Augmenting optical character recognition (OCR) for improved digitization: Strategies to access scientific data in natural history collections

The Augmenting OCR Working Group (A-OCR WG) at Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) seeks to improve community OCR strategies and algorithms for faster, better parsing of OCR output derived from valuable data on natural history collection specimen labels. This task is exceedingly difficult because museum labels are often annotated, and vary in content, form and font. Under the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program, iDigBio is building a cyberinfrastructure to aggregate quality data from museum specimens housed in collections across the United States for use by researchers, educators, environmentalists and the public. Since March of 2012, the A-OCR WG formed from community consensus to begin its role in this endeavor, defining reachable goals including setting up a hackathon concurrent with iConference 2013. This paper reports on the definition of some key problems identified by the A-OCR WG since these science problems will drive research and cyberinfrastructure development.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Exploration, Science, and Society in Venezuela's Cave Landscape.

Geographic knowledge has played a key role in the formation of empires and nations. As maps and monuments, it has helped define imperial and national identities and territories. In the case of the Venezuelan cave landscape, however, it is not the state that performs its exploration or manages its knowledge, but a group of civilians—mostly friends among them, many not even career scientists. For over 40 years, the members of the Sociedad Venezolana de Espeleología (Venezuelan Speleological Society), have practiced speleology, or cave science, as an amateur pursuit. This has involved exploring, mapping, and cataloguing caves all over the country into a national registry that the group publishes. Once mapped, caverns become spaces for and objects of science, whether in geology, biology, or archeology. Based on research carried out in 2007 and 2008, this dissertation examines the activities of the Venezuelan Speleological Society, from ethnographic and historical perspectives. By analyzing the relations between scientific practice, sociality, and landscape, I argue that the production of speleological knowledge must be considered in dialectic with the production of the Society itself. For most of its members, cave science primarily is about experience and relatedness: exploring and mapping caverns as a collective pursuit. It is in this context that the national speleological project is produced, gains meaning, and is maintained over time. This highlights the importance of collective experience and relatedness, along with norms and trust, in scientific practice. Moreover, by going beyond the field and laboratories, this project exposes a broader, more intimate, and also more dynamic geography of science. At the same time, understanding speleological practice begs appreciating caves’ intense symbolic and material qualities that come into being as humans traverse their passages. Representing caverns requires their exploration, since there is no technology that can accurately map them from the surface. This grants an anachronistic second life to exploration often dismissed as a thing of the past. Finally, in the case of Venezuela, speleological practice points to unexplored ways citizens may reconfigure and even challenge state-orchestrated relations between nature, nation, and their histories.Ph.D.AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91583/4/Perez_2012_Diss_UM_Vnzla_Caves_REV.pd

A study of Shakespeare criticism in the Jahrbuch 1865-1914

This thesis outlines the early history and aims of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft and surveys the different types of contributions found in volumes 1-50 of the Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. It also considers a few critical works outside the Jahrbuch. Purely academic scholarship is distinguished from general criticism and special attention is paid to particular aspects of this criticism. Political interpretations of the plays are related to the political situation and beliefs in Germany at that time, and a parallel is drawn between Elizabethan England and 'Bismarck' Germany. Similarly it is suggested that the somewhat Humanistic approach to Shakespeare's religious beliefs is influenced by German religious attitudes. The German preoccupation with psychological character studies is shown as sometimes going to unreal extremes, and as symptomatic of German Romanticism. The contracts drawn between England and Germany are also related to the political background of the times and to German ideas concerning the "Nordic culture", and the German concern with the moral and educations value of Shakespeare is examined. The current theories of literary criticism and scholarship are explained in their historical and philosophical context, and the significance is assessed of the German criticism of this period in the history of Shakespeare criticism in general

From the ground up: archaeology as colonial knowledge production in Upper Canada, 1830-1860

This thesis presents a study of archaeology as a form of colonial knowledge production employed in Simcoe County in the years between 1830 and 1860, set against the backdrop of the Native assimilation policies in Upper Canada. I argue that the identification of archaeological sites, their survey, documentation, excavation, and the collection of their contents shaped new epistemologies that contributed to the administration and governance of Aboriginal populations, their territories and the nation-building efforts of this period. I ask: Who took on the tasks of digging, mapping and collecting in Simcoe County? Why were Aboriginal remains and artifacts tom from their original contexts and reinserted as new forms of knowledge into European historical chronologies? What did settlers, colonial administrators and missionaries cum archaeologists know, and how did they know? To address these questions, I draw on the theoretical framework advocated by historical anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism. Cultural studies of colonialism have revealed how, in the nineteenth century, all across the globe, territory was conquered not only through physical force and economic expansion but also through the creation of facts that gave colonial agents and settlers power over indigenous societies, their natural resources and their culture. Colonial domination was enacted through the defining and classifying of space, the counting of populations, the codifying and representation of the past, and the insertion of this information into government reports and archives (Cohn 1996; Dirks 1992). While historical anthropologists have focused heavily on the textual documentation found within these archives, I also interrogate the material, archaeological archive to reveal the complex architecture of colonialism. Yet, as this thesis demonstrates, colonial knowledge production was not monolithic, nor was it without its uncertainties: what was observed and how it was recorded and made into governable knowledge was conditioned by particular socio-political circumstances (Stoler 2009; Thomas 1994). Through the four case studies that structure this thesis, I seek out the ways in which the project of colonial archaeology in Simcoe County was both contingent and often unsettled. In addition, I identify how the production of archaeological knowledge was not an isolated activity. Published reports and archaeological evidence from Simcoe County moved quickly across imperial space, influencing the formation of emerging racial typologies and categories of difference within the metropole that, as I conclude, reverberate in the present

Newsletter no. 30 for 1997

INHIGEO produces an annual publication that includes information on the commission's activities, national reports, book reviews, interviews and occasional historical articles.N

Anaphoric resolution of zero pronouns in Chinese in translation and reading comprehension

The primary aim of the thesis is to investigate some of the processes of reading Chinese text by means of comparing and analysing approximately 100 parallel translations of four texts from Chinese to English. The translations are answers to A Level examination questions. The focus of the investigation is interpretation of the zero pronoun, a common phenomenon in Chinese, which often requires explicitation when translated into English. The secondary aim is to show how translation gives evidence of comprehension, as shown by the variation in interpretation of zero pronouns. The thesis reviews relevant psycholinguistic research into reading, particularly reading of Chinese text. This is followed by reviews of relevant research into translation as a reading activity, and a discussion of its role in language teaching and testing.The core of the thesis is the discussion of the zero pronoun in Chinese, including discussion of anaphoric choice - the writer's decision on when to use zero in preference to an explicit anaphoric form - and of anaphoric resolution - how a reader decides what a zero pronoun refers to. Anaphoric resolution may be problematic for less experienced readers of Chinese owing to its lack of rich morphological inflection which, in other languages, provides the reader with information. Some of the key ideas on anaphoric choice and resolution are then applied to the analysis of the data in the parallel translations. It would appear that factors in Chinese texts which have an effect on comprehending zero pronouns are antecedent distance, topic persistence, abstraction, multiplicity of arguments and the meaning of the verb. Characteristics of the reader which may affect comprehension of the zero pronoun include personal schemata which may lead to elaborative inferences. On the basis of the data I suggest that mark schemes could be devised on a scalar system encompassing optimal solution, proximal solution and nonsolution, which might help to solve the problem of variability in marking translation.A by-product of the thesis, and an avenue for further research, is the apparent close relationship between idea units, clause length, punctuation breaks and antecedent distance in Chinese texts and saccade length and working memory capacity in the reader of Chinese

The Gamut: A Journal of Ideas and Information, No. 02, Winter 1981

CONTENTS OF ISSUE NO.2, WINTER, 1981 Stuart M. Klein: The Business of City Management, 3 Anthony Addison: The Un-Person Without Whom Opera Would Not Exist, 13 Walter T. Olson: Visiting the Planets, 22 Cyril A. Dostal: Two Poems, 36 Mother and the White Slavers Starting the Model T Patrick de Winter: Art, Devotion and Satire -the Book of Hours of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre, 42 Helen A. Weinberg: The Novel in America Today, 60 Abe Frajndlich: Homage to Yukio Mishima -A Portfolio of Photographs, 67 Grace Butcher: Remembering Stella Walsh, 76 Earl R. Anderson: Athletic Mysticism in the Olympics, 83 W.B. Clapham, Jr.: Acid Rain and Ohio Coal, 93 Back Matter, 106https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Gamut: A Journal of Ideas and Information, No. 02, Winter 1981

CONTENTS OF ISSUE NO.2, WINTER, 1981 Stuart M. Klein: The Business of City Management, 3 Anthony Addison: The Un-Person Without Whom Opera Would Not Exist, 13 Walter T. Olson: Visiting the Planets, 22 Cyril A. Dostal: Two Poems, 36 Mother and the White Slavers Starting the Model T Patrick de Winter: Art, Devotion and Satire -the Book of Hours of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre, 42 Helen A. Weinberg: The Novel in America Today, 60 Abe Frajndlich: Homage to Yukio Mishima -A Portfolio of Photographs, 67 Grace Butcher: Remembering Stella Walsh, 76 Earl R. Anderson: Athletic Mysticism in the Olympics, 83 W.B. Clapham, Jr.: Acid Rain and Ohio Coal, 93 Back Matter, 106https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives/1001/thumbnail.jp