Supporting Research in Area Studies: a guide for academic libraries

The study of other countries or regions of the world often crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences. Supporting Research in Area Studies is a comprehensive guide for academic libraries supporting these communities of researchers. This book explores the specialist requirements of these researchers in information resources, resource discovery tools, and information skills, and the challenges of working with materials in multiple languages. It makes the case that by adapting their systems and procedures to meet these needs, academic libraries find themselves better placed to support their institution's�� international agenda more widely. The first four chapters cover the academic landscape and its history, area studies librarianship and acquisitions. Subsequent chapters discuss collections management, digital products, and the digital humanities, and their role in academic projects. The final chapter explores information skills and the various disciplinary skills that facilitate the needs of researchers during their careers

American Innovation: Preserving and Providing Access to 80 Years of Industrial Design History

From washing machines to computers, and sports cars to space capsules, America's infatuation with invention has fueled industrial design. Design history helps us understand American culture in a whole new way. By engaging an interdisciplinary team of diverse experts, Art Center College of Design proposes to advance historical knowledge of American culture through an archival preservation and access management pilot project. As the country's leading school of industrial design, Art Center archives include photos, films, and print material documenting American innovation over an 80-year period. New policies and procedures will be tested for digitization and public access, while immediately preserving assets at greatest risk for deterioration. The pilot project will build Art Center Archives' organizational capacity to ensure that the history of American innovation and imagination can be told for years to come

Geopolitics of Knowledge and Cultural Displacements

The Lyon’s Institut Franco-chinois: the politicization of memory The writing of history is always an intervention from and in the present. We publish this thematic issue in the context of a spectacular eruption of Lyon’s Institut Franco-chinois (中法大學 or Sino-French University) onto the public stage. Neglected over several decades after its official closure in 1946, the fecund and instructive history of the Institute re-surfaced, a decade ago, when the City of Lyon decided to valorize this und..

Extraction and Visualization of Toponyms in Diachronic Text Corpora

International audienceThis paper focuses on the extraction of German and Austrian place names in historical texts. Our text basis is Die Fackel (The Torch) published by Karl Kraus. The database we develop follows from a combination of approaches: gazetteers are curated in a supervised way to account for historical differences,and current geographical information is used as a fallback. Our maps highlight the linguistic and cultural ties of Kraus and his contemporaries, "Die Fackel" is (at least) a European phenomenon; Kraus' vision of Europe is more inclined towards cultural centers

Learning from Trump and Xi? Globalization and innovation as drivers of a new industrial policy. Bertelsmann GED Focus 2020

Technological innovations are essential drivers of longterm and sustainable growth. Accordingly, there currently is a debate in Germany and the EU as to whether a new, strategic industrial policy can be an answer to the complex dynamics of digitization. Products of this discussion are, for example, the Industrial Strategy 2030 published by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in November 2019 and the Franco-German Manifesto for a European Industrial Policy for the 21st Century. The focus here is on the question of how the EU and its member states can maintain their innovative and thus competitive ability in the face of diverse challenges. However, there is no standard recipe for building and expanding the innovative capacity of an economy. Different countries rely on different strategies that can be equally successful. An important distinguishing feature is the role of the state. A clear example of divergent innovation models are China and the USA. Although both countries have completely different approaches to an innovation-promoting industrial policy, both models are characterized by major technological successes. With an analysis of the Chinese and American innovation system, this study highlights the main features and success factors of both innovation models and discusses whether and to what extent these factors are transferable to the European and German case. Five fields of action for an innovation-promoting industrial policy in the EU and Germany emerge from this analysis • Implementation of a long-term innovation strategy • Expansion of venture capital • Expansion of cluster approaches at EU level • Thinking and strengthening of cybersecurity at EU level • Creation of uniform and fair conditions for competition In addition to these fields of action, which are relevant both for the EU and for individual member states, industrial policy measures in the following three areas could be useful for Germany. In particular: • Improvement of framework conditions for research and development • Gearing the education and research system more strongly towards entrepreneurship and innovation • State as a pioneer and trailblazer in new technologies In their implementation, however, strategic European and German industrial policies face a trade-off between the protection and promotion of legitimate self-interests on the one hand and the defense against economically damaging protectionism and ill-considered state interventionism on the other. The so-called “mission orientation” can make a significant contribution here: Accordingly, industrial policy should serve to address specific societal challenges (e. g. globalization, digitization, demographic change, climate change) and be coherently targeted towards these objectives. Furthermore, industrial policy is to be driven in parallel by different actors. Above all, it is a joint task of business and politics to enable a competitive business location where the state ensures good competition- promoting framework conditions and the private actors implement concrete actions

Current Trends of Computing in the Humanities in England

Computerizing the materials used by humanistic scholars requires sophisticated and innovative use of the latest of new technologies as these are areas which pose particularly complex problems of mixed media data handling. The popular view of humanists is that they are either non-technological or that their needs are extremely simple, far simpler than those of scientists; perhaps limited to the use of word-processors and a little e-mail. This is far from being the truth: the key limiting factor on the use of computers in the humanities in the past has been the inability of the technology to handle many of the highly technical and abstruse problems of data handing which are dealt with daily in humanities scholarship. Now, however, the technology is rapidly catching up with the disciplines in its ability to handle the varieties of media: text, images, graphics, sound, and video. Computers are now used by humanists around the world for many different applications in a large number of subject areas, for quantitative analysis of those topics which are amenable to numerical study, such as the analysis of datasets for historians, for the study of paintings and artefacts by art historians and archaeologists, for the sophisticated study of textuality by literary critics and textual editors, for the study of the moving image by film theorists, and many, many more. The topics which I should like to consider in this paper are: electronic publishing and the changes which are being wrought in the publishing industry; the uses of networks; image digitization; hypermedia and multimedia; and finally the uses of computers in humanities teaching. In particular, I will be looking at the current state of these in Britain

The Image Bank: Reflections on an Incomplete Archive

This thesis examines the development of a digital archive for The Image Bank at GSU as a process of excavation and reconstruction. It defines the digital archive as a medium for the institutionalization of knowledge, its reproduction, and preservation. In addition, this thesis examines the digital archive as it operates on a continuum of materiality and immateriality, encompassing fractured distinctions between its possibilities and impossibilities in an increasingly dematerialized digitized landscape

Digitally-Mediated Practices of Geospatial Archaeological Data: Transformation, Integration, & Interpretation

Digitally-mediated practices of archaeological data require reflexive thinking about where archaeology stands as a discipline in regard to the ‘digital,’ and where we want to go. To move toward this goal, we advocate a historical approach that emphasizes contextual source-side criticism and data intimacy—scrutinizing maps and 3D data as we do artifacts by analyzing position, form, material and context of analog and digital sources. Applying this approach, we reflect on what we have learned from processes of digitally-mediated data. We ask: What can we learn as we convert analog data to digital data? And, how does digital data transformation impact the chain of archaeological practice? Primary, or raw data, are produced using various technologies ranging from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Global Positioning System (GPS), LiDAR, digital photography, and ground penetrating radar, to digitization, typically using a flat-bed scanner to transform analog data such as old field notes, photographs, or drawings into digital data. However, archaeologists not only collect primary data, we also make substantial time investments to create derived data such as maps, 3D models, or statistics via post-processing and analysis. While analog data is typically static, digital data is more dynamic, creating fundamental differences in digitally-mediated archaeological practice. To address some issues embedded in this process, we describe the lessons we have learned from translating analog to digital geospatial data—discussing what is lost and what is gained in translation, and then applying what we have learned to provide concrete insights to archaeological practice