The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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3117 research outputs found
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Evidence from Twitter Discourse between 2015 and 2022
No full textThe ethical issues that arise in the development of AI technologies are closely linked to public engagement. Although Twitter, as an online public sphere, provides a platform for exploring AI ethics discourse, it is difficult for current research to effectively extract fine-grained but meaningful information from the vast amount of social media data. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a research framework for the fine-grained exploration of AI ethics discourse on Twitter. The framework consists of two main parts: (1) combining neural networks with large-scale language models to construct a hierarchically structured topic framework that not only extracts popular topics of public interest, but also highlights smaller, yet significant voices; (2) using narrative metaphors to achieve the integration of fragmented information across levels and topics, ultimately presenting a complete story to help the public better understand the evolution of topics within AI ethics discourse. Our research has revealed that the most significant concern in the current AI ethics discourse is the lag in AI-related laws and ethical guidelines. It also shows that the integration of AI technology with the humanities is essential to promote a good public society. Through cross-level fine-grained mining, this study uncovers information hidden beneath the noise interference, which helps policymakers make targeted adjustments or improvements to policies. In addition, this research framework provides a reference for fine-grained mining of other specific issues in social media data
Inuit Perceptions of (Im)Mobility and Wellbeing Loss under Climate Change across Inuit Nunangat in the Canadian Arctic
No full textThe academic literature on personal experiences of climate-induced wellbeing erosion (often conceptualised as ‘non-economic losses and damages’) is still limited. This represents a serious climate policy gap that hinders support for marginalised people across the world including Indigenous People. Lately, we have seen a rapid growth in empirical studies exploring linkages between climate change and mental health among Indigenous Inuit in Canada. However, its association with human (im)mobility remains unexplored. This review article brings together the empirical evidence of Inuit experiences and perceptions of climate-related wellbeing loss and (im)mobility while providing climate policy with guidance for appropriate action. The systematic review investigates how Inuit in Arctic Canada felt that climatic changes impacted their (im)mobility and mental health while putting these feelings into a wider context of colonial violence, forced child removal, the residential schools, and other systematic human rights abuses. Twelve electronic databases (four specific to Arctic research) were searched for English and French, peer reviewed, qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2021. Fifteen selected articles were analysed using NVivo and thematic narrative analysis from a climate-violence-health nexus systems approach. Three overarching climate-related wellbeing loss themes, all strongly intertwined with feelings of immobility, emerged from the literature namely ‘identity and cultural loss’, ‘land connection as a source of healing’, and ‘changing environment triggering emotional distress’. The narratives circled around Inuit land connection and how climate-induced temporary (im)mobility interrupted this relationship. Climatic changes isolated Inuit away from the land and cut off their ability to partake in land activities. This strongly eroded Inuit wellbeing, expressed through distress, anxiety, depression, social tension, suicide ideation and deep feelings of cultural loss. The findings showed how Inuit mental health strongly depend on a sustained connection to the land. Further empirical research among other Indigenous People or nomadic groups on wellbeing loss and climate-induced involuntary immobility is urgently needed. Future research should particularly explore how such mental health impacts tie into past and present (post)colonial traumas and current suicide occurrences. This will help climate policy, research, and adaptation planning better prepare and propose more contextually and culturally appropriate health actions in the future
Filling Dr Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf in 1909
No full textDrawing attention to a forgotten controversy, this article describes the furious nationwide response to an inaccurate advance list of the contents of the forthcoming Harvard Classics that circulated across the United States in June 1909. The conversation about this list offers a rich trove of evidence for historians of reading: commentators express views about good and bad reading, the proper curriculum of a liberal education, and criteria for the status of “classic.” Especially in their attention to the perceived omissions of Shakespeare and the Bible from the set, these responses contradict simple, unidirectional accounts of “high” and “low” culture. Instead, this controversy shows Americans of the early twentieth century invoking a “classic” at once accessibly ubiquitous and highly prestigious: their commentary about the contents of the Harvard Classics presumes a relationship between elite authority and the broader reading public that is complex and reciprocal
Comparing Algorithms for Clustering the Genres of Literary Fiction
No full textWhat are the best methods of capturing thematic similarity between literary texts? Knowing the answer to this question would be useful for automatic clustering of book genres, or any other thematic grouping. This paper compares a variety of algorithms for unsupervised learning of thematic similarities between texts, which we call “computational thematics”. These algorithms belong to three steps of analysis: text pre-processing, extraction of text features, and measuring distances between the lists of features. Each of these steps includes a variety of options. We test all the possible combinations of these options. Every combination of algorithms is given a task to cluster a corpus of books belonging to four pre-tagged genres of fiction. This clustering is then validated against the “ground truth” genre labels. Such comparison of algorithms allows us to learn the best and the worst combinations for computational thematic analysis. To illustrate the difference between the best and the worst methods, we then cluster 5000 random novels from the HathiTrust corpus of fiction
The Case of the Cercle
No full textThe so-called Cercle, Cercle Pinay or Cercle Violet emerged in the 1960s as an informal discussion group of senior politicians, publicists, businessmen and intelligence officers from France, Germany and other Western European countries. A secret meeting place for conservative elites, the Cercle was initially based on the transnational network of the French lawyer, political advisor and anti-communist activist Jean Violet. In the second half of the 1970s, in reaction to Détente, the Cercle turned into a transatlantic forum with close personal ties to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The Cercle thus became both a catalyst and a typical example of a ‘neo-conservatism’ that combined classical conservative positions with neoliberal principles. What was ‘new’ about this ‘neo-conservatism’ was above all that it overcame the contradictions between different national currents of conservatism. Its representatives saw themselves as part of a transnational community and emphasized the global dimension of their political thought and action. Within this transatlantic conservative alliance, the fight against communism served as both a means of integration and an overarching goal. Nevertheless, the Cercle survived the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. It has remained a transnational meeting place for conservative elites to this day, although its focus seems to have shifted from anti-communism to anti-terrorism.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (1024
Aesthetics
No full textThe extensive evidence that Pound was a committed and influential propagandist for fascism and, by 1935, a hardened antisemite is typically dismissed by Pound’s defenders on grounds that he was more than just a fascist and racist. Inevitably, fascists are more than just fascists: Mussolini was a journalist; Hitler a painter; and Quisling a military officer. All also led fascist movements and contributed to the Holocaust. The same is true of fascist writers: Celine was initially a travelling doctor and Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature long before he gifted it to Goebbels in 1943. People contain multitudes; and yes, fascists are also people. Somehow these truths have wholly eluded Ezra Pound’s hagiographers. Further proof is therefore adduced in this article of Pound’s central role in the launching of postwar American fascism. Short case studies of Eustace Mullins, John Kasper and Matthias Koehl — who all visited Pound during his institutionalisation at St Elizabeths — makes plain that Pound became more than even a leading poet and fascist propagandist after 1945: he was also a leading neo-Nazi. This can no longer be denied. Pound took ideas seriously; when are we going to take his core ideas seriously
Histories of Northern and Regional Australia
No full textThe inspiration for the ubiquitous external stud frame of the Queensland house has previously been assumed to be the half timbered houses of Britain. There was an assumed single point of dissemination throughout Queensland via the work of a British immigrant architect, Richard George Suter. This article demonstrates a direct connection between an 1853 house in Geelong designed by German immigrant architect Frederick Kawerau and the earliest known external stud buildings in Queensland. The earliest of these two buildings, the
Rockhampton Railway house (1865), pre-dates Suter’s arrival in Australia and was designed by a German architect, Richard Roericht, who had emigrated from the same town as Kawerau. Roericht spent six years in Victoria before he relocated to Queensland. The second building, the Nanango School (1866) was designed by Benjamin Backhouse. Backhouse had previously practiced in Geelong and his association with Kawerau is well documented. This article challenges what we thought we knew about outside studding in Queensland and recognises the previously unexplored role of German architects in shaping the quintessential Queensland house
