Monuments and Memories: The Evolution of British Columbian Cemeteries, 1850-1950

Cemeteries represent the most material, and therefore public, means by which people express their reactions to death. This article analyzes the changing aesthetic qualities of British Columbian cemeteries between 1850 and 1950, the physical divisions created within them, and the monuments that populated them. A nineteenth-century garden where the family "visited" the deceased evolved into an increasingly invisible twentieth-century lawn cemetery. For the middle-class people who controlled cemetery regulations, the graveyard remained a place where social distinctions were established, although it had lost its role as a refuge for the mourning family. By 1950. the mourners' memories had supplanted the cemetery as the final resting place for the deceased. Résumé C'est dans les cimetières que les gens expriment le plus tangiblement et le plus ouvertement leurs réactions à la mort. L'article s'attache aux cimetières de Colombie-Britannique; il analyse l'évolution de leur esthétique de 1850 à 1950, la façon dont ils étaient compartimentés et les monuments funéraires qui s'y trouvaient. Le jardin du XIXe siècle on la famille ^rendait visite» à ses défunts a graduellement cédé le pas, au XX' siècle, à des pelouses, ce qui a rendu la présence de cimetières de moins en moins manifeste. Bien qu'il ne serve plus de refuge à la famille du défunt, le cimetière demeure un lieu où les distinctions sociales sont bien établies, tout au moins pour la classe moyenne qui en contrôle la regimentation. Les gens ont fini par délaisser les cimetières, préférant conserver intérieurement le souvenir de leurs proches

Canadian Countercultures and the Environment

Studies of the radical environmental politics of the 1960s have tended to downplay the extent to which much of that countercultural intellectual and social ferment continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment adds to our knowledge of this understudied period. This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major environmental debates in this era and examines a range of issues related to broad environmental concerns, topics which emerged as key concerns in the context of Cold War military investments and experiments, the oil crisis of the 1970s, debates over gendered roles, and the increasing attention to urban pollution and pesticide use. No other publication dealing with this period covers the wide range of environmental topics (among others, activism, midwifery, organic farming, recycling, urban cycling, and communal living) or geographic locales, from Yukon to Atlantic Canada. Together, they demonstrate how this period influenced and informed environmental action and issues in ways that have had a long-term impact on Canadian society. With contributions by: Matt Cavers Megan Davies Nancy Janovicek Alan MacEachern David Neufeld Ryan O'Connor Daniel Ross Henry Trim Sharon Weave

Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration

Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary research project between environmental historians, computational linguists and visualization specialists. It combines text mining and information visualization alongside traditional research methods in environmental history to explore commodity trade in the nineteenth century from a global perspective. Along with a unique data corpus, this project developed three visual interfaces to enable the exploration and analysis of four historical document collections, consisting of approximately 200,000 documents and 11 million pages related to commodity trading. In this paper we discuss the potential and limitations of our approach based on feedback from historians we elicited over the course of this project. Informing the design of such tools in the larger context of digital humanities projects, our findings show that visualization-based interfaces are a valuable starting point to large-scale explorations in historical research. Besides providing multiple visual perspectives on the document collection to highlight general patterns, it is important to provide a context in which these patterns occur and offer analytical tools for more in-depth investigations.PostprintPeer reviewe

The proposed Caroline ESA M3 mission to a Main Belt Comet

We describe Caroline, a mission proposal submitted to the European Space Agency in 2010 in response to the Cosmic Visions M3 call for medium-sized missions. Caroline would have travelled to a Main Belt Comet (MBC), characterizing the object during a flyby, and capturing dust from its tenuous coma for return to Earth. MBCs are suspected to be transition objects straddling the traditional boundary between volatile–poor rocky asteroids and volatile–rich comets. The weak cometary activity exhibited by these objects indicates the presence of water ice, and may represent the primary type of object that delivered water to the early Earth. The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals. Caroline was ultimately not selected by the European Space Agency during the M3 call; we briefly reflect on the pros and cons of the mission as proposed, and how current and future mission MBC mission proposals such as Castalia could best be approached

Comparing computer-generated and pathologist-generated tumour segmentations for immunohistochemical scoring of breast tissue microarrays

BACKGROUND: Tissue microarrays (TMAs) have become a valuable resource for biomarker expression in translational research. Immunohistochemical (IHC) assessment of TMAs is the principal method for analysing large numbers of patient samples, but manual IHC assessment of TMAs remains a challenging and laborious task. With advances in image analysis, computer-generated analyses of TMAs have the potential to lessen the burden of expert pathologist review. METHODS: In current commercial software computerised oestrogen receptor (ER) scoring relies on tumour localisation in the form of hand-drawn annotations. In this study, tumour localisation for ER scoring was evaluated comparing computer-generated segmentation masks with those of two specialist breast pathologists. Automatically and manually obtained segmentation masks were used to obtain IHC scores for thirty-two ER-stained invasive breast cancer TMA samples using FDA-approved IHC scoring software. RESULTS: Although pixel-level comparisons showed lower agreement between automated and manual segmentation masks (κ=0.81) than between pathologists' masks (κ=0.91), this had little impact on computed IHC scores (Allred; [Image: see text]=0.91, Quickscore; [Image: see text]=0.92). CONCLUSIONS: The proposed automated system provides consistent measurements thus ensuring standardisation, and shows promise for increasing IHC analysis of nuclear staining in TMAs from large clinical trials