How Digital Cultural Heritage Resources can Lead to New Understandings in the Humanities: Future Challenges for Digital Libraries and Archives (Invited Paper)

This paper reports on the presentation made during the panel on "Digital Libraries and Digital Archives: Problems and Challenges for AI Approaches" of the 1st Workshop on Intelligent Techniques At LIbraries and Archives (ITALIA 2015) co-located with the XIV Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, 22 September 2015, Ferrara, Italy

Path Dependence and Occupations

Path dependence in occupations refers to the observed occupational distribution in a population or in a sub-population at a point in time that depends on changes that occurred years or centuries earlier. Path dependence in occupations can be the outcome of the cumulative concentration of certain productive activities in specific regions over time, it can emerge through the effect of parental income or wealth on offspring’s occupations and incomes, or it can be the outcome of group effects. Some historical cases are selected to illustrate the various mechanisms through which path dependence in occupations can emerge or disappear.path dependence, occupational structure, social norms, trade diasporas, Jewish occupational selection, feminization of occupations, African-American occupational transition

From Farmers to Merchants, Voluntary Conversion and Diaspora: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish History

From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions, which account for a large share of the reduction in the size of the Jewish population from about 4.5 million to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education, gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the vast urbanization in the newly developed Muslim Empire (7th and 8th centuries) and they actually did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education–a pre-condition for the extensive mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora by migrating within the Muslim Empire, and later to western Europe where they were invited to settle as high skill intermediaries by local rulers. By 1200, the Jews were living in hundreds of towns from England and Spain in the West to China and India in the East. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry (about one million) lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm regarding education, and hence, voluntarily converted, exactly as it had happened centuries earlier.social norms, religion, human capital, Jewish economic and demographic history, occupational choice, migration.

Are there Increasing Returns in Marriage Markets?

The returns to scale of marriage markets have important behavioral and welfare consequences. It is quantitatively difficult to estimate the returns to scale because, due to endogenous migration, the marriage market size is endogenous. This paper addresses the endogeneity in two ways. First, it estimates the degree of returns to scale in U.S. marriage markets using the 2000 census. Given that in the United States people move to cities to find marriage partners and, therefore, the size of the marriage market is endogenous, we instrument the current size of a cohort in the marriage market with the size of that cohort twenty years earlier. Second, it estimates city scale effects in two societies---early Renaissance Tuscany and pre-reform China---where there was little internal mobility, and thus, the size of the marriage market can be considered exogenous. The main finding is that in all three societies, there is no evidence of increasing returns to scale in marriage markets, whereas the hypothesis of constant returns to scale cannot be rejected. This is true when looking at marriage odds ratios, total gains to marriage, and the quality of marital match. Given the different characteristics of the three societies in terms of population size, time period, economic structure, and social norms characterizing the marriage market, the similarity and precision of the estimates for returns to scale parameters is remarkable.Increasing returns, marriage market, United States, China, Renaissance Tuscany

Guided Tours Across a Collection of Historical Digital Images

We propose the use of short lectures, called narratives, embedded in a digital archive as a personalization method to support and guide users within a collection of historical material. The effectiveness of the approach has been evaluated with two groups of users. An analysis of the results has been conducted enabling the presentation of preliminary results

Why Dowries?

Parents transfer wealth to their children in many ways. The dowry is distinctive because it is a large transfer made to a daughter at the time of her marriage. In an insightful essay, Goody (1973) proposed that the dowry is a premortem inheritance to the bride. A daughter obtains a wealth transfer from her parents as her dowry whereas a son obtains his as a bequest. His observation has been confirmed in different dotal (dowry giving) societies. We develop a theory of dowries that explains his observation. Our work builds on Becker's seminal research on marriage markets and the research program on economics of the family (Rosenzweig and Stark 1997). We argue that in virilocal societies, where married daughters leave the parental home and their married brothers do not, altruistic parents use dowries and bequests to solve a free riding problem between siblings. In virilocal societies, married sons continue to work with the family assets after their marriage. If married daughters share in the parents' bequests, the sons will not get the full benefits of their efforts in extending the family wealth. Thus they will supply too little effort. In order to mitigate this free riding problem, altruistic parents give bequests to sons and lump sum payments to daughters. The model predicts that dowry contracts, which may be complicated, should not contain claims on shares of income generated with the family assets. A theory of dowry has to explain its disappearance in previously dotal societies. As the labor market becomes more developed, as the demand for different types of workers grow, children are less likely to work in the same occupation as their parents. They are also less likely to work for or live with their families. The use of bequests to align work incentives within the family becomes less important. Since it is costly to pay a dowry, the demand for dowry (within the family) will fall as the need to use bequests exclusively for sons to align work incentives falls. Instead of the dowry, parents will transfer wealth to both their daughters and sons as bequests. So the development of labor markets will be important in reducing the role of dowries. We test our model of dowries with two types of evidence. The primary source of evidence comes from notarial deeds and the Florentine Catasto (census) of 1427 housed at the State Archives of Florence. The deeds record marriages in the Tuscan town of Cortona and fortyfour villages in its countryside between 1415 and 1436. The Florentine Catasto of 1427 supplied information on the paternal households of the brides and grooms. The model's prediction on contractual form is matched against the terms found in the marriage contracts. We merge the value of dowries from the marriage contracts to family characteristics found in the Catasto to test the model's predictions on family demographics and dowry values. Dotal marriages in medieval Cortona support the model presented here. In general, there is little data on the decline of dowries in a society due to the large time span of historical data needed to track its decline. A singular exception is the insightful study by Nazzari (1991) who studied the decline of dowries in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 1600 to 1900. Although her theory is different from ours, the factors which Nazzari considered as responsible for the decline of dowries there are consistent with our model.

Servicing the federation : the case for metadata harvesting

The paper presents a comparative analysis of data harvesting and distributed computing as complementary models of service delivery within large-scale federated digital libraries. Informed by requirements of flexibility and scalability of federated services, the analysis focuses on the identification and assessment of model invariants. In particular, it abstracts over application domains, services, and protocol implementations. The analytical evidence produced shows that the harvesting model offers stronger guarantees of satisfying the identified requirements. In addition, it suggests a first characterisation of services based on their suitability to either model and thus indicates how they could be integrated in the context of a single federated digital library

Pierre Jeanneret _ Progetti per Chandigarh

gli studenti che intendono frequentare il corso opzionale (V° anno) "architettura e città della contemporaneità" tenuto dalla prof.ssa maristella casciato, sono pregati di inviare, entro il 23/02/2009, un messaggio email che esprima il loro interesse, a: [email protected]

Italy 1942: Visions of the Future Dwelling

This paper wishes to examine why and how of what was termed in 1942 'uno strano momento d'ozio' ('an odd period of idleness') became for an elite of Italian architects, who grew up under the banner of modernism, a fertile condition to reassess the future dwelling as the new ideal for all human beings. One year earlier Alberto Lattuada, architect, photographer, and renowned film director captured that suspended atmosphere in his L'occhio quadrato, 26 black and white pictures of strong realism. The call for reviewing 'la casa e l'ideale' ('the home: an ideal vision') launched by Domus in August 1942, offered these architects the model ground to express their dreams and hopes. Domus program eventually allowed them to free the creation of a kind of 'esperanto' that helped to transfer the iconic rationalism in the cultivated modern vernacular of postwar reconstruction. It was all but an escape from reality; rather it showed how these architects used that call for adjusting their know-how to the elaboration of some radical, alternative design inventions, that displayed a rich repertoire of materials and technologies, a visionary high-tech avant la lettre. The year 1942 may well serve as synecdoche of the period between autharchy and post-WWII reconstruction. The comparison between Domus and the special issue of Edilizia Moderna, April-December 1942, entitled 'Costruzioni del Tempo di Guerra' ("Building during War Time") exemplifies the ambiguities that the profession was confronting. Here the agony of the regime is in the background, while the buildings show how technical skill may be turned into dull functionality. I'm planning as well to read this condition looking backward to a series of booklets, issued by the Ministry of War in 1938, to instruct architects and planners, among others, on how to build in order to prevent damages caused by air attacks. War also meant imprisonment. Ludovico Quaroni, one of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian architecture and a protagonist of postwar reconstruction remained in a camp in India for about five years. His carnets of sketches contained a plenitude of drawings for the ideal home next to vivid images of village dwellings and domestic vernacular. Would the Indian trope become a source of his village like the Tiburtino neighborhood of early '50s? It is worth exploring further this more distant resonance. No doubt that the pendulum between desire of the new and nostalgia justified the permanence of the contradictions this paper aims to illustrate. By the end, Fascism caused death, fear, emigration...as well as being pivotal in forcing architects to envision the 'rinascita'.Conference co-organized by the Institute of Fine Arts; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Princeton University's School of Architecture

Personalised multilingual hypertext retrieval: An overview

The aims of the workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval (PMHR) are twofold: to set the scene in this challenging area, allowing the different communities engaged in related research topics to meet and to determine a program of actions to undertake; to devise a strategy for the evaluation of PMHR systems, which should define the collection of resources to use to evaluate such systems together with the evaluation metrics to use. The workshop results will be of use in the design of personalised tools that can help end-users fully benefit from the use of distributed multilingual hypertext content