Transforming data silos into knowledge: Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)

This paper introduces the project “Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)” [1]. ECPO joins several important digital collections of the early Chinese press and puts them into a single overarching framework. In a first phase, several databases on early women’s periodicals and entertainment publishing were created: “Chinese Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period” (WoMag), “Chinese Entertainment Newspapers” (Xiaobao), and databases hosted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. These systems approach the material in two ways: in the intensive approach all articles, images, advertisements, and related agents are recorded and assigned to a complete set of scanned pages, while in the extensive approach the main characteristic features of publications are stored. ECPO has begun to join these various materials in a second, ongoing phase of the project. Today, ECPO provides open access to 267 publications comprising over 280.000 pages of print. A key aspect is to make entire issues available, front-to-back, including illustrations, advertisements, and even blank pages. For 138 publications we also provide descriptions of individual items in Chinese with Pinyin transcription. These records also contain genre and column information, basic content analysis, as well as names and roles of agents associated with an item. Our new cross-database agent service allows us to manage the approximately 47.000 names recorded in WoMag and ECPO: a) merge identical names across databases, b) identify agents and assigning names to them, and c) link agent records to authority data (GND, VIAF, Wikidata). Besides creating a curated list of agents occurring in the publications, we also aim to add missing persons to authority files like the GND. One crucial aspect ECPO is full text capability. Unfortunately, OCR software cannot be used out-of-the-box, for a number of reasons: document analysis fails to recognize complex newspaper layout, character recognition fails when it faces emphasis marks next to characters, and recognized passages have to be grouped in the right semantic order. The paper will discuss approaches to further exploring and analyzing the knowledge hidden in these publications, together with efforts to open the collection’s data for re-use. We will demonstrate workflows in the Agents service and cross-database record curation. We also present results from a crowdsourced approach to newspaper segmentation to generate segments that can easier be OCRed. In addition, we introduce first ideas to create a module for encoding text in TEI and relate it to the database

Kvävemineralisering under olika årstider och utlakning på en mojord i Västergötland

During a seven-year period (1993-1999) studies were made on the effct on soil nitrogen dynamics, utilization ration of nitrogen in crops and leaching losses by different soil tillage times, application of pig slurry and undersown perennial ryegrass as a catch crop. The experimental field was situated on a loamy sand soil in Västergötland, in western Sweden. The field was divided into eight separate tile-drained plots, each with an area of 840 m². The amount of drainage water was measured and water samples were collected twice a month. The water samples were analyzed for pH, electrical conductivity, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Soil samples were taken periodically from the 0-90 cm soil layer for analysis of mineral nitrogen. Plant material was sampled in late summer, late sutumn and early spring to measure plant growth and nutrient in crops, weeds and plat residues. The crop sequence was: oats (1993 and 1994), spring barley (1995), potatoes (1996), oats (1997) and spring barley (1998). The fertilizer regimes were commercial fertilizer according to normal reccommendations (90 kg N/ha) or half the dose of commercial fertilizer (45 kg N/ha) supplemented with pig slurry (on average, 94 kg tot-N/ha) applied before sowing in spring. Treatments with catch crop were ploughed either in April-May or in early November, whereas other treatments without a catch crop were stubble cultivated in August-September and plouged in November, or only plouged in April-May. The catch crop didn't impact negatively on the yield; instead incorporation if catch crop material seemes to increase the amount of nitrogen available for the next crop, due to increased nitrogen mineralization. Further, the catch crop reduced nitrogen leaching during the cold seasons to half when the catch crop was left to grow until spring ploughing. In late autumn, the amount of nitrogen in catch crop, including other green vegetation, was 15-17 kg N/ha, which were in the same range as the decrease of nitrogen leaching in treatments with spring ploughing and an undersown ryegrass. When tillage was delayed from early autumn to spring (without a catch crop), nitrogen leaching decreased with 25%, due to lower mineralization during autumn and winter. Ploughing in spring did not result in increased nitrogen delivery from the soil during growing season, compared with tillage in early autumn. When pig slurry was used, nitrogen leaching increased somewhat, compared with treatments with commercial fertilizer nitrogen, due to increased nitrogen mineralization. The amount of plant available soil nitrogen during the growing season was also larger in treatments with pig slurry applications. Balances of nitrogen were positive in all treatments, especially in treatments with catch crop and spring ploughing. By spring ploughing and using a catch crop it seems to be possible to manipulate the mineralization to be lower wintertime and increse during the growing season. This seemed to conserve nitrogen in soil organic matter