Against the Stream, How Karl Barth Reframed Church-State Relations (Chapter 3 of Keine Gewalt! No Violence!)

Excerpt: Defenders of the Barmen Declaration\u27s apolitical tone remind us that it was never intended to establish a program of political protest, that Karl Barth and the others were pastors not politicians; that the goal was to reassert the integrity of the gospel in the face of the attempted subversion by the German Christians. On the one hand, the soundness of this interpretation is self-evident. And yet it should surprise no one that an apolitical strategy would have little political impact on the German state. It is also true that Barth\u27s views on church and state relations changed after Barmen; that afterward he expressed remorse over his own sins of omission. If we explore Barth\u27s writings over a twenty-year period, the change will become evident and so also his impact on the emerging political theology in Eastern Europe. The next two chapters will chronicle this development

Aprendizado de máquina aplicado para melhorar a acessibilidade de documentos PDF para usuários com deficiência visual

Orientador: Luiz Cesar MartiniDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Os documentos digitais são acessados por pessoas com deficiência visual (VIP) por meio de leitores de tela. Tradicionalmente, os documentos digitais eram traduzidos para texto em braille, mas os leitores de tela provaram ser eficientes para a aquisição de conhecimento para as VIP. No entanto, os leitores de tela e outras tecnologias assistivas têm limitações significativas quando existem tabelas em documentos digitais como os documentos PDF (Portable Document Format). Por exemplo, os leitores de tela não podem seguir a sequência de leitura correta da tabela com base em sua estrutura visual causando que esse conteúdo seja inacessível aos VIP. Para lidar com esse problema, neste trabalho, desenvolvemos um sistema para a recuperação de informações de tabela de documentos PDF para uso em leitores de tela usados por pessoas com deficiência visual. A metodologia proposta aproveita as técnicas de visão computacional com uma abordagem de aprendizado profundo para tornar os documentos acessíveis em vez da abordagem clássica de programação baseada em regras. Explicamos em detalhe a metodologia que usamos e como avaliar objetivamente a abordagem por meio de métricas de entropia, ganho de informação e pureza. Os resultados mostram que nossa metodologia proposta pode ser usada para reduzir a incerteza experimentada por pessoas com deficiência visual ao ouvir o conteúdo das tabelas em documentos digitais através de leitores de tela. Nosso sistema de recuperação de informações de tabela apresenta duas melhorias em comparação com as abordagens tradicionais de marcação de arquivos PDF. Primeiro, nossa abordagem não requer supervisão de pessoas com visão. Segundo, nosso sistema é capaz de trabalhar com PDFs baseados em imagem e em textoAbstract: Digital documents are accessed by visually impaired people (VIP) through screen readers. Traditionally, digital documents were translated to braille text, but screen readers have proved to be efficient for the acquisition of digital document knowledge by VIP. However, screen readers and other assistive technologies have significant limitations when there exist tables in digital documents such as portable document format (PDF). For instance, screen readers can not follow the correct reading sequence of the table based on its visual structure causing this content is inaccessible for VIP. In order to deal with this problem, in this work, we developed a system for the retrieval of table information from PDF documents for use in screen readers used by visually impaired people. The proposed methodology takes advantage of computer vision techniques with a deep learning approach to make documents accessible instead of the classical rule-based programming approach. We explained in detail the methodology that we used and how to objectively evaluate the approach through entropy, information gain, and purity metrics. The results show that our proposed methodology can be used to reduce the uncertainty experienced by visually impaired people when listening to the contents of tables in digital documents through screen readers. Our table information retrieval system presents two improvements compared with traditional approaches of tagging text-based PDF files. First, our approach does not require supervision by sighted people. Second, our system is capable of working with image-based as well as text-based PDFsMestradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Text representation using canonical data model

Developing digital technology and the World Wide Web has led to the increase of digital documents that are used for various purposes such as publishing, in turn, appears to be connected to raise the awareness for the requirement of effective techniques that can help during the search and retrieval of text. Text representation plays a crucial role in representing text in a meaningful way. The clarity of representation depends tightly on the selection of the text representation methods. Traditional methods of text representation model documents such as term-frequency invers document frequency (TF-IDF) ignores the relationship and meanings of words in documents. As a result the sparsity and semantic problem that is predominant in textual document are not resolved. In this research, the problem of sparsity and semantic is reduced by proposing Canonical Data Model (CDM) for text representation. CDM is constructed through an accumulation of syntactic and semantic analysis. A number of 20 news group dataset were used in this research to test CDM validity for text representation. The text documents goes through a number of pre-processing process and syntactic parsing in order to identify the sentence structure. Text documents goes through a number of preprocessing steps and syntactic parsing in order to identify the sentence structure and then TF-IDF method is used to represent the text through CDM. The findings proved that CDM was efficient to represent text, based on the model validation through language experts‟ review and the percentage of the similarity measurement methods

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

Preservation of Word-Processing Documents

Word processing documents are a major problem for digital repositories. As I will explain below, they are not suitable for long-term storage, so they need to be converted into an archival format for preservation. In this report I will address the following questions: • What file formats are suitable for long-term storage of word processed text documents?; and • How can we convert documents into a suitable archival format? I also address the related non-technical question: • How can we get authors to convert and deposit their work? While the vast majority of material generated by universities is text, most research on digital preservation concentrates on images, sound recordings, video and multimedia. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is because text is simple, but unfortunately that’s not so. Even relatively short text documents (like this one) have complex structure consisting of sections (parts, chapters, subsections etc) and also of indented structures like lists and blockquotes. A significant part of the meaning is lost if that structure is ignored (for example by saving as plain text)

Preservation of word processing documents

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositorie