Cooking up consumer anxieties about ‘provenance’ and ‘ethics. Why it sometimes matters where foods come from in domestic provisioning

Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes provenance meaningful and productive for consumers is missed. This paper draws upon qualitative and ethnographic data to explore why and how it sometimes matters where food comes from. What emerges is an expanded and problematized practical understanding of provenance, where concerns for the point of origin is generally inseparable from, and subsumed within, a broader range of ethical concerns about where food comes from

Learning from Jesus’ Wife: What Does Forgery Have to Do with the Digital Humanities?

McGrath’s chapter on the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife sets aside as settled the question of the papyrus’ authenticity, and explores instead what we can learn about the Digital Humanities and scholarly interaction in a digital era from the way the discussions and investigations of that work unfolded, and how issues that arose were handled. As news of purported new finds can spread around the globe instantaneously facilitated by current technology and social media, how can academics utilize similar technology to evaluate authenticity, but even more importantly, inform the broader public about the importance of provenance, and the need for skepticism towards finds that appear via the antiquities market

On the Limitations of Provenance for Queries With Difference

The annotation of the results of database transformations was shown to be very effective for various applications. Until recently, most works in this context focused on positive query languages. The provenance semirings is a particular approach that was proven effective for these languages, and it was shown that when propagating provenance with semirings, the expected equivalence axioms of the corresponding query languages are satisfied. There have been several attempts to extend the framework to account for relational algebra queries with difference. We show here that these suggestions fail to satisfy some expected equivalence axioms (that in particular hold for queries on "standard" set and bag databases). Interestingly, we show that this is not a pitfall of these particular attempts, but rather every such attempt is bound to fail in satisfying these axioms, for some semirings. Finally, we show particular semirings for which an extension for supporting difference is (im)possible.Comment: TAPP 201

Archival ethics: The truth of the matter

This essay explores the question of whether records professionals are as aware of the ethical dimensions of their work as they should be. It consider first the historical and professional context of archival ethics, then examines a recent case about business archives involving the author that suggests the need for renewed attention to professional ethics, and concludes with a discussion about how archivists might reconsider the ethical dimensions of their work

Mathematics, statistics and archaeometry: the past 50 years or so

This review of developments in the use of mathematics and statistics in archaeometry over the past 50 years is partial, personal and 'broad-brush'. The view is expressed that it is in the past 30 years or so that the major developments have taken place. The view is also expressed that, with the exception of methods for analysing radiocarbon dates and increased computational power, mathematical and statistical methods that are currently used, and found to be useful in widespread areas of application such as provenance studies, don't differ fundamentally from what was being done 30 years ago

Are Local Filters Blind to Provenance? Ant Seed Predation Suppresses Exotic Plants More than Natives

The question of whether species’ origins influence invasion outcomes has been a point of substantial debate in invasion ecology. Theoretically, colonization outcomes can be predicted based on how species’ traits interact with community filters, a process presumably blind to species’ origins. Yet, exotic plant introductions commonly result in monospecific plant densities not commonly seen in native assemblages, suggesting that exotic species may respond to community filters differently than natives. Here, we tested whether exotic and native species differed in their responses to a local community filter by examining how ant seed predation affected recruitment of eighteen native and exotic plant species in central Argentina. Ant seed predation proved to be an important local filter that strongly suppressed plant recruitment, but ants suppressed exotic recruitment far more than natives (89% of exotic species vs. 22% of natives). Seed size predicted ant impacts on recruitment independent of origins, with ant preference for smaller seeds resulting in smaller seeded plant species being heavily suppressed. The disproportionate effects of provenance arose because exotics had generally smaller seeds than natives. Exotics also exhibited greater emergence and earlier peak emergence than natives in the absence of ants. However, when ants had access to seeds, these potential advantages of exotics were negated due to the filtering bias against exotics. The differences in traits we observed between exotics and natives suggest that higher-order introduction filters or regional processes preselected for certain exotic traits that then interacted with the local seed predation filter. Our results suggest that the interactions between local filters and species traits can predict invasion outcomes, but understanding the role of provenance will require quantifying filtering processes at multiple hierarchical scales and evaluating interactions between filters.Fil: Pearson, Dean. University of Montana; Estados Unidos. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados UnidosFil: Icasatti, Nadia Soledad. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados Unidos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hierro, Jose Luis. Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa. Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa; ArgentinaFil: Bird, Benjamin B.. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados Unido

Signs of intelligence: William Herle's report of the Dutch situation, 1573

On the 11 June 1573 the agent William Herle sent his patron William Cecil, Lord Burghley a lengthy intelligence report of a ‘Discourse’ held with Prince William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands.∗ Running to fourteen folio manuscript pages, the Discourse records the substance of numerous conversations between Herle and Orange and details Orange’s efforts to persuade Queen Elizabeth to come to the aid of the Dutch against Spanish Habsburg imperial rule. The main thrust of the document exhorts Elizabeth to accept the sovereignty of the Low Countries in order to protect England’s naval interests and lead a league of protestant European rulers against Spain. This essay explores the circumstances surrounding the occasion of the Discourse and the context of the text within Herle’s larger corpus of correspondence. In the process, I will consider the methods by which the study of the material features of manuscripts can lead to a wider consideration of early modern political, secretarial and archival practices

Causality and the semantics of provenance

Provenance, or information about the sources, derivation, custody or history of data, has been studied recently in a number of contexts, including databases, scientific workflows and the Semantic Web. Many provenance mechanisms have been developed, motivated by informal notions such as influence, dependence, explanation and causality. However, there has been little study of whether these mechanisms formally satisfy appropriate policies or even how to formalize relevant motivating concepts such as causality. We contend that mathematical models of these concepts are needed to justify and compare provenance techniques. In this paper we review a theory of causality based on structural models that has been developed in artificial intelligence, and describe work in progress on a causal semantics for provenance graphs.Comment: Workshop submissio

Cryptographic Methods with a Pli Cachete: Towards the Computational Assurance of Integrity

Unreproducibility stemming from a loss of data integrity can be prevented with hash functions, secure sketches, and Benford's Law when combined with the historical practice of a Pli Cacheté where scientific discoveries were archived with a 3rd party to later prove the date of discovery. Including the distinct systems of preregistation and data provenance tracking becomes the starting point for the creation of a complete ontology of scientific documentation. The ultimate goals in such a system--ideally mandated--would rule out several forms of dishonesty, catch computational and database errors, catch honest mistakes, and allow for automated data audits of large collaborative open science projects

Requirements for Provenance on the Web

From where did this tweet originate? Was this quote from the New York Times modified? Daily, we rely on data from the Web but often it is difficult or impossible to determine where it came from or how it was produced. This lack of provenance is particularly evident when people and systems deal with Web information or with any environment where information comes from sources of varying quality. Provenance is not captured pervasively in information systems. There are major technical, social, and economic impediments that stand in the way of using provenance effectively. This paper synthesizes requirements for provenance on the Web for a number of dimensions focusing on three key aspects of provenance: the content of provenance, the management of provenance records, and the uses of provenance information. To illustrate these requirements, we use three synthesized scenarios that encompass provenance problems faced by Web users toda