1,720,985 research outputs found
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
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
"Personal Totems": The poetics of the popular in contemporary indigenous popular culture in north america
The main focus of this dissertation is placed squarely on cultural texts and productions by contemporary Indigenous artists that are of popular culture. The aim of this work is to examine closely a selection of contemporary works by Native American and First Nations authors that incorporate various aspects of mainstream Eurowestern popular culture into their creative makeup and/or draw on the archive of popular genre fiction. In doing so, I analyze in what exact ways popular stories and icons become reinterpreted to mirror the issues that concern Indigenous people of today’s North America. I argue that creative works of Indigenous popular culture make use of various conventions and frameworks of the popular in order to interrupt colonial cultural archives. In doing so, they perform cultural works which is simultaneously decolonial and resurgent. For the purposes of this study, I define Indigenous popular culture as a field of cultural production which encompasses cultural texts that make use of specific recurrent tropes, icons, and genres of globalized popular culture and simultaneously are situated in contemporary discourses on indigeneity and Indigenous cultural contexts. I further contend that Indigenous popular culture can be productively conceived of as a unified conceptual and cultural field which needs to be engaged on its own terms under the consideration of its own dynamics and specificities. This dissertation aims at helping consolidate this cultural field and develops one methodological blueprint for critical engagement with texts of Indigenous popular culture.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), International Research Training Group (IRTG) Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space
Variations on the Author
“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
Running hand in hand : the librotraficantes mapping cultural resistance in the US Mexico borderlands
In January 2012, a groundbreaking K-12 Mexican American Studies [MAS] program in Tucson was dismantled by the State. The program had been implemented in the late 1990s to help reverse negative educational and socioeconomic trends within local Chicanx communities. The MAS curriculum had questioned prevailing national identity discourse, countering majoritarian myths of the founding and the functioning of the United States. Despite validated evidence of the program’s successful learning outcomes, it was ruled anti-American and seditious by a right-wing conservative legislature, and subsequently found to contravene state law. The books of the program’s bibliography were removed from the classrooms, these included texts considered a critical part of the canon of Chicanx, African American, and Native American literature. The news of the State’s dismantling of the MAS program resonated with Chicanx community groups across the Southwest, communities long embattled by the outcomes of majoritarian politicking and definitions of justice. One such group, Houston-based Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say [NP], decided to act. NP’s strategy was to return books from the removed MAS bibliography to the program’s students. To do so, the group applied a critical understanding of the racialized criminalization of their communities to then fourteen years of counter/storytelling organizing. Hereby, the Librotraficante Movement was born. In praxis, a group of thirty-eight “book smugglers” who, over a period of five days in March 2012, took a caravan of texts to Tucson, engaging on route with community sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. My project utilizes the caravan’s route as a framework to investigate Chicanx resistance in the contested US Mexico borderlands. I pay particular attention to Texas. Annexed in 1845 by the White Supremacist urges of Manifest Destiny, and bordered in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw Mexico stripped of fifty-percent of its territory, Texas has long been on the frontline of the making of the United States. This “making” brought about not only much of the geopolitical space of the nation, but the racialization of those who now found themselves, in the words of Mexican General José Mariano Salas in 1856, “strangers in their own land” (qtd. in Griswold del Castillo 1990, 3). Post-Hidalgo, said “strangers” were disenfranchised by settler-colonialism. They were surveilled and brutalized by the Texas Rangers, and from 1924 by the US Border Patrol whose praxis at that time, as Kelly Lytle Hernández argues, “was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands” (2010, 41). Little has changed. Yet, in this often-visceral contested space, Mexican heritage communities continue to struggle and thrive. The Librotraficante caravan’s Texas journey maps myriad resistance to historical and contemporary trauma as it “operates”, in Ofelia Garcia and Camila Leiva’s words, “within a dynamic network of cultural transformation” (2014, 203). This dissertation brings to light a legacy of Chicanx cultural resilience that troubles US-centric narrative constructions of identity and belonging. My work is located at the intersections of Cultural, Chicanx, Borderlands, American, Literary, and Ethnic Studies, and the Political and Social Sciences. It is at these intersections that sites in my four case-study cities (Tucson, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso) operate in response to, and despite, historical and contemporary oppressions. Said oppressions take the shape of, but are not limited to, epistemological colonization, NAFTA, gentrification, right-wing politicking, border militarization, anti-immigrant discourse, and the persistent marking of brown bodies as “illegal”. My goal is to elevate the historical, cultural, political, and literary consciousness produced by the resistance organizing of the sites. This, I argue, is a consciousness that arises from within the community’s collective experiences
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
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
Getting over : a study of the history, industry, performance art and cultural impact of American professional wrestling
In the American tradition of using revisionist fiction to tell cultural myths, professional wrestling is a genre of performance that can be loosely described as “revisionist sport.” It tells the story of a fictional sporting league and the fictional figures therewithin. These fictional figures chase self-actualization through the glory, wealth, and validation promised by a professional championship in a dramatized version of the sport of catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The enactment of American cultural values and/or their rejection permeates the narratives of the style from formatting of the foundational match to weeks-long angles and years-long arcs. The central theme of the genre is the insecurity of each of the performers, and their reactions to it in their quest for self-actualization. Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler is credited with first asserting that false bravado is an expression of internal insecurity, which means that the bombastic displays of hypermasculine chest-thumping in professional wrestling are expressive of massive internal fears of inferiority among the characters (Ma, 2015). Despite their fears, babyface-heroes seek to walk the righteous path in a corrupt world to chase their principled, morally upright, and apparently deserved self-actualization; villainous heels reject the noble path and take any unethical shortcut to achieve corrupted validation and immoral success. This ethical paradigm dominates much of the storytelling in this genre. Due to the unending episodic nature of the style, most characters see shifts in their ethical alignments as time goes by. Likewise, the cultural values enacted by professional wrestling evolve, and so too do the personal qualities of the heroes and villains. When a particular character captures a cultural moment, the industry is at its most successful. The ethical flexibility of the archetypal characters has allowed professional wrestling to be a consistent and prominent part of American culture from the late-19th century until now. During this period, thanks to its customer-driven ethical compass and the early adoption of evolving media technology, the performance art of professional wrestling has grown to be a nigh-ubiquitous part of American culture, permeating, and influencing the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and politics
Dimension lapsisée : Neukonstruktion von Subjektivität in Quebecscher Frauenliteratur
“Dimension lapsisée: Revised subjectivity in Québécois women’s narratives” argues that the long-standing binary divisions of Montréal that are rooted in the double colonisation of its territory have created a discursive space that is reminiscent of what Gloria Anzaldúa terms ‘borderlands’ in her 1987 publication Borderlands – La Frontera. In particular, this study is a critical discussion of the construction and modification of subjectivity emerging from the Montréal borderlands. It is based on the reading of selected first-person narratives in English and French that have been published since the beginning of the Quiet Revolution. These close readings of narratives – and fiction/theories – by Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott, Nathanaël, Heather O’Neill, and Zoe Whittall are at the core of my dissertation. The investigation of the ways in which the literary productions of these writers are critical of cultural norms is characteristic of many encounters that take place in contemporary Montréal. Because of their hyper-awareness of the structures of anglophone and francophone colonialism, these writings intervene to disrupt cultural preconceptions of imperialism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. More generally, they challenge cultural as well as linguistic homogeneity and nationalisms. By and large, I take a historical approach to investigate the following question in this project: How has the crossing of cultural, linguistic, and ideological borders been addressed in narratives by bilingual, anglophone, and francophone Québécois women writers in Montréal for the past three decades?
This dissertation explores Montréal writing, analysing the urban topographies it maps, the social encounters it stages as well as the representations of both, and its many trans-lingual experiences and experiments. In particular, my readings of French Kiss (1974), Le désert mauve (1987), Main Brides (1993), My Paris (1999), Paper City (2003), The Sorrow and the Fast of It (2007), Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), and Bottle Rocket Hearts (2007) focus on the notion of ‘subjectivity.’ On that account, first-person narrating subjects are at the centre of my study. Relying on theories of performativity, I outline the process of alteration of the subject as well as the deconstruction of its product.
The texts I have assembled here from a corpus of fiction as well as theory are written by individuals that identify – or at least temporarily identified – with the category of ‘woman.’ They live in Montréal or spent considerable time there (here) or shared (share) ideological principles, writing practices, and theories of subjectivity and translation.29 My choice of novels, long poems, and essays written in English, French, and translated from French into English and vice versa reaches from the 1970s to the beginning of the new millennium and reflects the changing character of the ‘subject’ and its location between cultures, languages, and genders. I use the concept of ‘dimension lapsisée’ to grapple with the multiple matrices of the writings and translations at hand. This concept is informed by fiction and theory taken from Montréal’s borderlands and is used as an interpretative device: As much as it describes the zones of cultural and linguistic encounters in the historically bisected city of Montréal, the ‘lapsised dimension,’ I claim, at the same time illustrates the oscillating state of an in- between generated by these encounters and that blurs the boundaries of nations, linguistic codes, genders and genres.Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit den Fronten zwischen dem englischsprachigen Teil Kanadas und der frankophonen Provinz Quebec. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse steht dabei die Metropole Montreal, in der englisch- und französischsprachige Gemeinschaften nebeneinander und miteinander leben. Lange Zeit wurde die Stadt in Kunst und Kultur aber auch vor allem politisch als geteilt konstruiert: typischerweise wird Montreals Westen als anglophon, der Osten als frankophon dargestellt. Als historische Demarkationslinie zwischen den beiden gilt dabei der Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Er teilt die Stadt mittig und geradlinig von Süd nach Nord. Das Hauptargument meiner Arbeit liegt darin, dass das dabei entstandene urbane Grenzgebiet – das allerdings viel komplexer ist, als es die zweispaltige topographische Darstellung vermittelt – ein diskursiver Raum ist, der mit dem Konzept des ‚borderlands,’ das die Chicana Schriftstellerin und Theoretikerin Gloria Anzaldúa in ihrem Werk Borderlands/La Frontera beschreibt, vergleichbar ist.
Im Detail diskutiert diese Dissertation die Konstruktion und Modifizierung von Subjektivität, wie sie in den borderlands Zonen Montreals stattfindet. Die Studie basiert auf Ich-Erzählungen, die seit der Stillen Revolution sowohl auf Englisch als auch auf Französisch geschrieben wurden. Der Korpus der Arbeit umfasst folgende Texte: French Kiss und Le désert mauve von der frankophonen feministischen Autorin Nicole Brossard, Main Brides und My Paris von der anglophonen Quebec-nahen feministischen Schriftstellerin Gail Scott, Paper City und The Sorrow and the Fast of It von Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), einer gebürtigen Montrealer Schriftstellerin, die nun in Chicago und zwischen den Geschlechtern lebt, sowie Lullabies for Little Criminals von der englischsprachigen Montrealer Autorin Heather O’Neill und Bottle Rocket Hearts von der anglophonen queeren Schrifstellerin Zoe Whittall. All diese Texte stellen sowohl sprachliche Homogenität als auch kulturellen Nationalismus in Frage. Aber auf welche Weise nimmt das Überschreiten von linguistischen, kulturellen und ideologischen Grenzen Form an in diesen Erzählungen zweisprachiger anglophoner und frankophoner Schriftstellerinnen aus einem Montréal der siebziger Jahre bis heute
"Verortung ist Alles" : die Konzeption des Raumes in John Updikes Rabbit Tetralogie und Richard Fords Bascombe Trilogie
Location, and in a broader sense, the complex representation of space constitutes a key issue in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy. Both authors chronicle the suburban life of their male protagonists in the Eastern United States from 1959 to the turn of the century. The aim of this thesis is to derive from seven novels (and the novella Rabbit Remembered) how the main characters perceive space and how they construe their sense of place. Relying on the method of close reading, this study examines Updike’s and Ford’s literature within the discourse of the male protagonists’ white middle class world.
This dissertation takes a socio-spatial approach to Updike’s and Ford’s multivolume fiction and shows in what ways space serves as an organizing principle of their texts. With regard to the writing and reading of Updike’s and Ford’s landscapes, this study draws on the critical work by Robert T. Tally Jr., who differentiates between “literary cartography” and “literary geography” in his monograph Spatiality. In their fiction, Updike and Ford create a “literary cartography” by meticulously mapping their main characters’ surroundings. By analogy, this dissertation represents a “literary geography” gained through a spatial reading of their texts.
Crucial to this research project was a triadic reading of both authors’ literature. First, the chapter on (sub)urban space investigates how the characters cognitively map space. Second, this study probes the representation of social space. In this context, the state of community life and the structure of civic engagement are examined. The third pillar of the triadic reading of space focuses on the protagonists’ private sphere and scrutinizes the representation of domestic space. The nexus between these three fields of investigation determines the main characters’ idea of home and their sense of place.
This study contributes to the field of spatiality in literary criticism, and it encourages a triadic reading of suburban literature written from a feminist or ethnic perspective. The “literary geography” of Updike’s and Ford’s spatialized fictions opens up new avenues to inquire into the prominent and increasingly important role of space in American literature.Die Bedeutung von Verortung und - im weiteren Sinne - die komplexe Konzeption des Raumes, stellt einen thematischen Schwerpunkt dar in John Updikes Rabbit Tetralogie und in Richard Fords Frank Bascombe Trilogie. Beide Autoren dokumentieren das Vorstadtleben ihrer männlichen Protagonisten im Osten der Vereinigten Staaten von 1959 bis zur Jahrtausendwende. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, durch die Analyse von sieben Romanen (und der Erzählung Rabbit Remembered) herauszufinden, wie die Hauptfiguren Räume wahrnehmen und wie sie ihre Ortsverbundenheit definieren. Basierend auf der Methode des close reading untersucht diese Studie Updikes und Fords Literatur aus der Sicht ihrer weißen, mittelständischen, männlichen Protagonisten.
Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert Updikes und Fords mehrbändige Literatur aus sozial-räumlicher Sicht und legt dar, inwiefern sich beide Autoren eines übergreifenden Raumkonzepts bedienen. Was die Raumtheorie in Updikes und Fords Romanen anbelangt, so stützt sich die Argumentation auf Robert T. Tally Juniors Monographie Spatiality, in der er zwischen „literarischer Kartographie“ und „literarischer Geographie“ unterscheidet. Durch ihre umfassende Darstellung von Räumen und Orten erschaffen Updike und Ford in ihrer Literatur eine „literarische Kartographie“. Diese Dissertation stellt demnach eine „literarische Geographie“ dar, da sie die Relevanz von Raum und Räumlichkeit in den narrativen Texten beider Autoren untersucht.
Das vorliegende Dissertationsprojekt basiert auf einer triadischen Lesart der Werke von Updike und Ford. Zunächst wird in dem Kapitel über (sub)urbanen Raum untersucht, wie die Charaktere den sie umgebenden Raum nachgerade kartieren. In einem nächsten Schritt wird die Abbildung von sozialem Raum näher beleuchtet. In diesem Zusammenhang werden Gemeinschaftsleben und gesellschaftliches Engagement in den Vororten kritisch hinterfragt. Die dritte Säule des dreigliedrigen Raumkonzepts legt das Hauptaugenmerk auf die private Umgebung der Protagonisten und nimmt die Beschreibung des häuslichen Raumes unter die Lupe. Die Verquickung dieser drei räumlichen Kategorien determiniert, wie die Hauptpersonen ihre Vorstellung von einem „Zuhause“ und ihren sense of place definieren.
Die vorliegende Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur raumtheoretischen Analyse in der Literaturkritik. Es wäre von Interesse, das triadische Raumkonzept auch auf Romane anzuwenden, die aus feministischer oder ethnischer Perspektive verfasst sind. Die „literarische Geographie“ der von Räumen und Orten bestimmten Werke von Updike und Ford zeigt neue Wege auf, die Bedeutung der Komponente Raum in der amerikanischen Literatur aufzuwerten
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
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
- …
