Posted: The Campaign Sign Landscape, Race, and Political Participation in Mississippi

Cultural landscapes offer potential insights into cultural processes. As a cultural/political landscape element, the domestic campaign sign is linked to a variety of socio-cultural and political processes. Examination of the geographical distribution of 2004 presidential election campaign signs posted throughout the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, illustrates that race is a factor in understanding who chooses to post signs. Historically, limitations on political participation in the South would have included use of landscape for communication, imposing a sort of metacommunicative landscape hegemony. Further, patterns of sign postings and voter turnout indicate that both activities are forms of political participation that are embraced differently by different social groups

Standardising the elimination of unnecessary data from interview transcripts for the purposes of knowledge-based systems - A case study

Although knowledge elicitation, the process of extracting knowledge from human experts to be incorporated into a knowledge-based system, has been the subject of some notable studies, less attention has been paid to the methods of analysing the raw data once it has been extracted from the expert. When knowledge elicitation sessions are interview-based, the resultant form of raw data is usually a transcript of the interviewee's utterances. This paper describes an investigation into the preliminary stage of analysing such transcripts. It outlines the development of an approach to eliminate unnecessary detail from interview transcripts, thus enabling attention to be focused upon the remaining, more relevant data via a simple technique based upon cheap and readily available technology. The paper then outlines a rapid-prototyping approach for evaluating this method, the results of which were felt to be very encouraging