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

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

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

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

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

Regionalism and American Legal History: The Southern Experience

Commentators surprisingly have failed to focus on the influence of regionalism in the development of American law. To be sure, numerous books and articles examine state law and its local application or explore the treatment by several states of a particular legal concept or category of laws. But attempts to define regional attitudes toward law or to analyze regional differences in legal practice are almost nonexistent. So foreign has the topic of regionalism been to scholarship in American legal history that Lawrence Friedman\u27s acclaimed synthesis, A History of American Law,\u27 contains no discussion of regionalism or its close relative,sectionalism. Even now, no comprehensive study treats the law of any region in the country, including the South, despite countless regional studies by scholars from many disciplines. This omission has not gone without notice. As early as 1950 James Willard Hurst called for greater attention to regional and state legal history. In 1982 Hurst declared that it is only within recent years that students of legal history have begun to explore ways in which legal doctrine and uses of law may have shaped or responded to sectional experiences and patterns different from or in tension with interests taking place on a national scale.\u27 Still,many topics remain unexplored, and historians have not developed any central themes to guide a regional approach to legal history.The purpose of this Article is to make a modest beginning in this direction

IUPUI Center for Health Geographics

poster abstractThe IUPUI Center for Health Geographics develops and supports research innovation through integration of geographic information science, medical informatics, community informatics, and public health. Our areas of research emphasis include geospatial technologies and standards for health surveillance, spatial and temporal contexts of health behaviors and health outcomes, and space-time models for investigating disease and mortality trends. Our poster highlights our collaborations, which include interdisciplinary partnerships with investigators in the fields of geographic information science, social science, clinical epidemiology, medical informatics, and health services research

SAVI Public Health Needs Assessment: Final Report and Recommendations

This report summaries the 2007 assessment of current and projected health sector uses of the SAVI Community Information System (SAVI) and recommends SAVI enhancements to meet the information needs of decision makers, practitioners, and researchers. Based on focus groups and key informant interviews, it was discovered that local decisionmakers and practitioners in Central Indiana currently used SAVI, or would like to use SAVI, to assess the relative spatial demand and supply of health and human services, select sites for new health and human service facilities, assess patient access to health and human service facilities, select locations for services and programs, and track characteristics of facility catchment areas. Health practitioners and public health professionals were interested in using geospatially-enabled indicators for more effective planning and interventions, including to track public health outcomes, understand the socio-economic and physical environment of individual patients and communities, locate target populations for existing and potential health programs and services, support grant applications, and inform the public about environmental risk factors and disease prevalence in their communities. Clinical translational and public health researchers are using, or would like to use, geospatially-enabled measures for the study of social and environmental determinants of health, health disparities, environmental exposure and health risk, predictors of health knowledge, ecological models of health behavior, health service access, quality, and cost, and efficacy of health interventions. Detailed recommendations are provided for both short- and long-term enhancements to SAVI based on the existing and potential SAVI users and uses identified via this study and toward assisting the local health sector improve health knowledge and ultimately the health and wellbeing of Central Indiana communities.United Way of Central Indian