Becoming the Gothic Archive: From Digital Collection to Digital Humanities

The Gothic Archive is the flagship digital humanities project for the Marquette University library. The project was birthed from a simple digital collection, and through the partnership of faculty and librarians, was transformed into something more. The core tenets of digital collection creation were adhered to in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build the Archive. The expertise of both groups and communication were key in the evolution of the collection, and in discovering and highlighting the relationships between the objects. This case study reviews the steps Marquette took in creating the collection and taking it to the level of digital humanities project

Life in the sun and the deep-freeze

The future effects of climate change will potentially have massive impacts upon society, infrastructure, energy and food supplies. Considerable research is focused upon the development of sophisticated predictive climate models that forecast the implications and effects of climate change over the next few millennia. However, two obvious questions arise. Firstly, how can we test whether these models work? Secondly, are we being short-sighted and not looking far enough into the future? Both of these questions can be examined by looking at analogues from the geological record

Access and use of weather and climate information by women and men farmers: Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture qualitative evaluation preliminary findings

The Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project has sought to build capacity of the country’s national institutions to provide climate information tailored to the needs of the agriculture sector, deliver climate services to farmers across Rwanda’s 30 districts, and help them to effectively use the information to manage climate risk. Project interventions include: training Farmer Promoters, who are part of Rwanda’s national agricultural extension service, to guide farmers in the Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) process (Dorward et al., 2015); and organizing farmers into Radio Listeners’ Clubs that meet weekly to participate in climate services radio programs and discuss management responses

Looking beyond loss and damage: Reframing insurance to promote adaptation and resilience

In much of the developing world, climate change is expected to increase the risk from extreme weather events, and scaling insurance is vital to enhance agricultural risk management and adaptation among the rural poor. Insurance program impacts however too often claim impacts based on the number of farmers insured, or total payouts made; instead of documenting livelihood impacts, and/or addressing key challenges that hamper impacts on resilience. A mix of stakeholder expertise is required to design, evaluate and scale insurance programs that have the potential to enhance resilience among the rural poor. We highlight the contribution that agricultural research-for-development (AR4D) can play to help strengthening scaling efforts and evaluating the impacts of insurance on resilience

The Causes of Fiscal Transparency: Evidence from the U.S. States

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the U.S. states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our case studies and quantitative analysis suggest that both politics and fiscal policy outcomes influence the level of transparency. More equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of and increases in fiscal transparency during the sample period. Political polarization and past fiscal conditions, in particular state government debt and budget imbalances, also appear to affect the level of transparency. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund

The Causes of Fiscal Transparency: Evidence from the American States

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our case studies and quantitative analysis suggest that both politics and fiscal policy outcomes influence the level of transparency. More equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during the sample period. Political polarization and past fiscal conditions, in particular state government debt and budget imbalance, also appear to affect the level of transparency.