The ship Riksäpplet and the introduction of English naval architecture in Sweden in the 17th century

SUMMARY: The 84-gun ship Riksäpplet was one of the first ships in Sweden built under supervision of the newly recruited English master. In 1676, the ship came adrift, struck a rock and sank. In 2015 a minor field survey of the wreck was undertaken. An inventory of finds recovered from the wreck in various museum collections and in private hands has been compiled and the preserved correspondence from the construction of the ship has been re-examined. This material has provided new insights regarding the peculiarities and special architecture of Riksäpplet.     

Wicked game of smart specialization: a player’s handbook

The objective of this article is to explore the theoretical foundations of a wicked game. The theoretical part is based on the notion of wicked problems, which is developed further. It is also illustrated that the latest innovation strategy of the European Union, called smart specialization, resembles a wicked game. Comparison between the two revealed several similarities gives new insights into the theory of wicked problems and into the process of smart specialization.     

New Presses for Old Grapes: I: Multiple Classification Analysis

Searching, gathering, organizing, and retrieving data are basic tasks for historians. As long as historians work by themselves, decisions concerning data format, data exchange, computer platform, and the like remain secondary. Teams of historians often use relational databases for centralized data storage. However, fundamental risks are implicit when one uses databases. Among technical considerations, the process of transformation between the source and the database is a deciding factor. For those who gather data, the effective use of such possibilities as data exchange, compatibility, and simplicity of survey and the reuse of the data in other contexts and platforms becomes increasingly important. In contrast, the user's needs include the possibility of data verification and use of the data for more than one question. Many relational databases have considerable shortcomings because the stored data lose the visual characteristics, the syntax, and the semantics of the original source. The EuroClimHist database environment is a part of the NCCR Climate project. It uses a data tool, written in Java for the gathering of documentary data, which generates extensible markup language (XML) files for data exchange.     

How to Handle a Liberated Woman

Abstract

In this article, the author presents a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the raw data. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances between two events marking the life histories of chemists.