• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publicationsclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• Open Access close
• NL close
• NARCIS close

Semantic representations have long been argued as potentially useful for enforcing meaning preservation and improving generalization performance of machine translation methods. In this work, we are the first to incorporate information about predicate-argument structure of source sentences (namely, semantic-role representations) into neural machine translation. We use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to inject a semantic bias into sentence encoders and achieve improvements in BLEU scores over the linguistic-agnostic and syntax-aware versions on the English--German language pair.

Background This research is an investigation into the role of expert quotes in health news, specifically whether news articles containing a quote from an independent expert are less often exaggerated than articles without such a quote. Methods Retrospective quantitative content analysis of journal articles, press releases, and associated news articles was performed. The investigated sample are press releases on peer-reviewed health research and the associated research articles and news stories. Our sample consisted of 462 press releases and 668 news articles from the UK (2011) and 129 press releases and 185 news articles from The Netherlands (2015). We hand-coded all journal articles, press releases and news articles for correlational claims, using a well-tested codebook. The main outcome measures are types of sources that were quoted and exaggeration of correlational claims. We used counts, 2x2 tables and odds ratios to assess the relationship between presence of quotes and exaggeration of the causal claim. Results Overall, 99.1% of the UK press releases and 84.5% of the Dutch press releases contain at least one quote. For the associated news articles these percentages are: 88.6% in the UK and 69.7% in the Netherlands. Authors of the study are most often quoted and only 7.5% of UK and 7.0% of Dutch news articles contained a new quote by an expert source, i.e. one not provided by the press release. The relative odds that an article without an external expert quote contains an exaggeration of causality is 2.6. Conclusions The number of articles containing a quote from an independent expert is low, but articles that cite an external expert do contain less exaggeration.

Oral history may enhance students’ historical content knowledge, historical reasoning competencies, and motivation to learn history. However, little is known regarding the role of oral history in Dutch history education. This study therefore explores the role of oral history in Dutch history education. We developed student and teacher questionnaires to examine secondary school students’ views (n= 280) and history teachers’ views (n=40) on the role of oral history in Dutch history education. In addition, we conducted interviews with three educational experts on the role of oral history in Dutch history education. The results showed that most students, teachers and experts believe that working with oral history is interesting, motivating, and may contribute to significant insights into the past. However, our results indicate that oral history plays only a marginal role in the teaching and learning of history in the Netherlands. Our study may be used by history teachers to implement oral history in their curricula and help teachers develop meaningful oral history tasks.

In recent political and legal history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state-formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographers, this book explores the layered and constantly changing meanings of territory in late medieval and early modern Europe before cartography and state formation turned boundaries and territories into more fixed (but still changeable) geographical entities. Its central thesis is that assessing the notion of territory in a pre-modern setting involves analysing territorial practices: practices that relate people and power to space(s). The essays in this book not only examine the construction and spatial structure of pre-modern territories but also explore their perception and representation through the use of a broad range of sources: from administrative texts to maps, from stained-glass windows to chronicles.

Reviewing previous studies and adding new paleomagnetic and micropaleontologic data, this paper focuses on the Middle Miocene chronology and stratigraphy in the Dacian Basin area -a critical moment in a critical location -a choking point between the water masses of the Eastern and Central Paratethys. Firstly, it gives a new time-frame for one major tectonic, biologic and basin evolution event -the intra-Sarmatian tectonic phase -that took place in the above mentioned time interval. Secondly, it proposes a revision of the timing for one of the regional sub-stage boundaries of the Middle Miocene in Paratethys (the Volhynian and the Bessarabian). And thirdly, it offers new, reliable magnetic data from four locations that will be further used in studies regarding tectonic rotations in the Carpathian orogenic system.

Umhlatuzana rockshelter is an archaeological site with an occupational record covering the Middle Stone Age, Later Stone Age, and Iron Age. The presence of both Middle and Later Stone Age assemblages makes Umhlatuzana the ideal location for the study of the MSA–LSA transition (20–40 ka) in southern Africa. This transitional period is characterized by important modifications in stone tool technology, from prepared core technology to a toolkit based on microlith production. These changes are argued to have occurred in response to changes in climate and environment leading up to the Last Glacial Maximum. The deposits bearing the transitional assemblages at Umhlatuzana rockshelter appear homogeneous with no visible stratigraphic boundaries. This study integrates geoarchaeological techniques in order to explore fine-resolution geochemical differentiations of the sediments that are macroscopically invisible, and that will provide insight into (post-)depositional processes over time. Samples were systematically retrieved from the western profile of the site following a grid-based sampling strategy and analyzed for pH, elemental composition (XRF), and Magnetic Susceptibility. Additionally, the results were integrated with preliminary micromorphological observations. Our study reveals a steady, gradual change in the geochemistry of the deposits throughout the Pleistocene, related to a combination of environmental change and occupation intensity. We suggest that the part of the sequence reported to bear Middle to Later Stone Age transitional industries is characterized by wetter environmental conditions compared to the underlying deposits. Additionally, we support results from previous studies that excluded large scale post-depositional movement of the sedimentary sequence. Our study offers a successful multi-proxy approach to systematically sample and study archaeological deposits at the macro and micro scale, integrating a variety of geoarchaeological techniques. The approach provides insight into the depositional and post-depositional history of the site, and allows for questions of stratigraphic integrity, anthropogenic input, preservation, and environmental change to be addressed.

Annotation has been identified as one of the "scholarly primitives", and plays a pivotal role in facilitating access to audio-visual (AV) media in a scholarly context. However, there is a lack of understanding of scholars' annotation needs and behavior. This paper is part of a group of studies aiming to understand how to improve annotation support of AV media, in order to facilitate research activities of media scholars and other scholars who make intensive use of AV media.The main findings confirm previous research discerning stages in media scholars' research processes, and indicate a great variety of research activities which occur in a non-linear order. Our studies also show that different annotation activities occur along those stages. The main contribution of this paper is a generic process model capturing AV media annotation, potentially applicable to a variety of research use cases in a scholarly context.

The aim of this research is to assign the provenance of marble samples uncovered from the extra-mural Byzantine Church of Udhruh (Augustopolis), south Jordan. The church is a three-nave basilica that most probably was built in the fifth century CE. In later expansion phases, it was remodeled by the addition of two side chapels and several rooms. The research investigated the physical, mineralogical, and isotopic properties of twenty-four marble samples of different functions using naked eyes, lenses, and multiple analytical techniques including optical microscopy, mass spectrometry, and X-ray diffraction. The results showed that the architectural elements were made of the gray calcitic Proconnesus-1 marble (Marmara, Turkey); while the four fonts or basins were carved out of the beige dolomitic Thasos-3 marble (Thasos Island, Cape Vathy, Greece); and the small squared column of unknown function was carved out of the fine-grained white calcitic Penteli marble (Mount Pentelikon, Attica, Greece).The results indicate that the most popular supply of the ecclesial marble to the south (and north) Jordan during the Byzantine period was the gray Proconnesus-1. The use of white Penteli and Thasos-3 marbles were limited to ritual elements.

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years1. Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configuration and specific interactions2,3. Here we provide detailed distributions of milk exploitation across Europe over the past 9,000 years using around 7,000 pottery fat residues from more than 550 archaeological sites. European milk use was widespread from the Neolithic period onwards but varied spatially and temporally in intensity. Notably, LP selection varying with levels of prehistoric milk exploitation is no better at explaining LP allele frequency trajectories than uniform selection since the Neolithic period. In the UK Biobank4,5 cohort of 500,000 contemporary Europeans, LP genotype was only weakly associated with milk consumption and did not show consistent associations with improved fitness or health indicators. This suggests that other reasons for the beneficial effects of LP should be considered for its rapid frequency increase. We propose that lactase non-persistent individuals consumed milk when it became available but, under conditions of famine and/or increased pathogen exposure, this was disadvantageous, driving LP selection in prehistoric Europe. Comparison of model likelihoods indicates that population fluctuations, settlement density and wild animal exploitation—proxies for these drivers—provide better explanations of LP selection than the extent of milk exploitation. These findings offer new perspectives on prehistoric milk exploitation and LP evolution.