Claiming expertise from betwixt and between: Digital humanities librarians,emotional labor,and genre theory

ABSTRACT

Librarians' liminal (intermediate) position within academia situates us to make unique contributions to digital humanities (DH). In this article, we use genre theory, feminist theory, and theories of emotional labor to explore the importance of discourse mediation and affective labor to DH and the interplay between these areas and academic structural inequality. By claiming our expertise and making explicit work that is often not visible, we can advocate for new and varied roles for librarians in digital humanities. Our analysis is informed by both theory and practice, and it takes a dialogic approach that depends upon the interactions between the two.     

Do karate fighters use situational probability information to improve decision-making performance during on-mat tasks?

This study examined the contribution of situational probability information to the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying decision-making behaviour during in situ Karate performance. Experts and novices were required to make decisions about various attacks in different fight scenarios. The order in which the fight situations were presented was modified in order to provide advanced probability information and identify whether fighters were able to use the latter information to make better decisions. Specifically, one of the attacks was repeated every four actions. Results revealed that experts were more accurate and faster than their less skilled counterparts to block and counterattack the opponent. The experts picked up the occurrence of the attack pattern after the fifth repetition whereas novices did not. This enabled experts to improve decision time and decision accuracy. Findings suggest that such superiority could stem from the perceptual and cognitive skills possessed by the experts, thus giving them the opportunity to recognise a situation more easily. This was reinforced by gaze behaviour which demonstrated that experts used a more efficient search strategy involving fewer fixations of longer duration on a lesser number of areas relative to the novices. Moreover, experts generated more refined karate-specific knowledge structures compared with the novices.     

Transfer paths and academic performance: The primary school merger program in china

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China's Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious program of primary school mergers by shutting down small village schools and opening up larger centralized schools in towns and county seats. The goal of the program was to improve the teacher and building resources in an attempt to raise the human capital of students in poor rural areas, although it was recognized that students would lose the opportunity to learn in the settings of their own familiar villages. Because of the increased distances to the new centralized schools, the merger program also entailed building boarding facilities and encouraging or mandating that students live at school during the week away from their family. Given the magnitude of the program and the obvious mix of benefits and costs that such a program entails there has been surprisingly little effort to evaluate the impact of creating a new system that transfers students from school to school during their primary school period of education and, in some cases, making student live in boarding facilities at school. In this paper, our overall goal is to examine the impact of the Rural Primary School Merger Program on academic performance of students using a dataset from a survey that we designed to reflect transfer paths and boarding statuses of students. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching approaches and demonstrate that there is a large “resource effect” (that is, an effect that appears to be associated with the better facilities and higher quality of teachers in the town and county schools) that appears to be associated with the transfers of students from less centralized schools (such as village schools) to more centralized schools. Boarding, however, is shown to have negative impacts on academic performance. However, students who transfer to county school benefit from the transfer no matter where they start and whether they board or not.     

Beliefs of experienced and student teachers about the nature and purpose of social studies education in New Zealand elementary schools

This paper reports on an investigation carried out in New Zealand into experienced elementary and student teachers’ beliefs about the nature and purpose of social studies education. Since its inclusion in New Zealand's curriculum, social studies has been organized around the notion of citizenship education with curricula and programmes of work influenced by four overarching “traditions” – social studies as: citizenship transmission; social science; reflective inquiry; and personal, social and ethical empowerment. A 20-item scale based on these traditions was administered to 228 student teachers and 64 experienced teachers. A factor analysis indicated that participants' perceptions of the dimensions of social studies education were, with one exception, reasonably close to the four traditions. Despite the contested nature of social studies, the student and experienced teachers held similar positions on the relative importance of the traditions and dimensions. It is argued that this agreement arises, wholly or in part, from their common “apprenticeship of experience” in classrooms, the broader socio-historical context in which their beliefs were developed, the widespread influence of a prevalent educational discourse, and a shared lack of experience in formal knowledge associated with specific social science disciplines. It was concluded that the uncomfortable generational encounters often reported in the literature between novice and experienced teachers are unlikely to occur in relation to the teaching of elementary social studies in New Zealand.     

Running for Freedom: The Politics of Long-Distance Running in Modern Fiction

This essay analyses the uses of running in contemporary fiction. It addresses the question of the literariness of running, and the ways in which literature enables us to articulate aspects of the sport such as its heroism or its relationship to the nation. It looks at a number of fictional texts, and focuses largely on two important works, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, Sillitoe's celebrated novella of 1958, and Jean Echenoz's novel, Running, published 50 years later. This essay examines the quality of running defined in literature, then looks at its traditional function of celebration of heroes, before closing on the freedom associated with running in such works.     

How New Caledonian crows solve novel foraging problems and what it means for cumulative culture

New Caledonian crows make and use tools, and tool types vary over geographic landscapes. Social learning may explain the variation in tool design, but it is unknown to what degree social learning accounts for the maintenance of these designs. Indeed, little is known about the mechanisms these crows use to obtain information from others, despite the question’s importance in understanding whether tool behavior is transmitted via social, genetic, or environmental means. For social transmission to account for tool-type variation, copying must utilize a mechanism that is action specific (e.g., pushing left vs. right) as well as context specific (e.g., pushing a particular object vs. any object). To determine whether crows can copy a demonstrator’s actions as well as the contexts in which they occur, we conducted a diffusion experiment using a novel foraging task. We used a nontool task to eliminate any confounds introduced by individual differences in their prior tool experience. Two groups had demonstrators (trained in isolation on different options of a four-option task, including a two-action option) and one group did not. We found that crows socially learn about context: After observers see a demonstrator interact with the task, they are more likely to interact with the same parts of the task. In contrast, observers did not copy the demonstrator’s specific actions. Our results suggest it is unlikely that observing tool-making behavior transmits tool types. We suggest it is possible that tool types are transmitted when crows copy the physical form of the tools they encounter.     

Denver,Colorado

丹佛市,是美国西部科罗拉多州首府,位于雄伟壮丽的落基山东麓,濒南普拉特河,不仅风景秀丽。同时也是落基山区经济文化中心,到底是怎样的魅力让丹佛成为“美国人最希望居住的城市”呢？让我们一起来感受一下吧!