Chapter 1 assesses the evidence beyond the charter corpus for literary activity in Kent, Mercia and Wessex in the mid-ninth century. This evidence comprises five categories: surviving manuscripts with contemporary English provenances, letters, inscribed objects, the events of the 850s, and Asser’s account of King Alfred’s childhood engagement with books. The importance of understanding survival patterns and the nature of the evidence is stressed, particularly because attempts were rarely made to preserve letters for posterity, and because different ways of engaging with books and inscribed objects generated varyingly large fingerprints for twenty-first-century eyes. Asser’s famous account, furthermore, needs to be approached with caution, though it does in several ways align with the impression of literary activity that one gets from mid-ninth-century sources. A good deal remains unknown about many of the contexts in which literary activity took place, but it is nonetheless clear that the written word was conspicuous in many mid-ninth-century social settings, despite the likelihood that in some contexts resources for new literary productions were limited. Much of this literary culture was fundamentally social, and it was often inspired by international exchange.

This book concludes with a summary of key types of machine translation use discussed in the project. The conclusion outlines ethical principles of multilingual AI use including the potential or intended legal value of a message, the stability of the information and its potential to be reused, and the need for any uses of machine translation to be transparent and as far as possible consensual and cybersecure. The conclusion also examines some of the challenges posed by the broader project. It offers a reflection on the question of accountability and on the difficulties of living well with technology in environments that elevate cost efficiency above other values.

In this chapter, we adapt two concepts from the theory of ordinary graphs to the setting of signed graphs. A signed graph is called integral if its spectrum consists entirely of integers. Two signed graphs are said to be cospectral if they are switching non-isomorphic yet share the same spectrum. In both cases, the term ‘spectrum’ refers to the eigenvalues of a prescribed matrix associated with the signed graph. Integral signed graphs are studied within the class of graphs with vertex degree at most four, with a complete classification provided for those with degree at most three. Numerous sporadic constructions of cospectral signed graphs are considered, alongside two basic operations transferred from the domain of ordinary graphs: GM-switching and WQH-switching, both of which produce signed graphs with identical spectra. As a central result, a pivotal and distinguishing construction is presented that consistently generates cospectral signed graphs, representing a fundamental phenomenon unique to the domain of signed graphs. A survey of signed graphs that do not have a cospectral pair is given at the end of the chapter.

The introduction of the book is dedicated to the discussion of the concept and doctrinal elements (prerequisites) of upcycling, its role in the legal system, as well as its interdisciplinary nature. We argue that upcycling is not a single dimensional activity to be approached solely from the perspective of exclusive IP rights. It represents a new philosophy for environment-conscious producers and consumers, promising the construction of new bottom-up approaches to decrease the negative consequences of human activities on earth. With the growing need for green transition, also addressed by legislators, upcycling can work as a case study for decision-makers from the domestic to the international level to reimagine IP policies to support green transitions at micro level by allowing individual upcyclers the reuse of IP-affected goods; at mezo level by convincing investors and industry-level organizations to renew economic models and invest in transformative reuses; and at macro level by allowing legislation to incentivize innovative activities to minimize waste and maximize the benefits of consumables for their full life-cycle.

This chapter establishes the terminology and notation necessary for the study of signed graphs and introduces their two fundamental concepts, balance and switching equivalence. It provides formal definitions of the key matrices associated with signed graphs, including the adjacency matrix, Laplacian matrix, and net Laplacian matrix, and discusses their basic properties in detail. The chapter also examines foundational results concerning the characteristic polynomials and eigenvalues of these matrices, highlighting their role in analysing the structural and spectral properties of signed graphs. In addition, the standard structural balance criteria are extended and generalized through spectral criteria, which can be computed efficiently in polynomial time, providing a practical framework for assessing balance in larger and more complex networks.

In this chapter, we elaborate on the fundamental importance of Carleson measures in complex analysis on the unit disk, concerning here interpolation sequences and embedding theorems. It is convenient to first recall a few classical facts.