1,721,010 research outputs found
Eerie Technologies and Gothic Acoustemology
Get PDFFirst paragraph: In Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, the poet and his guide, Virgil, enter the second ring of hell. Here, the poet is taken aback by eerie sounds: ‘I heard cries coming from every direction / And yet saw nobody who could be crying; / I became so bewildered that I stopped’. Upon hearing these disembodied cries, the poet is so disoriented in this dark forest of strange trees that he stops in his tracks. As the voices continue to emerge from the tree-stumps, Virgil encourages the poet to ‘break off / A little twig from one of these plants’. He follows his guide’s suggestion and picks a little branch from a great thorn. As he does, the trunk cries out in pain: ‘Why are you tearing me? […] Why are you dismembering me? Have you no compassion?’ (98). The poet hears the plant’s pain as these words emerge from the wound on the plant’s stem. Virgil explains that, while he regrets the suffering inflicted upon the plant, his friend would never have believed it unless he had heard the cries from the plant itself. Hearing is believing
Introduction: Technogothics
No full textFirst paragraph: A radioactive sea monster emerges from Tokyo Bay and ravages the city. The creature’s atomic breath unleashes death and destruction. Bombardments of shells, army tanks, fighter jets and a 50 000 volt electric fence are ineffective. Tokyo is in ruins. Thousands lie dead or wounded. Hospitals overflow with victims. Radiation poisoning is rampant. Survivors evacuate the city, fleeing to bomb shelters. The only hope is a secret weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer, which disintegrates oxygen atoms, leaving organisms to die of a rotting asphyxiation. The device is planted deep in Tokyo Bay. Divers descend into the water, where they find the monster at rest. The weapon is activated. The monster begins to suffocate and resurfaces. It expels a final roar before disintegrating into a massive skeleton. The odious weapon is destroyed by its inventor. He kills himself and the secrets of the Oxygen Destroyer die with him
Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas
No full textFirst paragraph: Space, place and region have always been central to Gothic literary and cultural production. We see this in the labyrinthine underground spaces found in 18th century English novels by, among others, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe or in the tombs and claustrophobic spaces of 19th century short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We see it in how the Catholic nations of Southern Europe become significant places for the development of 18th century Gothic plots about cross-dressing monks and bleeding nuns just as the dark forest and untamed frontier of the United States become meaningful places for the rise of national Gothic narratives in the wake of European-Aboriginal conflict and genocide. And we see this in how the European regions associated with the sublime become unsettling terrains that reflect 18th century revolutionary political upheavals just as the images of decay and grotesquery in the regional U.S. Southern Gothic become important geographical markers for signifying difference, degeneration and chattel slavery. In all of these locations, Gothic texts explore dislocations and a sense of the unhomely in the homeland that is caused by the transformation of geographic space into alienating or incorporating sites. Gothic thus casts a dark shadow over the nationalist projects that arise out of European Enlightenment thought, Romanticism and imperialist projects, signalling remote geographies that lie beyond the stable landscapes of rationality and logic
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
Introduction
Get PDFFirst paragraph: In the Mexican film Cronos (1993), a mysterious device designed to provide its owner with eternal life resurfaces after four hundred years, leaving a trail of destruction in its path. When opened, the device stabs the handler and the incision stimulates youthful vigour and a vampire’s need for blood. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, who would go on to make the Gothic horror films Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the American mainstream vampire superhero action movie Blade II (2002), Cronos is part of a tradition of vampire narratives in the American tropics that stretches from the civatateo of Aztec mythology to the tale of the azeman in Surinam to the oral stories of the peuchen in Chile to the lobisomem of Brazilian folklore to the soucouyant and volant in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. But Cronos is also part of a significant Gothic cinematic tradition in the tropics of the Americas that includes, among many others, vampire films such as Vampiros (2004) by the Puerto Rican director Eduardo Ortíz, Sangre eternal (Eternal Blood, 2002) by Jorge Olguin from Chile, as well as the Columbian films Pura sangre (Pure Blood, 1982) by Luis Ospina and Carne de tu carne (Flesh of Your Flesh, 1983) by Carlos Mayolo. In fact, Mayolo refers to his vampire movie and his haunting work La mansión de Araucaíma (The Manor of Araucaíma 1986) as ‘Gótico tropical’ (tropical Gothic) films that revolve around ‘la estructura del gótico’, a gothic structure in a tropical setting (9)
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