391,594 research outputs found
Capitalizing on Information Organization and Information Visualization for a New-Generation Catalogue
Subject searching is difficult with traditional text-based online public
access library catalogues (OPACs), and the next-generation discovery
layers are keyword searching and result filtering tools that offer little
support for subject browsing. Next-generation OPACs ignore the rich
network of relations offered by controlled subject vocabulary, which
can facilitate subject browsing. A new generation of OPACs could
leverage existing information-organization investments and offer
online searchers a novel browsing and searching environment. This is
a case study of the design and development of a virtual reality subject
browsing and information retrieval tool. The functional prototype
shows that the Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) can
be shaped into a useful and usable tree structure serving as a visual
metaphor that contains a real world collection from the domain of
science and engineering. Formative tests show that users can effectively
browse the LCSH tree and carve it up based on their keyword
search queries. This study uses a complex information-organization
structure as a defining characteristic of an OPAC that goes beyond
the standard keyword search model, toward the cutting edge of online
search tools.published or submitted for publicatio
Kittens in the Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, and the Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s \u3cem\u3eHow the GarcĂa Girls Lost Their Accents\u3c/em\u3e
The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic during this era is still heartbreakingly apparent, and perhaps nowhere is that trauma more thoroughly illustrated than in the literature of Julia Alvarez. Alvarez is a prime example of an author who utilizes narrative in a clear attempt to come to grips with lingering traumatic memories. After her father’s role in an attempt to overthrow the dictator is revealed, Alvarez’s family is forced to flee the Dominican Republic as political exiles, and a sense of displacement has haunted her since. Because both the Dominican Republic and the United States are extraordinary racially charged, concepts of home and identity are inextricably bound to race relations in much of Alvarez’s art. Using theoretical concepts drawn from the fields of trauma studies and Black cultural studies, this essay examines Alvarez’s debut novel in order to illustrate the myriad ways in which culture, politics, and race converge and speak through each other, largely in the form of traumas that can irreparably alter one’s sense of home, voice, and identity
A Benchmark for Image Retrieval using Distributed Systems over the Internet: BIRDS-I
The performance of CBIR algorithms is usually measured on an isolated
workstation. In a real-world environment the algorithms would only constitute a
minor component among the many interacting components. The Internet
dramati-cally changes many of the usual assumptions about measuring CBIR
performance. Any CBIR benchmark should be designed from a networked systems
standpoint. These benchmarks typically introduce communication overhead because
the real systems they model are distributed applications. We present our
implementation of a client/server benchmark called BIRDS-I to measure image
retrieval performance over the Internet. It has been designed with the trend
toward the use of small personalized wireless systems in mind. Web-based CBIR
implies the use of heteroge-neous image sets, imposing certain constraints on
how the images are organized and the type of performance metrics applicable.
BIRDS-I only requires controlled human intervention for the compilation of the
image collection and none for the generation of ground truth in the measurement
of retrieval accuracy. Benchmark image collections need to be evolved
incrementally toward the storage of millions of images and that scaleup can
only be achieved through the use of computer-aided compilation. Finally, our
scoring metric introduces a tightly optimized image-ranking window.Comment: 24 pages, To appear in the Proc. SPIE Internet Imaging Conference
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