Gandhi’s Many Influences and Collaborators

In Gandhi's Printing Press, Isabel Hofmeyr introduces readers to the nuances of the newspaper in a far-flung colony in the age when mail and news traveled by ship and when readers were encouraged by Gandhi to read slowly and deeply. This article explores the ways in which Thoreau's concept of slow reading influenced Gandhi and Hofmeyr herself. She discusses the community that surrounded Gandhi and the role it played in supporting the newspaper. Yet, I argue, the role of women of all races as well as Coloured and black South African men in leading, modeling, and shaping the movement of resistance to pass laws and other racist legislation might have been integrated more into the main narrative. Gandhi's newspaper, Indian Opinion, reported on the pass law protests of the African women of Bloemfontein, and Abdurahman's APO newspaper (popular in the Coloured community) reported on Gandhi's protests. Indian Opinion included speeches given by John Dube, and it often praised Dube and the work at Ohlange and reprinted stories from the black press. I offer these remarks to supplement Hofmeyr's fascinating account by providing additional information in portraying the newspaper in its historical and social context

An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Pandemic seeks to harness the power of data mining techniques with the interpretive analytics of the humanities and social sciences to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion and represented authoritative knowledge during this deadly pandemic. This project makes use of the more than 100 newspaper titles for 1918 available from Chronicling America at the United States Library of Congress and the Peel’s Prairie Provinces collection at the University of Alberta Library. The application of algorithmic techniques enables the domain expert to systematically explore a broad repository of data and identify qualitative features of the pandemic in the small scale as well as the genealogy of information flow in the large scale. This research can provide methods for understanding the spread of information and the flow of disease in other societies facing the threat of pandemics

The Resonance and Residue of the First African American Newspaper: How Freedom\u27s Journal Created Space in the Early 19th Century

The first African American newspaper, Freedom\u27s Journal, has a historical, rhetorical, and spatial purpose. It not only showed the impact made by African Americans in the fight for their civil rights in the early 19th century, but as an artifact it illustrated and preserved that history allowing it to be studied centuries after the newspaper ceased printing. The purpose of The Resonance and Residue of the First African American Newspaper: How Freedom\u27s Journal Created Space in the Early 19th Century is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to historical newspapers that illustrates an alternative history in this country — a history of and by African Americans. By combining both print and digital research methods, new historical, rhetorical, and spatial information can be discovered that illustrates how the first African American newspaper fought against the influences of white society in the early 19th century and created a space for the black community that became meaningful enough to transform America into a place in which African Americans identified as Americans. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to combine traditional research and close reading with digital analysis (machine reading) by using different digital tools to illustrate how Freedom\u27s Journal used text to combat the influences/powers that were shaping the early 19th century, and create a new and different type of historical narrative about how one oppressed community was successfully able to fight another dominant community through the use of text

Philanthropy in the News

Over the last two decades, the quantity of news coverage of foundations has gradually risen, but its quality remains highly superficial, according to this report by Philanthropy Awareness Initiative and University of Minnesota professor David Fan. In fact, nearly 99% of more than 40,000 stories since 1990 have been transactional in their content -- focused on grants made and dollars out the door, not on benefits achieved

From media crossing to media mining

This paper reviews how the concept of Media Crossing has contributed to the advancement of the application domain of information access and explores directions for a future research agenda. These will include themes that could help to broaden the scope and to incorporate the concept of medium-crossing in a more general approach that not only uses combinations of medium-specific processing, but that also exploits more abstract medium-independent representations, partly based on the foundational work on statistical language models for information retrieval. Three examples of successful applications of media crossing will be presented, with a focus on the aspects that could be considered a first step towards a generalized form of media mining