New Tools for the Humanities: Visualizing Complex Spatial Data

This proposal, New Tools for the Humanities: Visualizing Complex Spatial Data, requests funding to develop new approaches and new tools to enhance the use of spatial data in the humanities. It uses web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology in an existing product, the North American Religion Atlas, but seeks to make it both easier to use and much more powerful as a research tool through new types of visualizations already developed and tested in prototype by the project collaborators

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Great American Outlaw: A Legacy of Fact and Fiction\u3c/i\u3e by Frank Richard Prassel

Outlaws are mythic figures in American culture. They appear in many guises: gunman, desperado, rebel, fugitive, gangster, moll, highwayman, pirate, bandit, bugheway. As metaphor, they represent loss of innocence, resistance to oppressive authority and injustice, fearlessness, independence. In fact they are far less sympathetic characters. Outlaws are classic narcissists who have laid waste and ruined lives in pursuit of no higher goal than self-benefit. Even so, they remain romantic actors in our collective imagination. Instead of bank robbers and murderers, Bonnie and Clyde become Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, beautiful people whom ill fate has placed beyond the law. Frank Richard Prassel, whose earlier work, The Western Peace Officer (1972), helped to demythologize the outlaw\u27s chief adversary, takes a similar tack in this book. He traces the concept of outlawry to pre-Norman England through the highwaymen and pirates of early Modern Europe to the legendary lawbreakers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. It is a selective but carefully mapped tour, with separate chapters detailing an outlaw typology that incorporates change over time. For example, Prassel first discusses the bandit, which he sees as the earliest form of outlaw, before moving to the pirate, the dominant characterization of outlaws during the age of discovery. Some scholars will find the typology too simplistic and the chronological divisions too neat, yet they help frame Prassel\u27s argument that the concept of outlawry varies in relation to shifting social and cultural norms

Reliability and usability of ChatGPT for library metadata

At the end of November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, and it quickly became a world-wide phenomenon. Instantly, it became a subject of controversy and concern as well as praise. Schoolteachers and professors grew worried as ChatGPT was used to create content for everything from high school assignments to scholarly works. Lazy writers aside, ChatGPT’s output has often proved to be inaccurate to the point of complete fabrication. ChatGPT has also regularly misattributed the sources of its information, even giving the wrong author for large blocks of text.With all ChatGPT’s weaknesses, does ChatGPT have any beneficial uses for catalogers and metadata professionals? As a field, information professions are regularly challenged to do more work, more accurately, in less time. Does ChatGPT offer any reliable, accurate services at this time to assist these professionals in completing their tasks?This study seeks to evaluate the weaknesses and strengths of ChatGPT as it tries to perform three common cataloging/metadata tasks: 1) assigning classification numbers, 2) choosing Library of Congress subjects headings, and 3) harvesting keywords. Over the course of four months, it will ask ChatGPT a standardized list of questions on these topics. Then it will collate and evaluate ChatGPT’s performance. In the end, this study will offer its findings as well as best practices for using ChatGPT in cataloging and metadata tasks.Librar

Outlaw Operators: Prevention Failures and the Resurgence of Black Lung in Central Appalachia

In this brief, author Aysha Bodenhamer describes how prevention failures in the coal mining industry have resulted in the resurgence of black lung disease. Caused by the chronic inhalation of coal and silica dust, black lung is progressive, incurable, life-altering, and fatal. Despite it being a preventable disease, black lung is resurgent among coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Fieldwork including in-depth interviews with miners, clinic workers, black lung attorneys, government employees, and lay advocates, and a case-study analysis of two black lung clinics in southwest Virginia inform this analysis. These data reveal that coal operators routinely evade dust regulations. Once miners are diagnosed with black lung, coal companies have made obtaining black lung compensation difficult for miners and fight the tax that supports the Black Lung Benefits Trust Fund. Miners are not well informed of the dangers of coal dust and black lung prevention. In fact, many miners avoid black lung testing because of fear for their jobs. Bodenhamer identifies policy and practice opportunities to ensure that safe work environments are provided for all mine workers

Making Waves: How Mandated Arbitration Could Better Address Cultural Heritage and Bring Treasure Salvage Law into the Twenty-First Century

This Note argues that American treasure salvage law should implement the modern legal techniques of Alternative Dispute Resolution—specifically arbitration—to address the modern problems surrounding treasure salvage law. Part I of this Note provides an overview of the law governing treasure salvage law. This includes common law principles called the law of finds and the law of salvage as well as the governing United States law and international treaties. Part II will outline the problems with the current standing of treasure salvage law, particularly how it fails to address modern cultural heritage considerations such as scientific advancement and the proliferation of commercial salvors. Part III outlines a proposal suggesting that the United States adopt a policy of mandatory prelitigation arbitration among all interested parties for each salvaged shipwreck. This Note argues that mandated arbitration will resolve issues with cultural heritage, commercial salvage, and the rights of all key stakeholders in a more efficient manner than litigation. This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction

Rights in the Balance: Free Press, Fair Trial, and Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart

Review of: Rights in the Balance: Free Press, Fair Trial, and Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, by Mark R. Scherer

Checklist for Planning a Successful Meeting (1993)

"Reviewed October 1993."Much time, energy and other resources go into planning and holding meetings. The purpose of a meeting should be to bring about desired change in a specific group of people or target audience. This change could be in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes or aspirations. A meeting can be judged successful to the extent planned objectives are reached. Success is viewed from both the standpoint of those planning the meeting and the target audience

NSDI Cooperative Agreements Program, Category 7: Geospatial Platform Cloud Service Test Bed

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the technical issues, opportunities, and costs associated with deployment and geoprocessing of IndianaMap Cadastral data in Amazon Cloud Platforms

Beyond GIS: The Promise of Spatial Humanities

Geospatial technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have facilitated the (re)discovery of space for humanists. Yet until recently GIS has had only limited ability to move us beyond a map of geographical space into a richer, more evocative concepts of place based on history and memory. Over the past few years, GIScientists have made advances in spatial multi-media, in GIS-enabled web services, geo-visualization, cyber geography, and virtual reality that provide capabilities far exceeding the abilities of GIS on its own. This presentation will explore how the convergence of technologies, including but not limited to GIS, has led to the development of a new multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary approach known as spatial humanities. This convergence of technologies promises to revolutionize the role of place in the digital humanities by allowing us to move far beyond the static map to deep maps with multidimensional representations that allow us to explore space and place dynamically

Criminal sentencing in Antebellum America: a North-South comparison

Historiker sehen in der Regel einen sehr engen Zusammenhang zwischen einer effizienten und voraussagbaren Justiz und der Entwicklung des Industriestaats, insbesondere der Verstädterung. Der vorliegende Beitrag vergleicht die Rechtsprechung von Indiana (ein industrialisierter und verstädteter Nordstaat) mit Georgia (ein agrikultureller Südstaat) in der Zeit von 1830 bis 1860 (Antebellum), um den behaupteten Zusammenhang näher zu prüfen. In der Rechtsprechung zeigen sich erhebliche Unterschiede; in beiden Staaten entwickelt sich jedoch das 'plea bargaining' in vergleichbarer Form. Die Ausführungen zeigen insgesamt, daß der anfänglich behauptete Zusammenhang in dieser Form nicht aufrechtzuerhalten ist. (pmb)'Scholars often view the 19th-century emphasis on efficient and predictable justice as synonymous with the rise of the commercial-industrial state, and especially with urbanizing areas. An examination of the sentences assigned to white defendants convicted of crimes in two states of the antebellum United States casts doubt on this interpretation. Indiana was a northern, urbanizing, commercial-industrial state; Georgia was southern, rural, and agricultural. Both states operated with similar legal systems and criminal codes, although Georgia assigned sentencing authority to the judge and Indiana to the jury. A comparative analysis of sentences in the two states reveals: (1) Georgia sentences fell into a more narrow and predictable (hence 'bureaucratic') range than did Indiana sentences; (2) Indiana juries displayed no predictability in sentencing; and (3) both states developed 'plea bargaining', despite the wide discrepancy in sentencing patterns. This latter finding contradicts the traditional view that plea bargains were a late-19th century innovation.' (author's abstract