1,720,959 research outputs found

    Local food and civic food networks as a real utopias project

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    For scholars and activists alike, local food is linked to visions of a more equitable, ethical and sustainable agro-food system. Notwithstanding an apparent unity, local food is mobilized for very different aims including environmental sustainability, the revitalization of rural economies, the reconnection of consumers to agriculture and nature and the promotion of land entitlements for marginalized populations. At the same time, local food has become a crucial element in protectionist and neo-ruralist ideologies that support bounded, defensive spatial strategies. These contradictions point to the limited heuristic value of the ‘local food’ concept, particularly when decoupled from an explicit attention to the political and power dimensions of the local. Building upon these considerations, in this article we explicitly focus on the political and transformative dimensions of different local food projects and propose to read local food as a ‘real utopia’ project whose aim is the transformation of the food economy in the direction of sustainability, social emancipation and social justice. Utilizing the framework developed by E.O. Wright, we look at local food as a diagnosis and critique of the present; as the prefiguration of a more sustainable, just and democratic future; and as a set of transformative strategies that aim at changing the system in the desired direction. Our analysis suggests that, differently from the oppositional movements of the Fordist era, the local food movement is characterized by its use of interstitial (“ignore the state”) and symbiotic (“use the state”) strategies. These strategies either seek to establish new economic and social relations at the margins of the neoliberal food economy, or partner with local institutions to consolidate new experiences with food democracy and food justice. By mobilizing non-ruptural strategies in the service of a real utopian project, local food initiatives are opening up new, enlarged spaces for non-capitalist or post-capitalist economies that constitute the basis for social learning and experimentation of a global more sustainable and just food system. A further step ahead could be constituted by the promotion of a reflexive, more democratic, socially empowering system of governance, able to lead the innovative potential of the food movement to its full expression

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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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