1,720,988 research outputs found
The Worm in the Bud
No full textSolo Exhibition at Handel Street Projects, London
These are large paintings that inhabit the domestic rooms of the gallery with an outrageous assertiveness, exaggerating the monstrous complexity of the plant’s structure. The details of each bunch of flowers are rendered with obsessive, unnatural clarity and the titles reflect on the emotional implications of this overreaching realism: 'The Explosive Child', 'This Thing of Darkness', 'Sexual Anarchy' and 'The Worm in the Bud'. These are all titles of books that suggest an implied threat to established order, without that threat being specified or understood.
Fairnington’s work occupies a position somewhere between the 18th century collectors who sought to rationalise the unfamiliar through taxonomy and the surrealists who subverted the natural order to explore further the workings of the human mind. Whether it be large scale paintings of mounted insects, taxidermy displays, portraits of bulls or people his interest has been resolutely in the eccentricities the one required to stand in for all: the specimen.
Mark Fairnington is Reader in Painting at the University of the Arts London and much of his work has resulted from research projects with museum collections, sustaining a visual examination of the idea and image of the specimen. Past projects have been with the Imperial War Museum, Oxford Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum and the Wellcome Collection.
In 2002 the Welcome Trust funded a field trip to Belize, with the biologist Dr George McGavin from Oxford University, with aim to study the use of mimetic camouflage by insects called treehoppers. In 2004 an exhibition of Mark’s work, 'Fabulous Beasts', was mounted at the Natural History Museum. 'Unnatural History', 2012, was a retrospective at the Mannheim Kunstverein, Germany. His most recent solo exhibition, 'Collected and Possessed', was at the Horniman Museum in London last year.
Mary Horlock, author of The Book of Lies and forthcoming Joseph Gray’s Camouflage has been commissioned to write a short story to accompany the exhibition at Handel Street Projects
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
Fabulous Beasts
No full textFunded by the Natural History Museum, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the AHRC and London Arts, this research project addressed how scientific methods of imaging may be used in the production of art; and examined relationships between painting and scientific imaging. Working in the field of natural history imaging, the project used the Museum collections, displays and library archives to create a series of paintings that used the image of the specimen to explore and articulate different aspects of imaging the natural world.
The work was exhibited at the Natural History Museum with that of Giles Revell, a photographer who made a series of images of insects using scanning-electron microscopy. Fairnington was invited to participate in the project as a result of previous work with the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The exhibition focused upon parallels and differences between the two bodies of work and their relation to scientific research methodologies.
This exhibition was an important demonstration of the Natural History Museum’s commitment to collaborative art-science projects. The research methodology was consistent for each painting and involved taking hundreds of photographs from many different viewpoints, scales of magnification, and degrees of focus. The paintings incorporate each of these elements into a single image. The originality of the work lies in its construction of fictional spaces in which sustained observation, known fact and imaginative speculation existed together, drawing upon a series of referents and connecting to different locations of meaning. Through this nuanced process the image of the specimen becomes a way of illuminating the changing relationships between human beings and the history of thinking about the natural world
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