A Preparatory Analysis of Peer-Grading for a Digital Humanities MOOC

Over the last two years, Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs) have been unexpectedly successful in convincing large number of students to pursue online courses in a variety of domains. Contrary to the "learn anytime anywhere" moto, this new generation of courses are based on regular assignments that must be completed and corrected on a fixed schedule. Successful courses attracted about 50 000 students in the first week but typically stabilised around 10 000 in the following weeks, as most courses demand significant involvement. With 10 000 students, grading is obviously an issue, and the first successful courses tended to be technical, typically in computer science, where various options for automatic grading system could be envisioned. However, this posed a challenge for humanities courses. The solution that has been investigated for dealing with this issue is peer-grading: having students grade the work of one another. The intuition that this would work was based on some older results showing high correlation between professor grading, peer-grading and self-grading. The generality of this correlation can reasonably be questioned. There is a high chance that peer-grading works for certain domains, or for certain assignment, but not for others. Ideally this should be tested experimentally before launching any large-scale courses. EPFL is one of the first European schools to experiment with MOOCs in various domains. Since the launch of these first courses, preparing an introductory MOOC on Digital Humanities was one of our top priorities. However, we felt it was important to first validate the kind of peer-grading strategy we were planning to implement on a smaller set of students, to determine if it would actually work for the assignments we envisioned. This motivated the present study which was conducted during the first semester of our masters level introductory course on Digital Humanities at EPFL

A social network analysis of Rousseau’s autobiography “Les Confessions”

We propose an analysis of the social network composed of the characters appearing in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographic Les Confessions, with existence of edges based on co-occurrences. This work consists of twelve volumes, that span over fifty years of his life. Having a unique author allows us to consider the book as a coherent work, unlike some of the historical texts from which networks often get extracted, and to compare the evolution of patterns of characters through the books on a common basis. Les Confessions, considered as one of the first modern autobiographies, has the originality to let us compose a social network close to the reality, only with a bias introduced by the author, that has to be taken into account during the analysis. Hence, with this paper, we discuss the interpretation of networks based on the content of a book as social networks. We also, in a digital humanities approach, discuss the relevance of this object as an historical source and a narrative tool

Studying Linguistic Changes on 200 Years of Newspapers

Large databases of scanned newspapers open new avenues for studying linguistic evolution. By studying a two-billion-word corpus corresponding to 200 years of newspapers, we compare several methods in order to assess how fast language is changing. After critically evaluating an initial set of methods for assessing textual distance between subsets corresponding to consecutive years, we introduce the notion of a lexical kernel, the set of unique words that maintain themselves over long periods of time. Focusing on linguistic stability instead of linguistic change allows building more robust measures to assess long term phenomena such as word resilience. By systematically comparing the results obtained on two subsets of the corpus corresponding to two independent newspapers, we argue that the results obtained are independent of the specificity of the chosen corpus, and are likely to be the results of more general linguistic phenomena

La simulation humaine : le roman-fleuve comme terrain d'expérimentation narrative

Dans cet article nous présentons la démarche et les premiers résultats d’une recherche participative menée conjointement par le laboratoire d’humanités digitales de l’EPFL (DHLAB) et l’écrivain suisse Daniel de Roulet. Dans cette étude, nous explorons les façons dont la lecture numérique est susceptible d’influencer la façon d’écrire et de réorganiser des récits complexes, de type roman-fleuve ou saga. Nous exposons également nos premières conclusions ainsi que les possibles travaux futures, dans ce domaine très vaste et peu étudié à ce jour

Navigating through 200 years of historical newspapers

This paper aims to describe and explain the processes behind the creation of a digital library composed of two Swiss newspapers, namely Gazette de Lausanne (1798-1998) and Journal de Genève (1826-1998), covering an almost two-century period. We developed a general purpose application giving access to this cultural heritage asset; a large variety of users (e.g. historians, journalists, linguists and the general public) can search through the content of around 4 million articles via an innovative interface. Moreover, users are offered different strategies to navigate through the collection: lexical and temporal lookup, n-gram viewer and named entities

Efflux Pump, the Masked Side of ß-Lactam Resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae Clinical Isolates

International audienceBACKGROUND: Beta-lactamase production and porin decrease are the well-recognized mechanisms of acquired beta-lactam resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates. However, such mechanisms proved to be absent in K. pneumoniae isolates that are non susceptible to cefoxitin (FOX) and susceptible to amoxicillin+clavulanic acid in our hospital. Assessing the role of efflux pumps in this beta-lactam phenotype was the aim of this study. METHODOLOGY/FINDINGS: MICs of 9 beta-lactams, including cloxacillin (CLX), and other antibiotic families were tested alone and with an efflux pump inhibitor (EPI), then with both CLX (subinhibitory concentrations) and EPI against 11 unique bacteremia K. pneumoniae isolates displaying the unusual phenotype, and 2 ATCC strains. CLX and EPI-dose dependent effects were studied on 4 representatives strains. CLX MICs significantly decreased when tested with EPI. A similar phenomenon was observed with piperacillin+tazobactam whereas MICs of the other beta-lactams significantly decreased only in the presence of both EPI and CLX. Thus, FOX MICs decreased 128 fold in the K. pneumoniae isolates but also 16 fold in ATCC strain. Restoration of FOX activity was CLX dose-dependent suggesting a competitive relationship between CLX and the other beta-lactams with regard to their efflux. For chloramphenicol, erythromycin and nalidixic acid whose resistance was also due to efflux, adding CLX to EPI did not increase their activity suggesting differences between the efflux process of these molecules and that of beta-lactams. CONCLUSION: This is the first study demonstrating that efflux mechanism plays a key role in the beta-lactam susceptibility of clinical isolates of K. pneumoniae. Such data clearly evidence that the involvement of efflux pumps in beta-lactam resistance is specially underestimated in clinical isolates

Cracking alimentaire et consequences nutritionnelles

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Consequences nutritionnelles de la cuisson-extrusion en alimentation humaine

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Amidons modifies derives de cereales et tubercules : aspects hygieniques, metaboliques et nutritionnels

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Viscosite et effets metaboliques des glucides et des lipides

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