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A sensitive and groundbreaking study of women, this examination of globalization in India provides a fascinating case study of its effects on female workers in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Originally published in 1982, the book is an important insight into a group dispossessed before the recent economic boom in India. It details the way in which women have been used to produce luxury goods for the Western market while they are not counted as workers or producers in their fragmented workplaces. Instead, these women are defined as nonworking housewives and their work as leisure activity. With rates of pay far below acceptable levels, pauperization is accelerated and their position in Indian society rapidly deteriorates. An invaluable analysis with implications on the global stage, the case of the lace makers continues to instruct on the real impact of industrial development.

This study focuses on the making of African bark-cloth in the Caribbean and the use of plant fibers and pigments in the production and care of clothing for members of the colonized population. The material artifact of interest in this study is lace-bark, a form of bark-cloth, obtained from the bark of the lagetto tree found only in Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. The fibres of the lagetto bark were removed by hand and dried, and the end result resembled fine lace or linen that was used by enslaved and freed women in Jamaica to make clothing as well as a substitute for manufactured lace. Although lace-bark is derived from the bark of a tree, it is different from other forms of bark-cloth. For instance, unlike most bark-cloth, the bark of the lagetto tree was not beaten into malleable cloth. The scientific name for the lace-bark tree is Lagetta lagetto; however, common names and spelling vary across regions. The author argues that a vibrant cottage industry based on African bark-cloth and lace-bark developed in Jamaica in response to economic conditions, and the insufficient clothing enslaved Africans received from their enslavers. Women dominated this industry and it fostered a creative space that allowed them to be expressive in their dress and simultaneously to escape, at least temporarily, the harsh realities of the plantation. The subjects of this study are women of African ancestry living in Jamaica from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the late seventeenth century, a bark industry had developed in Jamaica that was responsible for producing exquisite bark material that was widely popular. The laghetto tree was known in Cuba as the Daguilla, and in Haiti as bois dentelle.

This paper presents how a contemporary lace practice explored the medium of animation as a digital tool for craft research. Research is practice based and theoretically framed around notions of smooth and striated space as a means to articulate how a designer engages in textile thinking to reimagine new expressions for (p)lace in a digital age. The author sought to test out if animation could capture and disseminate an ephemeral lace process. This led to a curious convergence between two disciplines. What was initially to be a tool for efficiency and speed unexpectedly turned out to be a method for abstracting an allusive lace making process. Learning about the idiosyncrasies of another discipline opened new aesthetic opportunities for a contemporary lace practice and introduced novel methods to disseminate future material research.

This paper presents how a contemporary lace practice explored the medium of animation as a digital tool for craft research. Research is practice based and theoretically framed around notions of smooth and striated space as a means to articulate how a designer engages in textile thinking to reimagine new expressions for (p)lace in a digital age. The author sought to test out if animation could capture and disseminate an ephemeral lace process. This led to a curious convergence between two disciplines. What was initially to be a tool for efficiency and speed unexpectedly turned out to be a method for abstracting an allusive lace making process. Learning about the idiosyncrasies of another discipline opened new aesthetic opportunities for a contemporary lace practice and introduced novel methods to disseminate future material research.

In the recently proposed Lace framework for collective entity resolution, logical rules and constraints are used to identify pairs of entity references (e.g. author or paper ids) that denote the same entity. This identification is global: all occurrences of those entity references (possibly across multiple database tuples) are deemed equal and can be merged. By contrast, a local form of merge is often more natural when identifying pairs of data values, e.g. some occurrences of 'J. Smith' may be equated with 'Joe Smith', while others should merge with 'Jane Smith'. This motivates us to extend Lace with local merges of values and explore the computational properties of the resulting formalism.

We consider spread-out models of lattice trees and lattice animals on Zd, for d above the upper critical dimension dc=8. We define a correlation length and prove that it diverges as (pc-p)-1/4 at the critical point pc. Using this, we prove that the near-critical two-point function is bounded above by C|x|-(d-2)exp[-c(pc-p)1/4|x|]. We apply the near-critical bound to study lattice trees and lattice animals on a discrete d-dimensional torus (with d>dc) of volume V. For pc-p of order V-1/2, we prove that the torus susceptibility is of order V1/4, and that the torus two-point function behaves as |x|-(d-2)+V-3/4 and thus has a plateau of size V-3/4. The proofs require significant extensions of previous results obtained using the lace expansion.

We study lattice trees (LTs) and animals (LAs) on the nearest-neighbor lattice Zd in high dimensions. We prove that LTs and LAs display mean-field behavior above dimension 16 and 17 , respectively. Such results have previously been obtained by Hara and Slade in sufficiently high dimensions. The dimension above which their results apply was not yet specified. We rely on the non-backtracking lace expansion (NoBLE) method that we have recently developed. The NoBLE makes use of an alternative lace expansion for LAs and LTs that perturbs around non-backtracking random walk rather than around simple random walk, leading to smaller corrections. The NoBLE method then provides a careful computational analysis that improves the dimension above which the result applies. Universality arguments predict that the upper critical dimension, above which our results apply, is equal to dc=8 for both models, as is known for sufficiently spread-out models by the results of Hara and Slade mentioned earlier. The main ingredients in this paper are (a) a derivation of a non-backtracking lace expansion for the LT and LA two-point functions; (b) bounds on the non-backtracking lace-expansion coefficients, thus showing that our general NoBLE methodology can be applied; and (c) sharp numerical bounds on the coefficients. Our proof is complemented by a computer-assisted numerical analysis that verifies that the necessary bounds used in the NoBLE are satisfied.

Nottingham is both the birthplace and the global centre of the machine-made lace industry and is home to the Nationally Designated collection of machine-made lace and machinery. In 2017 Lace Unravelled was launched with the aim to conserve the collection and connect with local ‘industry mentors’ to learn more about its objects.  This led to wider collaborations and the exhibition ‘Lace Unarchived’, held at Nottingham Trent University intended to reveal the legacy of the art school, established in 1843, and its impact on the generations of lace designers it educated.  This paper proposes to explore the project’s achievements, what it revealed, and what it has meant for the interpretation and understanding of the collection, and wider understanding of ‘Nottingham Lace’.