Batten Down the Hatches! Digitizing and Displaying Finds from the Spanish Plate Fleet Wrecks

Artefacts from the Spanish Plate Fleet Wrecks of 1715 and 1733 provide an unmatched archaeological window into 18th century life. To publicize these important finds that are often overshadowed by the wrecks’ alluring gold and silver treasures, the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research Collections and Conservation section created an online 3D museum of selected artefacts. This presents our experiences as we plunged headfirst into the world of 3D photogrammetry and online museum development. We highlight our successes and failures with photogrammetry techniques, model creation, general workflow, and 3D web design for education and public outreach

Review of Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures

Review of Science in the Archives, an edited volume of 12 essays that emerged from a working group held at the Max Planck Institute for History and Science in 2013 and 2014. This working group sought to develop a shared framework for thinking about how the sciences choose to remember past findings and plan future research (p. vii). The quest for such a shared framework, by necessity, calls for the crossing of long-standing temporal and disciplinary boundaries that artificially silo and separate. Drawing together a cohort of practitioners to build such a framework is no easy task, but this compendium hits its mark and is an exemplar of the new interdisciplinary tack emerging in forward-thinking corners of academia

What Makes a Librarian Digital?

This poster reflects an ongoing project to study the nature of the digital librarian. In this poster, we analyze 2017 postings from Code4Lib\u27s job board with job titles that include the words digital and librarian in any combination. We use NVivo and text-mining tools to look for patterns (or lack thereof) in the responsibilities, skills, and educational requirements for these positions. This work is a timely update on the evolving nature of digital librarians, and it offers a fresh and well-needed scholarly perspective on larger changes to library employment practices. As a former archaeologist and a former actress, we now find ourselves working as Digital Learning and Scholarship Librarians. A growing number of individuals are, likewise, following similarly non-traditional pathways to the library, and rightly so. The job market for new graduates across fields is perilous and many of the digital needs of libraries are going unmet. A deeper understanding of the prevailing skills that one must cultivate to become employable as a digital librarian is needed

Laboring with the Economics of Mycenaean Architecture: Theories, Methods, and Explorations of Mycenaean Architectural Production

This study examines the connection between architecture and economy in Mycenaean Greece; it is a deep investigation of economic theory and models of the Mycenaean economy, existing methods for the study of prehistoric architecture, and particular Mycenaean structures. Over the course of the study, I present current thinking on the Mycenaean economy and fundamentally rethink the concept of economic embeddedness and human agency. With a novel theoretical grounding, I present a methodology based in human action to study the intersection of architecture and the Mycenaean economy, and in three detailed case studies, I apply the methodology to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, the harbor town of Kalamianos in the Corinthia, and the Northeast Extension of Mycenae's fortification wall. I argue that to advance the study of Mycenaean economy and theory, the concept of economic embeddedness, which posits that economic actions and decisions are bounded by larger social concerns, must be rethought. In its place, I offer a theory of complex embeddedness that envisions human action as fluid and cross-cutting traditionally circumscribed categories of economy, society, and polity. This foundation in human action with it links to agency theory helps to move the study of architecture away from the static sociopolitical meaning of the final built form and towards the human processes of construction. Under the guidance of this theory, I envision construction as a form of production in which individuals interact with one another and the material world to build a structure. I ultimately use the term architectural production to label this novel viewpoint. To study architectural production at a range where human actions and agency matter, I advance a methodology that draws together architectural energetics, chaîne opératoire, and tools from the construction management industry

Carving Out Our Past: Photogrammetry for the Study and Preservation of Cleveland\u27s 20th Century Inscribed Graffiti

Pilot research project for photogrammetry in the field with regard to cultural heritage preservation. Created for Research ShowCASE, Case Western Reserve University 2019

AI-Informed Approaches to Keyword Generation, Text Summarization, and Document Clustering for Improved Resource Discovery

Academic and cultural institutions are grappling with problems of how to organize, label, and search disparate bodies of texts. As aggregators, preservers, and disseminators of substantial repositories of digital texts, research libraries are naturally situated at the heart of these problems. This chapter explores how unsupervised machine learning may be used to capture and simplify the complexity and nuances of text. Traditional approaches to improving discoverability and accessibility of text through metadata and controlled vocabularies have time-tested strengths. As the volume of digital data explodes, the obstacles and limitations of traditional approaches become more pronounced, and machine learning “show(s) the potential to create efficiencies that smooth the path to access, enhancing description and expanding forms of discovery along the way.”1 In light of the need for new approaches to metadata generation to facilitate discovery, the authors look at Doc2Vec and topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to explore their utility as assistive tools for authors, librarians, and readers. The authors apply the two approaches to a corpus of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) completed at Ohio universities and colleges

A Digital Archaeology of Life in Cleveland’s Depression-Era Slums

This presentation discusses a new digital initiative undertaken by the authors to study Depression-era housing in Cleveland through the Ernest J. Bohn Collection, which is held by Case Western’s Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections. Bohn, who directed the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority from 1933–1968, was instrumental in establishing the city’s housing policy, and the collection that bears his name is a unique witness to life in the shanties of 1930s Cleveland. An assortment of manuscripts, maps, photographs, pamphlets, and videos, the Bohn Collection is a rich source of data, but each topically-relevant item must first be “excavated” from this archive, which has seen only rudimentary processing. This archaeological mentality of “excavating the collection” provides the methodological core of the initiative, and in particular, the authors are presently focused on excavating the visual and cartographic materials that highlight life in Cleveland’s 1930s slums. The authors follow a digital-archaeology workflow which attempts to return these excavated photographs and maps to their original provenience by spatializing, temporalizing, and contextualizing them, just as an archaeologist would with any other piece of material culture. Digitizing, enhancing, and colorizing the photographs; georeferencing the maps; closely analyzing photographic content and mapping their locations; and reconstructing the photographer’s point of view by taking modern photographs of these locations are all central to this process. The resulting provenienced dataset is then used by the authors to build an aesthetically-focused digital narrative of life in the slums of Depression-era Cleveland and to explore how reprovenienced archival materials and digital narratives may be effectively disseminated to interested audiences

Suppressing a Blocked Balance Recovery Step: A Novel Method to Assess an Inhibitory Postural Response

Stepping to recover balance is an important way we avoid falling. However, when faced with obstacles in the step path, we must adapt such reactions. Physical obstructions are typically detected through vision, which then cues step modification. The present study describes a novel method to assess visually prompted step inhibition in a reactive balance context. In our task, participants recovered balance by quickly stepping after being released from a supported forward lean. On rare trials, however, an obstacle blocked the stepping path. The timing of vision relative to postural perturbation was controlled using occlusion goggles to regulate task difficulty. Furthermore, we explored step suppression in our balance task related to inhibitory capacity measured at the hand using a clinically feasible handheld device (ReacStick). Our results showed that ReacStick and step outcomes were significantly correlated in terms of successful inhibition (r = 0.57) and overall reaction accuracy (r = 0.76). This study presents a novel method for assessing rapid inhibition in a dynamic postural context, a capacity that appears to be a necessary prerequisite to a subsequent adaptive strategy. Moreover, this capacity is significantly related to ReacStick performance, suggesting a potential clinical translation

Regional Carbon Fluxes from Land Use and Land Cover Change in Asia, 1980-2009

We present a synthesis of the land-atmosphere carbon flux from land use and land cover change (LULCC) in Asia using multiple data sources and paying particular attention to deforestation and forest regrowth fluxes. The data sources are quasi-independent and include the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization-Forest Resource Assessment (FAO-FRA 2015; country-level inventory estimates), the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv4.3), the 'Houghton' bookkeeping model that incorporates FAO-FRA data, an ensemble of 8 state-of-the-art Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM), and 2 recently published independent studies using primarily remote sensing techniques. The estimates are aggregated spatially to Southeast, East, and South Asia and temporally for three decades, 1980–1989, 1990-1999 and 2000-2009. Since 1980, net carbon emissions from LULCC in Asia were responsible for 20%-40% of global LULCC emissions, with emissions from Southeast Asia alone accounting for 15%-25% of global LULCC emissions during the same period. In the 2000s and for all Asia, three estimates (FAO-FRA, DGVM, Houghton) were in agreement of a net source of carbon to the atmosphere, with mean estimates ranging between 0.24 to 0.41 Pg C yr?1, whereas EDGARv4.3 suggested a net carbon sink of ?0.17 Pg C yr?1. Three of 4 estimates suggest that LULCC carbon emissions declined by at least 34% in the preceding decade (1990-2000). Spread in the estimates is due to the inclusion of different flux components and their treatments, showing the importance to include emissions from carbon rich peatlands and land management, such as shifting cultivation and wood harvesting, which appear to be consistently underreported