1,721,171 research outputs found
Critical Spirits: New Animism As Historical Materialism
No full textThis essay reads the so-called 'new animism' alongside the historical materialism of Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno. The aim is to draw out the political dimensions of the former and the ecological dimensions of the latter. New animism shares with historical materialism a critique of modernity and the alienation produced by the separation of the human sphere of culture from the nonhuman field of nature. Both theories are interested in animism as exemplary refusals of this separation and both seek a mimetic, non-objectifying, relation to the world. New animism operates to correct historical materialism's Eurocentric tendency to think of such 'naturecultures' as premodern and thus superceded, showing what can still be learnt from the example of specific indigenous peoples and their animistic engagement with the more than human world. But historical materialism's dialectical approach to history also helps to guard against the romanticisation of animism and dehistoricised models of animistic relations to 'nature'. Capitalist modernity is not simply the extirpation of animism, the turning of souls into things, but also itself a modified form of animism, the turning of things into magical commodities. Once we understand the mythic nature of capitalism, the critical task becomes not to reanimate the world but to counter-animate it. Both new animism and historical materialism are utopian in their investment in a spirited, more than human world, but the latter also seeks to promote what I call a critical spiritedness, an ironised, melancholic identification with our fellow beings, both human and nonhuman, as subject to history and thus, in Adorno's phrasing, 'damaged life'. In the final part of my essay, I consider the way in which art can channel this critical spirit through an exploration of Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, and its counter-animation of the cinematic tradition of the Western. The film is at once a melancholic critique of the deanimating, ecocidal and genocidal consequences of Western expansion and an attempt to respiritualise the cinematic gaze through a creaturely identification with damaged life
Introduction: Essays in migratory aesthetics: cultural practices between migration and art-making
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Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words
No full textMonolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy
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
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