TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization

As archives are being digitized at an increasing rate, scholars will require new tools to make sense of this expanding amount of material. We propose to build TOME, a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives. Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling--a computational method for identifying themes that recur across a collection--TOME will visualize the topics that characterize each archive, as well as the relationships between specific topics and related metadata, such as publication date. An archive of 19th-century antislavery newspapers, characterized by diverse authors and shifting political alliances, will serve as our initial dataset; it promises to motivate new methods for visualizing topic models and extending their impact. In turn, by applying our new methods to these texts, we will illuminate how issues of gender and racial identity affect the development of political ideology in the nineteenth century, and into the present day

An Archive of Taste

A groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, An Archive of Taste reveals how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive.Lauren F. Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it. She tells the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Klein offers richly layered accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders and, in doing so, directly affected the development of our national culture—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American–authored culinary text.The first book to examine the gustatory origins of aesthetic taste in early American literature, An Archive of Taste shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States

Deploying Care Managers From Care Management Agencies Into Primary Care: A Pilot Study

Background: As the nation shifts to value based payment programs (VBP), financial incentives drive primary care providers (PCPs) to improve outcomes and reduce costs. One method to drive physicians to focus their practices and to increase time working at the top of their licenses is the use of care management (CM) services to meet these goals but the resources needed to implement CM are a barrier. In the Hudson Valley, PCPs embedded local CM staff to provide CM services. This study assesses the provider and care manager perceived patient outcomes from CM, barriers to successful implementation, resources required, total cost of this integration and the sustainability of subcontracting for CM. Methods: In 2017, care managers were embedded in six PCP practices. Using an exploratory sequential study, Care Managers and PCPs received open ended surveys. Themes were coded. Resources were identified to calculate the total cost with additional cost data. The threshold of patients to cover the total cost was calculated and a sensitivity analysis was performed. Results: The perceived impact of CM on the health of patients was mixed. Barriers to the implementation included: staff not understanding the role of the care manager, lack of relationship between the care manager and PCP, lack of patient trust and PCP time constraints. Resources identified included items such as computers. The cost for the first year of CM was $64,307. Practices require 1072 patients with a$5PMPM CM reimbursement. Conclusion: Results of this study are aligned with the literature. This study suggests CM impact on outcomes is mixed. Training practice staff would mitigate barriers care managers face. Subcontracted CM is a potentially sustainable model with enough patients in a VBP arrangement. Subcontracting for part time CM may be a model for smaller practices

Reading Thomas Jefferson with TopicViz: Towards a Thematic Method for Exploring Large Cultural Archives

In spite of what Ed Folsom has called the “epic transformation of archives,” referring to the shift from print to digital archival form, methods for exploring these digitized collections remain underdeveloped. One method prompted by digitization is the application of automated text mining techniques such as topic modeling -- a computational method for identifying the themes that recur across an archive of documents. We review the nascent literature on topic modeling of literary archives, and present a case study, applying a topic model to the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The lessons from this work suggest that the way forward is to provide scholars with more holistic support for visualization and exploration of topic model output, while integrating topic models with more traditional workflows oriented around assembling and refining sets of relevant documents. We describe our ongoing effort to develop a novel software system that implements these ideas

Holocaust Education in Arkansas: An Exploration of Policy Process and Implementation

The Holocaust was the attempted extermination of the Jewish people--a fact previously considered to be common knowledge. However, recent national surveys find that Arkansas students have the lowest levels of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States. A recent law mandated the teaching of the Holocaust for 5-12th grade public school students in Arkansas, however, little is known about the policy process and implementation of such a mandate. Given the magnitude of the gaps in the literature on this topic, this dissertation uses a three article format to address specific gaps and make specific contributions to the literature by addressing three following research questions: (1) what does the current literature say about Holocaust education policy for grades K-12 in the United States? (2) How did Holocaust education legislation pass in Arkansas? And, (3) How interculturally aware are Arkansas teachers, and do they hold any antisemitic biases? First, we know very little about state Holocaust education policy, not only in Arkansas, but really of any states in the United States. The gap is a national gap in knowledge for the United States, so a scoping review was used for the first article, to understand what the literature says about Holocaust education policy for K-12 in any state. The findings from this article indicate that what little research exists on the topic is not centered in public policy, but rather in teacher education. Thus, this article offers a unique contribution to the field of public policy, adding the social justice component of re-centering policies on historically marginalized communities. Building on this knowledge, the second article makes a unique contribution to the field of public policy with a case-study of the stakeholders involved in passing the Holocaust education mandate in Arkansas. Findings indicate that a grassroots coalition of Jewish activists, inspired by a Holocaust survivor, engaged faith and political communities to pass Holocaust education legislation, despite having less than 2,000 Jews in the entire state. Finally, the third article addresses the question of implementation, and how interculturally aware Arkansas teachers are, exmainig if they hold any antisemitic bias. Not only have previous studies not examined a relationship between antisemitic bias and intercultural competence, but this has never been examined in teachers tasked with implementing Holocaust education. There was a strong relationship between antisemitic bias and a lack of cultural competence, which makes sense—if one expresses more bias and hatred towards one group, they would likely have lower cultural competence. Findings indicate that the sample of Arkansas teachers in this study were not interculturally competent, and many hold antisemitic views. While these are concerning results, this was a small sample, and reinforces a conclusion of all three articles: more research is needed on this topic. Each of these three articles offer independent contributions, however, when taken together, there is an understanding of the lack of attention given to Holocaust education and the concerning pitfalls of doing so. There are simply too many gaps in knowledge at such a critical moment of policy passage and implementation to warrant a one-article dissertation, necessitating a three-article format to ensure a strong contribution could be made to the literature

Holocaust Education in Arkansas: An Exploration of Policy Process and Implementation

The Holocaust was the attempted extermination of the Jewish people--a fact previously considered to be common knowledge. However, recent national surveys find that Arkansas students have the lowest levels of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States. A recent law mandated the teaching of the Holocaust for 5-12th grade public school students in Arkansas, however, little is known about the policy process and implementation of such a mandate. Given the magnitude of the gaps in the literature on this topic, this dissertation uses a three article format to address specific gaps and make specific contributions to the literature by addressing three following research questions: (1) what does the current literature say about Holocaust education policy for grades K-12 in the United States? (2) How did Holocaust education legislation pass in Arkansas? And, (3) How interculturally aware are Arkansas teachers, and do they hold any antisemitic biases? First, we know very little about state Holocaust education policy, not only in Arkansas, but really of any states in the United States. The gap is a national gap in knowledge for the United States, so a scoping review was used for the first article, to understand what the literature says about Holocaust education policy for K-12 in any state. The findings from this article indicate that what little research exists on the topic is not centered in public policy, but rather in teacher education. Thus, this article offers a unique contribution to the field of public policy, adding the social justice component of re-centering policies on historically marginalized communities. Building on this knowledge, the second article makes a unique contribution to the field of public policy with a case-study of the stakeholders involved in passing the Holocaust education mandate in Arkansas. Findings indicate that a grassroots coalition of Jewish activists, inspired by a Holocaust survivor, engaged faith and political communities to pass Holocaust education legislation, despite having less than 2,000 Jews in the entire state. Finally, the third article addresses the question of implementation, and how interculturally aware Arkansas teachers are, exmainig if they hold any antisemitic bias. Not only have previous studies not examined a relationship between antisemitic bias and intercultural competence, but this has never been examined in teachers tasked with implementing Holocaust education. There was a strong relationship between antisemitic bias and a lack of cultural competence, which makes sense—if one expresses more bias and hatred towards one group, they would likely have lower cultural competence. Findings indicate that the sample of Arkansas teachers in this study were not interculturally competent, and many hold antisemitic views. While these are concerning results, this was a small sample, and reinforces a conclusion of all three articles: more research is needed on this topic. Each of these three articles offer independent contributions, however, when taken together, there is an understanding of the lack of attention given to Holocaust education and the concerning pitfalls of doing so. There are simply too many gaps in knowledge at such a critical moment of policy passage and implementation to warrant a one-article dissertation, necessitating a three-article format to ensure a strong contribution could be made to the literature

Data Feminism

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed