Publications

Abstract

Although sign language-using communities exist in all areas of the world, few sign languages have been documented in detail. Sign languages occur in a variety of sociocultural contexts, ranging from sign languages used in closed village communities to officially recognized national sign languages. They may be grouped into language families on historical grounds or may participate in various language contact situations. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison reveals both significant structural similarities and important typological differences between sign languages. Focusing on information from non-Western countries, this article provides an overview of the sign languages of the world.

Abstract

Celiac disease (CD) is an intolerance to dietary proteins of wheat, barley, and rye. CD may have substantial morbidity, yet it is quite common with a prevalence of 1%-2% in Western populations. It is not clear why the CD phenotype is so prevalent despite its negative effects on human health, especially because appropriate treatment in the form of a gluten-free diet has only been available since the 1950s, when dietary gluten was discovered to be the triggering factor. The high prevalence of CD might suggest that genes underlying this disease may have been favored by the process of natural selection. We assessed signatures of selection for ten confirmed CD-associated loci in several genome-wide data sets, comprising 8154 controls from four European populations and 195 individuals from a North African population, by studying haplotype lengths via the integrated haplotype score (iHS) method. Consistent signs of positive selection for CD-associated derived alleles were observed in three loci: IL12A, IL18RAP, and SH2B3. For the SH2B3 risk allele, we also show a difference in allele frequency distribution (F(st)) between HapMap phase II populations. Functional investigation of the effect of the SH2B3 genotype in response to lipopolysaccharide and muramyl dipeptide revealed that carriers of the SH2B3 rs3184504*A risk allele showed stronger activation of the NOD2 recognition pathway. This suggests that SH2B3 plays a role in protection against bacteria infection, and it provides a possible explanation for the selective sweep on SH2B3, which occurred sometime between 1200 and 1700 years ago.

Abstract

The amount of research data in the Humanities is increasing at fastspeed. Metadata helps describing and making accessible this data tointerested researchers within and across institutions. While metadatainteroperability is an issue that is being recognised and addressed,the systematic and user-driven provision of annotations and thelinking together of resources into new organisational layers havereceived much less attention. This paper gives an overview of ourevolving technological eScience environment to support suchfunctionality. It describes two tools, ADDIT and ViCoS, which enableresearchers, rather than archive managers, to organise and reorganiseresearch data to fit their particular needs. The two tools, which areembedded into our institute's existing software landscape, are aninitial step towards an eScience environment that gives our scientistseasy access to (multimodal) research data of their interest, andempowers them to structure, enrich, link together, and share such dataas they wish.

Abstract

Sign language lexicography has thus far been a relatively obscure area in the world of lexicography. Therefore, this article will contain background information on signed languages and the communities in which they are used, on the lexicography of sign languages, the situation in the Netherlands as well as a review of a sign language dictionary that has recently been published in the Netherlands.