1,720,970 research outputs found
Digital Limits of Government: The Failure of E-Democracy
No full textInternational audienceWhile the Internet is often touted as a revolutionary technology, it might be noted that democratic institutions have witnessed no digital revolution through the Internet. This observation leads this chapter to argue that the field of e-democracy has generally failed to live up to its own reformist rhetoric. It argues that instead of reforming government processes through technology, e-democracy projects have tended to focus either on lowering the costs and increasing the efficiency of existing political processes or on analysing the civic participation that occurs outside of purpose-built e-democracy platforms. The chapter suggests that this lack of attention to the Internet's potential for systemic change in formal political institutions has little normative impact on the democratization of society and may even re-enforce, rather than challenge, the sociopolitical status quo. Further, it suggests that the current approach of e-democracy risks normalizing the Internet to the norms and expectations of the offline world. To elucidate this argument, this chapter overviews both the general trend of e-democracy projects and criticisms of those projects. Finally, the chapter proposes a more radical vision of e-democracy that, it suggests, would usher a larger potential for democratization. This more radical vision of e-democracy consists of recognizing the attributes of the Internet that transcend the limits of the analogue world and applying these to democracy. Such an approach would open the path for envisaging new political processes and systems, allowing the field of e-democracy to live up to its own rhetoric, and affording society the means to address multiple of the centuries-old problems faced by democracy
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
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
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
Mutable Conditions, Immutable Governance: Instability in U.S. Democracy
No full textInternational audienceThe question of democracy is central to any study of the United States. Yet the shortcomings of the actual workings of the democratic process in the United States are becoming increasingly evident, as witnessed in a growing disenchantment with government, the evidence of the alienation and growing apathy of citizens, coupled with a distrust of politicians. While academics often focus on these apparent ailments of democracy, it is perhaps more constructive to view them as symptoms of a vulnerable political structure, rather than as problems in themselves. This paper proposes that a re-examination of the structure of democracy in the United States, starting out from a revision of its first principles, can provide greater opportunity for a fully-fledged enhancement of the procedures of democratisation than is possible by way of the currently dominant trend in the academic literature, which argues for the pursuit of incremental improvements in government processes. This article applies both class theory and elite theory to argue that the indirect democracy of the United States is inherently vulnerable to the distortion of the public will, and ultimately to the hegemony of political elites over ordinary citizens. It concludes that an assessment of the structure of democracy through 21st-century perspectives, informed by new technology (such as Internet Democracy), offers the potential to remedy the core vulnerabilities of modern democracy. The structural analysis that is presented here, based on the specific case of the United States, demonstrates that current approaches to democracy may be likened to the remedial patching of political systems that are fundamentally obsolete. It is argued here that the acknowledgement of this limitation provides an opportunity for the emergence of fundamentally new forms of societal governance.La question de la démocratie est d’une importance centrale pour toute étude des Etats-Unis. Cependant, les imperfections du fonctionnement effectif du processus démocratique américain sont de plus en plus patentes, comme en atteste le désenchantement grandissant à l’égard du gouvernement, les indices d’aliénation et d’apathie chez les citoyens, corrélés à la défiance vis-à-vis de la classe politique. Alors que très souvent les chercheurs mettent l’accent sur ces imperfections manifestes du processus démocratique, il serait peut-être plus constructif d’y voir les symptômes de la vulnérabilité de la structure politique, plutôt que des problèmes en eux-mêmes. L’article sous-tend qu’un réexamen de la structure de la démocratie aux Etats-Unis, en commençant par une révision de ses principes fondateurs, offre de meilleures possibilités d’un renforcement significatif des procédures de démocratisation, comparé à la tendance actuellement dominante dans la littérature scientifique qui préconise la consolidation incrémentielle des procédures de gouvernement. L’article emprunte aussi bien à la théorie des classes qu’à la théorie des élites, démontrant que la démocratie indirecte des Etats-Unis met en évidence une vulnérabilité intrinsèque à la distorsion de la volonté publique et, en dernier ressort, un biais conduisant à l’hégémonie des élites politiques sur les citoyens ordinaires. Il en déduit qu’une évaluation de la structure de la démocratie, à l’aune des perspectives du 21e siècle et en tenant compte des innovations technologiques (notamment la démocratie par Internet), peut potentiellement remédier aux vulnérabilités de la démocratie moderne. L’analyse structurelle présentée ici, à partir du cas spécifique des Etats-Unis, démontre que les approches actuellement adoptées s’agissant de la démocratie s’apparentent au « replâtrage » de systèmes politiques qui sont fondamentalement obsolètes, alors que c’est plutôt le constat de ses limites qui permettrait de saisir l’occasion pour encourager l’émergence de formes radicalement nouvelles de gouvernance sociétale
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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