1,720,959 research outputs found
LEX MERCATORIA, PRIVATE "ORDER", AND COMMERCIAL "CONFUSION": A VIEW FROM SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LIVORNO
No full textThis article examines how maritime Averages - legal procedures that were quotidian but multi-centred and potentially complex - were managed in the jurisdictionally crowded Mediterranean. One suggested solution to this difficulty was that procedures were governed by the lex mercatoria, a supposedly universal body of customary merchant law which allowed disputes to be resolved according to a common framework: the debunking of this historical myth demands that legal historians elucidate more clearly how the problem of different maritime customs was resolved in a transnational environment. Evidence from seventeenth-century Livorno suggests that heterogenous maritime Average rules were overcome by mutual recognition of the decisions made in other jurisdictions even when these followed different rules. This was justified with reference to the "disorder" and "confusion" that would otherwise afflict commerce. "Order" here did not mean uniformity and ex-ante certainty of outcomes but rather general expectations that judgements made in other centres would be respected. Attempts by the English and French states to press for consular jurisdiction threatened - mostly unsuccessfully to disrupt this system. The case buttresses certain lex mercatoria theories only in as far as it demonstrates that early modern state building had the potential to destabilise a functioning international commercial order: yet this order was guaranteed by a legitimating authority that only state-backed institutions could provide
General average, human jettison, and the status of slaves in Early Modern Europe
Full text linkThis is the final version. Available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record. This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.European Research Council (ERC
Histories of trade as histories of civilisation, edited by Antonella Alimento, Aris Della Fontana, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (Switzerland) 2021
Full text linkGoing 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
- …
