Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
New laws requiring mandatory reporting of hazing activity in fraternities constrain anthropological research on hazing.
Machine learning and image processing strategies promise to significantly expand access to the information available in the corpus of digitized newspaper images.
Diving below the surface has its challenges, however. For example, “noise effects” are especially widespread when digital images have been created from earlier microphotographic copies, as is common in historical newspaper collections. Noise effects introduce interference to the primary signals of the pages, both for human vision and computer vision and processing. Various types of noise effects (fig. 1) are common, including unevenly distributed luminosity (i.e., range effects), visible characters from the other side of the page (bleed-through), tilted document scans (skewed orientation), and markings on the newspaper that obscure text (blobs).1 There is a wide range of severity for each of these effects, and images can range from very clean to very noisy within and across datasets.