No abstract

Blogs represent an important new arena for knowledge discovery in open source intelligence gathering. Bloggers are a vast network of human (and sometimes non-human) information sources monitoring important local and global events, and other blogs, for items of interest upon which they comment. Increasingly, issues erupt from the blog world and into the real world. In order to monitor blogging about important events, we must develop models and metrics that represent blogs correctly. The structure of blogs requires new techniques for evaluating such metrics as the relevance, specificity, credibility and timeliness of blog entries. Techniques that have been developed for standard information retrieval purposes (e.g. Google's PageRank) are suboptimal when applied to blogs because of their high degree of exophoricity, quotation, brevity, and rapidity of update. In this paper, we offer new metrics related for blog entry relevance, specificity, timeliness and credibility that we are implementing in a blog search and analysis tool for international blogs. This tools utilizes new blog-specific metrics and techniques for extracting the necessary information from blog entries automatically, using some shallow natural language processing techniques supported by background knowledge captured in domain-specific ontologies.

Diversity work remains one of the most critical, yet complicated and contentious efforts in higher education. To promote transformative institutional change, a university in California, United States developed an innovative, federally funded community-building model designed to institutionalize diversity efforts. As part of this model, a cross-sectional climate survey was administered in 2010, 2014, and 2018 to learn more about perceptions of campus diversity-oriented work. We present a qualitative, Critical Race Theory analysis of faculty and graduate student responses to the open-ended question, “What do you think we should know about diversity at [this university]?” These data offer a window into a unique period of American history when politics were, and continue to be, especially contentious and social inequality was, and is, at the forefront of American consciousness. We conclude with respondent-inspired suggestions for moving higher education toward social justice.

Access to justice is a theoretical construct and applied principle within the US legal system, centering equity in access to legal services and representation. However, access to justice extends beyond the legal sphere and into the daily lives of vulnerable people. This article contributes to long-standing efforts to reimagine and repurpose the access to justice framework through an ethnographic examination of rural domestic violence. In doing so, there exists significant promise to transform access to justice in a way that comprehensively sees and addresses inequity and injustice. Access to justice can be used in a multitude of ways to make sense of vulnerability at the intersection of rurality, domestic violence, resource accessibility, and activism, expanding the theoretical framework beyond its original scope toward social justice.

‘Specialized justice’ is deeply rooted in a movement toward socializing and humanizing crime and justice in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Structurally and ideologically, this movement influenced courts to maintain their law-upholding purpose while simultaneously operating as a public service to communities in need. Based on this ideological and structural shift, specialized justice via specialty courts is one mechanism through which citizens should be able to access justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and restorative forms of justice. Given this reality, this chapter serves as an entry point for a critical assessment of alternative and specialized justice initiatives, their historical roots, and the potential collateral consequences of specializing justice for crossover youth and families in particular. This chapter posits some of the benefits, challenges, and potential drawbacks of alternative justice initiatives of this kind, especially in relation to the adversarial and punitive justice model from which they derive.