Center for Uncertainty Studies Blog - Tag [research]
Digital Academy 2023: Exploring Uncertainty in Toponyms within the British Colonial Corpus
From September 25 to 28, 2023, the Digital History Working Group at Bielefeld University welcomed participants to the Digital Academy, themed "From Uncertainty to Action: Advancing Research with Digital Data." This event delved into the complexities of data-based research, exploring strategies to navigate uncertainties within the Digital Humanities. In a series of blog posts, four attendees of the workshop program share insights into their work on data collections and analysis and reflect on the knowledge gained from the interdisciplinary discussions at the Digital Academy. Learn more about the event visiting the Digital Academy Website.
Exploring Uncertainty in Toponyms within the British Colonial Corpus
by Shanmugapriya T
My research project aims to extract toponyms from the British India colonial corpus to create a historical gazetteer. The primary challenge in this work revolves around the toponyms themselves, as they exhibit a high degree of fuzziness and inconsistency, particularly in their spellings. Historically, mapping, documenting, and surveying have been recognized as essential tools employed by colonial powers to demarcate, expand, and exert control over their colonial subjects. These activities enabled the colonial administration to establish governance over land and streamline revenue collection during the British colonial period. As time progressed, surveys expanded beyond their initial military and geographical purposes, evolving into comprehensive sources of information encompassing geography, political economy, and natural history. The British colonial India corpus is, therefore, intricate, marked by non-standard formatting, and plagued by inconsistencies in the spelling of Indian toponyms. This intricacy adds an extra layer of complexity to the task of extracting and organizing these toponyms for the creation of a historical gazetteer. The recognition of these challenges underscores the importance of using advanced techniques and tools to handle the uncertainty inherent in this historical data.
Digital Humanities methods and tools
The first and foremost challenge is the absence of a trained dataset of Indian place names. I need to focus on creating a trained dataset using Named Entity Recognition and other external open-access resources, such as Wikipedia. The second challenge pertains to the advanced programming techniques that I am experimenting with. The initial experiment with BERT NER for identifying toponym entities demonstrates that the algorithm performs well compared to other NER libraries. However, it also identified a few words that are not toponyms as place names and did not identify the broken toponym words as place names. Therefore, the extracted place name entities will require manual verification to confirm their accuracy. I anticipate encountering additional challenges when I begin exploring DeezyMatch, as I am currently in the initial stages of my research.
Digital Academy workshop on uncertainty
The Digital Academy workshop presented a fantastic opportunity for scholars like myself to convene and discuss a wide array of challenges, approaches, methods, and tools for addressing uncertainty. The inclusion of experts in the field of uncertainty was a valuable aspect of this workshop, enabling attendees to solicit advice and feedback on the challenges they face in their research. Although I was not able to attend the entire workshop, the workshop's theme serves as a motivating factor for me to persist in my research endeavors despite the numerous challenges I've encountered. I believe that ongoing discussions and collaboration within the academic community will be instrumental in finding effective solutions to these challenges and further advancing the field.
Questions remain open
The open questions revolve around the ideal size of the corpus required for applying the aforementioned advanced techniques and the expected effectiveness of the trained dataset. However, I am hopeful that I will be able to find answers to these questions in the near future.
References
Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova. “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.” North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2019). Accessed October 5, 2023. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805v2.
Hosseini, Kasra, Federico Nanni, and Mariona Coll Ardanuy. “DeezyMatch: A Flexible Deep Learning Approach to Fuzzy String Matching.” Paper presented at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, Online, October 2020. https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-demos.9. Accessed October 5, 2023.
Biographical note
Digital Academy 2023: Catrina Langenegger about Swiss Military Refugee Camps
From September 25 to 28, 2023, the Digital History Working Group at Bielefeld University welcomed participants to the Digital Academy, themed "From Uncertainty to Action: Advancing Research with Digital Data." This event delved into the complexities of data-based research, exploring strategies to navigate uncertainties within the Digital Humanities. In a series of blog posts, four attendees of the workshop program share insights into their work on data collections and analysis and reflect on the knowledge gained from the interdisciplinary discussions at the Digital Academy. Learn more about the event visiting the Digital Academy Website.
Historical Map of Switzerland.
by Catrina Langenegger
I now come back to the missing reports mentioned above. My goal is to be transparent about this gap. However, making this gap visible in statistics and visualisations is one of the greatest challenges when dealing with uncertainty. Statistics and visualisations are positivistic: they only show what is there. In the first statistics, the gaps weren’t visible. I therefore made artificial observations in my dataset with a zero as value to mark the gaps. In other words, I made the missing weekly reports visible by creating an observation for each of these dates. I have labelled these artificial observations as such. My data model now provides a field to mark whether there is a report for the week or not. Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible to visualise the weeks without information. Although I have made artificial entries in my dataset, these are not displayed in the visualizations because they do not contain a value.
fig. 1: Timeline with missing data
fig. 2: Auto-corrected timeline
The software I use calculates out all uncertain data and provides the average. I found a way to work around this by only using the edit mode, even for my visualisations because in the viewing mode, the observations inserted by me to show the uncertainty will be removed. In both examples, I was able to incorporate the uncertainty into the data via a categorisation in my data model. In this way, I also hope that my data can be better reused, as it makes transparent statements about its own quality.
Catrina Langenegger recently submitted her PhD thesis on refugee camps under military control in Switzerland during the Second World War. She conducts her research at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Basel. As a historian with a focus on digital humanities she exercises her passion for data also in her role as subject librarian with a background in library and information sciences.
References:
1. Cf. Karten der Schweiz - Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft - map.geo.admin.ch: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=swisstopo&lang=de&bgLayer=ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-farbe&catalogNodes=1392&layers=ch.swisstopo.zeitreihen&time=1864&layers_timestamp=18641231.
Looking back on 2023 – and into the future
Photo Copyrights: Philipp Ottendörfer, imago / Ikon Images / Gary Waters, Universität Bielefeld.
For CeUS, the year 2023 was shaped by exciting developments in the field of uncertainty research at Bielefeld University and beyond. It is worth taking this chance to look back at the key events of the year.
Uncertainties and Policy Support: A Brief Look at The Two Ongoing Studies at Bielefeld University
by Elif Sandal Önal & Andreas Zick
Independent of legal and structural effects, governmental and political decisions taken during crises or emergencies are received and interpreted through different cognitive and emotional dynamics of citizens (Maor & Capelos, 2023). These lead to support or rejection of policies. The processing of the information relevant to policies also differs, at least, depending on the psychological underpinnings that refer to individual differences (McDermott, 2019) and the characteristics of the crisis context like the level of emergency (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015) or on the way the issue of the policy is framed (e.g., Esses et al., 2013). Intersecting all these factors, uncertainty and the navigation of uncertainties, linked to cognitive and affective dynamics, is of utmost importance, particularly during crises (Zick & Sandal-Önal, 2023). A clear definition of uncertainties and a reliable analysis of the navigation help understand citizens' support for policies. This is also crucial since general modes of navigation are needed in times of global and interlinked polycrises. Two research projects we are conducting in IKG provide different lenses to different facets of uncertainty regarding public support for government policies in Germany. The findings indicate the cruciality of individual and collective uncertainties on political attitudes and behaviors, particularly during crises and emergencies.
Understanding the role of uncertainty in different political groups' policy support
"I do not know what war means": Understanding emotional and informational uncertainty in support of the German government's military policies during the war in Ukraine.
Interestingly, emotional and informational uncertainty about war indicates lower support for military policies, while uncertainty about peace indicates the opposite. Further analyses show that respondents who have high emotional uncertainty do not support military policies because they consider Russia a threat to Europe and are concerned that the war might be expanded. However, this is not the case for those who report high uncertainty about the war. On the other hand, considering Russia as a threat to Europe also explains the relationship between peace uncertainty and higher support for military policies. So, people do not know how to restore peace, considering Germany's military support policies to Ukraine would decrease the Russian threat towards Europe. The scientific report of the study is in progress, while the uncertainty-related findings were presented at various conferences (e.g., Sandal-Önal, Ayanian, et al., 2023).
References
Albertson, B., & Gadarian, S. K. (2015). Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139963107
Cohen, G. L. (2003). Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 808–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.808
Esses, V. M., Medianu, S., & Lawson, A. S. (2013). Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees: Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees. Journal of Social Issues, 69(3), 518–536. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12027
Haas, I. J., Baker, M. N., & Gonzalez, F. J. (n.d.). Political uncertainty moderates neural evaluation of incongruent policy positions.
Macdonald, D. (2021). Political Trust and Support for Immigration in the American Mass Public. British Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 1402–1420. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000668
Maor, M., & Capelos, T. (2023). Symposium: Affect and emotions in policy dynamics. Policy Sciences, 56(3), 439–448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-023-09512-7
McCright, A. M., & Dunlap, R. E. (2011). The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming, 2001–2010. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(2), 155–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2011.01198.x
McDermott, R. (2019). Psychological Underpinnings of Post-Truth in Political Beliefs. PS: Political Science & Politics, 52(2), 218–222. https://doi.org/10.1017/S104909651800207X
Robinson, S. E., Ripberger, J. T., Gupta, K., Ross, J. A., Fox, A. S., Jenkins-Smith, H. C., & Silva, C. L. (2021). The Relevance and Operations of Political Trust in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Public Administration Review, 81(6), 1110–1119. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13333
Sandal-Önal, E., Hellmann, J., & Zick, A. (2023, June 5). The Role of Uncertainty in the Support for Governmental Policies. Paper presented at the 1st Interdisciplinary Uncertainty Conference: Navigating Uncertainty: Preparing the Society for the Future, Bielefeld University.
Sandal-Önal, E., Ayanian, A.H., Eden, M., Mokros, N. & Zick, A. (2023). Does Uncertainty about the War in Ukraine pave the way to Support Military Action? Paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, Charles University, September 4-8, 2023, Prague.
Unsworth, K. L., & Fielding, K. S. (2014). It's political: How the salience of one's political identity changes climate change beliefs and policy support. Global Environmental Change, 27, 131–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.05.002
Weinberg, J. (2022). Can Political Trust Help to Explain Elite Policy Support and Public Behaviour in Times of Crisis? Evidence from the United Kingdom at the Height of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic. Political Studies, 70(3), 655–679. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720980900
Zick, A., & Sandal-Önal, E. (2023). Uncertainty in Conflicts between Societal Groups – A Social Psychological View (Vol. 4) [Working Paper]. https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2979155
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