Big Data and the Military: First World War Personnel Records in Australia,Britain, Canada,New Zealand and British Africa

The digitisation of a large number of First World War personnel files in different countries permits novel big data analyses that contribute in important ways to the histories of the British Empire and of individual countries including Australia. Mass digitisation is very recent; we are only beginning to realise the power of the new resources. In this article we highlight recent use of First World War datasets for non-First World War research questions as an example of the potential uses of big data for historians. Much of the new research considers aspects of living standards and health that are not accessible from other sources.     

Land Recycling, Community Revitalization, and Distributive Politics: An Analysis of EPA Brownfields Program Support

This article examines social, economic, and political factors influencing the distribution of resources to local governments under the EPA Brownfields Program, an innovative federal effort to encourage the remediation and redevelopment of contaminated properties. Signed into law in 2002, the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act provided the program with a congressional mandate, new tools to promote reuse such as liability protections, and increased funding up to a level of $250 million per year. This article contributes to research on environmental regulatory reform with an analysis of successful and unsuccessful local government applicants for EPA Brownfields Program support between 2003 and 2007. Building on prior research, we develop a series of expectations and an empirical model, and estimate the influence of program priorities, government and civic capacity, interest group pressures, and institutional politics. Results point to significant relationships between program priorities and award patterns. Contrary both to EPA's explicit commitments to equity and to analysis of pre-2003 award patterns, however, we find negative correlations between the proportions of local populations that are nonwhite or low-income and the likelihood of receiving an award. In addition, better-resourced governments and several dimensions of political representation show strong associations with the likelihood of winning awards. We conclude by discussing implications.     

The impossible intimacies of M N Roy

Manabendranath Roy (1884–1954) was a Marxist philosopher, an Indian nationalist, and an anti-colonial cosmopolitan. M.N. Roy ended up imprisoned in India for six years from 1931 to 1936, in the midst of the greatest colonial counterterrorism campaign ever organized by the British Raj. Aged 36 when he entered prison in 1931, he had already engaged in anti-colonial guerilla warfare in his youth during the swadeshi insurgency, 1903–1915. In subsequent years, up to his arrest in 1931, but especially during his prison years, Roy embarked on a long-term project to rethink and revise his own understanding of revolutionary action. Roy came to see the chief exponents of revolutionary action as “deviant” Indian women whose intimate relations transgressed the bounds of the traditional Hindu family. This essay studies the radical feminist currents in M.N. Roy's prison writings, and interprets his broader revolutionary project as a pursuit of “impossible intimacies” that transgressed the cultural bounds both of empire and of nation.     

Discriminant function analyses in archaeology: are classification rates too good to be true?

The use of discriminant function analyses (DFA) in archaeological and related research is on the increase, however many of the assumptions of this method receive a mixed treatment in the literature. Statisticians frequently use complex statistical models to investigate analytical parameters, but such idealised datasets may be hard to relate to “real-life” examples and the literature difficult to assess. Using two faunal datasets that are more typical of archaeological and related research, one comprised of size-corrected linear measurements of bovid humeri and another of 3D geometric morphometric (GMM) shape data of African monkey skulls, and two simulated datasets, we illustrate some of the most important but often ignored issues of DFA. We specifically show why it is paramount to address “over-fitting” by cross-validation when applying this method and how the probability of correctly classifying cases by chance can be properly and explicitly taken into account.