1,720,957 research outputs found

    When I walked the dark road of Hades: Orphic katabasis and the katabasis of Orpheus

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    Accounts of the descent to the Underworld attributed to Orpheus have been presumed to provide privileged information about the Underworld from the first hand experience of the narrator Orpheus, giving such accounts a special eschatological significance (R. PARKER [1995]). The surviving evidence, however, suggests that accounts of katábasis in texts attributed to Orpheus are not in the first person, while accounts of Orpheus’ katábasisare not attributed to Orpheus (with exception of the allusion in the late Orphic Argonautica). The possibility that the Orphic katabáseis might have recounted the descent of Herakles or Theseus rather than Orpheus himself opens up new avenues for understanding the nature of pre-Platonic Orphica within the Greek epic tradition. Likewise, looking beyond practising Orpheotelests for the authors of these katabáseis allows us to appreciate the way such texts may have been used to explore contemporary medical, mechanical, and other physical ideas. The katabáseis of Orpheus are, quite literally, another story – the story of a mythical poet, whose music is so powerful that it can charm even the lords of death. This separation in the evidence for the katábaseis of Orpheus the author and Orpheus the character prompts re-evaluation of the eschatological significance of Orphic poetry

    The Many Faces of Dionysos in the Hexameters of the Sinai Palimpsest (Sin. ar. NF 66)

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    The fragments of a hexameter poem about Dionysus recently discovered in a palimpsest (Sin. Ar. NF 66) reveal some different faces of Dionysus, including an Adonis-figure at the heart of a dispute between two goddesses (Persephone and Aphrodite), and a personified wine-god, Oinos, threatened by the machinations of his enemies in the court of Zeus. These palimpsest texts help to illuminate some of the allusions to the early life of the god that have long puzzled scholars, especially in some of the early Christian apologists and the collection of Orphic Hymns

    Contingent Catastrophe or Agonistic Advantage: The Rhetoric of Violence in Classical Athenian Curses

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    The surprising absence of violent language from classical Athenian curses is best understood as a rhetorical strategy appropriate for getting the divine powers to enact the curser\u27s desire to harm his or her enemies and to gain an advantage in the particular agonistic context. A contrast with the extravagantly violent language of other contemporary curses, which call for unmitigated catastrophe to befall their targets, shows that the fundamental difference between these curses is the audience that they primarily address, which shapes the nature of the request that is made in the imprecation. Whereas contingent curses primarily address the human community with highly intense rhetoric to deter potential violation, these agonistic curses against rivals request assistance in the rivalry from some power beyond the human community, limiting the extravagance of the request to improve the chance of fulfilment

    Who Does That?: Further Conversations on Drawing Down the Moon

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    This paper addresses responses to Drawing Down the Moon by Shannon Grimes, James Davila, Gregory Shaw, and Naomi Janowitz, using the cues of extraordinary efficacy, performance, social location, and ends to determine whether something is labeled magic and by whom. In each of the papers, the cue of social location appears as the most significant, even though the others each play a role as well

    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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