1,721,000 research outputs found
Putting Things into Practice: Pragmatic Theory and the Exploration of Monumental Landscapes
No full textThe Neolithic and Bronze Age burial ground of Flintbek provides a well-documented case study of a monumental landscape, whose shaping and development through ritual practices of monument building can be studied over the course of centuries. The minute excavation and data analyses (Mischka 2011a) enable a discussion of the interrelations between collective social practices of monument building and modification as well as the practical effects those individual monumental features – and the monumental landscapes as a whole – would have had on those social collectives. We want to explore pragmatic theory as a tool to better understand the dialectic between the creation and recreation of landscapes and the reproduction of social organization in the course of social practices.
This paper aims to highlight how an inquiry into prehistoric social practices based on semiotic pragmatism, as was formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, provides a theory on how meanings and social relations are created and recreated in the course of social practices, a model explaining how these practices as material and spatially situated phenomena can be used to explore the interrelation of social practices and their material outcomes, which have practical consequences for subsequent practices and social relations. We exemplify this by the reconstruction of building activities on the megalithic long barrow Flintbek LA3, Northern Germany, 3500‐3400 BCE. Here, it can be demonstrated how construction activities over the course of a century are both shaped by and actively shape social relations. New developments can be explained by a creative recombination of already existing singular components. A process of complexification and enlargement of building activities is set into motion, including inter-group competition. This development is terminated around 3400 BCE, whereafter grave construction activities are re-directed towards a smaller number of collectively used passage graves, which further enhance the level of complexity of design, but dispense with the unequal, competitive component. This represents a process of social collectivisation paralleled with the establishment of first larger villages in the region
Ice Jams and their Impact on Urban Communities from a Long-term Perspective (Middle Ages to the Nineteenth century)
No full textIce jams and subsequent floods were among the most disastrous events for riverside cities in pre-modern times. An ice jam could cause the water to rise very quickly and in some cases much higher than even the worst summer floods. Urban quarters could be flooded rapidly and with little time for any rescue activities for the afflicted inhabitants. The low water temperature made it nearly impossible to survive in the floods. This paper examines ice floods in a long-term perspective to see how urban communities in Europe perceived and adapted to those dangerous hazards. After an overview of the sparse records from the Middle Ages (still to be researched systematically), three single events from Early Modern Times are highlighted. By looking at the disastrous ice floods of 1573, 1784 and 1830 in the cities of Krems and Vienna, both situated along the Danube River in modern Austria, the development of coping strategies and the emergence of memory cultures in an urban context are outlined
From Hunting to Herding? Aspects of the Social and Animal Landscape during the Southern Scandinavian Neolithic
No full textIn accordance with current perceptions, the Neolithic landscape of Southern Scandinavia appears to be dominated by two innovations that are connected to the transition to the Neolithic in this region: agriculture and monuments such as megalithic tombs or Single Grave burial mounds. So it seems natural to assume that these aspects also dominated the contemporaneous perception and the organisation of space. Most prominently, the monuments have a very important role in the landscape archaeology of the Funnel Beaker period particularly because they form a landscape of monuments. But from a pragmatic perspective, it is more likely for the perception of the landscape as a taskscape (sensu Ingold 1993) that the everyday practises and routines of the inhabitants as well as the movements that evoke such practises were much more salient than the monuments. Given the agricultural nature of the economy, it would be consequent to assume that the most important constraints on spatial planning and settlement locations would arise from this economy, resulting in an agrarian landscape. On the basis of a case study from the region of Stormarn-Lauenburg and the evidence of the number of identified specimens (NISP) of animals from a range of Funnel Beaker sites, this paper intends to demonstrate that it might not have been the monuments nor the agrarian subsistence economy but rather practises founded in the Mesolithic tradition that dominated the settlement system of Funnel Beaker societies. As an alternative, a scenario should be presented in which the access to larger animals, hunted or domesticated, as a currency in a social exchange, had a more significant influence on the choice of the settlement site than the purely economic optimisation of agricultural production processes
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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