'Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated': Scholarly editing in the digital age

Some scholars still doubt that the electronic text has much of a role in humanities, and particularly literary scholarship, when it is compared to the printed book. They fear that that the use of computers blows away all else in its path, leaving nothing standing that we might recognise. Others are enthusiastic about the possibility of the new medium to hold unprecedented amounts of information, and are willing to admire the hard work and scholarship of those who create such textual resources, but they are worried about the ways in which their work, and scholarly methods may be affected by this. Those of us who work in this new medium of electric editing rather anxiously release the products of our effort into the scholarly world, unsure about how well it will be regarded, and indeed how long it may last. What we can all agree on is that the electronic text should at least lead to some literary defamiliarisation, which in turn should make us to wonder about the future of our discipline. What will happen to the text in the future? What control does the author have over the reception of the text? Where does it fit into the scholarly community? Will it be preserved for posterity? How much information can the current technological medium cope with? Most profoundly it causes us to question whether the discipline will continue to exist, and whether there is any future for the textual editor in an age of electronic text

Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies

Once again Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman have produced a remarkable collection of writing about scholarship and resource creation in the area of digital humanities. This volume on digital literary studies is, as it were, a companion to their earlier Companion to Digital Humanities. As such it promises to be be equally significant to the field and should be equally well used and highly regarded in universities both in Europe and North America. The companion provides a very thorough survey of research and resource development in numerous area of digital literary studies, written by an impressive collection of leading scholars. It is intended as a general introduction to the multiple aspects of the field, but many of the chapters go beyond this to provide fascinating discussion of the problems and scholarly possibilities of different aspects of this highly diverse area. As such it is impossible in this space to do justice to the entire range of subjects covered in the Companion's thirty-one very detailed chapters, and so what follows will survey its general structure and comment on themes emerging from the book as a whole. The book is divided into three sections, on traditions, textualities and methodologies. In the first section chapters are concerned with periodic areas of study, such the classical, medieval, early modern, and so on. They review the digital resources available and the type of scholarly questions that are being researched in their area, and include some speculation about future scholarship made possible by digital resources

Mental health and emotional well-being of students in further education - a scoping study

This study aimed to explore how FE colleges in England are engaging with and addressing the mental health needs of their young students (aged 16-19), both in terms of promoting positive mental health and emotional well-being and in responding to identified mental health problems

Information seeking in the Humanities: physicality and digitality

This paper presents a brief overview of a research project that is examining the information seeking practices of humanities scholars. The results of this project are being used to develop digital resources to better support these work activities. Initial findings from a recent set of interviews is offered, revealing the importance of physical artefacts in the humanities scholars’ research processes and the limitations of digital resources. Finally, further work that is soon to be undertaken is summarised, and it is hoped that after participation in this workshop these ideas will be refined

White South Africa and defence, 1960-1968 : militarization, threat perceptions and counter strategies

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 469-494).This thesis is concerned with the militarization of white South African society in the 1960s. It argues that the military threat perceptions of the period were crucial in altering white views of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and reinforcing support for the National Party government. The military achieved enhanced public status within civil society as the state's supposed bulwark. A range of purported potential threats, both internal and external and regularly reported in the media, were investigated by the SADF in response to Afro-Asian bloc spokespersons calling for international military intervention against white South Africa to end apartheid

Recent Advances in Scanning Electron Microscope Cathodoluminescence Assessment of GaAs and InP

The capabilities of the cathodoluminescence mode of the scanning electron microscope are reviewed, with particular reference to the low temperature wavelength dispersive system in the author\u27s own laboratory. The design of the luminescence collection optics is highlighted. The interpretation of the luminescence spectra is discussed in terms of the physics of radiative recombination. We offer some solutions to some of the main experimental problems with illustrations drawn from two case studies. The first is a study of the elimination of dopant striations in dislocation-free germanium doped indium phosphide and the second an analysis of the causes of threshold voltage scattering in GaAs Schottky-gated field effect transistors. Future directions of the technique are speculated upon

Detuned Mechanical Parametric Amplification as a Quantum Non-Demolition Measurement

Recently it has been demonstrated that the combination of weak-continuous position detection with detuned parametric driving can lead to significant steady-state mechanical squeezing, far beyond the 3 dB limit normally associated with parametric driving. In this work, we show the close connection between this detuned scheme and quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement of a single mechanical quadrature. In particular, we show that applying an experimentally realistic detuned parametric drive to a cavity optomechanical system allows one to effectively realize a QND measurement despite being in the bad-cavity limit. In the limit of strong squeezing, we show that this scheme offers significant advantages over standard backaction evasion, not only by allowing operation in the weak measurement and low efficiency regimes, but also in terms of the purity of the mechanical state.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Mechanical Entanglement via Detuned Parametric Amplification

We propose two schemes to generate entanglement between a pair of mechanical oscillators using parametric amplification. In contrast to existing parametric drive-based protocols, both schemes operate in the steady-state. Using a detuned parametric drive to maintain equilibrium and to couple orthogonal quadratures, our approach can be viewed as a two-mode extension of previous proposals for parametric squeezing. We find that robust steady-state entanglement is possible for matched oscillators with well-controlled coupling. In addition, one of the proposed schemes is robust to differences in the damping rates of the two oscillators.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure