Features of Islamic Children’s Books in English: A Case Study of Books Published in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to investigate the elements of Islamic children’s books that are written in English by focusing on books that are available in the Malaysian market and published in Malaysia. This study applies the content analysis method, by examining the selected books of their subject matter as well as the language. The results of the study reveal that Islamic books written for children in English are distinctive in terms of the content and language features.     

“There’s nothing I hate more than a racist:” (Re)centering whiteness in American Horror Story: Coven

This article examines race and racism in the popular cable horror-drama American Horror Story: Coven. Centered around a feud between a white witch coven and a black, voodoo group of witches, Coven overtly deals with the issue of racism, but presents racism as a phenomenon contained in the past; something that does not happen anymore. Using critical post-race theory and scholarship on colorblind racism, whiteness, as well as black feminist theory, I show that although the narrative of Coven explicitly decries racism, it simultaneously invests in colorblind racist narratives and dialogue. Whiteness is central in Coven, operating through discourse that ignores racial difference and contemporary forms of oppression and erasure. Coven uses graphic depictions of violence against black bodies, makes explicit connections between black sexuality and animals, and uses exotic and aggressive stereotypes of black women to tell its story. Thus, Coven’s narrative both condemns racism and relies on it. This article shows that the contemporaneous presentations of explicit anti-racist dialogue and racist imagery work to (re)place whiteness at the center of Coven, a TV show that purports to forward a message of equality and justice for those who are different.     

Using word embeddings in Twitter election classification

Word embeddings and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have attracted extensive attention in various classification tasks for Twitter, e.g. sentiment classification. However, the effect of the configuration used to generate the word embeddings on the classification performance has not been studied in the existing literature. In this paper, using a Twitter election classification task that aims to detect election-related tweets, we investigate the impact of the background dataset used to train the embedding models, as well as the parameters of the word embedding training process, namely the context window size, the dimensionality and the number of negative samples, on the attained classification performance. By comparing the classification results of word embedding models that have been trained using different background corpora (e.g. Wikipedia articles and Twitter microposts), we show that the background data should align with the Twitter classification dataset both in data type and time period to achieve significantly better performance compared to baselines such as SVM with TF-IDF. Moreover, by evaluating the results of word embedding models trained using various context window sizes and dimensionalities, we find that large context window and dimension sizes are preferable to improve the performance. However, the number of negative samples parameter does not significantly affect the performance of the CNN classifiers. Our experimental results also show that choosing the correct word embedding model for use with CNN leads to statistically significant improvements over various baselines such as random, SVM with TF-IDF and SVM with word embeddings. Finally, for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words that are not available in the learned word embedding models, we show that a simple OOV strategy to randomly initialise the OOV words without any prior knowledge is sufficient to attain a good classification performance among the current OOV strategies (e.g. a random initialisation using statistics of the pre-trained word embedding models).     

Clustering small-sized collections of short texts

The need to cluster small text corpora composed of a few hundreds of short texts rises in various applications; e.g., clustering top-retrieved documents based on their snippets. This clustering task is challenging due to the vocabulary mismatch between short texts and the insufficient corpus-based statistics (e.g., term co-occurrence statistics) due to the corpus size. We address this clustering challenge using a framework that utilizes a set of external knowledge resources that provide information about term relations. Specifically, we use information induced from the resources to estimate similarity between terms and produce term clusters. We also utilize the resources to expand the vocabulary used in the given corpus and thus enhance term clustering. We then project the texts in the corpus onto the term clusters to cluster the texts. We evaluate various instantiations of the proposed framework by varying the term clustering method used, the approach of projecting the texts onto the term clusters, and the way of applying external knowledge resources. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates the merits of our approach with respect to applying clustering algorithms directly on the text corpus, and using state-of-the-art co-clustering and topic modeling methods.     

Imagining transformative spaces: the personal–political sites of community archives

Although much has been written about formal archival spaces, little scholarship has addressed the physical spaces of community archives. This paper asks: How do community members imagine the physical spaces that steward identity-based community archives? Based on focus groups with more than 54 community archives users at five different community archives sites across Southern California, this paper examines how members of marginalized communities conceive of the physical space inhabited by community archives representing their communities. The sites explored range from a prominent location on a university campus, to storefronts, strip malls, and small cinderblock buildings. Yet across sites, users spoke about community archives spaces as symbolic and affectively moving locations. Many users described their community archives site as a “home-away-from-home,” marked by intergenerational dialog and a profound sense of belonging. For other users, community archives sites were described as “politically generative spaces” which foster dialog and debate about identity, representation, and activism and enable the community to envision its future. And yet, while the very existence of community archives is political, many participants felt that the full political potential of these sites is not yet realized. By listening to the voices of the communities represented and served by community archives, our research both indicates that a shift is warranted in archival metaphors of space and reveals how community archives are personally and politically transformative spaces for the communities they represent and serve.     

Traveling through: exploring doctoral demographics in archival studies

The growth of archival studies programs has prompted archival scholars to establish an international network for supporting collaborative research, curriculum development, and pedagogy. Doctoral education is key to the sustainability of such programs and the continuation of the network over time. We carried out longitudinal research to survey the population of doctoral students attending one or more Archival Education and Research Institutes (AERI), an annual meeting first held in 2009. Building on prior research on graduate archival education, we gathered demographic and qualitative data about doctoral students specializing in archival studies who are based in several countries including the USA. We sought to assess attendee motivations, guide conference planning, and help advance overall AERI objectives. Our study provides a baseline understanding of the disciplinary backgrounds, research directions, and specific professional development activities that doctoral students in archival studies pursued around the globe from 2013 to 2015. This paper argues that doctoral education should continue to be a particular subject of archival research and indicates how archival students’ range of academic interests is diversifying and strengthening the scholarly community.     

Decolonising higher education curricula in South Africa: factoring in archives through public programming initiatives

South African higher education curricula are largely Eurocentric, to such an extent that indigenous knowledge is marginalised (Horsthemke in Transform High Educ 2(1)–9, 2017). Consequently, the decolonisation of university curricula has become a necessity. The nationwide ‘FeesMustFall’ student protests in 2015 and 2016 have underlined the need to address this matter urgently. Free quality education and the decolonisation of university curricula were among some of the students’ demands (Le Grange in SAJHE 30(2):1–12, 2016). Fundamentally, decolonising curricula involve a serious investigation of history and the strategising of future actions (Ngulube in Historia 47(2):563–582, 2002). Little is known about the potential role of archives in the process of decolonising higher education curricula in South Africa. Perhaps this can be attributed to a lack of awareness about archives and their significance in South Africa (Sulej in ESARBICA J 33:13–35, 2014). This paper explores the role of archives in the decolonisation of higher education curricula in South Africa. It appears that sub-Saharan scholars rarely consult archives (Onyancha et al. in ESARBICA J 32:67–77, 2013). Therefore, public programming is investigated as a means to get more members of the academic community to use archives as centres of critical inquiry. The relevant literature was consulted and discussed. Unique outreach or public programming initiatives will help the academic community to better understand the significance of archives in the decolonisation process.     

Spanish historic archives’ use of websites as a management transparency vehicle

Against the backdrop of Spain’s Transparency Act, this article discusses the presence or otherwise of a series of document types, proposed as management-related transparency indicators, on 61 (8 national and 53 provincial) historic archive websites. Although examples of good practice were identified, the information provided was found to be scant, in particular as regards lines of action, organisational objectives and yearly reports. The information most commonly provided on the websites included the collection classification chart, service use regulations and citizen charters. The inference drawn was that archives, so intently focused on their role in the application of the Act by the organisations they serve, neglect their own administrative obligations in respect of its provisions. The recommendation is that as government-funded and subsidised public service institutions, historic archives should exercise transparency by furnishing the information stipulated in the Act on their websites.