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An editorial of the second issue of the journal "Research in Film and History" that explores current research, debates, and projects at the intersection between the disciplines of film studies and history. Issue 2

In automatic speech recognition, often little training data is available for specific challenging tasks, but training of state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition systems requires large amounts of annotated speech. To address this issue, we propose a two-staged approach to acoustic modeling that combines noise and reverberation data augmentation with transfer learning to robustly address challenges such as difficult acoustic recording conditions, spontaneous speech, and speech of elderly people. We evaluate our approach using the example of German oral history interviews, where a relative average reduction of the word error rate by 19.3% is achieved.

This piece serves to provide an introduction to this special issue of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, marking 50 years since the foundation of the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS). The various contributions cover some major technical achievements over this period, both looking back and looking forward. They also attempt to recognize some of the individuals who have played their part in leadership of AESS over this time, and they emphasize the global nature of the subject and of the Society.

In this presentation, I'd like to present the current status of Helmholtz AI consultancy for matter research in Helmholtz. I'd provide sneak previews into past and ongoing vouchers we embarked upon for the accelerator physics community and other collaborators. I'll try my best to give some insights on what we use our cluster for and why. Last but not least, I'll discuss challenges we faced along the way and will highlight some future directions if time allows.

DE: Das Ethnographische Material wurde in zwei Phasen in der Redaktion des Science Media Center (SMC) Germany erhoben. Das SMC ist eine unabhängige intermediäre Organisation zwischen Wissenschaft und Journalismus, die wissenschaftliche Expertise für die journalistische Nutzung auswählt und aufbereitet. Das Forschungsinteresse galt den Praktiken der redaktionellen Themenauswahl, den Organisationsstrukturen und dem Selbstverständnis des einzigartigen Akteurs in der deutschen Wissenschaftskommunikationslandschaft. Die Ethnographin war zunächst an allen Arbeitstagen vom 6. bis 31. Januar 2020 in der Redaktion anwesend und sammelte Material durch Interviews, Beobachtungen von Arbeitspraktiken und Redaktionssitzungen, Chat-Protokolle und Sendungen der Organisation, die aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen nicht im Datensatz enthalten sind. Unerwartet kollidierte der Forschungsaufenthalt mit dem ersten Ausbruch des neuartigen Coronavirus. Die Daten zeigen, wie die Redakteure auf den anfänglichen Mangel an wissenschaftlichem Wissen und die unsichere Situation reagierten, z. B. durch die Nutzung vorhandener Beziehungen zu passenden wissenschaftlichen Experten, die Anpassung der Auswahlkriterien zur Berücksichtigung wissenschaftlicher Preprints und die Entwicklung neuer Sendeformate, um den akuten Bedürfnissen im Journalismus gerecht zu werden. Auf der Grundlage dieser Erkenntnisse wurde eine weitere Ethnographie initiiert. Die zweite Feldphase fand vom 5. bis 31. Oktober 2020 statt. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt befand sich Deutschland mitten in der COVID-19-Pandemie, mit einer steigenden Zahl von Infektionen und einem wahrscheinlich zweiten Lockdown. Die Forschung wurde geleitet von dem Interesse an der Entwicklung des organisatorischen Aufbaus, den redaktionellen Praktiken und dem Selbstverständnis des SMC als Akteur der Wissenschaftskommunikation seit dem Ausbruch von COVID-19. Diese Feldphase wurde als 'hybride' Ethnographie mit drei Wochen digitaler und einer Woche physischer Präsenz konzipiert. Dies ermöglichte vergleichende Einblicke in die redaktionelle Arbeitsorganisation unter Heimarbeitsbedingungen. EN: The ethnographic material was collected in two phases in the newsroom of the Science Media Center (SMC) Germany. The SMC is an independent intermediary organization between science and journalism that selects and prepares scientific expertise for journalistic use. Research interests included editorial topic selection practices, organizational structures, and the self-image of this unique actor in the German science communication landscape. The ethnographer was initially present in the newsroom on all working days from January 6 to 31, 2020, and collected material through interviews, observations of working practices and editorial meetings, chat transcripts, and broadcasts of the organization, which are not included in the dataset for copyright reasons. Unexpectedly, the field work collided with the first outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The data reveal how editors responded to the initial lack of scientific knowledge and uncertainties, for example, by leveraging existing relationships with appropriate scientific experts, adjusting selection criteria to include scientific preprints, and developing new broadcast formats to meet acute journalism needs. Based on these findings, another ethnography was initiated. The second field phase took place from October 5 to 31, 2020. At that time, Germany was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an increasing number of infections and a likely second lockdown. The research was guided by an interest in the evolution of SMC's organizational structure, editorial practices, and self-perception as a science communication actor since the COVID-19 outbreak. This field phase was designed as a 'hybrid' ethnography with three weeks of digital presence and one week of physical presence. This allowed comparative insights into editorial work organization under home-working conditions.

While recent automatic speech recognition systems achieve remarkable performance when large amounts of adequate, high quality annotated speech data is used for training, the same systems often only achieve an unsatisfactory result for tasks in domains that greatly deviate from the conditions represented by the training data. For many real-world applications, there is a lack of sufficient data that can be directly used for training robust speech recognition systems. To address this issue, we propose and investigate an approach that performs a robust acoustic model adaption to a target domain in a cross-lingual, multi-staged manner. Our approach enables the exploitation of large-scale training data from other domains in both the same and other languages. We evaluate our approach using the challenging task of German oral history interviews, where we achieve a relative reduction of the word error rate by more than 30% compared to a model trained from scratch only on the target domain, and 6-7% relative compared to a model trained robustly on 1000 hours of same-language out-of-domain training data.

The computer has come to play a transformative role in the ways we model, store, process and study text. Nevertheless, we cannot yet claim to have realised the promises of the digital medium: the organisation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge through the exchange, reuse and enrichment of data sets. Despite the acclaimed interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, current digital research takes place in a closed environment and rarely surpasses the traditional boundaries of a field. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to continue questioning the models we use and whether they are actually suitable for our scholarly needs. There’s a risk that the affordances and limitations of a prevailing model may blind us to aspects it doesn’t support. In her talk, Elli Bleeker discusses different technologies to model data with respect to their expressive power and their potential to address the needs of the scholarly community. Within this framework, she introduces a new data model for text, Text-As-Graph (TAG), and it’s reference implementation Alexandria, a text repository system. The TAG model allows researchers to store, query, and analyse text that is encoded from different perspectives. Alexandria thus stimulates new ways of looking at textual objects, facilitates the exchange of information across disciplines, and secures textual knowledge for future endeavours. From a philosophical perspective, the TAG model and the workflow of Alexandria raise compelling questions about our notions of textuality, and prompt us to reconsider how we can best model the variety of textual dimensions.

This paper was originally presented in German at the DHd 2018 conference in cologne under the title "Eine nachhaltige Präsentationsschicht für digitale Editionen"

Editorial introduction to the third issue of the journal Research in Film and History. 1 5 3

In the ostensibly unceasing prioritization of motorized infrastructure, walking has remained a ubiquitous mode of mobility for a large proportion of Nairobi’s urban commuters. Planning for motorized mobility has historically been at a higher level of consideration although a much larger percentage of the population travels on foot. The conspicuous pedestrian has been and continues to be masked under the spotlight of the motor vehicle with a discernible outcome of spatial injustices. Using secondary data, historical literature and expert interviews, this paper examines how walking as a mode of mobility has developed over time and the challenges experienced by pedestrians in Nairobi. Linking to the notion of justice, the paper attempts to assess the association between walking and spatial justice using three dimensions—spatial, modal and individual dimensions—that are used as a framework to assess how injustices unfold and are experienced by Nairobi’s pedestrians. The historical path dependency that has restricted and attempted to replace walkability by prioritizing motor vehicle use as well as the technical engineering design that lacks integration of social aspects of mobility has presented challenges in provision of safe non-motorized infrastructure in the contemporary urban travel in Nairobi, enduringly dismissing walking as a valid mode of mobility. Advancing spatial justice in Nairobi’s urban mobility will require more than a technical process of extending the side of the road by a metre or two but rather deliberate effort in understanding the pedestrians’ mobility needs that can best be understood by attuning to the everyday realities of travelling on foot.