Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly known as digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data and information visualizations, interactive maps, timelines, audio files, and virtual worlds. These outputs are designed to enhance accessibility to users, facilitating engagement with historical content. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D modeling, and big data analysis. By utilizing these resources, the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories. == History == Rooted in earlier social science history work, particularly around the history of enslavement in the United States, early digital history in the 1960s and 70s focused on using computers to conduct quantitative analyses, primarily of demographic and social history data - censuses, election returns, city directories, and other tabular or countable data. - with the aim of producing defensible research findings These early computers could be programmed to conduct statistical analyses of these records, creating tallies, or seeking trends across records. This research into historical demography was rooted in the rise of social history as a field of historical interest. The historians involved in this work sought to quantify past societies, to come to new conclusions about communities and population. Computers proved capable tools for that type of work. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, most of these studies involved online databases that were checked by Professionals in Great Britain about once a year. The outpouring of quantitative studies by established scholars continued. Since then, quantitative history and cliometrics have been used primarily by historically minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded the Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s. The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc. that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative. Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas, and medieval historian Dr. Lynn Nelson's World History Index and History Central Catalogue. Another was The Valley of the Shadow, conceived in 1991 by current University of Richmond professor of humanities and president emeritus, Edward L. Ayers, who was then at the University of Virginia. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia adopted the Valley Project and partnered with IBM to collect and transcribe historical sources into digital files. The project collected data related to Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania during the American Civil War. In 1996, William G. Thomas III joined Ayers on the Valley Project. Together, they produced an online article entitled "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," which also appeared in The American Historical Review in 2003. A CD-ROM also accompanied the Valley Project, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000. Rosenzweig, who died October 11, 2007, founded the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in 1994. Today, CHNM boasts several digital tools available to historians, such as Zotero, Omeka or Tropy. In 1997, Ayers and Thomas used the term "digital history" when they proposed and founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, the earliest center devoted exclusively to history. Several other institutions promoting digital history include the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online (MATRIX) at Michigan State University, Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. In 2004, Emory University launched Southern Spaces, a "peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum" examining the history of the South. == Applications == There are many potential benefits to the use of digital history when combined with traditional historical methods. Some of these applications include: Combining traditional historical methods and new research methods in order to come to new conclusions. Using different tools to extract and analyse larger amounts of data that would not be manageable otherwise. Create models and maps of data extracted to create a visualisation of the data. Data extracted and analysed can be placed alongside existing historiography to increase combined historical knowledge. By adding new research methods to existing historical method, historians can benefit greatly from the ability to work with larger amounts of data and develop new interpretations from this. == Notable Projects == The collaborative nature of most digital history endeavors has meant that the discipline has developed primarily at institutions with the resources to sponsor content research and technical innovation. Two of the first centers, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia have been among the leaders in the development of digital history projects and the education of digital historians. Some of the noteworthy projects emerging from these pioneering centers are The Geography of Slavery, The Texas Slavery Project, and The Countryside Transformed at VCDH and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and The Lost Museum at the CHNM. In each of these projects, mediated archives holding multiple types of sources are combined with digital tools to analyze and illuminate an historical question to a varying degree; this integration of content and tools with analysis is one of the hallmarks of digital history—projects move beyond archives or collections and into scholarly analysis and the use of digital tools to develop that analysis. The differences between the ways projects incorporate these integrations are a measure of the development of the field and point to the ongoing debates over what digital history can and should be. While many of the projects at VCDH, CHNM, and other university's centers have been geared towards academics and post-secondary education, the University of Victoria (British Columbia), in conjunction with the Université de Sherbrooke and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, has created as series of projects for all ages, "Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History." Laden with instructional aids, this site asks teachers to introduce students to historical research methods to help them develop analytical skills and a sense of the complexities of their national history. Issues of race, religion, and gender are addressed in carefully constructed modules that cover incidents in Canadian history from Viking exploration through the 1920s. One of the original co-creators of the project, John Lutz has also developed Victoria's Victoria with the University of Victoria and Malaspina University-College. In addition to Ayers, Thomas, Lutz, and Rosenzweig, numerous other individual scholars work with digital history techniques and have made and/or continue to make important contributions to the field. Robert Darnton's 2000 article, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" was supplemented with electronic resources and is an early model of the discussions around digital history and its future in the humanities. One of the first major digital projects to be reviewed by the American Historical Review (AHR) was Philip Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge"—a multimedia exploration of changes to Los Angeles' physical profile over the course of several decades. In this essay, he also expresses his beliefs that historians have major power in
Stixel
In computer vision, a stixel (portmanteau of "stick" and "pixel") is a superpixel representation of depth information in an image, in the form of a vertical stick that approximates the closest obstacles within a certain vertical slice of the scene. Introduced in 2009, stixels have applications in robotic navigation and advanced driver-assistance systems, where they can be used to define a representation of robotic environments and traffic scenes with a medium level of abstraction. == Definition == One of the problems of scene understanding in computer vision is to determine horizontal freespace around the camera, where the agent can move, and the vertical obstacles delimiting it. An image can be paired with depth information (produced e.g. from stereo disparity, lidar, or monocular depth estimation), allowing a dense tridimensional reconstruction of the observed scene. One drawback of dense reconstruction is the large amount of data involved, since each pixel in the image is mapped to an element of a point cloud. Vision problems characterised by planar freespace delimited by mostly vertical obstacles, such as traffic scenes or robotic navigation, can benefit from a condensed representation that allows to save memory and processing time. Stixels are thin vertical rectangles representing a slice of a vertical surface belonging to the closest obstacle in the observed scene. They allow to dramatically reduce the amount of information needed to represent a scene in such problems. A stixel is characterised by three parameters: vertical coordinate of the bottom, height of the stick, and depth. Stixels have fixed width, with each stixel spanning over a certain number of image columns, allowing downsampling of the horizontal image resolution. In the original formulation, each column of the image would contain at most one stixel, and later extensions were developed to allow multiple stixels on each column, allowing to represent multiple objects at different distances. == Stixel estimation == The input to stixel estimation is a dense depth map, that can be computed from stereo disparity or other means. The original approach computes an occupancy grid that can be segmented to estimate the freespace, with dynamic programming providing an efficient method to find an optimal segmentation. Alternative approaches can be used instead of occupancy grid mapping, such as manifold-based methods. The freespace boundary provides the base points of the obstacles at closest longitudinal distance, however multiple objects at different distances might appear in each column of the image. To fully define the obstacles, their height should be estimated, and this is accomplished by segmenting the depth of the object from the depth of the background. A membership function over the pixels can be defined based on the depth value, where the membership represents the confidence of a pixel belonging to the closest vertical obstacle or to the background, and a cut separating the obstacles from the background can again be computed effectively with dynamic programming. Once both the freespace and the obstacle height are known, the stixels can be estimated by fusing the information over the columns spanned by each stixel, and finally a refined depth of the stixel can be estimated via model fitting over the depth of the pixels covered by the stixel, possibly paired with confidence information (e.g. disparity confidence produced by methods such as semi-global matching).
E-Science librarianship
E-Science librarianship refers to a role for librarians in e-Science. == Early scholars == Early references to e-Science and librarianship involve information studies scholars researching cyberinfrastructure and emerging networked information and knowledge communities. Notably Christine Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was a key player in bringing e-Science, and the idea of networked knowledge communities, to the attention of the library profession. In 2004, as a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, she conducted research and lectured publicly on e-Science, Digital Libraries, and Knowledge Communities. In 2007 Anna K. Gold, formerly of MIT and Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, authored a series of articles in D-Lib Magazine that opened the door for academic libraries to begin exploring roles, skills, and strategies for engaging in e-Science: Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians and Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 2: Libraries and the Data Challenge: Roles and Actions for Libraries. == Academic research and health sciences libraries == In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) e-Science task force issued its report on e-Science and librarianship. The ARL's report encouraged its member libraries to position themselves to engage with researchers involved in e-Science (eScience) by cultivating new research support strategies and developing their digital scholarship infrastructure. E-Science has multiple attributes; Tony and Jessie Hey framed e-Science for the library community by characterizing it as a research methodology: "e-Science is not a new scientific discipline in its own right: e-Science is shorthand for the set of tools and technologies required to support collaborative, networked science". In addition to academic libraries' interests in providing support for their researchers engaging in e-Science, the health sciences library community also emerged as a major proponent for creating librarian positions for supporting the information needs of large-scale, networked, research collaborations on their campuses. Neil Rambo, current director of NYU's Health Sciences Library and former director of University of Washington Health Sciences Library, was the first to use the term in the Journal of the Medical Library Association, in his 2009 editorial e-Science and the Biomedical Library. Rambo's definition of e-Science highlighted the potential e-Science held for creating data as a research product: "E-science is a new research methodology, fueled by networked capabilities and the practical possibility of gathering and storing vast amounts of data." In response to this article the University of Massachusetts Medical School Lamar Soutter Library and National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region encouraged health sciences libraries to cooperate to identify skills and develop a program for training e-Science Librarians. Then, in 2013, Shannon Bohle, an archivist who was employed in the library at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an NCI-designated basic cancer research facility, used experience gained there and previous papers and presentations about preserving scientific archival materials to expand the traditional definition of e-Science by including the terms, principles, and practices used in archival science. These included in the definition the "long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process," as well as examples of material types traditionally preserved in archives, like "electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints," as well as library materials ("print and/or electronic publications"). == Roles == Many areas of science are about to be transformed by the availability of vast amounts of new scientific data that can potentially provide insights at a level of detail never before envisaged. However, this new data dominant era brings new challenges for the scientists and they will need the skills and technologies both of computer scientists and of the library community to manage, search and curate these new data resources. Libraries will not be immune from change in this new world of research. Karen Williams identifies roles in the following areas for librarians in the developing world of e-Science. Campus Engagement Content/Collection Development and Management Teaching and Learning Scholarly Communication E-Scholarship and Digital Tools Reference/Help Services Outreach Fund Raising Exhibit and Event Planning Leadership == Challenges for research libraries == E-science tends toward inter- and multidisciplinary approaches that depend on computation and computer science. Research libraries have traditionally been discipline focused and, although increasingly technologically sophisticated, do not have systems of the scale or complexity of the e-science environment. E-science is data intensive, but research libraries have not typically been responsible for scientific data. E-science is frequently conducted in a team context, often distributed across multiple institutions and on a global scale. The primary constituency of libraries generally comprises those affiliated with the local institution. Licenses for electronic content are typically restricted to a particular institutional community, and the infrastructure to move institutional licenses into a multi-institutional environment is not well developed. E-science challenges all these traditional paradigms of research library organization and services. == Skills == Garritano & Carlson were among the first to outline a skill set for librarians seeking to support the data needs of e-Science; they identified five skill categories librarians new to this area should expect to adapt or develop when participating on such projects: Library and information science expertise Subject expertise Partnerships and outreach (both internal and external) Participating in sponsored research Balancing workload An example of librarians reconfiguring traditional librarian skills to meet the needs of researchers engaging in e-Science is Witt & Carlson's adaptation of the traditional reference interview into a "data interview" in order to provide effective data management and e-Science services. This interview consists of ten practical queries necessary for understanding the provenance and expectations for the preservation of datasets typical of e-Science that also help illustrate some of the educational tools and skills needed by a librarian new to e-Science. "What is the story of the data? What form and format are the data in? What is the expected lifespan of the dataset? How could the data be used, reused, and repurposed? How large is the dataset, and what is its rate of growth? Who are the potential audiences for the data? Who owns the data? Does the dataset include any sensitive information? What publications or discoveries have resulted from the data? How should the data be made accessible?" == Resources == In 2009 the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) and the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region (NN/LM NER) funded an e-Science program for building the skills highlighted above for librarians. Elaine Russo Martin, Director of Library Services at the Lamar Soutter Library and Director of the NN/LM NER developed this comprehensive e-Science program to build librarians' subject expertise in the sciences, developing their data management skills, and their familiarity with cyberinfrastructure and e-Science. Three major products of this program are the e-Science web portal for librarians, the E-Science Symposium, and the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC). This portal includes educational resources for specific tools and subject/discipline tutorials and modules to assist librarians new to e-Science. UMMS and NN/LM NER also publish an open access journal called the Journal of eScience Librarianship.
AlphaTensor
AlphaTensor is an artificial intelligence system developed by DeepMind for discovering efficient matrix multiplication algorithms using reinforcement learning. Introduced in 2022, the system was based on AlphaZero and formulated the search for matrix multiplication algorithms as a single-player game called TensorGame. AlphaTensor was designed to search for new ways to multiply matrices with fewer scalar multiplication operations. Matrix multiplication is a fundamental operation in linear algebra, numerical analysis, scientific computing, computer graphics, and machine learning. The system discovered thousands of matrix multiplication algorithms, including algorithms that rediscovered known human-designed methods and others that improved on previously known results for particular matrix sizes and mathematical settings. == Background == Matrix multiplication is one of the basic operations in numerical computing. The standard algorithm for multiplying two square matrices has cubic time complexity, while faster algorithms such as the Strassen algorithm reduce the number of multiplication operations by using more complex algebraic decompositions. Finding optimal matrix multiplication algorithms can be difficult because it involves searching through a large space of possible tensor decompositions. AlphaTensor approached this problem by representing algorithm discovery as TensorGame, in which each move corresponds to an operation that reduces a tensor representing matrix multiplication. The goal of the game is to find a low-rank decomposition of the matrix multiplication tensor, corresponding to an efficient multiplication algorithm. == Development == AlphaTensor was developed by DeepMind and described in a paper published in Nature in October 2022. The system built on the reinforcement-learning approach used in AlphaZero, which had previously been applied to games such as Go, chess, and shogi. Unlike those games, TensorGame involved a very large search space, requiring changes to the AlphaZero-style search method and neural network architecture. DeepMind released source code and discovered algorithms associated with the publication through a public GitHub repository. == Results == AlphaTensor discovered matrix multiplication algorithms over both standard arithmetic and finite fields. One widely reported result was a method for multiplying 4 × 4 matrices over the field with two elements using 47 multiplication operations, improving on the 49 operations required by applying Strassen's algorithm recursively in that setting. The system also found algorithms optimized for particular computer hardware, including algorithms designed for graphics processing units and Tensor Processing Units. DeepMind stated that some of the hardware-specific algorithms improved practical execution time compared with commonly used algorithms on the tested hardware. == Significance == AlphaTensor was described as an example of using machine learning not only to apply existing algorithms, but to assist in discovering new ones. The work was connected to broader research in algorithm discovery, automated machine learning, program synthesis, and computational complexity theory, especially the open problem of determining the optimal complexity of matrix multiplication. AlphaTensor later became part of a broader group of Google DeepMind systems for algorithm and mathematical discovery, alongside systems such as AlphaDev and AlphaEvolve.
Information professional
The term information professional or information specialist refers to professionals responsible for the collection, documentation, organization, storage, preservation, retrieval, and dissemination of printed and digital information. The service delivered to the client is known as an information service. The term "information professional" is a versatile one, used to describe similar and sometimes overlapping professions, such as librarians, archivists, information managers, information systems specialists, information scientists, records managers, and information consultants. However, terminology differs among sources and organisations. Information professionals are employed in a variety of private, public, and academic institutions, as well as independently. == Skills == Since the term information professional is broad, the skills required for this profession are also varied. A Gartner report in 2011 pointed out that "Professional roles focused on information management will be different to that of established IT roles. An 'information professional' will not be one type of role or skill set, but will in fact have a number of specializations". Thus, an information professional can possess a variety of different skills, depending on the sector in which the person is employed. Some essential cross-sector skills are: IT skills, such as word-processing and spreadsheets, digitisation skills, and conducting Internet searches, together with skills loan systems, databases, content management systems, and specially designed programmes and packages. Customer service. An information professional should have the ability to address the information needs of customers. Language proficiency. This is essential in order to manage the information at hand and deal with customer needs. Soft skills. These include skills such as negotiating, conflict resolution, and time management. Management training. An information professional should be familiar with notions such as strategic planning and project management. Moreover, an information professional should be skilled in planning and using relevant systems, in capturing and securing information, and in accessing it to deliver service whenever the information is required. == Associations == Most countries have a professional association who oversee the professional and academic standards of librarians and other information professionals. There are also international associations related to LIS (library and information science), the most prominent of which is the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). In many countries, LIS courses are accredited by the relevant professional association, as the American Library Association (ALA) in the USA, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the UK, and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) in Australia. == Qualifications == Educational institutions around the world offer academic degrees, or degrees on related subjects such as Archival Studies, Information Systems, Information Management, and Records Management. Some of the institutions offering information science education refer to themselves as an iSchool, such as the CiSAP (Consortium of iSchools Asia Pacific, founded 2006) in Asia and the iSchool Caucus in the USA. There are also online e-learning resources, some of which offer certification for information professionals. === Africa === Information development in Africa started later than in other continents, mainly due to a lack of internet access, expertise and resources to manage digital infrastructure, and "opportunities for capacity development and knowledge-sharing". Nowadays, academic degrees in information studies are available at many universities of African countries, such as the University of Pretoria (South Africa), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Botswana (Botswana), and University of Nigeria (Nigeria). === Asia === LIS-related studies are available in more than 30 Asian countries. Some examples listed by iSchools Inc. are the University of Hong Kong, University of Tsukuba, Japan, Yonsei University, South Korea, National Taiwan University and Wuhan University, China. Centre of Library and Information Management Science (CLIMS) at Tata Institute of Social Science in Mumbai, India. In Southeast Asia, the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL) connects librarians and libraries in more than 10 countries with resources, networking opportunities, and support for growing library systems. === Australasia === The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) as of 2021 lists six schools offering undergraduate and postgraduate accredited university courses for "Librarian and Information Specialists" on their website. In New Zealand, the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and the Victoria University of Wellington offer undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses for information professionals. === Europe === The majority of European countries have universities, colleges, or schools which offer bachelor's degrees in LIS studies. Over 40 universities offer master's degrees in LIS-related fields, and many institutions, such as the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University of Borås (Sweden), the University of Barcelona (Spain), Loughborough University (UK), and Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK) also offer PhD degrees. === North America === Information studies and degrees are available at numerous academic institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada. U.S. professional associations, together with their European counterparts, have undertaken many educational initiatives and pioneered many advances in the field of Information studies, such as increased interdisciplinarity and more effective delivery of distance learning. The Association for Intelligent Information Management, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, offers a qualification called Certified Information Professional (CIP), earned upon passing an examination, with certification remaining valid for three years. === South America === There are many schools and colleges in Latin America, which offer courses in Library Science, Archival Studies, and Information Studies, however these subjects are taught completely separately.
VideoPoet
VideoPoet is a large language model developed by Google Research in 2023 for video making. It can be asked to animate still images. The model accepts text, images, and videos as inputs, with a program to add feature for any input to any format generated content. VideoPoet was publicly announced on December 19, 2023. It uses an autoregressive language model.
Metadirectory
A metadirectory system provides for the flow of data between one or more directory services and databases in order to maintain synchronization of that data. It is an important part of identity management systems. The data being synchronized typically are collections of entries that contain user profiles and possibly authentication or policy information. Most metadirectory deployments synchronize data into at least one LDAP-based directory server, to ensure that LDAP-based applications such as single sign-on and portal servers have access to recent data, even if the data is mastered in a non-LDAP data source. Metadirectory products support filtering and transformation of data in transit. Most identity management suites from commercial vendors include a metadirectory product, or a user provisioning product.