Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography

New on ejournals@cambridge A-Z : JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY.

From the journal’s Aims and Scope page:

“The Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography(JASE) brings physicians and sonographers peer-reviewed original investigations and state-of-the-art review articles that cover conventional clinical applications of cardiovascular ultrasound, as well as newer techniques with emerging clinical applications. These include three-dimensional echocardiography, strain and strain rate methods for evaluating cardiac mechanics and interventional applications.”

Now available to University of Cambridge users from volume 8 (1995) to present.

Access Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography via the ejournals@cambridge A-Z or at this link.

Nature Ecology and Evolution

New on ejournals@cambridge A-Z : NATURE ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION.

Nature ecology and evolution, a new journal published by the Nature Publishing Group, has now been added to the University’s site licence.

“The journal will cover the fundamental science of evolution and ecology, from molecules through to ecosystems, as well as the applications to fields as diverse as conservation, behaviour and medicine.”

Available to the University of Cambridge electronically from volume 1 (2017) to present.

Access Nature ecology and evolution via the ejournals@cambridge A-Z or at this link.

Text & Data Mining LibGuide

We are keen to help the research process where we may be able to make a contribution towards facilitating text & data mining in the University.  To that end we offer a new LibGuide on text & data mining in the growing number of guides in the Cambridge Libraries’ family of LibGuides.

The aim of this guide is to make a start towards exposing the breadth of content (mostly library-subscribed) that may be of potential exploitation by Cambridge researchers wanting to use the techniques of text and data mining in their research.  The guide summarizes the main points in the Hargreaves exception and builds on and links out to professional bodies and information sources to provide librarians and University members with a beginner’s guide to first steps in TDM and considerations it is important to make.

The guide provides a means of contacting us to clear any issues that may arise with site access when TDM is performed on publisher content, as appropriate to researchers’ rights and needs.  As everyone acknowledges, these are still early days in experience with the exception and so we hope and expect the guide to develop with your feedback and grow to become more useful over time. Just now the emphasis of the guide is more on the side of supply of library provided content for mining, and how we can help with that.  In the University the Research Data Management website and the Office of Scholarly Communication have the expertise to support researchers more broadly in their wider remits and maintain resources to support every stage of a research project.

As we’re releasing this guide with Wimbledon in full swing, we thought a visualization from Tableau – the tool to inspire colleagues with the findings and insights from analysis on big data – of the genius that is Roger Federer might be pertinent …

 

Digital humanities support & ConceptLab at CRASSH

Dr. Gabriel Recchia, Research Associate, CRASSH, writes from the interdisciplinary Concept Lab project:-

For the past two and a half years, I have been a research associate at the Concept Lab (under PI Peter de Bolla), an interdisciplinary project housed at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. The Concept Lab combines perspectives from digital humanities, computational linguistics, and cognitive science to attempt a bold goal: the development of a practical and theoretical framework for the analysis of conceptual structure. This is linked to a deep commitment to developing new methods for understanding the history of ideas. By attending to how statistical associations between groups of words in large corpora of printed texts constellate, disaggregate, and change in other ways over time, it is possible to obtain a deeper understanding of how the discourse surrounding particular concepts has changed from decade to decade — and, we would argue, to discover how the very concepts being discussed have changed as well.

In this regard, the eresources and services provided by the Cambridge University Library Eresources Subscriptions team have been invaluable. Early on, we considered turning to Google Books data to derive lexical associations for the eighteenth century, but quickly discovered that the coverage and variety of sources searchable within ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) was far superior to what Google Books had to offer for this time period. In addition, we were aware that the Stanford Literary Lab had successfully obtained access to the full text of ECCO documents in a machine-readable format, although in their case this required the metadata to be extracted from ancient tape drives. We hoped it might be possible to get such access given Cambridge’s ECCO subscription, and made our request known to the library.

Thus began a lengthy period of negotiation between the publisher and the Library to hash out the terms under which Cambridge University researchers might obtain access to ECCO metadata for purposes of text and data mining. Although I only had a slim window into this process, I was continually struck by the Library’s strong commitment to obtaining terms that would be in the best interest of University projects. Ultimately, a deal was made, and the Cambridge University Library Eresources team provided us with what we needed in an easy-to-use format under terms that permitted us to do the research we had hoped to do. It was well worth the wait, as ECCO has allowed us to explore the trajectory of political, economic, psychological and other concepts over time in a way that simply would not otherwise have been possible. Through my participation in the Digital Humanities Network, I have gladly been able to point many people at Cambridge towards ECCO and other subscription eresources, available at http://libguides.cam.ac.uk/az.php?a=all , that we make use of on a regular basis. These include Early English Books Online and Gale Primary Sources, which provides advanced search capabilities for texts within the Times Digital Archive, British Library Newspapers, and eleven other databases. We owe Cambridge University Library and the Eresources Subscriptions team many thanks for their efforts.

For more information on Digital humanities at the University Library, please visit How we can help you, some of the services we provide.

For more information and support for supply of copies of digital archives for TDM, please visit the TDM LibGuide. 

Druid’s Temple near Ilton, Yorkshire, c. 1800 built by William Danby. Image credit: By Paul Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9114383

“Between these two extremes, there are numberless degrees of similitude, each of which affects the observer more or less according to his turn of mind.”

Index of Christian Art Name Change

As of July 1, 2017, the Index of Christian Art became The Index of Medieval Art, a decision made after careful thought and consultation with Princeton faculty, students, administration, and the wider scholarly community.

“The change reflects the broad evolution of our institution’s scope and mission since its founding in 1917, when its work was limited to cataloguing religious themes and subjects in early Christian art up to 700 C.E. A century later, our records have expanded to encompass both religious and secular imagery, including Jewish and Islamic works, from the first centuries of the Common Era until the sixteenth century. The scholarly activities that we support and generate have also evolved over the years, reflecting the broad interpretive and interdisciplinary analysis that has become fundamental to the study of medieval images. Our new name signals more accurately our expanded holdings, mission, and goals, as well as our institution’s broad potential to serve researchers in multiple fields of study.”

The Index of Medieval Art can be accessed via this link or via the Cambridge LibGuides Databases A-Z.  (Note that though the name has changed, the URL remains the same.)

Image credit: Courting couple on horseback with falcon, Morgan Library M.73, fol. 3r. (Paris, c. 1470).