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International audience; Published in OA on RESSI (http://www.ressi.ch/) at the end of Octobre 2021. We present here highlights from an enquiry on the innovations in scholarly writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the H2020 project OPERAS-P. This article explores the theme of Open Research Data and its role in the emergence of new models of scholarly writing. We examine more closely the obstacles and fostering conditions to the publication of research data, both from a social and a technical perspective.

Mexico’s so-called “War on Drugs” began as a war on poor people. This article locates the roots of Mexico’s current drug-related violence in a longer history of state terror and violence enacted against social movements and rural communities. The article traces this history by grounding it locally in the guerrerense municipality of Coyuca de Catalán. Resumen: El norte chiquito: De “guerras sucias” a guerras de drogas en Tierra Caliente de Guerrero La mal llamada “guerra contra las drogas” en México empezó como una guerra contra los pobres. Este articulo ubica las raíces de la violencia en el México contemporáneo dentro una historia de terrorismo de estado y violencia durante la década de los años 70. Para desenredar estas raíces, el artículo ofrece una perspectiva histórica y local basada en el municipio guerrerense de Coyuca de Catalán.

An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate, an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is based on Schema$.$org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for their use in a wide variety of situations. An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics, digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying "just enough" Linked Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. An RO-Crate for this article is available at https://www.researchobject.org/2021-packaging-research-artefacts-with-ro-crate/ Comment: 42 pages. Submitted to Data Science

AbstractMany believe that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites. However, quantifications of how features of reference lists affect citations remain sparse. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this period, significant changes occurred in reference lists’ features. On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications. We also show that highly cited articles across the ecological literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful references, and include more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal span of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists, at least in ecology.

Introduction to Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges edited by Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas. Forthcoming, Routledge, 2020.

­The Eastern Fertile Crescent region of western Iran and eastern Iraq hosted major developments in the transition from hunting and gathering to more sedentary agricultural lifestyles through the Early Neolithic period, 10,000-7000 BC. Within the scope of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project, excavations have been conducted at two Early Neolithic sites in the Kurdistan region of Iraq: Bestansur and Shimshara, as well as survey in the region of the Epipalaeolithic site of Zarzi since 2012. Bestansur represents an early stage in the transition to sedentary, agricultural life, where the inhabitants pursued a biodiverse strategy of hunting, gathering, herding and cultivating, maximising the new opportunities afforded by the warmer climate of the Early Holocene. They also constructed a substantial settlement of mudbrick, including a major building with a minimum of 78 human individuals buried under its floor in association with hundreds of beads. ­ These buildings and human remains provide new insights into social relations, mortuary practices, demography, diet, health and disease during the early stages of sedentarisation. ­ The material culture of Bestansur and Shimshara is rich in imported items such as obsidian, carnelian and sea-shells, indicating the extent to which Early Neolithic communities were networked across the Eastern Fertile Crescent and beyond along routes that later became the Silk Roads. This volume includes final reports by a large-scale interdisciplinary team on a wealth of new data from excavations at Bestansur and Shimshara, through application of state-of-the-art scientific techniques, integrated ecological and social approaches and sustainability studies. ­ The net result is to re-emphasise the enormous significance of the Eastern Fertile Crescent in one of the most important episodes in human history: the Neolithic transition.

The last glacial period is characterized by a number of millennial climate events that have been identified in both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and that are abrupt in Greenland climate records. The mechanisms governing this climate variability remain a puzzle that requires a precise synchronization of ice cores from the two hemispheres to be resolved. Previously, Greenland and Antarctic ice cores have been synchronized primarily via their common records of gas concentrations or isotopes from the trapped air and via cosmogenic isotopes measured on the ice. In this work, we apply ice core volcanic proxies and annual layer counting to identify large volcanic eruptions that have left a signature in both Greenland and Antarctica. Generally, no tephra is associated with those eruptions in the ice cores, so the source of the eruptions cannot be identified. Instead, we identify and match sequences of volcanic eruptions with bipolar distribution of sulfate, i.e. unique patterns of volcanic events separated by the same number of years at the two poles. Using this approach, we pinpoint 82 large bipolar volcanic eruptions throughout the second half of the last glacial period (12–60 ka). This improved ice core synchronization is applied to determine the bipolar phasing of abrupt climate change events at decadal-scale precision. In response to Greenland abrupt climatic transitions, we find a response in the Antarctic water isotope signals (δ18O and deuterium excess) that is both more immediate and more abrupt than that found with previous gas-based interpolar synchronizations, providing additional support for our volcanic framework. On average, the Antarctic bipolar seesaw climate response lags the midpoint of Greenland abrupt δ18O transitions by 122±24 years. The time difference between Antarctic signals in deuterium excess and δ18O, which likewise informs the time needed to propagate the signal as described by the theory of the bipolar seesaw but is less sensitive to synchronization errors, suggests an Antarctic δ18O lag behind Greenland of 152±37 years. These estimates are shorter than the 200 years suggested by earlier gas-based synchronizations. As before, we find variations in the timing and duration between the response at different sites and for different events suggesting an interaction of oceanic and atmospheric teleconnection patterns as well as internal climate variability.

Massively multilingual models for neural machine translation (NMT) are theoretically attractive, but often underperform bilingual models and deliver poor zero-shot translations. In this paper, we explore ways to improve them. We argue that multilingual NMT requires stronger modeling capacity to support language pairs with varying typological characteristics, and overcome this bottleneck via language-specific components and deepening NMT architectures. We identify the off-target translation issue (i.e. translating into a wrong target language) as the major source of the inferior zero-shot performance, and propose random online backtranslation to enforce the translation of unseen training language pairs. Experiments on OPUS-100 (a novel multilingual dataset with 100 languages) show that our approach substantially narrows the performance gap with bilingual models in both one-to-many and many-to-many settings, and improves zero-shot performance by ~10 BLEU, approaching conventional pivot-based methods. ACL2020

RésumésL’objectif de cet article est de proposer un examen détaillé des apports et des limites de la modélisation en histoire à partir du cas de la Shoah. Il s’appuie sur une enquête qui a permis de reconstituer les « trajectoires de persécution » des 992 Juifs de Lens pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dont 527 seulement ont survécu. 491 ont été arrêtés, 468 ont été déportés et 449 ont été exterminés. Les données prosopographiques sont utilisées ici pour répondre à une question simple : est-il possible de modéliser la persécution ? En d’autres termes, est-il possible de construire une représentation simplifiée mais heuristique des processus causaux complexes qui ont déterminé les chances de survie face à la persécution nazie à partir de données standardisées sur un nombre relativement important d’individus ? L’article discute les apports et les limites d’une succession de méthodes quantifiées : celles qui s’inscrivent dans ce qu’Andrew Abbott appelle le « programme standard » des sciences sociales, ainsi que l’analyse des réseaux et l’analyse séquentielle. Pour chacune d’entre elles, sont plus particulièrement discutées les manières de rendre compte des interactions entre les individus, de l’historicité des comportements et des processus déterminant ces chances de survie. Les tentatives de modélisation à partir de données historiennes apportent ainsi de véritables renouvellements de connaissances, notamment lorsqu’elles sont menées de manière cumulative sur une même enquête. En passant d’une logique de propriétés individuelles à une logique de trajectoires interconnectées, ces approches permettent de mieux comprendre les interactions sociales et locales, et offrent ainsi des perspectives stimulantes pour la microhistoire de l’Holocauste.