Finding What You Need, and Knowing What You Can Find: Digital Tools for Palaeographers in Musicology and Beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making fluid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed

The role of the N-glycolyl modification in Mycobacterial peptidoglycan synthesis and survival

Mycobacteria are acid fast bacilli responsible for the wide spread global diseases tuberculosis and leprosy. The increased persistence of multidrug resistant (MDR) mycobacterial strains has led to the focus on discovery of new and under-utilised cellular targets such as the cell wall. Peptidoglycan, the principle structural component of the bacterial cell wall is a heteropolymer comprised of alternating monosaccharides cross-linked by pentapeptide chains. The cell wall of mycobacteria are inherently resistant to antimicrobials and aid in evasion from host immune detection due to modifications to its composition. The hydroxylase enzyme NamH has been documented to play a role in the N-glycolylation of peptidoglycan monosaccharides, utilizing molecular oxygen during aerobic growth to convert N-acetylto N-glycolyl groups. This modification is found predominantly in Actinobacteria, except Mycobacterium leprae due to genomic reduction. The percentage incorporation of Nacetylated and N-glycolylated saccharides is dependent upon the environment and functional characterisation of the impact of each modification is vital to achieving a greater understanding into mycobacterial response to a range of factors including dormancy, resuscitation and intracellular propagation. The investigations described in this thesis concern the susceptibility of a M. smegmatis DnamH strain, the cell wall of which contains solely N-acetylated cell wall components towards: (a) selected hydrolytic enzymes, as a model of the survival of phagocytosed mycobacteria within the harsh conditions of the phagolysosome and; (b) new and existing antimicrobials commonly used as therapies against infection. The absence of the Nglycolylated sugar within the peptidoglycan cell wall led to consistently observed increases in susceptibility to a range of hydrolytic enzymes and antimicrobials, especially those which target the formation of peptidoglycan. Mycobacterial Mur ligases demonstrated increased catalytic bias towards N-glycolylated substrates to increase their inclusion into the wide peptidoglycan sacculus. Investigations were expanded to characterize the impact of newly discovered known cell wall active compounds against the peptidoglycan biosynthesis machinery

A Comparative Study of the Writing Component of the Language Arts Curricula in Japan and in California\u27s Secondary Schools

Digitized thesi

"Gone Are The Days": a social and business history of cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910-1982

This dissertation presents a comprehensive business and social history of cinema-going in urban Gold Coast/Ghana from 1914 to 1982, the local beginning and end points of mass participation in that form of leisure. Local business owners invested capital and energy to create an audience for a new leisure form, and they built the sector from a single screen in 1914 to more than seventy cinemas by the early 1960s. Entrepreneurs confronted state regulators, whether colonial or post-colonial, who viewed the cinema as a negative force to be managed - but never embraced. Officials feared that the emergence of a popular leisure form could challenge their efforts to impose particular models of behavior. Successive governments characterized the cinema as a potential source of criminal inspiration. Officials treated expatriate entrepreneurs of the post-war period with equal disdain, profiting from their business know-how but rejecting them when expedient. As the gatekeeper for foreign films, most of which came from the US, the state had a position of considerable legal power. Governments regulated imports, developed censorship policies, and policed screenings. They could not, however, restrain the popular imagination. Ghanaians embraced the cinema from its inception, seeing in it a cheap leisure outlet in urban areas that were reorienting social and familial lives, as well as a means for reflection on their modern selves. Where officials feared imagery of luxury, adventure and romance on the big screen, Ghanaians saw the opportunity for comparison and analysis in addition to rich entertainment. Ghanaian audiences created their own cinema-going culture. They thrived on constant rotation of new films and old favorites to the point of forcing compromise on an American industry eager to impose its own business model in the early 1960s. Ghana's status in the vanguard of African independence prompted internal and external observers to analyze local cinema-going culture to understand and to control the audience in the cheap seats. However, the urban audience fought against this impulse, seeing in the cinema space a place to configure new relationships and to give voice to a joyous engagement with a vibrant, ever-changing art form

Photoemission Spectroscopy

Contains a summary of research.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-76-C-1400

Moduli spaces of nonnegatively curved metrics on exotic spheres

We show that the moduli space of nonnegatively curved metrics on a manifold homeomorphic to $S^7$ has infinitely many path components. The components are distinguished using the Kreck-Stolz $s$-invariant computed for metrics constructed by Goette, Kerin and Shankar. The invariant is computed by extending each metric to the total space of an orbifold disc bundle and applying generalizations of the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem for orbifolds with boundary.Comment: 13 page

Strip and tease: digitally undressing Tudor scribes

High-resolution digital images of our collections are reshaping our understanding of how we can approach and use damaged manuscripts. The most damaged sources can usually not be held or examined closely, but a very high quality digital image can serve as a literal surrogate, allowing us to access and even repair a damaged manuscript in a way that would otherwise be impossible. This way of interacting with manuscripts has radically changed the landscape of document research as well as the activities and functions of archives, libraries and scholars, and it has opened the door to some exciting advances in research. This paper discusses two very different approaches to manuscripts with extreme problems of legibility and access, examining the results and processes needed to tease out enough information by stripping back damage to achieve a usable result

Finding what you need, and knowing what you can find: digital tools for palaeographers in musicology and beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making !uid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single "xed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed