Mis-taken identities: The Photographic Conceptualization of Identity in Nikki S. Lee’s Projects (1997-2001)

This thesis examines artist Nikki S. Lee’s Projects photographs taken from 1997 to 2001 and their entanglement with discourses of culture and identity. In this series, a collection of snapshots captures Lee in different guises as she engages with members of several cultural communities after whom she models her appearance. Through her peculiar use of the snapshot vernacular, Lee challenges subject-object binaries fixed to the glossy surface of the photograph, thus making questionable the verity of the Projects photographs. Projects urges the viewer to reconstruct narratives to reconcile the indeterminate relationships between Lee and her hosts and more significantly between the viewer and members of each depicted culture. These ambiguities elicit and address questions about the complex and often problematic visual expressions of identity and the subtle ways that such representations both promote and challenge dominant visual paradigms of society

Tracking Institutional Data Assets Using OAI-PMH

This master's paper explores the impetus for data stewardship policies and guidelines and describes an empirical study conducted to assess the feasibility of employing OAI-PMH as a tool to enable institutions to track data stewardship activities. Quantitative analyses of Dublin Core metadata harvested from twelve data-specific repositories were used to make conclusions about the current state of OAI-PMH implementation, to consider ways in which the unique properties of scholarly domains and their data might be reflected in metadata values, and to suggest steps repositories can take to enable the development and implementation of a federated index of distributed data records as a tool to support the sustainability of the research enterprise

Operationalizing the Replication Standard

In response to widespread concerns about the integrity of research published in scholarly journals, several initiatives have emerged that are promoting research transparency through access to data underlying published scientific findings. Journal editors, in particular, have made a commitment to research transparency by issuing data policies that require authors to submit their data, code, and documentation to data repositories to allow for public access to the data. In the case of the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) Data Replication Policy, the data also must undergo an independent verification process in which materials are reviewed for quality as a condition of final manuscript publication and acceptance. Aware of the specialized expertise of the data archives, AJPS called upon the Odum Institute Data Archive to provide a data review service that performs data curation and verification of replication datasets. This article presents a case study of the collaboration between AJPS and the Odum Institute Data Archive to develop a workflow that bridges manuscript publication and data review processes. The case study describes the challenges and the successes of the workflow integration, and offers lessons learned that may be applied by other data archives that are considering expanding their services to include data curation and verification services to support reproducible research

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead