1,721,046 research outputs found
John Baskerville: art & industry of the Enlightenment
No full textThis book is concerned with the eighteenth-century typographer, printer, industrialist and Enlightenment figure, John Baskerville (1707-75). Baskerville was a Birmingham inventor, entrepreneur and artist with a worldwide reputation who made eighteenth-century Birmingham a city without typographic equal, by changing the course of type design. Baskerville not only designed one of the world’s most historically important typefaces, he also experimented with casting and setting type, improved the construction of the printing-press, developed a new kind of paper and refined the quality of printing inks. His typographic experiments put him ahead of his time, had an international impact and did much to enhance the printing and publishing industries of his day. Yet despite his importance, fame and influence many aspects of Baskerville’s work and life remain unexplored and his contribution to the arts, industry, culture and society of the Enlightenment are largely unrecognized. Moreover, recent scholarly research in archaeology, art and design, history, literary studies and typography, is leading to a fundamental reassessment of many aspects of Baskerville’s life and impact, including his birthplace, his work as an industrialist, the networks which sustained him and the reception of his printing in Britain and overseas. The last major, but publication of Baskerville dates from 1975. Now, forty years on, the time is ripe for a new book. This interdisciplinary approach provides an original contribution to printing history, eighteenth-century studies and the dissemination of ideas
James Watt: Culture, Innovation and Enlightenment
No full textJames Watt (1736-1819) was a pivotal figure of the Industrial Revolution. His career as a scientific instrument maker, inventor and engineer developed in Scotland, his land of birth, but his national and international significance as a successful technologist businessman, scientist was formed in Birmingham, where his partnership with Matthew Boulton and the intellectual and personal support of other members of Lunar network, such as Erasmus Darwin, James Keir, William Small and Josiah Wedgwood enabled him to translate his improvements in steam technology into efficient energy machines. His pumping and rotative steam engines represent the summit of technological achievement for the early industrial revolution in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and led to future developments in locomotive and steam ship design and mechanical engineering such as the steam hammer. This is the traditional picture of James Watt. His reputation as a hero of modernity was created after his death, not least by his son James Watt jnr. As a result other steam engine innovators were reduced in importance, the context in which he operated was underplayed and the ‘great man’ approach to making sense of the Industrial Revolution became an important dimension of popular historical understanding. This book aims to reassess Watt the man, his inventions and his contribution to the Enlightenment
Pen and Print: communication in the eighteenth century
No full textIn his preface to Paradise Lost (1758), John Baskerville, writing master and printer, described himself as ‘an admirer of the beauty of letters’ with a practical interest in the relationship between the written and printed word. This proposal takes his phrase as a starting point to explore different dimensions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of both private and public letters, words and texts during the long eighteenth century (c. 1688-1820). In combination, the proposed papers consider how the processes of both writing and printing contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted in the spread of knowledge and furthered both personal and national political, economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider world. Collectively the papers provide an original narrative on the nature of communication in the eighteenth century and together they bring fresh perspectives on printing history, print culture and the literate society of the Enlightenment
Introduction: pen, print and communication in the eighteenth century
Get PDFThe eighteenth century, perhaps more than any other, was a pivotal time in the development of the mechanics and methods of communication. Commercial, political, legal, social and religious interactions were all facilitated by a variety of material processes such as handwriting, painting, drawing, printing and engraving which coexisted alongside more ephemeral and immaterial means of communication including voice, gesture, costume and performance. New sites for consuming the products of communication emerged such as coffee houses, oratories, libraries, institutes, theatres, shops and galleries. Developments in road and water transport and postal systems facilitated means of communication and enabled the products of pen and print to travel further and faster than ever before. This introduction and subsequent chapter, considers pen, print and other forms of communication in the eighteenth century
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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