Marketing a memory of the world: Magna Carta and the student as producer perspective

From Runnymede in 1215, to parliamentary struggles, across the seas to a fledgling America, then onwards in time to many parts of the globe where it encourages human rights and shapes legal systems, the Magna Carta has been enormously influential. As a consequence, the document has been placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, a process designed to preserve highly significant documentary archive collections. Of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta, one is owned by Lincoln Cathedral of the UK and is on display to the general visitor in Lincoln Castle. This case study provides a critical account of the marketing of this document, arguing that the experiential dimensions of the Magna Carta exhibition are poorly executed. Additionally, as presently constituted, it is postulated that the existing marketing strategy will fail to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta’s signing in 2015 and the planned national celebrations. Evidence for these claims have been drawn mainly from an inquiry led research project conducted by a group of undergraduate marketers and two tutors at Lincoln University, demonstrating the clear value of the “student as producer” approach to learning and research in marketing

An evolutionary algorithm with double-level archives for multiobjective optimization

Existing multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) tackle a multiobjective problem either as a whole or as several decomposed single-objective sub-problems. Though the problem decomposition approach generally converges faster through optimizing all the sub-problems simultaneously, there are two issues not fully addressed, i.e., distribution of solutions often depends on a priori problem decomposition, and the lack of population diversity among sub-problems. In this paper, a MOEA with double-level archives is developed. The algorithm takes advantages of both the multiobjective-problemlevel and the sub-problem-level approaches by introducing two types of archives, i.e., the global archive and the sub-archive. In each generation, self-reproduction with the global archive and cross-reproduction between the global archive and sub-archives both breed new individuals. The global archive and sub-archives communicate through cross-reproduction, and are updated using the reproduced individuals. Such a framework thus retains fast convergence, and at the same time handles solution distribution along Pareto front (PF) with scalability. To test the performance of the proposed algorithm, experiments are conducted on both the widely used benchmarks and a set of truly disconnected problems. The results verify that, compared with state-of-the-art MOEAs, the proposed algorithm offers competitive advantages in distance to the PF, solution coverage, and search speed

Searchable Sky Coverage of Astronomical Observations: Footprints and Exposures

Sky coverage is one of the most important pieces of information about astronomical observations. We discuss possible representations, and present algorithms to create and manipulate shapes consisting of generalized spherical polygons with arbitrary complexity and size on the celestial sphere. This shape specification integrates well with our Hierarchical Triangular Mesh indexing toolbox, whose performance and capabilities are enhanced by the advanced features presented here. Our portable implementation of the relevant spherical geometry routines comes with wrapper functions for database queries, which are currently being used within several scientific catalog archives including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Hubble Legacy Archive projects as well as the Footprint Service of the Virtual Observatory.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PAS

When images work faster than words: The integration of content-based image retrieval with the Northumbria Watermark Archive

Information on the manufacture, history, provenance, identification, care and conservation of paper-based artwork/objects is disparate and not always readily available. The Northumbria Watermark Archive will incorporate such material into a database, which will be made freely available on the Internet providing an invaluable resource for conservation, research and education. The efficiency of a database is highly dependant on its search mechanism. Text based mechanisms are frequently ineffective when a range of descriptive terminologies might be used i.e. when describing images or translating from foreign languages. In such cases a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system can be more effective. Watermarks provide paper with unique visual identification characteristics and have been used to provide a point of entry to the archive that is more efficient and effective than a text based search mechanism. The research carried out has the potential to be applied to any numerically large collection of images with distinctive features of colour, shape or texture i.e. coins, architectural features, picture frame profiles, hallmarks, Japanese artists stamps etc. Although the establishment of an electronic archive incorporating a CBIR system can undoubtedly improve access to large collections of images and related data, the development is rarely trouble free. This paper discusses some of the issues that must be considered i.e. collaboration between disciplines; project management; copying and digitising objects; content based image retrieval; the Northumbria Watermark Archive; the use of standardised terminology within a database as well as copyright issues

Aligning archive maps and extracting footprints for analysis of historic urban environments.

Archive cartography and archaeologist's sketches are invaluable resources when analysing a historic town or city. A virtual reconstruction of a city provides the user with the ability to navigate and explore an environment which no longer exists to obtain better insight into its design and purpose. However, the process of reconstructing the city from maps depicting features such as building footprints and roads can be labour intensive. In this paper we present techniques to aid in the semi-automatic extraction of building footprints from digital images of archive maps and sketches. Archive maps often exhibit problems in the form of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in scale which can lead to incorrect reconstructions. By aligning archive maps to accurate modern vector data one may reduce these problems. Furthermore, the efficiency of the footprint extraction methods may be improved by aligning either modern vector data or previously extracted footprints, since common elements can be identified between maps of differing time periods and only the difference between the two needs to be extracted. An evaluation of two alignment approaches is presented: using a linear affine transformation and a set of piecewise linear affine transformations

Finding What You Need, and Knowing What You Can Find: Digital Tools for Palaeographers in Musicology and Beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making fluid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed

Fast algorithm for detecting community structure in networks

It has been found that many networks display community structure -- groups of vertices within which connections are dense but between which they are sparser -- and highly sensitive computer algorithms have in recent years been developed for detecting such structure. These algorithms however are computationally demanding, which limits their application to small networks. Here we describe a new algorithm which gives excellent results when tested on both computer-generated and real-world networks and is much faster, typically thousands of times faster than previous algorithms. We give several example applications, including one to a collaboration network of more than 50000 physicists.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Stokes tomography of radio pulsar magnetospheres. I. Linear polarization

Polarimetric studies of pulsar radio emission traditionally concentrate on how the Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) varies with pulse longitude, with special emphasis on the position angle (PA) swing of the linearly polarized component. The interpretation of the PA swing in terms of the rotating vector model is limited by the assumption of an axisymmetric magnetic field and the degeneracy of the output with respect to the orientation and magnetic geometry of the pulsar; different combinations of the latter two properties can produce similar PA swings. This paper introduces Stokes phase portraits as a supplementary diagnostic tool with which the orientation and magnetic geometry can be inferred more accurately. The Stokes phase portraits feature unique patterns in the I-Q, I-U, and Q-U planes, whose shapes depend sensitively on the magnetic geometry, inclination angle, beam and polarization patterns, and emission altitude. We construct look-up tables of Stokes phase portraits and PA swings for pure and current-modified dipole fields, filled core and hollow cone beams, and two empirical linear polarization models, L/I = \cos \theta_0 and L/I = \sin \theta_0, where \theta_0 is the colatitude of the emission point. We compare our look-up tables to the measured phase portraits of 24 pulsars in the European Pulsar Network online database. We find evidence in 60% of the objects that the radio emission region may depart significantly from low altitudes, even when the PA swing is S-shaped and/or the pulse-width-period relation is well satisfied. On the other hand, the data are explained adequately if the emission altitude exceeds ~10% of the light cylinder radius. We conclude that Stokes phase portraits should be analysed concurrently with the PA swing and pulse profiles in future when interpreting radio pulsar polarization data.Comment: 60 pages, 58 figures, submitted to MNRAS, accepted 13 Oct 201