1,720,976 research outputs found
Les poissons muets. Fish-shaped vishaps and cult of water in prehistoric Armenia.
No full textishaps are monumental standing stelae decorated with animal reliefs found in the mountains of the South Caucasus. Although their existence and importance have been known since the late 19th century, they remain one of the most enigmatic megalithic phenomena of Eurasian prehistory. Especially intriguing are those vishaps representing monumental fish, the "piscis" vishaps. This contribution lays out a method to decode their symbolic meaning integrating quantitative analysis, iconographic analysis, and semiotic analysis. Quantitative analysis of the original altitude of vishaps shows that piscis vishaps enjoyed a privileged connection with higher altitudes, as opposed to other vishaps, such as the "vellus" vishaps, which were also erected at lower altitudes. Iconographic analysis indicates that piscis vishaps represent large-size fish naturally living in the rivers and lakes of the lowlands, such as catfish, pikes, or carps. As a result, we observe a specific desire to monumentalize fish known from a lowland environment at a location far away from its habitat, thus envisioning a precise connection between high-altitude meadows and lowland environments. A semiotic analysis of piscis vishaps supports the hypothesis that they are part of a religious cult of water, with a focus on mountain springs. Bronze Age parallels and a structuralist analysis of the symbolic code of vishaps suggest that they reflect a cult based on a dual origin of water, a subterranean and a celestial origin. Specifically, we argue that piscis vishaps represent a local numinous entity connected with the idea of vast, primaeval expanses of subterranean water as the origin of the water of mountain springs, rivers, and lakes, but also of life and wisdom. Conversely, we propose to interpret vellus vishaps as images of bloody sacrifices to a local storm god, based on a cultic offering of blood in exchange for rainfall water
Author Response [to "Commentary" by Daniel E. Fleming, Virginia R. Herrmann, Marina Pucci and Valérie Matoïan, JNES 80/2:401-406]
No full textThis is a critical response to the "Commentary" by Daniel Fleming, Georgina Herrmann, Marina Pucci and Valerie Matoian (JNES 80/2:401-406), attached as a discussion forum to the article "Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit". The response addresses in particular three debated questions concerning the Syrian city of Ugarit at the end of the Late Bronze Age: the economic and social differences within Ugarit’s urban population (moderate); the long-term existence and changing political meaning of urban squares - including their relationship to the political discourse of Ugarit’s ruling elite in the 13th century; and the possibility that squares may have had multiple functions (it was likely so)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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