The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. The choice of the most appropriate binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very difficult procedure itself. In this paper, we propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesn’t req...

An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

Old master drawings were mostly created step by step in several layers using different materials. To art historians and restorers, examination of these layers brings various insights into the artistic work process and helps to answer questions about the object, its attribution and its authenticity. However, these layers typically overlap and are oftentimes difficult to differentiate with the un...

The remarkable properties of graphene have renewed interest in inorganic, two-dimensional materials with unique electronic and optical attributes. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are layered materials with strong in-plane bonding and weak out-of-plane interactions enabling exfoliation into two-dimensional layers of single unit cell thickness. Although TMDCs have been studied for decade...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

We describe ongoing work aiming at deriving a multilingual controlled vocabulary (German, French, Italian) from the combined subject indices from 22 volumes of a large-scale critical edition of historical documents. The controlled vocabulary is intended to support editors in assigning descriptors to new documents and to support users in retrieving documents of interest regardless of the spellin...

Post-employment restrictive covenants in the context of employment relationships have long posed challenges for employers. Both the nature of the agreement and the context in which it is entered into impact the enforceability of restrictive covenants. The lack of a unified or “national” body of law on restrictive covenants within the US further complicates the issue. For example, in some states...