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2.46 MB

Extraction Summary

5
People
4
Organizations
0
Locations
2
Events
0
Relationships
3
Quotes

Document Information

Type: Academic paper / methodology report (supplementary material)
File Size: 2.46 MB
Summary

This document appears to be a page (p. 28) from a scientific or academic methodology paper found within House Oversight files (Bates stamped HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017036). It details a quantitative analysis of historical censorship, specifically identifying individuals suppressed by the Nazi regime using Wikipedia data and language frequency analysis. The authors discuss validating their statistical 'suppression index' by hiring an expert from Yad Vashem to manually annotate a list of names.

People (5)

Name Role Context
Adolf Hitler Historical Figure
Mentioned as an 'outlier' name in a list regarding suppression.
Walter Gropius Historical Figure
Indicated on a plot as an individual who received scores indicating suppression in German.
Pablo Picasso Historical Figure
Indicated on a plot as an individual who received scores indicating suppression in German.
Hermann Maas Historical Figure
Indicated on a plot as an individual who received scores indicating suppression in German.
Unnamed Guide Expert Annotator
A guide at Yad Vashem with advanced degrees in German and Jewish literature hired to validate the study's findings.

Organizations (4)

Name Type Context
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Source of the 'degenerate artists' list from a recent exhibition catalog.
Wikipedia
Source of biographical data and categories used for the analysis.
Yad Vashem
Institution where the expert annotator/guide was hired.
Nazi Party
Historical organization referenced regarding membership and censorship.

Timeline (2 events)

N/A
'Degenerate Art' exhibition
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
N/A
Hiring of expert annotator
Yad Vashem
Unnamed Yad Vashem guide

Key Quotes (3)

"The list of degenerate artists was taken directly from the catalog of a recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which endeavored to reconstruct the original ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition (Ref S15)."
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"We hired a guide at Yad Vashem with advanced degrees in German and Jewish literature to manually annotate these 100 names based on her assessment..."
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"Thus the annotator’s assessment is wholly independent of our own."
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Quote #3

Full Extracted Text

Complete text extracted from the document (3,711 characters)

secondary sources. Because Adolf Hitler is only one of many names, the list as a whole nevertheless
exhibits strong evidence of suppression, especially because the measure we retained (median usage) is
robust to such outliers.
3) Degenerate artists
The list of degenerate artists was taken directly from the catalog of a recent exhibition at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art which endeavored to reconstruct the original ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition (Ref S15).
4) People with recorded ties to Nazis
The list of Nazi party members was generated in a manner consistent with the occupation categories in
section 7. We included the following Wikipedia categories: Nazis_from_outside_Germany, Nazi_leaders,
SS_officers, Holocaust_perpetrators, Officials_of_Nazi_Germany, Nazis_convicted_of_war_crimes,
together with all of their subcategories, with the exception of Nazis_from_outside_Germany. In addition,
the three categories German_Nazi_politicians, Nazi_physicians, Nazis were included without their
respective subcategories.
III.9B. De Novo Identification of Censored and Suppressed Individuals
We began with the list of 56,500 people, comprising the 500 most famous individuals born in each year
from 1800 – 1913. This list was derived from the analysis of all biographies in Wikipedia described in
section 7. We removed all individuals whose mean frequency in the German language corpus was less
than 5 x 10-9 during the period from 1925 – 1933; because their frequency is low, a statistical assessment
of the effect of censorship and suppression on these individuals is more susceptible to noise.
The suppression index is computed for the remaining individuals using an observed/expected measure.
The expected fame for a given year is computed by taking the mean frequency of the individual in the
German language from 1925-1933, and the mean frequency of the individual from 1955-1965. These two
values are assigned to 1929 and 1960, respectively; linear interpolation is then performed in order to
compute an expected fame value in 1939. This expected value is compared to the observed mean
frequency in the German language during the period from 1933-1945. The ratio of these two numbers is
the suppression index s. The complete list of names and suppression indices is included as supplemental
data. The distribution of s was plotted for using a logarithmic binning strategy, with 100 bins between 10-2
and 102. Three specific individuals who received scores indicating suppression in German are indicated
on the plot by arrows (Walter Gropius, Pablo Picasso, and Hermann Maas).
As a point of comparison, the entire analysis was repeated for English; these results are shown on the
plot.
III.9C. Validation by an expert annotator
We wanted to see whether the findings of this high-throughput, quantitative approach were consistent
with the conclusions of an expert annotator using traditional, qualitative methods. We created a list of 100
individuals at the extremes of our distribution, including the names of the fifty people with the largest s
value and of the fifty people with the smallest s value. We hired a guide at Yad Vashem with advanced
degrees in German and Jewish literature to manually annotate these 100 names based on her
assessment of which people were suppressed by the Nazi (S), which people would have benefited from
the Nazi regime (B), and lastly, which people would not obviously be affected in either direction (N). All
100 names were presented to the annotator in a single, alphabetized list; the annotator did not have
access to any of our methods, data, or conclusions. Thus the annotator’s assessment is wholly
independent of our own.
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