1,720,961 research outputs found
Visions of Disaster in the Central Middle Ages
Get PDFWhereas modern Western scientific thought has tended to draw a sharp distinction between nature and society, for the early middle ages they were united as part of God's creation (cf. Davidson 1989). For a medieval cleric, a disaster was not a 'natural' event calling forth a 'social' response. Rather, the medieval imagination both defined disaster and gave it meaning, by placing it in a wider intellectual, moral and symbolic context. In a sense this is true of all societies. A disaster may start as a natural event, but in becoming a disaster it becomes a social experience, that is an experience defined and interpreted according to social beliefs. Not even natural disasters can remain purely 'natural'. A close examination will reveal their social dimension-who they affect and why. At first glance some events appear unequivocally disastrous. Earthquakes and plagues seem to afflict indiscriminately everyone who has the misfortune to be in their vicinity. Yet some people are more vulnerable to their assaults than others -the poor more than the rich, or urban dwellers more than those who live in the country. And while few people would dispute that such events are disastrous, people nevertheless differ on what such disasters may mean. Religious fundamentalists were swift to see the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the Aids epidemic as divine punishments for a godless and unnatural lifestyle. This approach is a commonplace of religious disaster interpretation. Medieval writers were equally willing to see unpleasant events as divine retribution for sins. We are never as good as we should be, or as the moralists would like us to be
Dreams, History and the Hero in the Chansons de Geste
Get PDFThe predictive dreams and divine revelations in which epics and histories abound contrast with the dreams of personal desire to be found in the romances. For the twelfth century epic poetry was a form of history. Like history it was permeated with a religious world-view. Whereas the romance dream tends to express the fundamental theme of the romance, namely the alienation of the individual from the social group, epic and historical dreams function to situate the individual in a social and religious context. The chansons were written in vernacular poetry and the histories in Latin prose and verse but they shared a common subject matter in the exploits of famous kings and warriors, and they were subject to the same influences and examples. Following the classical view of history as rhetoric, medieval historians sought to glorify nations and their rulers, while hopefully entertaining their readers5. Dreams served to demonstrate the exceptional nature of the protagonists, their providential mission and moral status, and like digressions in general, to provide a relief from an accumulation of details which historians feared would prove tedious. Epic poetry formed part of this approach to history. Virgil's Aeneid provided the model by which the rising barbarian nations could be endowed, like Rome, with a noble Trojan descent. Geoffrey of Monmouth was to be the twelfth-century's most notable practitioner of this technique which Suger applied to the Capetians and Ekkehard to Henry V
Aeneid VI and Medieval Views of Dreaming
Get PDFVirgil's Aeneid was the most popular classical text preserved by the Middle Ages'· Like many classical works, it abounds in dreams and so it is not surprising that it should have influenced medieval thought concerning them. Perhaps even more importantly, the Aeneid was seen by medieval scholars as resembling a dream, in that it was a falsehood that concealed a truth, and in this respect it was representative of all pagan and indeed fictional literature. Virgil's contribution to medieval dream theory derives preeminently from Aeneid VI, which both provides a model of an otherworld journey and makes metaphoric statements about the nature of dreams. Virgilian imagery figures in Gregory the Great's account of Stephen's vision, in the popular Visio San Pauli, in Gregory of Tours account of Sunniulfs vision, in the visions of Prudentius and W etti, in the twelfth-century visions of Tundale and St.Patrick's Purgatory, and, of course, in Dante's Divine Comedy where Virgil guides Dante through HeiJ2. Aeneas' descent to the otherworld through a cave with an ecstatic priestess as guide suggests incubation such as medieval Christians practised at St.Patrick's Purgatory. Virgil's account was inspired by Plato's vision of Er, itself a literary version of a shamanistic soul journey3 Aeneid VI begins with Daedalus, whose flight Neoplatonic commentators saw as symbolic of that of the soul, and ends with Aeneas and the Sybil emerging, curiously enough, from the Gate of False Dreams. Between these two points Virgil not only makes several references to dreams but also presents a Platonic myth of the eternal cycle of the soul's incorporation, purification and release. The nature of this allegory, and the meaning of the Gate of Ivory and the fa/sa insomnia which pass through it, excited the interest of medieval commentators as they continue to puzzle modems.
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
Boundaries and Crossings: Religious Fluidity in Twenty-first Century India
Get PDFFollowing Partition, newly independent India adopted a constitution based on secularism and rights for minorities. In recent years, under the Bharatiya Janata Paty government, this model of society has been steadily eroded and supplanted by one favouring Hindu nationalism. This shift has changed the ways in which various religious communities relate to each other as well as their relationship with the state. In this special issue, we examine how these social and political shifts have impacted on the willingness of individuals to engage across religious boundaries and highlight instances of continuing religious cosmopolitanism.  
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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