Overturning anti-miscegenation laws: news media coverage of the Lovings' legal case against the state of Virginia

ClioQuery : Interactive Query-Oriented Text Analytics for Comprehensive Investigation of Historical News Archives

Historians and archivists often find and analyze the occurrences of query words in newspaper archives, to help answer fundamental questions about society. But much work in text analytics focuses on helping people investigate other textual units, such as events, clusters, ranked documents, entity relationships, or thematic hierarchies. Informed by a study into the needs of historians and archivists, we thus propose ClioQuery , a text analytics system uniquely organized around the analysis of query words in context. ClioQuery  applies text simplification techniques from natural language processing to help historians quickly and comprehensively gather and analyze all occurrences of a query word across an archive. It also pairs these new NLP methods with more traditional features like linked views and in-text highlighting to help engender trust in summarization techniques. We evaluate ClioQuery  with two separate user studies, in which historians explain how ClioQuery ’s novel text simplification features can help facilitate historical research. We also evaluate with a separate quantitative comparison study, which shows that ClioQuery  helps crowdworkers find and remember historical information. Such results suggest possible new directions for text analytics in other query-oriented settings.

Battling Against Interfaith Relations in Israel: Religion, Therapy, and Social Services

One of the less studied aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is its demography. On the Jewish side, active steps are taken by the state to encourage Jewish immigration and Jewish births and discourage Jewish assimilation. As part of these efforts, the "problematic relationships" between Arab men and Jewish women from low socioeconomic background have become a high agenda item in public discussions in Israel during the last decade. I will examine here how the diagnostic category "girls at risk" and a therapeutic intervention employed by social services dealing with these couples helps maintaining the delicate balance between Jewish and democratic values. I will analyze these practices as a solution to a structural problem of the Jewish enclave in Israel.