1,720,964 research outputs found
Mother\u27s Tongue in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction
No full textBook Description: How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed. With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke, Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction for
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
The Train Rolls On
No full textTranscript:
Whenever the freight trains comes through Grady, Arkansas, where my maternal family originates, the windows, tables and kitchen tops shake as the locomotive makes it way. The noise could be so deafening conversations television shows are interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of the engines. More than once the train woke me while I was sleeping at Aunt Freddie Mae’s house.
When my sister Chung and I were small children, we spent the summers from 1974 until 1983 running around barefoot on Grady’s red dirt roads playing with dozens of our first cousins. Going down South meant riding 412 miles from St. Louis to Grady to where Mama grew up.
As the crow flies, Grady is 22 miles south and east of Pine Bluff in the middle of Lincoln County, a town of 523 souls. Cotton gins and John Deere tractors litter the landscape. Cotton, rice, and soybean fields claim more than three-quarters of Grady’s land, an atmosphere where rats and snakes always thrive. Chung and I were so busy playing with cousins and partaking with the feeding of pigs, chickens and cows, I never realized just how tiny Grady was.
But it was always the train that arrested my attention.
The train’s thunderous vibration revealed something in my sister’s brain. At about 6 years of age, she’d stick an index fingers in each ear and run down the road. My cousins and I chased her, early signs of mental illness.
Routinely the freight trains stopped on the railroad tracks preventing our family from getting to their jobs in the fields or at the saw mill in Pine Bluff. Aunt Louise told me that in the 1950s and 1960s she and her siblings often crawled underneath the train to get to the school bus.
My grandfather, Roy, got so irate at the train once, he climbed up waved a revolver at the conductor and yelled: “You’ve got five minutes to move this goddamned train out of the way.”
The train moved.
Cousin Travis told me that once he was dreaming of wrestling with his dead grandfather when the 3 am came through. In the middle of the confusion, he jumped through a window and woke up outside covered in blood and glass.
My family had learned to live with the train’s racket. Sometimes conductors waved.
We stopped going in 1983. Aunt Freddie Mae died in 1991.
In the early 2000s, the federal government extended Interstate 530, effectively cutting Grady off the map. Nearly everything closed – the schools, furniture stores, bank, even the gas station closed for a while.
As the town died, Grady became a place to attend funerals. My grandparents, great grandmother, Aunt Freddie Mae, Aunt Verla, and several cousins died. The relatives who remained alive most of them have moved away. My sister moved into a care facility for the mentally ill.
The further I get away from those Grady days, the more I long for the boy running after his sister who was spooked by the train. At family gatherings in Dallas and Atlanta, we all stand around talking about how life was in Grady.
In February 2011, I dreamt I was standing on the dirt road in Grady, Arkansas, and I heard a loud voice say, “The trains will no longer ride through Grady.” Two days, my beloved grandfather died at 94.
Perhaps the saddest train story happened to my uncle Arvan, the third oldest of the boys of my mother’s eight siblings. In late November 2013, he was trying to make it over the track when the train clipped his car, killing him. On the day of his funeral, the train company parked a single red engine to park outside Damascus Missionary Baptist Church.
In the summer of 2014, I took a video camera and smartphone to capture these images of the train and the town. Grady hovers over death but won’t cross over, yet the train keeps coming through each day.
In ‘Two Trains,’ the late poet Tony Hoagland writes:What grief it is to love some people like your ownblood, and then to see them simply disappear;to feel time bearing us awayone boxcar at a time
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
In Salt Lake City, Everyone and Everything is Queer*
No full textSamuel Autman’s “In Salt Lake City, Everyone and Everything is Queer*” is an extraordinary insight into his time in Salt Lake city on the education beat
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
“Black Body Snatchers” in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
No full textTwenty-five narrative essays by contemporary LGBTQ writers reflecting on queerness in horror film, from Hitchcock to Halloween to Hereditary -- Provided by publisher
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