Beyond the lowest common denominator: designing effective digital resources

As the web has become the de facto medium of the Digital Humanities, we have seen enormous advances in the ‘functional ambition’ of the online resources that characterise the discipline. Increasingly, digital humanities outputs strive not simply to disseminate primary sources, but to supply a nexus of rich contextual materials and functionality: allowing the user to control editorial perspectives, digitally curate objects, and apply tools for real‐time analysis and visualisation. But, the web, as a medium, is a mutable sand; consider the variety of web browsers and platforms, in regular use today, and the rate at which they change. Web applications are increasingly provisional and ephemeral; the more use we make of exciting, current technology, the more fragile the outputs we produce. All that we can be sure will prevail, in time, are the primary sources (text, images) digitised and stored according to accepted standards. For all the creative work that goes into the delivery of digital editions and archives, it is a disappointing reality that simple democratised access to primary sources often remains the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the Digital Humanities. How do we progress the field, allowing our users to better understand the potential of ubiquitous technologies for display and interaction for their own areas of research? How do we ensure that the effort expended on building delivery environments for digital humanities research outputs will have a lasting impact across subject disciplines? The discussion will address issues of usability, user centred design, and functional design specific to the Digital Humanities, focusing on experimental work carried out across a number of projects at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London (in particular the online version of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson; the Gough Map; and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition).Australian Academy of the Humanities; the ANU College of Arts and Social Science

Injectable and porous PLGA microspheres that form highly porous scaffolds at body temperature

Injectable scaffolds are of interest in the field of regenerative medicine because of their minimally invasive mode of delivery. For tissue repair applications, it is essential that such scaffolds have the mechanical properties, porosity and pore diameter to support the formation of new tissue. In the current study, porous poly(DL-lactic acid-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) microspheres were fabricated with an average size of 84 ± 24 lm for use as injectable cell carriers. Treatment with ethanolic sodium hydroxide for 2 min was observed to increase surface porosity without causing the microsphere structure to disintegrate. This surface treatment also enabled the microspheres to fuse together at 37 C to form scaffold structures. The average compressive strength of the scaffolds after 24 h at 37 C was 0.9 ± 0.1 MPa, and the average Young’s modulus was 9.4 ± 1.2 MPa. Scaffold porosity levels were 81.6% on average, with a mean pore diameter of 54 ± 38 lm. This study demonstrates a method for fabricating porous PLGA microspheres that form solid porous scaffolds at body temperature, creating an injectable system capable of supporting NIH-3T3 cell attachment and proliferation in vitro

Myths of the medical methods exclusion: medicine and patents in nineteenth century Britain

This paper explores the interaction of British medical practitioners with the nascent intellectual property system in the nineteenth century. It challenges the generally accepted view that throughout the nineteenth century there was a settled or professionally agreed hostility to patenting. It demonstrates that medical practitioners made more substantial use of the patent system and related forms of protection than has previously been recognised. Nevertheless, the rate of patenting remained lower than in other fields of technical endeavour, but this can largely be explained by the public nature of medical practice during this period. This paper therefore seeks to retell the history of the exclusion of medical methods from patent protection, an exclusion whose history has produced a substantial body of scholarship. However, its aims go beyond this in that it also seeks to illuminate how medical practitioners engaged with the broader political and policy landscape in order to secure financial remuneration for their inventions. Through an exploration of how prominent doctors interacted with Parliament around claims for a financial reward, it demonstrates that doctors sought to use reputational advantage to leverage financial success and the important role that Parliament could play in that process

Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO)

x, 591 hal. ; 24 c