United Arab Emirates, New York, and London, this thesis intervenes in, and bridges, these two research strands. Carbon-based financial interdependence between the Gulf and the West is the visible afterlife of colonialism in the region. I argue that these asymmetrical circuits of capital accumulation underpin the new cultural ecology. The theory of racial capitalism emphasises that racialisations are central to the functioning of the world economy, resolving the contradictions inherent in liberal institution-building under the profoundly hierarchical conditions of global markets. Working with these insights, I show how orientalist imaginings of the Gulf contributed to the opening of its art market, and how white epistemologies have legitimised this enterprise and its violent effects. I examine how these cultural infrastructures form part of the Gulf states’ post-oil vision, elucidating how their built environments attempt to manage difference by turning the unruly multiplicity of urban space into homogenous and marketable identities. Bringing these together I argue that, despite centring decolonial aesthetics, the Gulf’s cultural infrastructure contributes forcefully to colonialism. Its institutions enshrine the Gulf’s colonial relations with subaltern subjects from the postcolonies on its peripheries and demonstrate the persistence of a racial calculus that prioritises whiteness. This infrastructure thus underscores that, rather than provincialise Europe, postcolonialism must stretch its concepts to the changing constellation of power precipitated by maturing capitalist processes