54 research outputs found

    TEI and Project Bamboo

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    Project Bamboo, a cyberinfrastructure initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, takes as its core mission the enhancement of arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services. Rather than developing new tools for curating or analyzing data, Project Bamboo aims to provide core infrastructure services including identity and access management, collection interoperability, and scholarly data management. The longer-term goal is for many organizations and projects to leverage those services so as to direct their own resources towards innovative tool or collection development. In addition, Bamboo seeks to model a paradigm for tool integration that focuses on tools as discrete services (such as a morphology annotation service and a geoparser service, instead of a web-based environment that does morphological annotation and geoparsing) that can be applied to texts, individually or in combination with other services, to enable complex curatorial and analytical workflows. This paper addresses points of intersection between Project Bamboo and TEI over the course of Bamboo's development, including the role of TEI in Bamboo's ongoing development work. The paper highlights the significant contributions of the TEI community to the early development of the project through active participation in the Bamboo Planning Project. The paper also addresses the influence of TEI on the Bamboo Technology Project's collection interoperability and corpus curation/analysis initiatives, as well as its role in current (as of October 2012) development work

    Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition: A Labor of Love

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    Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition (BDLT) has been one of the longest-running Slavic digital humanities projects in the United States. Initially conceived in 2008 as a series of printed volumes, the digital project was built upon the foundation of a long-term international collaboration dating to the 1970’s. As BDLT nears completion in 2019, this paper reflects on the trajectory of its development and its sustainability as an unfunded digital humanities project, and the ways it can serve as both a model and cautionary tale for others who seek to undertake similar work

    Characterizing Online Vandalism: A Rational Choice Perspective

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    What factors influence the decision to vandalize? Although the harm is clear, the benefit to the vandal is less clear. In many cases, the thing being damaged may itself be something the vandal uses or enjoys. Vandalism holds communicative value: perhaps to the vandal themselves, to some audience at whom the vandalism is aimed, and to the general public. Viewing vandals as rational community participants despite their antinormative behavior offers the possibility of engaging with or countering their choices in novel ways. Rational choice theory (RCT) as applied in value expectancy theory (VET) offers a strategy for characterizing behaviors in a framework of rational choices, and begins with the supposition that subject to some weighting of personal preferences and constraints, individuals maximize their own utility by committing acts of vandalism. This study applies the framework of RCT and VET to gain insight into vandals' preferences and constraints. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Wikipedia, I combine social computing and criminological perspectives on vandalism to propose an ontology of vandalism for online content communities. I use this ontology to categorize 141 instances of vandalism and find that the character of vandalistic acts varies by vandals' relative identifiability, policy history with Wikipedia, and the effort required to vandalize

    DARIAH Beyond Europe

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    International audienceDARIAH, the digital humanities infrastructure with origins and an organisational home in Europe, is nearing the completion of its implementation phase. The significant investment from the European Commission and member countries has yielded a robust set of technical and social infrastructures, ranging from working groups, various registries, pedagogical materials, and software to support diverse approaches to digital humanities scholarship. While the funding and leadership of DARIAH to date has come from countries in, or contiguous with, Europe, the needs that drive its technical and social development are widely shared within the international digital humanities community beyond Europe. Scholars on every continent would benefit from well-supported technical tools and platforms, directories for facilitating access to information and resources, and support for working groups.The DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop series, organised and financed under the umbrella of the DESIR project (“DARIAH ERIC Sustainability Refined,” 2017–2019, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program), convened three meetings between September 2018 and March 2019 in the United States and Australia. These workshops served as fora for cross-cultural exchange, and introduced many non-European DH scholars to DARIAH; each of the workshops included a significant delegation from various DARIAH bodies, together with a larger number of local presenters and participants. The local contexts for these workshops were significantly different in their embodiment of research infrastructures: on the one hand, in the U.S., a private research university (Stanford) and the de facto national library (the Library of Congress), both in a country with a history of unsuccessful national-scale infrastructure efforts; and in Australia, a system which has invested substantially more in coordinated national research infrastructure in science and technology, but very little on a national scale in the humanities and arts. Europe is in many respects ahead of both host countries in terms of its research infrastructure ecosystem both at the national and pan-European levels.The Stanford workshop had four main topics of focus: corpus management; text and image analysis; geohumanities; and music, theatre, and sound studies. As the first of the workshops, the Stanford group also took the lead in proposing next steps toward exploring actionable “DARIAH beyond Europe” initiatives, including the beginnings of a blog shared among participants from all the workshops, extra-European use of DARIAH’s DH Course Registry, and non-European participation in DARIAH Working Groups.The overall theme of the Library of Congress workshop was “Collections as Data,” building on a number of U.S.-based initiatives exploring how to enhance researcher engagement with digital collections through computationally-driven research. In Washington, D.C., the knowledge exchange sessions focussed on digitised newspapers and text analysis, infrastructural challenges for public humanities, and the use of web-archives in DH research. As at Stanford, interconnecting with DARIAH Working Groups was of core interest to participants, and a new Working Group was proposed to explore global access and use of digitised historical newspapers. A further important outcome was the agreement to explore collaboration between the U.S.-based “Collections as Data” initiatives and the Heritage Data Reuse Charter in Europe. The third and final workshop in the series took place in March 2019 in Australia, hosted by the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Convened by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), together with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and DARIAH, this event was co-located with the Academy’s second annual Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit. The first day of the event, targeted at research leadership and policy makers, was intended to explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure. The two subsequent days focused on engaging with a wide variety of communities, including (digital) humanities researchers and cultural heritage professionals. Organised around a series of Knowledge Exchange Sessions, combined with research-led lightning talks, the participants spoke in detail about how big ideas can be implemented practically on the ground. This poster reflects on the key outcomes and future directions arising from these three workshops, and considers what it might look like for DARIAH to be adopted as a fundamental DH infrastructure in a complex variety of international, national, and regional contexts, with diverse funding models, resources, needs, and expectations. One major outcome of all workshops was the shared recognition that, in spite of extensive funding, planning, and goodwill, these workshops were not nearly global enough in their reach: most importantly they were not inclusive of the Global South. Our new DARIAH beyond Europe community has a strong shared commitment to address this gap

    Behaviour change techniques: the development and evaluation of a taxonomic method for reporting and describing behaviour change interventions (a suite of five studies involving consensus methods, randomised controlled trials and analysis of qualitative data)

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    Background Meeting global health challenges requires effective behaviour change interventions (BCIs). This depends on advancing the science of behaviour change which, in turn, depends on accurate intervention reporting. Current reporting often lacks detail, preventing accurate replication and implementation. Recent developments have specified intervention content into behaviour change techniques (BCTs) – the ‘active ingredients’, for example goal-setting, self-monitoring of behaviour. BCTs are ‘the smallest components compatible with retaining the postulated active ingredients, i.e. the proposed mechanisms of change. They can be used alone or in combination with other BCTs’ (Michie S, Johnston M. Theories and techniques of behaviour change: developing a cumulative science of behaviour change. Health Psychol Rev 2012;6:1–6). Domain-specific taxonomies of BCTs have been developed, for example healthy eating and physical activity, smoking cessation and alcohol consumption. We need to build on these to develop an internationally shared language for specifying and developing interventions. This technology can be used for synthesising evidence, implementing effective interventions and testing theory. It has enormous potential added value for science and global health. Objective (1) To develop a method of specifying content of BCIs in terms of component BCTs; (2) to lay a foundation for a comprehensive methodology applicable to different types of complex interventions; (3) to develop resources to support application of the taxonomy; and (4) to achieve multidisciplinary and international acceptance for future development. Design and participants Four hundred participants (systematic reviewers, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers) from 12 countries engaged in investigating, designing and/or delivering BCIs. Development of the taxonomy involved a Delphi procedure, an iterative process of revisions and consultation with 41 international experts; hierarchical structure of the list was developed using inductive ‘bottom-up’ and theory-driven ‘top-down’ open-sort procedures (n = 36); training in use of the taxonomy (1-day workshops and distance group tutorials) (n = 161) was evaluated by changes in intercoder reliability and validity (agreement with expert consensus); evaluating the taxonomy for coding interventions was assessed by reliability (intercoder; test–retest) and validity (n = 40 trained coders); and evaluating the taxonomy for writing descriptions was assessed by reliability (intercoder; test–retest) and by experimentally testing its value (n = 190). Results Ninety-three distinct, non-overlapping BCTs with clear labels and definitions formed Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy version 1 (BCTTv1). BCTs clustered into 16 groupings using a ‘bottom-up’ open-sort procedure; there was overlap between these and groupings produced by a theory-driven, ‘top-down’ procedure. Both training methods improved validity (both p < 0.05), doubled the proportion of coders achieving competence and improved confidence in identifying BCTs in workshops (both p < 0.001) but did not improve intercoder reliability. Good intercoder reliability was observed for 80 of the 93 BCTs. Good within-coder agreement was observed after 1 month (p < 0.001). Validity was good for 14 of 15 BCTs in the descriptions. The usefulness of BCTTv1 to report descriptions of observed interventions had mixed results. Conclusions The developed taxonomy (BCTTv1) provides a methodology for identifying content of complex BCIs and a foundation for international cross-disciplinary collaboration for developing more effective interventions to improve health. Further work is needed to examine its usefulness for reporting interventions. Funding This project was funded by the Medical Research Council Ref: G0901474/1. Funding also came from the Peninsula Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care

    Use of SMS texts for facilitating access to online alcohol interventions: a feasibility study

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    A41 Use of SMS texts for facilitating access to online alcohol interventions: a feasibility study In: Addiction Science & Clinical Practice 2017, 12(Suppl 1): A4

    Effects of Once-Weekly Exenatide on Cardiovascular Outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes.

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    Abstract BACKGROUND: The cardiovascular effects of adding once-weekly treatment with exenatide to usual care in patients with type 2 diabetes are unknown. METHODS: We randomly assigned patients with type 2 diabetes, with or without previous cardiovascular disease, to receive subcutaneous injections of extended-release exenatide at a dose of 2 mg or matching placebo once weekly. The primary composite outcome was the first occurrence of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, or nonfatal stroke. The coprimary hypotheses were that exenatide, administered once weekly, would be noninferior to placebo with respect to safety and superior to placebo with respect to efficacy. RESULTS: In all, 14,752 patients (of whom 10,782 [73.1%] had previous cardiovascular disease) were followed for a median of 3.2 years (interquartile range, 2.2 to 4.4). A primary composite outcome event occurred in 839 of 7356 patients (11.4%; 3.7 events per 100 person-years) in the exenatide group and in 905 of 7396 patients (12.2%; 4.0 events per 100 person-years) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.83 to 1.00), with the intention-to-treat analysis indicating that exenatide, administered once weekly, was noninferior to placebo with respect to safety (P<0.001 for noninferiority) but was not superior to placebo with respect to efficacy (P=0.06 for superiority). The rates of death from cardiovascular causes, fatal or nonfatal myocardial infarction, fatal or nonfatal stroke, hospitalization for heart failure, and hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome, and the incidence of acute pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, medullary thyroid carcinoma, and serious adverse events did not differ significantly between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with type 2 diabetes with or without previous cardiovascular disease, the incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events did not differ significantly between patients who received exenatide and those who received placebo. (Funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals; EXSCEL ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01144338 .)

    Kidnapped by Cowboys: Taking the Next Steps from "DARIAH Beyond Europe Workshop 1"

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    DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop 1 "cowboys" (Quinn Dombrowski, Anthony Caldwell, Zoe Borovsky, Alix Keener) with Joke Daems For the past three days, the DARIAH Beyond Europe (DBE) workshop has brought together researchers, librarians, staff, and other interested members of the digital humanities community on the US west coast, to exchange knowledge and ideas with our European colleagues from DARIAH. This workshop has provided a fruitful forum for discussing digital humanities infrastructure, in..
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