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We present a speculative design of handwritten text recognition(HTR), a form of automatic image-to-text recognition, resultingin plain text files of historical materials which can be presentedin a variety of formats (Muehlberger et. al 2019). HTR isbeginning to shift historical methods and practice, from samplingdata to exhaustive interrogation of primary sources (Muehlbergeret al. 2019). The aspiration of recognising the hands of peoplefrom various backgrounds, nationalities, professions, and education,with equal competence, surety and speed, has largely beenrealised (although this remains to be seen for marginalised communities).However, questions of equity, diversity and inclusion inthe technology and tools of HTR are yet to be properly addressed.This paper will adopt a speculative design approach to imaginea minimal HTR design, informing how collaboration and inclusivityare approached in the next stage of its development.

As the primary resource for preschool children, picture books,and their gender narratives, can unconsciously shape and changechildren’s perceptions of sex roles and gender identity (Bleakley etal., 1988; Connor & Serbin, 1978; Latima, 2020). However, existingstudies show concerning trends in the representation of genderinequality in modern picture books, such as the overwhelmingnumber of male main characters and traditional gender stereotypesof vocations, personalities and habits (Casey et al., 2021; Hamiltonet al., 2006; Lee & Chin, 2019; Terras, 2018). It is thereforeimportant for children’s picture books to have diverse gender descriptionsand improved equal gender representations.Since the second Feminist Movement in the 1960s, gender equalityin UK children’s picture books have been continuously examinedyet slowly improved (Adams et al., 2011; Allen et al., 1993;Capuzza, 2020; Hamilton et al., 2006). Similar studies have beenfar less common in China, as the Chinese picture book market onlydeveloped from the start of the 21 st Century (Xiao, 2021). Onestudy has shown the existence of the traditional gender biases inChinese picture books (Liu & Chen, 2018). Based on the researchgap between these two countries, this study will (1) investigategender representations and narratives in picture books, (2) comparethe similarities and differences between bestselling Britishand Chinese picture books texts from 2010 to 2020. We do so byapplying text mining techniques to analyse gender narratives withinpicture book texts themselves. This follows on from our 2022study where we analysed publisher’s descriptions of texts, ratherthan full text mining of the book’s content (Li et al., 2022).

This presentation reports on a case study investigating how NaturalLanguage Processing, a field that applies computational methodssuch as Machine Learning to human-written texts, can supportthe measurement and evaluation of gender biased languagein archival catalogs. Working with English descriptions from thecatalog metadata of the University of Edinburgh’s Archives, wecreated an annotated dataset and classification models that identifygender biases in the descriptions. Conducted with archival data,the case study holds relevance across Galleries, Libraries, Archives,and Museums (GLAM), particularly for institutions withcatalog descriptions in English. In addition to bringing NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP) methods to Archives, we identifiedopportunities to bring Archival Science methods, such as CulturalHumility (Tai, 2021) and Feminist Standpoint Appraisal (Caswell,2022), to NLP. Through this two-way disciplinary exchange,we demonstrate how Humanistic approaches to bias and uncertaintycan upend legacies of gender-based oppression that mostcomputational approaches to date uphold when working with dataat scale.

This chapter explores the changing human valuations of oil shale waste – blaes – in the district of West Lothian, Scotland. Around 150 million cubic metres of this material remain here in vast heaps known as bings, the remnants of a short-lived but globally significant oil industry, active between 1851 and 1962. In following the changing perceptions and uses of blaes through its creation, exploitation, discard, and reuse, it becomes apparent that it is not easy to definitively apply the categories of ‘toxic’ and ‘non-toxic’ to such materials and their heritage associations. In exploring the shifting valuations of blaes and bings over the last 170 years, the chapter proposes a geosocial understanding of the heritage of hydrocarbon exploitation and its waste in the Anthropocene and suggests that such materials may yet prove useful to us in the face of the climate crisis.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5NX (clade 2.3.4.4b) is responsible for major outbreaks in poultry and wild birds in recent years. In 2014/2015, 2016/2017 and 2020/2021 the main subtype in Europe was H5N8, however for 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 seasons, the virus acquired a different neuraminidase making subtype H5N1. It has also undergone additional reassortments with internal protein coding segments from other low pathogenic strains and spread intercontinentally to the Americas, Africa and Asia.Using a sequence dataset of over 4000 genomes, we propose a method for determining and classifying reassortants suitable for further phylogenetic analysis. For each segment, the genetic distance between pairs of sequences is calculated, and sequences are grouped into 1.5-2% similarity clusters, and labelled according to size. The reassortment code of a whole-genome is composed of the individual segment cluster labels. With this method we see that there are 2-3 main reassortants in Europe for 2021-2023, particularly with different polymerase segments. The donor viruses for these reassorted segments largely originate from other co-circulating ‘Eurasian-pool’ low pathogenic strains, however one reassortant which has been severely affecting gulls and other seabirds also has segments from a ‘Northern-pool’ of viruses (Alaska and Northern Europe). Additionally, once in the Americas, there are multiple reassortments with co-circulating low pathogenic America’s lineages.Next, reassortants fitness properties in the population were estimated from phylodynamic growth rates of viral effective population size from time-scaled phylogenies as a function of genome composition, and bird-species with BEAST2 Birth-Death-Multitype-Models. We also used local branching index to provide a relative lineage growth measure with different bird-species at each node in the tree. Coupled with dates and spatial locations inference of the ancestral nodes, we are able to map the spatial and host species origin, dissemination, and initial fitness of the different reassortants.We find that the H5N1 strain has mixed with previously co-circulating low pathogenic viruses and acquired polymerases and other internal protein coding segments, resulting in fitter viruses in certain avian populations and further spread. We predict the reassortants will continue in the autumn in Europe, and expect further reassortments in the Americas.

This essay outlines the history and context of the development of Digital Humanities (DH) in Russia, demonstrating various influences at play. We link the quantitative methods used to trace previous trends in scholarship, including mathematics and sciences; and modeling data and processes in the humanities. Each country is individual in the societal and intellectual contexts which encourage a field to emerge. This means that although the history of that field in various countries may look similar to outsiders, we are able to identify the lineage of intellectual approaches which continue to influence its methods and research.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digital content and infrastructures are increasingly essential, at a time when routine business and commercial frameworks have been disrupted or permanently destroyed, particularly in the cultural and heritage sectors (Arts Council 2020;Bakhshi 2020; Creative Scotland 2020). Yet it has also been a time of digital opportunity for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums: when digital representations of culture and heritage is all that is accessible, digitised versions of artefacts and objects have shown both how essential digitisation now is, and the versatility of digitisation. Cultural Heritage is important for wellbeing(Power and Smyth 2016), and although many institutions worldwide had to restrict physical access, 86% of museums increased their online presence and/or the amount of content they were placing online (ArtFund 2020), online searches for aggregated cultural content “quadrupled” (Gaskin 2020), with emerging opportunities regarding the reframing of digitised content as anessential part of cultural memory (Kahn 2020).

The Taiwan orogenic belt has high precipitation and high exhumation rates (3–6 km/Myr), making it a natural laboratory for understanding how erosion, tectonics, and climate interact. Understanding how rock exhumation rates have evolved since the late Miocene is key to unraveling climate–tectonic interactions. In this study, we present 8 new zircon fission track (ZFT) and (Usingle bondTh)/He (ZHe) cooling ages (including 2 unreset ages) from 5 samples from 1700 to over 3300 m elevation around the highly incised Dajia River in the core of the Hsuehshan Range (termed the mid-HR in this study) in central Taiwan. Two of the ZFT and ZHe ages (5.3 Ma and 2.6 Ma) are the oldest ages recorded in this region. These ages suggest that the cooling rate of the mid-HR is lower than that of the Backbone Range and Yushan. With these and previously published cooling ages, we modeled the exhumation and cooling history using a 2-D thermal diffusion equation with time-varying erosion. The ZFT and ZHe ages are best explained by a steadily increasing exhumation rate up to 3.4 + 0.5/−0.3 km/Myr from 6.5 to 1 Ma. The exhumation rate in the last million years is not as well constrained but appears to have increased at a slower rate. Our findings differ from those of previous studies that propose that the exhumation rate increased rapidly in the last 1–2 Myr. We propose that the steady increase in the exhumation rate in the mid-HR indicates increasing topographic relief, which is likely caused by progressive crustal thickening.