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In the present article we use geometric microliths (a specific type of arrowhead) and Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) in order to evaluate possible origin points and expansion routes for the Neolithic in the Iberian Peninsula. In order to do so, we divide the Iberian Peninsula in four areas (Ebro river, Catalan shores, Xúquer river and Guadalquivir river) and we sample the geometric microliths existing in the sites with the oldest radiocarbon dates for each zone. On this data, we perform a partial Mantel test with three matrices: geographic distance matrix, cultural distance matrix and chronological distance matrix. After this is done, we simulate a series of partial Mantel tests where we alter the chronological matrix by using an expansion model with randomised origin points, and using the distribution of the observed partial Mantel test’s results as a summary statistic within an Approximate Bayesian Computation-Sequential Monte-Carlo (ABC-SMC) algorithm framework. Our results point clearly to a Neolithic expansion route following the Northern Mediterranean, whilst the Southern Mediterranean route could also find support and should be further discussed. The most probable origin points focus on the Xúquer river area.

In this work, long standing challenges in the research on amorphous materials have been identified. In particular, the lack of reliable data repositories for properties and structures of amorphous materials significantly limits the possibilities for research. As a consequence, state-of-the-art data-driven methods, which have been widely used for crystalline materials for decades, can hitherto only be used in most limited capacity in the domain of amorphous materials. A pathway towards a resolution of these problems is proposed in this work. The overall methodology relies on the extraction of information from primary-literature sources, i.e., scientific articles. In this way, the entirety of knowledge in the domain, which has been published in the past, can, in principle, be utilized for new scientific discovery. The goal of the work presented in this thesis is to enable state-of-the-art data-driven research for the domain of amorphous materials science. In order to achieve this goal, novel contributions, in the form of new methodologies and their validation, in three distinct fields have been achieved. First, in the domain of information science, the table understanding problem has been approached. Based on previous research in the field, a complete methodology for the standardization of complex table structures is delivered, in the form of the stand-alone software library TableDataExtractor. Secondly, in the domain of data-driven research in the chemical sciences, and based on previous research in the field, new methodologies were developed for the extraction of physical and chemical properties for chemical compounds. For the first time, hierarchies of nested physical properties are extracted from primary literature sources, and without the need for manually written grammatical rules for extraction. As many as 18 interrelated, nested properties of crystalline compounds are extracted to validate the methodology, with an achieved overall precision of 92 %. Finally, the developed methodologies were applied in the domain of amorphous materials. An independent database of glass transition temperatures for arbitrary inorganic compounds has been generated, based on primary literature sources. This has subsequently been used to predict glass transition temperatures for arbitrary inorganic compounds with high accuracy. The presented results validate the developed methodology for overcoming limitations in amorphous materials research. At the same time, the developed methods lay the foundation for seamless utilization of primary literature sources in data-driven research frameworks.

International audience; This paper presents a full procedure for the development of a Part-of-Speech (POS) tagged corpus of Old Catalan. As an extremely low-resource language with rich inflection and frequent homographs, Old Catalan poses non-trivial problems in the development of a searchable constituency-based treebank. We demonstrate, however, that a carefully designed, semi-supervised method of incrementally building training data using both neural and memory-based taggers together with the Pyrrha annotation tool is highly efficient and yields accurate results. We propose that this simple and effective method could easily be extended to other low-resource historical languages for which no NLP tools exist yet.

From 1950 to 1985, the period spanning the latter years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the subsequent democratic transition, informal, grassroots groups of women joined together to demand resources, reproductive justice and legislative change in Spain. These collectives helped transform the social, political and urban landscape and the self-perceptions of those involved. Yet they have been largely ignored both by mainstream accounts of twentieth century Spain and by histories of feminism. The former sub-discipline is more likely to depict working-class, rural and Catholic housewives as the obstacles to change than as its drivers, while the latter has tended to overlook the southern European dictatorships completely. A lack of dialogue between these fields has meant that male politicians and experts are presented as the main force behind social and urban transformation in 1950s to 1980s Spain, while feminism is portrayed as the preserve of educated, secular Spanish women acting from the mid-1970s onwards. This thesis paints a new picture of grassroots women’s activism in different parts of Spain. It synthesises a study of archival material with testimony from oral history interviews from the mining region of Asturias and the peripheries of Madrid and Seville. Women from these various sites began demanding basic resources on a relatively widespread scale from the late 1950s and early 1960s, against the backdrop of unprecedented internal migration and industrial unrest. These contexts are a neglected aspect of growing social agitation in late Francoism. The thesis also shows that women’s collectives on the geographical and political margins collaborated with, influenced and learned from other groups and individuals with national and international links. These included nuns and ‘worker priests’ who belonged to currents of social Catholicism spreading across Europe in the period leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Catholic worker groups taught female activists how to deploy social research methods, skills they used to claim further social rights. Religious movements also helped ensure that discussion among local activists about sexuality reflected influences from abroad that predated the dissemination of translated feminist texts. The thesis also observes how from the mid-1970s female students travelled to marginal towns and barrios to ‘liberate’ the local housewives. It explores the sometimes fraught collaborations that ensued, and considers the political and personal impact on both working class women and middle class students. The thesis concludes that Spain’s peripheral areas were sites of feminist innovation in the mid- to late twentieth century. Key factors prompting women to mobilise included internal migration, Catholic internationalism and long-standing networks of gossip, factors often neglected by histories of feminism, of Spain and of twentieth-century Europe.

Roland Freisler was a leading Nazi lawyer, civil servant, and judge. The main focus of the thesis is on Freisler’s hitherto neglected experiences during the Weimar Republic and his role in facilitating the transition of the German legal system from the democratic Rechtsstaat to the Nazi dictatorship. The first chapter (1893-1920) examines Freisler’s experiences during the First World War and its revolutionary aftermath and sheds doubt on the much-repeated claim that he had “converted” to Bolshevism. The second chapter (1920-1922) provides a close reading of his doctoral dissertation and early academic work. The close collaboration with his supervisor, Justus Wilhelm Hedemann, as well as stellar grades paved the ground for a stellar legal career. As the third chapter (1924-1930) shows, these ambitions were squashed and Freisler began to pursue an alternative career as a leading Nazi lawyer, who broke down the boundaries between street, courtroom, and city parliament in order to undermine the Novembersystem. The fourth chapter (1930-1932) looks at Freisler’s breakthrough during the early 1930s when he became a leading local politician as well as an indispensable legal advisor. The fifth chapter (1933) provides a close reading of Freisler’s role in the Nazi seizure of power, which shows that the especially violent period of transition is instrumental for understanding the nature of legal politics in the ‘Third Reich’. The penultimate chapter (1933-1942) traces the residues of these Weimar experiences through a selection of case studies from Freisler’s time as Staatssekretär in the Prussian and Reich Ministry of Justice. The final chapter (1942-1945) does the same for his stint as President of the Volksgerichtshof. Having fallen from grace as a senior civil servant, the Volksgerichtshof signified a chance for redemption and, in some sense, a return to the performative struggles of the Weimar period.

Summary Seen as a crucial historical step in the development of ‘modern’ institutional healthcare, eighteenth-century British naval medicine has traditionally been studied from the point of view of the state and of physicians and surgeons: naval sailors’ attitudes towards health, medicine and their own bodies remain virtually unexplored. Using official and personal sources, this article sketches a ‘patient’s history’ of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British ratings. Aiming to counterbalance Foucauldian interpretations, it highlights some of the ways in which individuals, even when apparently most powerless, confined in ships far from home, and controlled by rigidly disciplined institutions, could take responsibility for their health, successfully or otherwise, within, against or alongside the system. If the unprecedented administrative requirements of the French Wars strengthened and standardised top-down medical authority, they also brought opportunities for evasion and negotiation. This complicates established narratives of the relationship between modern medicine, the armed forces and power.

Recent work has suggested that disorganised speech might be a powerful predictor of later psychotic illness in clinical high risk subjects. To that end, several automated measures to quantify disorganisation of transcribed speech have been proposed. However, it remains unclear which measures are most strongly associated with psychosis, how different measures are related to each other and what the best strategies are to collect speech data from participants. Here, we assessed whether twelve automated Natural Language Processing markers could differentiate transcribed speech excerpts from subjects at clinical high risk for psychosis, first episode psychosis patients and healthy control subjects (total N = 54). In-line with previous work, several measures showed significant differences between groups, including semantic coherence, speech graph connectivity and a measure of whether speech was on-topic, the latter of which outperformed the related measure of tangentiality. Most NLP measures examined were only weakly related to each other, suggesting they provide complementary information. Finally, we compared the ability of transcribed speech generated using different tasks to differentiate the groups. Speech generated from picture descriptions of the Thematic Apperception Test and a story re-telling task outperformed free speech, suggesting that choice of speech generation method may be an important consideration. Overall, quantitative speech markers represent a promising direction for future clinical applications. SEM was supported by the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery, funded by Schmidt Futures, a Fellowship from The Alan Turing Institute, London, and a Henslow Fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, funded by the Cambridge Philosophical Society. PEV is supported by a fellowship from MQ: Transforming Mental Health (MQF17_24). This work was supported by The Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1, the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC-1215-20014), the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Mental Health Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London. Funder: DH | National Institute for Health Research (NIHR); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000272 Funder: RCUK | Medical Research Council (MRC); doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000265