118,651 research outputs found
Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Durable Encoding for When It's Too Late to Ask
No full textHow can an author store digital information so that it will be reliably intelligible, even years later when he is no longer available to answer questions? Methods that might work are not good enough; what is preserved today should be reliably intelligible whenever someone wants it. Prior proposals fail because they generally confound saved data with irrelevant details of today’s information technology—details that are difficult to define, extract, and save completely and accurately.
We use a virtual machine to represent and eventually to render any data whatsoever. We focus on a case of intermediate difficulty—an executable procedure—and identify a variant for every other data type.
This solution might be more elaborate than needed to render some text, image, audio, or video data. Simple data can be preserved as representations using well-known standards. We sketch practical methods for files ranging from simple structures to those containing computer programs, treating simple cases here and deferring complex cases for future work. Enough of the complete solution is known to enable practical aggressive preservation programs today.
Preserving Digital Records: A Method Guided by Scientific Philosophy
No full textPreserving digital information has received steadily increasing attention since 1995. However there has been little substantial progress towards resolving the key technical challenges: first, ensuring the future ability to use producer’s information with computers whose design cannot today be known; and second, creating durable evidence so that each future user can prudently decide whether to trust saved information.
We outline a solution to these challenges—a solution that we call the Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) method. TDOs provide reliable packaging for any type of digital object, no matter how distant its eventual recipients are in time, space, and organizational affiliation from the information sources. Each preserved object carries its own provenance audit trail. Information producers can prepare documents for archiving without help or permission from anyone. Archivists can add metadata without communicating with producers. Consumers can test the authenticity of preserved documents without human assistance.
Deep analyses and searching peer critiques are important as preludes to implementation and deployment of any proposed digital preservation solution. Early twentieth-century philosophy and pictorial models help clarify dilemmas expressed in Archivaria articles and elsewhere. Our analysis leads us to suggest that the TDO method achieves technical quality against which any method of digital preservation should be judged.
Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Evidence Even After Every Witness is Dead
No full textHow can a publisher store digital information so that any reader can reliably test its authenticity,
even years later when no witness can vouch for its validity? What is the simplest security
infrastructure sufficient to protect and later test evidence of authenticity?
In ancient times, wax seals impressed with signet rings were affixed to documents as evidence of
their authenticity. A digital counterpart is a message authentication code fixed firmly to each
important document. If a digital object is sealed together with its own audit trail, each user can
examine this evidence to decide whether to trust the content—no matter how distant this user is
in time, space, and social affiliation from the document’s source.
We suggest technical means for accomplishing this: encapsulation of the document content with
metadata describing its origins, cryptographic sealing, webs of trust for public keys rooted in a
forest of respected institutions, and a certain way of managing document identifiers. These
means will satisfy emerging needs in civilian and military record management, including medical
patient records, regulatory records for aircraft and pharmaceuticals, business records for
financial audit, legislative and legal briefs, and scholarly works.
This is true for any kind of document, independently of its purposes and of most data type and
representation details, and provides each user with autonomy for most of what he does.
Producers can prepare works for preservation without permission from or synchronization with
any authority or service agent. Librarians can add metadata without communicating with
document originators or repository managers. Consumers can test authenticity without Internet
delays, apart from those for fetching cryptographic certificates.
Our method accomplishes much of what is sought under labels such as “trusted digital
repositories”, and does so more flexibly and economically than any method yet proposed. It
requires at most easy extensions of available content management software, and is therefore
compatible with what most digital repositories have installed and are using today.
Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Syntax and Semantics--Tension Between Facts and Values
No full textPrior Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Object articles describe a method for preserving digitally represented information. Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) representation and packaging makes any digital content reliably meaningful to consumers, no matter how distant these are in time, in space, and in social affiliation from their information sources. The current article focuses on digital document authenticity and on evidence a consumer can use to decide whether to trust the content.
Such considerations are necessarily epistemological. Arguing the issues must start by conveying as unambiguously as possible what we mean by words like ‘authenticity’ and ‘evidence’ and by distinguishing between statements that are ‘objective’ and those that are ‘subjective’. Our analysis applies Wittgenstein’s teaching to pictorial models of digital and conventional communication.
This analysis leads us to identify an ethical imperative for digital preservation, and to suggest that the TDO method defines a quality standard against which any method of digital preservation should be judged.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Square Dancing with the Stars to Enhance Dynamic Hirschman Linkages?
No full textIn this Presidential Address, the author takes the reader on a reconnaissance of his life and time as a regional scientist. He points out scenery he found scintillating along the way, hoping that some may pick up the banner and chew on a few of the ideas for a while. He suggests a revisit to Albert O. Hirschman’s notion of key sectors and more empirical analysis related to Marcus Berliant’s and Masahisa Fujita’s notion of knowledge creation and transfer.Presidential Address, San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 2014 (53rd Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Letter from unknown writer to Jesse L. Boyce
No full textLetter to Jesse L. Boyce from unknown author (possibly Jack) about the investigation into the powder magazine located in the Grand Canyon. Some personal news is included in the letter such as the writer's marriage to the daughter of C.A. Taylor, former Supervisor of Cochise County
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Sarah L. Blum Author Visit - Warrior Nurse: PTSD and Healing
No full textHear Sarah L. Blum, author of Women Under Fire: Abuse in the Military, discuss her newest book, Warrior Nurse: PTSD and Healing followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Sarah L. Blum is a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as an operating room nurse during the intense fighting of 1967. In recognition of her service, she was awarded the Army Commendation Medal.
Sponsored by CWU Veterans Center and CWU Libraries.https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/libraryevents/1252/thumbnail.jp
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