The persona and deaths of Six 16th century Grand Masters of the Order of St. John

In a previous issue of this Journal, I focused on the personal and psychological traits of four sixteenth century Grand Masters of Malta, perhaps the most popular, or, anyway, the better known. I believe it would be equally rewarding to investigate the physical and mental set-up and health of the other six, who may have left a more indistinct impact on the course of Maltese history, but are nonetheless net contributors to the formation of our nationhood.peer-reviewe

Read, Play and Learn: An Interactive E-book for Children with Autism

Serious games can easily engage students, captivate and maintain their attention allowing them both learning with an adult, or on their own. But, teaching children with developmental disabilities like ASD, requires special set of tools and methods, due to decreased level of attention towards stimuli presented and lessened capability to learn in ways typical children do. Interactive multisensory computer based instruction seems to be a good match for these diverse learners because it offers multisensory learning experience, interactive practice with constant feedback, increased learning opportunities, and customization to each child’s needs. In this paper we present a web-based interactive educational e-book designed to engage a learner with additional auditory-visual stimulation related to the text being read in two languages, and by providing multi layered questions about the story read, for comprehension. Our educational goals were to teach children novel vocabulary, counting, identifying numbers and colors, and responding to inference questions

Designing the printed book as an interactive environment

Reading a book demands a certain level of interaction from the reader. The cover must be opened and pages turned to navigate the information inside. Conventions have been developed over the life of the book to assist the reader in this navigation and provide orientation. The evolution of electronic reading material has given readers greater opportunities for interacting with their reading material, but many readers still prefer reading from a printed book. This paper investigates how the interactive organizational paradigm of hypertext can be implemented in a printed book to give the reader the opportunity for greater interaction and benefit from some of the advantages that electronic reading environments provide. The investigation in this paper follows an iterative design process in consultation with a panel of four experts. Through four rounds of consultation and refinement two potential solutions were developed for the incorporation of hypertext methods in a printed book

Developing automated text-image alignment to enhance access to heritage manuscript images

The proposed project aims to enhance access to primary cultural heritage materials of India by developing human-validated automated text-image alignment techniques in order to provide access to digital images via related machine-readable texts, lexical resources, linguistic software, and a sophisticated search interface. Digital images of manuscripts written in Sanskrit, one of the world's richest culture-bearing languages, will be integrated into a digital library of Sanskrit. This integration will allow generalized information extraction and search techniques to reach enormous reservoirs of Sanskrit manuscripts. Integrating primary cultural materials with the Sanskrit Library will thus enable broad use of Indic collections for research and education where Indic materials are grossly underrepresented. The result will be extendable to the collections of Sanskrit manuscripts housed in American libraries and throughout the world and to archives of scanned Sanskrit books

How Ambonese Read: Challenges and Opportunities to Preserve Maluku Folklore and Culture

        Preserving culture can be done through the folklore that are passed down from generation to generation. The main aim of this survey is to see the challenges and opportunity for Maluku Folklore preservation. This research provides an insight on the students’ reading habit and preference, the availability of Maluku Folklore, and students’ perception on Maluku folklore. The data collected 248 responses through an online survey. The result highlighted several interesting information; 1) Despite the result show respondents perceived reading as their hobby, their preference activity shows that in their free time books are not the first choice and the culture of bedtime stories and/or being read to by parents are an uncommon practice. 2) Students rarely read Maluku Folklore unless it is an assignment from school. 3) Students believed that Maluku Folklore is not as popular and available compared to folklore from other parts of Indonesia. 4) Maluku Folklore is not readily available for students to find and consume. 5) Students prefer to read on digital and online platforms compared to the printed ones. 6) Opportunities for preservation can be done by embracing the technology and internet to tapped in to the current young people reading preferences and habit

Ancient Documents Denoising and Decomposition Using Aujol and Chambolle Algorithm

With the improvement of printing technology since the 15th century, there is a huge amount of printed documents published and distributed. These documents are degraded by the time and require to be preprocessed before being submitted to image indexing strategy, in order to enhance the quality of images. This paper proposes a new pre-processing that permits to denoise these documents, by using a Aujol and Chambolle algorithm. Aujol and Chambolle algorithm allows to extract meaningful components from image. In this case, we can extract shapes, textures and noise. Some examples of specific processings applied on each layer are illustrated in this paper