An integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

[Abstract]: This paper describes progress on a project funded by the Australian government to create Free software; the Integrated Content Environment for research and scholarship (ICE-RS). ICE-RS is a multi-faceted project which will add value to finished theses by making them available in both HTML and PDF, as well as providing a mechanism for packaging multimedia theses. The project will also concentrate on providing services for thesis production, with version control, automated backup and collaboration services. The paper begins with the established content management system that is the basis for the project, ICE-RS , originally developed to create courseware packages. ICE includes distributed, version controlled collaboration, using word processing software and works on multiple platforms, with standard document formats. We survey other approaches to content authoring and publishing for ETDs. We showcase exploratory work on integration of the thesis writing process with Institutional Repository software including publishing theses in both PDF and HTML with preservation and descriptive metadata. The presentation will include demonstrations of thesis production at all stages of development from proposal to completion. In a more speculative vein, we will discuss opportunities for institutions to provide new levels of support for candidates via automated thesis “dashboard” progress reports, supervisor and examiner annotation and comment and support for copyright considerations as early as possible in the process

Assessing a Scholarship Program for Underrepresented Students in Computer Science & Information Technology

There continue to be underrepresented student populations in undergraduate computer science and information technology programs in the United States and Pennsylvania. Despite some enrollment growth, female students in particular continue to be underrepresented. The authors are in the final year of managing a five-year, $614,375 program to support underrepresented student populations in our majors via scholarships and supporting activities, funded by the National Science Foundation. The program has been particularly successful in recruiting and retaining female students. We have discovered several patterns of behavior that provide early warnings for at-risk students. Lack of first-semester contribution to simple activities such as suggested blogging are about 93% accurate in predicting students who will not remain in the program due to lack of motivation and/or reliable work habits. Scholars leave the program because of low grade point averages, changes to non-STEM majors, or dropping out of college. Low incoming standardized exam scores also provide warnings. Detecting at-risk students early, and making continued scholarship support contingent on attendance at classes and tutoring sessions, are promising means for improving retention. Additional, more positive types of intervention are considered. Some of our findings may apply to our department’s overall undergraduate population

An Inquiry Into Friendship

This 2007 Senior Honor Thesis examines what friendship really is and what it means to our lives. It does so by examining friendship through the eyes of philosophers and scholars throughout many centuries. In addition, it also includes short stories written by the author to illustrate characteristics of different kinds of friendship

When WordHoard met Pliny: breaking down interaction silos between appliations

Compressed abstract from conference proceedings: One of the current issues within DH is the wish to break down “silos” between different applications, usually based on the observation that it is difficult to bring two separately developed applications together even on kinds of data that they might actually share. Scholarly notetaking has not been often been thought of as a kind of “anti-siloing” activity, however, it does juxtapose materials and ideas from a broad range of different sources. Normal web pages and digital applications work against the ability to juxtapose materials from different places, and making it difficult for a computer user to preserve those juxtapositions that are interesting. Base Pliny supports annotation for web pages, images and PDF documents, and places them in the larger Pliny context as objects in their own right, and can be extended to add support for annotation of media such as video or audio, while maintaining the integration between these media and the rest of the Pliny system. Thus, like the printed book, the Pliny screen becomes the nexus between the “display application” of the web or PDF page and the separate-but-linked “annotation/notetaking application”. Annotation in stable media is well understood. What happens if one moves to annotation for dynamic applications which are less like documents and more like tools. We chose to use the Mellon Foundation’s MATC 2008 award to Pliny as a way to explore this. With the cooperation of Martin Mueller and others at Northwestern University we have been exploring what their WordHoard tool would be like if it was presented in an intimately linkable environment where Pliny operates. At our poster session you will see the Wordhoard integration with Pliny and with other independently built tools that can interoperate there. What might this mean to a user? For the development community we hope to speak about the coding work that this represents and what lessons can be learned

The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination

オーストラリアにおける大学機関リポジトリの状況について

広島大学図書館ワークショップ「学術情報の新しいチャネル -海外機関リポジトリの動向をさぐる-」発表資料(2006.8.28

The Many Meanings of Wherefore in Legal History

This essay describes the strategies that sometimes allow me to make sense of the answers that people give to the question Why? when it comes up in scholarly accounts of legal outcomes from the past. The essay is constructive, not deconstructive; programmatic, not polemical. I mean to sketch and recommend a way of thinking about legal history that I call methodological self-consciousness. Methodological individualism would be both inaccurate and accurate as a label for the essay\u27s approach to questions of causality. The label is inaccurate, because it fails to express the heavy emphasis that I place on the dialectical relationship between individual legal actors and the social context in which they are embedded: People cause law, but law, in many interesting ways, also causes people. On the other hand, the label is accurate, because the methodology I advocate pays close attention to the ways in which an observer imagines that individual legal actors experienced the production of legal outcomes. As far as my wherefores are concerned, chipmunks, rocks, and sunbeams don\u27t make law: people do (although this does not mean that people aren\u27t constrained and shaped by the physical world they inhabit). By the same token, classes, ideologies, and institutions don\u27t sign decrees and judgments ordering people to pay money or go to jail: individual judges do (although this does not mean that a judge\u27s perceptions are not shaped-even determined-by his connections with one or more of these collectivities)