Room for archives? Use of archival materials in <Emphasis Type="Italic">No Gun Ri</Emphasis> research

Archivists have long tried to understand users from the viewpoint of their archival collections. Such an approach misses important perspectives about use in, and users of, archives; how they perform research and develop knowledge while using archives. This study aims to comprehend the use of archival materials in research from the users’ perspective. It attempts to understand users’ perceptions of the impact of archival collections on their research, how and when archival materials are involved in the research process and how much weight they grant those materials in support of their thesis, from an actual research topic, the No Gun Ri massacre. The case of the No Gun Ri incident provides a good example of how archival materials play a role in historical discussions and an opportunity to look at archival contributions. No Gun Ri researchers acknowledged that archival documents were essential source materials for details about the incident and a major player in stimulating controversies and, consequently, provided the impetus for further publications. General recordkeeping situations also provided a circumstantial context of the incident. However, No Gun Ri researchers agreed that oral history was the most valuable and influential evidence for their major ideas and used archival documents to provide hard facts about the details of oral history. There are some unique research patterns of No Gun Ri researchers identified in this study which are different from the typical assumptions of archivists.     

From abbey to archive: managing texts and records in early modern England

This article investigates the long-term transformations in England’s documentary storage regime wrought by the Reformation. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries famously resulted in the dispersal and destruction of many medieval texts and records, but he and his successors sponsored efforts to retrieve lost materials, which they then used in the formation of ecclesiastical policy. Elizabethan counselors expanded the scope of this project, applying their expertise in gathering records to secular issues and assiduously preserving their own documents. During James I’s reign, the Earl of Salisbury’s patronage gave new authority to the State Paper Office, encouraging the consolidation of a centralizing archive that integrated earlier methods of collection, preservation, and indexing in its operation and construction. The article thus offers an analytic trajectory tying the practices of Reformation to the development of expanding national archives in the seventeenth century.     

British Colonial Administrations’ registry systems: a comparative study of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland

Recordkeeping in twentieth century colonial states has been ignored by scholars, or at best regarded as the result of a monolithic process of migration of metropolitan practices. Registries provided the principal organ of recordkeeping in British government systems of administration. This comparative study of the registries in the neighbouring territories of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi) reveals the true extent of metropolitan British influence, exposing an absence of centralised advice, and a consequent dependence upon individual innovation. This engendered divergent and sometimes weak recordkeeping regimes. The effects of this included the diminution of fiduciary responsibility and administrative accountability.     

A general approximation framework for direct optimization of information retrieval measures

Recently direct optimization of information retrieval (IR) measures has become a new trend in learning to rank. In this paper, we propose a general framework for direct optimization of IR measures, which enjoys several theoretical advantages. The general framework, which can be used to optimize most IR measures, addresses the task by approximating the IR measures and optimizing the approximated surrogate functions. Theoretical analysis shows that a high approximation accuracy can be achieved by the framework. We take average precision (AP) and normalized discounted cumulated gains (NDCG) as examples to demonstrate how to realize the proposed framework. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the algorithms deduced from our framework are very effective when compared to existing methods. The empirical results also agree well with the theoretical results obtained in the paper.     

Entity ranking in Wikipedia: utilising categories,links and topic difficulty prediction

Entity ranking has recently emerged as a research field that aims at retrieving entities as answers to a query. Unlike entity extraction where the goal is to tag names of entities in documents, entity ranking is primarily focused on returning a ranked list of relevant entity names for the query. Many approaches to entity ranking have been proposed, and most of them were evaluated on the INEX Wikipedia test collection. In this paper, we describe a system we developed for ranking Wikipedia entities in answer to a query. The entity ranking approach implemented in our system utilises the known categories, the link structure of Wikipedia, as well as the link co-occurrences with the entity examples (when provided) to retrieve relevant entities as answers to the query. We also extend our entity ranking approach by utilising the knowledge of predicted classes of topic difficulty. To predict the topic difficulty, we generate a classifier that uses features extracted from an INEX topic definition to classify the topic into an experimentally pre-determined class. This knowledge is then utilised to dynamically set the optimal values for the retrieval parameters of our entity ranking system. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia can significantly improve entity ranking effectiveness, and that topic difficulty prediction is a promising approach that could also be exploited to further improve the entity ranking performance.     

A Look at Global Expansion for e-Books

Forecasts indicate a growing demand for digital content around the world. Converting to digital content can open up countless new revenue possibilities. Adding alternate channels may be worth consideration, but what are the options and what does it take to utilize them effectively? This article explores the opportunities that potentially exist for publishers with content that may be digitized and distributed to global markets. A brief review of the current marketplace is also incorporated, including current players and trends. Finally, an analysis of some of the potential issues, challenges and pitfalls is presented in context of delving into a new international digital content distribution strategy.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

From special to inclusive education in Macau (SAR)

The education for learners with special education needs (SEN) in Macau (SAR), China, has gradually transitioned over the past 30 years from a completely segregated approach to a more inclusive one. Following a review of the development of special education and the transition towards inclusion in Macau, consideration is given to the enactment of inclusive education in mainstream schools. Interviews with the leaders in a primary and secondary mainstream government school in Macau outline the ways in which learners with SEN are included in mainstream schools. The discussion focuses on a range of issues regarding the inclusion movement in Macau, including management, schooling and the inclusive model that is applied.     

Sustaining technological innovation: The example of videoconferencing in English Schools

The main factors associated with technology integration have been the subject of research for over a decade. However, the conditions which sustain technological developments have been less frequently investigated. This paper explores this issue in the context of the use of videoconferencing in schools in England. The research took a multiple case-study approach by returning to schools with a reputation for demonstrating innovative policy and practice in videoconferencing, which were the subject of an earlier investigation. Analysis of developments in the interim five-year period led to the construction of a five-level typology of change. Further analysis identified critical dimensions associated with the sustainability of videoconferencing. These included technical and structural factors, as well as policy frameworks and personnel status. The perceived usefulness and relevance of videoconferencing as a learning technology emerges as a central determinant of sustainability, with the conclusion that for policymakers and schools, videoconferencing has become an ‘orphan’ technology.