American historians and European archival theory: the collaboration of J.F. Jameson and Waldo G. Leland

J. Franklin Jameson and Waldo G. Leland remain forever linked in American archival history as the founders, respectively, of the National Archives and the American archival profession. From the immediate post-Revolutionary period until the eve of the First World War, American historians recognized that their nation's early history remained locked in European archives. However, not until the pioneering efforts of Leland, working under supervision of Jameson during the early 20th century, did any of these historical researchers bring to the United States, along with the voluminous copies of archival documents, the emerging tenets of European archival theory. This is the story of the collaboration between Jameson and Leland, and of Leland's efforts to professionalize American archival practice on the basis of European archival theory.     

Books are silent ambassadors: The Noma award for the translation of Japanese literature

Summary Now more than ever good translations are proving to be vitally important to fulfilling Shoichi Noma’s mission of advancing good relationships between cultures. With the emergence of dozens of world-class Japanese writers, the translators of Japanese literature have acquired a new significance and a new importance. No longer are they required to simply handle the language like an exotic and precious commodity but they must prepare a writer’s work to compete with literature from around the globe and let others understand the issues at their very heart of the Japanese people. Indeed, the selection committee’s choice of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an apt example of how literature at its very best can span cultural divides to promote mutual understanding of very complicated and important world issues. Written for Japanese to help them understand the devastation of war, it is a rare and timely book that confronts Japan’s experience head on. Ironically, Noma’s idea that books are silent ambassadors, an idea born from agony and defeat, so many years later is helping the world come together towards a unified vision of peace and understanding. “Literature has been described as a means of exchange between the hearts of people. Literary translation, then, is the building of bridges so that all peoples of the world can interact in this way.” Ye Weiqu, Chinese Institute of Social Studies.     

Analysis of Statistical Question Classification for Fact-Based Questions

Question classification systems play an important role in question answering systems and can be used in a wide range of other domains. The goal of question classification is to accurately assign labels to questions based on expected answer type. Most approaches in the past have relied on matching questions against hand-crafted rules. However, rules require laborious effort to create and often suffer from being too specific. Statistical question classification methods overcome these issues by employing machine learning techniques. We empirically show that a statistical approach is robust and achieves good performance on three diverse data sets with little or no hand tuning. Furthermore, we examine the role different syntactic and semantic features have on performance. We find that semantic features tend to increase performance more than purely syntactic features. Finally, we analyze common causes of misclassification error and provide insight into ways they may be overcome.     

Sustainability of independent community archives in China: a case study

There are three models for community archives in China. The first one is where community archives are kept in government-funded/government-established museums or archives. The second is where community archives are kept by scholarly organizations such as universities. The third involves the community establishing its own archive. This last model is very unusual in China. The PiCun Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Labor (PCMML) provides an example of this model as it is the only independent community archives focusing on migrant workers in China. This paper explores the emergence and development of PCMML, its impact on community members and challenges faced including funding and staffing, but also those unique to China—PCMML is greatly influenced by a range of national and local government policies and regulations. Conclusions are that survival strategies for independent community archives in China are dependent on three dimensions: the community itself, society and the government. Cultural consciousness of the community is the premise for the establishment and sustainability of independent community archives, and independent community archives can be the public space to cultivate cultural consciousness of community members and thus activates community members’ agency to document, preserve and disseminate their own history. At the same time, independent community archives also need to engage with broader society to avoid involution and gain support and understanding. Independent community archives are constrained by government policies and regulations, so it is essential for them to develop strategic relationships with government.     

International Collaboration and Openness in Jordanian Research Output: A 10-year Publications Feedback

Previous reports stressed on the importance of international collaboration and open access (OA) publishing, as they increase the quality of the research and increase its benefits. In this study, we will assess Jordanian international research collaboration and OA publishing in the past 10 years. We performed a Scopus search for Jordanian publications in the years 2008–2017, where we extracted and calculated the total number of publications, publications in OA journals, publications with international collaborations. Moreover, we assessed the disciplines Jordanians usually publish in. During the 10-year interval, we found a total of 20,359 Jordan-affiliated publications indexed in Scopus. We found a dramatic increase in number of publications with international collaboration from 38% in 2008 reaching 53.3% in 2017, and an increase in OA publications from 7.3% of the total publications in 2008, reaching 18.7% of the total publications in 2017. Total number of Scopus indexed publications from Jordan has increased by 57.9% over the past 10 years. Although international collaboration and OA publications have dramatically increased in recent years, Jordanian researchers should focus more on international collaboration with developed countries and on self-archiving their publications.     

The Dynamic Landscape of Marketing Children’s Books: Publishers Find Consistent Success Through a Combination of Online and Traditional Marketing to Adults and Children

There are a number of challenges unique to the children’s book sector faced by publishers in today’s digitally-dominant business market, making it more crucial than ever for children’s book marketers to create multifaceted marketing plans that include differing but complementary approaches. Among the common marketing challenges specific to children’s books are overabundance of content, competition, access to the library market, the digital versus print dichotomy, difficulty of marketing directly to young readers on the Internet, and the dual (child and adult) target audience. While some marketing tactics must effectively attract the attention of the child reader, it is of fundamental importance (with some exceptions) for publishers, authors, and marketers of children’s books to also ensure their marketing techniques target the adult gatekeepers who are likely to purchase those books. Depending upon various factors, including age range of the reader and subject matter, marketers of children’s books are most successful when applying a mix of traditional and digital marketing techniques.     

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.     

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.