The article deals with the sacred groves of the Balts in Lithuania and presents the linguistic background, the historical documents from the 12th– 18th century, the key folklore motifs of the topic, as well as selected examples of groves. The article also discusses possible relationships between pre-Christian religious traditions connected with the sacred groves and the ones which have survived...

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one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...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...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters.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one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Discovered in the early 16th century by European colonists, Bermuda is an isolated set of islands located in the mid-Atlantic. Shortly after its discovery, Bermuda became the first English colony to forcibly import its labor by trafficking in enslaved Africans, white ethnic minorities, and indigenous Americans. Oral traditions circulating today among contemporary tribes from the northeastern Un...

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...

This is the first monograph devoted to the history of chronic pain. A novel methodology is used. Examining responses to a problem that remained stable over time anchors a survey of shifting terms and theories and leaves the historical invariance of the clinical syndrome open to textual research. Writings by medical authors from a wide range of professional backgrounds are examined including sur...