The Viceroyalty of Miami: Colonial Nostalgia and the Making of an Imperial City

This dissertation argues that the history of Miami is best understood as an imperial history. In a series of thematic chapters, it demonstrates how the city came into existence as a result of expansionism and how it continued to maintain imperial distinctions and hierarchies as it incorporated new people, beginning as a colonial frontier prior to the nineteenth century and becoming an imperial center of the Americas in the twentieth century. In developing an imperial analysis of the city, “The Viceroyalty of Miami” pays particular attention to sources that elite imperialists generated. Their papers, publications, and speeches archive the leading and often loudest voices directing the city’s capitalist development and its future. This focus on the elite shows both their local power over the city and their global vision for it, putting local history into dialogue with newer scholarly approaches to global urban cities. Though imperialists worked to portray the area as untamed during the Spanish colonial period, taming nature became paramount in subsequent eras, especially during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century with the environmental transformation of south Florida. City founders intentionally introduced plants from the Americas and around the world that created an elite tropical culture in Miami, a consequence of overseas imperial acquisitions in 1898 in tropical parts of the world. Spanish revival architecture worked as the means of establishing U.S. sovereignty over a formerly contested frontier, but self-contained suburban development inaugurated persistent problems of metropolitan management. Finally, once imperialists laid claim to the soil and the building that sat upon it, they turned to the air, making Miami a projected site of U.S. power through aviation. In light of the four substantive chapters, the Epilogue recasts our understanding of ideological migration before and after 1959 as the final stage of Miami’s transformation from a colonial frontier to an imperial city

Enriching Solutions to Combinatorial Problems via Solution Engineering

International audienceExisting approaches to identify multiple solutions to combinatorial problems in practice are at best limited in their ability to simultaneously incorporate both diversity among generated solutions, as well as problem-specific desires that may only be discovered or articulated by the user after further analysis of solver output. We propose a general framework for problems of a combinatorial nature that can generate a set of of multiple (near-)optimal, diverse solutions, that are further infused with desirable features. We call our approach solution engineering. A key novelty is that desirable solution properties need not be explicitly modeled in advance. We customize the framework to both the mathematical programming and constraint programming technologies, and subsequently demonstrate its prac-ticality by implementing and then conducting computational experiments on existing test instances from the literature. Our computational results confirm the very real possibility of generating sets of solutions infused with features that might otherwise remain undiscovered

Reactive Exploration to Cope with Non-Stationarity in Lifelong Reinforcement Learning

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain shifts, which result in non-stationary rewards and environment dynamics. These non-stationarities are difficult to detect and cope with due to their continuous nature. Therefore, exploration strategies and learning methods are required that are capable of tracking the steady domain shifts, and adapting to them. We propose Reactive Exploration to track and react to continual domain shifts in lifelong reinforcement learning, and to update the policy correspondingly. To this end, we conduct experiments in order to investigate different exploration strategies. We empirically show that representatives of the policy-gradient family are better suited for lifelong learning, as they adapt more quickly to distribution shifts than Q-learning. Thereby, policy-gradient methods profit the most from Reactive Exploration and show good results in lifelong learning with continual domain shifts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ml-jku/reactive-exploration.Comment: CoLLAs 202

Automated Journalism 2.0: Event-driven narratives. From simple descriptions to real stories

This article introduces an exploratory computational approach to extending the realm of automated journalism from simple descriptions to richer and more complex event­driven narratives, based on original applied research in structured journalism. The practice of automated journalism is reviewed and a major constraint on the potential to automate journalistic writing is identified, namely the ab-sence of data models sufficient to encode the journalistic knowledge necessary for automatically writ-ing event-driven narratives. A detailed proposal addressing this constraint is presented, based on the representation of journalistic knowledge as structured event and structured narrative data. We de-scribe a prototyped database of structured events and narratives, and introduce two methods of using event and narrative data from the prototyped database to provide journalistic knowledge to a com-mercial automated writing platform. Detailed examples of the use of each method are provided, in-cluding a successful application of the approach to stories about car chases, from initial data reporting through to automatically generated text. A framework for evaluating automatically generated event-driven narratives is proposed, several technical and editorial challenges to applying the approach in practice are discussed, and several high-level conclusions about the importance of data structures in automated journalism workflows are provided

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

Florida\u27s Vanishing Heritage: Climate Risk and Adaptation at Florida Heritage Sites

This thesis examines history and preservation at coastal cultural heritage sites threatened by climate change and explores climate adaptation strategies at two sites on Florida\u27s Atlantic coast. Current climate change models indicate the planet may see as much as 1.1 meters, or four feet, of global average sea level rise by the year 2100, requiring site managers to intervene by using adaptation techniques to improve resilience and guard against the loss of cultural heritage monuments. Understanding the history and importance of these sites to the surrounding communities and their numerous stakeholders is the first step to ensuring these sites remain resilient in the face of a changing climate. This project uses GIS mapping software, publicly available elevation and tide data, and publicly available sea level rise projection tools to evaluate areas vulnerable to sea level rise and the associated effects at Fort Clinch on Amelia Island in northeast Florida and Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse on south Florida\u27s Atlantic coast. These two cultural heritage sites include both protected natural areas as well as examples of built environment that hold cultural significance for a number of stakeholder groups. While these two sites share similarities, climate change adaptation will look different at each. At Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse nature-based adaptation solutions like the current living shoreline project can provide a low-impact way to control erosion and improve resiliency at the site. Because of the coastal dynamics of Amelia Island, however, this type of adaptation project would not be effective at Fort Clinch. In the case of Fort Clinch several natural and anthropogenic factors contribute to an ever-present erosion problem which will worsen as sea levels rise. The changes that occur at these sites and adaptation efforts to respond to those changes will present future historians with opportunities to interpret the changes in the landscape for the public

New Mexico and the Pimería Alta

Colonialism and the process of state expansion into new territories far from the capitol and mother country have occurred for thousands of years across the globe. Within the American Southwest, colonial encounters and the processes of colonialism played out in notably divergent manners through time and space. The chapters in New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, focus on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters: the New Mexico Colony and the Pimería Alta. Although these broad areas share a similar early colonial history, the particular mix of players, socio-historical trajectories, and social relations within each area both led to, and were transformed by, markedly diverse colonial encounters. Understanding these different mixes of players, history, and social relations provides the foundation for conceptualizing the enormous changes wrought by colonialism throughout the region