Ministry of Culture Research Portal
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A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation
No full textFew cultural practices beyond language are as widespread as stringfigure games. Their global distribution and potential to yield insightsinto cultural transmission and cognition have long been noted. Yet, itremains unknown how or when this behaviour originated and to whatextent shared motifs are signals of repeated innovations or deep culturaltransmission. Here, we combined a global cross-cultural inventory ofstring figures with a novel methodology based on knot theory, whichenables the unequivocal numerical coding of string figures. We performeda computational analysis of a sample of 826 figures from 92 societiesaround the world. Across these societies, we found 83 recurring stringfigure designs, some of which are regionally restricted while others displaya global distribution. The cognitively opaque nature of string figuredesigns and their clear geographic distribution reveal processes of culturaltransmission, innovation, and convergent evolution. Most strikingly, theglobal distribution of some figures raises the possibility of shared ancientorigins
Speech to text::AI in libraries
No full textThis project aims to leverage the implementation of advanced Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to enable text-based searches within the Danish Royal Library’s extensive radio and television archives. Based on the Whisper ASR model, we will demonstrate how transcribing audiovisual materials can make these vast archives significantly more accessible and searchable for research.Established in 1987, the State Media Archive was created to collect and preserve Danish radio and television broadcasts for future historical research. The collection includes nationwide public service broadcasts from the mid-1980s onward, supplemented with older broadcasts. The 2005 legal deposit law revision included radio and television, ensuring comprehensive digital collection from significant nationwide channels, while selectively collecting from others. Today, the digital archive holds over three million broadcasts from around 80 Danish radio and television stations, with 1,500 broadcasts added daily, and efforts are ongoing to digitize over 150,000 analogue tapes from before 2005.Traditional indexing methods cannot efficiently manage this immense and diverse corpus. This is due to the fact that metadata varies significantly between different channels and changes over time. Additionally, some channels, broadcasts or periods lack metadata altogether. Based on a selective part of the collection, primarily older sourced materials, this project focuses on fine-tuning the Whisper ASR model for Danish-language content in order to make the audiovisual resources text-searchable for research. The process includes several steps: Feature extraction, Tokenizing, Low-Rank adapters (LoRA)
