Books
Edible People
Berghahn
Books, New York/Oxford, 2022.
An excursion into one of the darker aspects of the history of trade and commercial exploitation. Human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, and yet, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. Likewise ignored is the connection to xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. In this book I explore these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices. These are highly important for the history of the slave trade and for understanding the colonialist history of Africa and other regions.
Beitragen statt tauschen
AG SPAK Bücher,
Neu-Ulm, 2008.
Die deutsche Übersetzung meines Buchs From Exchange to Contributions: das Buch beschäftigt sich dem Potenzial der Peer-Produktion – der Art und Weise wie Freie Software und Freie Inhalte produziert werden. Wir wissen, dass diese neue Produktionsweise von großer Bedeutung ist, wenn es um Software und Inhalte geht – Erfolgsgeschichten wie die von GNU/Linux, Apache oder der Wikipedia sprechen hier eine deutliche Sprache. Aber mein Buch zeigt, dass das noch längst nicht alles ist: Peer-Produktion hat das Potenzial für mehr, bis hin zu einer Umwälzung der gesamten gesellschaftlichen Produktion.
From Exchange to Contributions
Edition C.
Siefkes, Berlin, 2007.
Peer production – the way in which free software
projects such as GNU/Linux and free content projects such as the Wikipedia are
produced – has revolutionized the areas of software and content production
during the last decades. But does peer production only work for information
goods, or can it have a similar effect on the production of physical goods?
I have written a book discussing this question, and showing how peer
production can indeed grow beyond the sphere of information. A society based
entirely on peer production is possible, and this book describes
how.
An Incrementally Trainable Statistical Approach to Information Extraction
VDM
Verlag, Saarbrücken, 2008.
My Ph.D. thesis, finished in 2007: The purpose of Information Extraction (IE) is to find desired pieces of information in unstructured or weakly structured texts and store them in a form that is suitable for automatic querying and processing. This book presents a innovative approach to statistical information extraction. It introduces a new algorithm which supports functionality not available in previous IE systems, such as interactive incremental training to reduce the human training effort. The system also utilizes new sources of information, employing rich tree-based context representations to combine document structure (HTML or XML markup) with linguistic and semantic information. The resulting IE system is designed as a generic framework for statistical information extraction.