1,721,012 research outputs found
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
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The Practice of Shi‘i Jurisprudence in Contemporary Lebanon
Full text linkDrawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Lebanon and France between 2012 and 2014, this dissertation discusses Shi‘i methods of legal reasoning (ijtihad), and considers their incorporation into state juridical apparatuses. Since its colonial inception in 1926, the Lebanese state has harnessed the shari‘a tradition to regulate the family life of its Shi‘i citizenry. In order to properly grasp the ethical and epistemological transformations underlying the state’s appropriation of Shi‘i legal discourse, I suggest we first examine the training judges, clerics, and jurists receive in traditional hawza seminaries. This dissertation’s first three chapters show that learning to perform authoritative shari‘a reasoning requires not only developing a mastery of the sacred texts, but also submitting oneself to the discipline of the Shi‘i moral tradition.The remaining chapters examine what Islamic legal reasoning becomes when it gets entangled with the judicial functions of a modern nation-state. To this end, I shift the ethnographic focus toward Beirut’s Shi‘i family courthouse, where hawza-trained judges are appointed by the Lebanese state to adjudicate familial disputes. I show that under the institutional and conceptual conditions of state legality, the Islamic legal tradition is divested of many of its interpretative possibilities and oriented toward the purpose of governing marital relationships uniformly. What accounts for this reorientation, I argue, is not so much the volition of individual judges, but the grammar of procedural norms and legal mechanisms through which these judges perform their work. While making this argument, I discuss the social and gender consequences of the Lebanese state’s appropriation of Shi‘i legal thinking
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
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Of Living Traces and Revived Legacies: Unfolding Futures in the Sultanate of Oman
Full text linkSince its inception as a modern nation state in 1970, the Sultanate of Oman has actively pursued a policy of national integration and modernization, smoothing over the region's political cleavages through the practices of heritage. Oman's expanding heritage industry and market for heritage crafts and sites is exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels. The material forms of national heritage provide the context within which the very foundations of the nation take shape. But the construction of the heritage project in modern Oman has also necessitated the formulation of the public domains of history and Islam as seemingly separate and autonomous, erasing any awareness of the socio-political and ethical relationships that once characterized Ibadi Imamate rule (1913-1958) in the region. This dissertation is a study of how forms of history, the re-configuration of temporality and the institutionalization of material heritage (turāth) recalibrate the Islamic tradition to requirements of modern political and moral order in Oman. Based primarily on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Muscat, the capital and Nizwa, once the administrative and juridical centre of the Ibadi Imamate, it explores the different ways in which the Oman's past inhabits the present, sustaining an active effect on the configuration of religion and community in the nation state.This study explores the temporal logics embodied in the concept of `tradition,' through following concrete practices of making and reflecting on the past, and the material objects and texts that make these practices possible. Chapter 1 discusses the past as sanctioned by the Nizwa fort in its role as sharī'a adjudicator, as well as popular written and aural histories during the Imamate. Primarily moral in nature, oriented towards God and salvation and grounded in Ibadi doctrine and practice, the function of history held that the heterogeneity of every-day life's interactions and relationships facilitated by objects and texts could be assessed on the basis of past authoritative and exemplary forms of justice and morality, as embodied by the lives of virtuous forbears such as former Imams as well as the Prophet and his companions. Chapter 2 discusses how cleaving through the temporal assumptions of sharī'a time, heritage and conservation practices of the secular modern state, reconfigure religion through adopting a temporal engagement with a past that entails a changing teleological future rather than one continuous with an exemplary history. The materiality of objects and sites - including mosques and shari'a manuscripts - once embedded in ethically grounded social practices assumes an iterable and pedagogical mode of representation that cultivates every-day civic virtues, new forms of religiosity and forms of marking time, defining the ethical actions necessary to become an Omani modern through the framework of tradition. In chapter 3, even as the national narrative conditions the way people ethically work on themselves through evoking such forms of heritage as the Nizwa fort, its old suq or the dalla (coffee pot) by way of example, it also generates anxieties and emotional sensibilities that seek to address the erasures and occlusions of the past through deploying alternative temporal logics assuming a dynamic perceptual edge. In chapter 4, an unacknowledged slave legacy, a residue of the sharī'a past, continues to create unofficial tribal hierarchies through state juridical regulation of marriage and divorce, legally endorsing`customary' marriage practices between `pure' tribal Arabs vs. those descended from slaves or client tribes even as a national past sanctifies civil and political equality. Chapter 5 highlights the active re-configuration of historical memory by a non-Ibadi, non-Arab group, the Lawati, to fit into the national template through a process of Arab tribalization.This dissertation argues that "inhabiting" heritage forms the nexus of competing modes of engagement with material objects and landscapes in Oman even as it mobilizes the very different anxieties that this history offers. Material forms produce a unique register for the exploration of the embodiment of multiple temporalities - destabilizing the modernist notion of time and its ties to global conservation practice - the practices and sensibilities that they foster and the ways in which they refigure new modes of relationships between religion and politics, creating new spaces and categories that have transformed the ways that Omanis perceive and organize historical experiences
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
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At the Margins of Law: Adjudicating Muslim Families in Contemporary Delhi
Full text linkThis dissertation explores questions of religion, law and gender in contemporary Delhi. The dissertation is based on eighteen months of fieldwork I conducted in four types of Muslim family law institutions: sharia courts (dar ul qaza institutions), women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats), a mufti's authoritative legal advice (fatawa), and a mufti's healing practice. All of these institutions adjudicate cases and attend to problems that fall under the definition of "Personal Law." According to the Indian legal system, Personal Law covers matters of marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, succession, and adoption. Within the state's legal system, secular judges adjudicate Personal Law cases according to a codified version of the religious law of the disputants. Although the institutions I studied hear cases that fall within the sphere of Personal Law, and are thereby shaped by the Indian state's legal structure, they are run by Muslim clerics and lay Muslims rather than by lawyers, and their judgments are not considered binding by the state. Their judgments cannot be appealed in the state's courts nor can they be enforced by the coercive arm of the state. Detailing the methods of hearing and responding to cases particular to each of these institutions, I show that each draws on and refigures a broader discursive Islamic legal tradition even as it works within and in dialogue with state law. The first major argument of the dissertation emerges from this analysis: although these institutions are technically extra-legal, together with the state institutions they constitute a form of legal pluralism and are, therefore, a significant part of the legal landscape for Delhi Muslims. For historical and structural reasons I analyze in the dissertation, the institutions I studied primarily adjudicate Personal Law matters. Women and men both approach these institutions with complaints, but women in particular have a high success rate. Women's presentations of their cases and their troubles demonstrate that they approach these institutions for a variety of legal, religious, and strategic reasons with the specific aim of reconfiguring their domestic arrangements. The second argument I make in the dissertation draws on this observation. I show that these particularly Indian Islamic legal institutions are significant sites at which men and women negotiate domestic expectations and marital disputes. As in the state courts, the processes and outcomes of these discussions are rife with tensions and contradictions, but the modes and logics of mediation offer notably different possibilities than state courts can. Together, these three main arguments--that these institutions constitute a single legal landscape along with the state's courts even as they draw on and reconfigure Islamic traditions of dispute; that Muslim men and women approach these institutions for a variety of legal, religious, and strategic reasons; and that the organization of gender is central to the work of these courts--open up new ways of thinking about the ways in which law is constituted through religious and gendered norms in the context of postcolonial India
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Provoking Tolerance: History, Sense of Self, and Difference in Latvia
Full text linkIn this dissertation, I explore how the post-Soviet Latvian state and people are invited and pressured to become European through discourses and practices of tolerance promotion, which have emerged as an integral element of contemporary liberal political culture in Europe. I locate this intervention in the broader context of the "minority problem" through which Eastern European states and peoples have been and continue to be governed by supranational organizations, such as the League of Nations at the beginning of the 20th century and the Council of Europe in the present. My work examines concrete practices of tolerance promotion through which local and international human rights and minority organizations, as well as international monitoring bodies, ask Latvians to reflect upon and remake their attitudes and conduct in relation to ethnic, racial, sexual or religious difference. Due to the fact that tolerance promotion initiatives draw legitimacy from the various political treaties and human rights conventions that shape the European present in Latvia, many Latvians exhibit skepticism and resentment towards such initiatives and view them as political and legal injunctions that misrecognize the historical specificity of public and political life in Latvia, especially the way in which the Soviet past bears upon the present. Consequently, in the view of human rights and minority activists and organizations, the problem of intolerance is often closely linked with the problem of Latvian nationalism, which constitutes an obstacle on the road to acquiring political and cultural membership in Europe. In my research, therefore, I focus specifically on how the historical community of Latvians is constituted through arguments about tolerance in Latvia. Rather than explain the Latvians' reluctance to embrace the liberal politics of tolerance as a problem of backward nationalism, I offer a more complex analysis of the historical and political contexts that produce such a reaction. For example, my research shows that the transnational discourses of tolerance tend to take for granted particular notions of sexual, racial, and ethnic identities, which, in turn, give rise to specific understandings of public and political life. Consequently, the Latvians' skepticism and resentment is largely a reaction to the ways in which the discourses and practices of tolerance attempt to remake public and political life. In six chapters, which focus on politics of injury, minority politics, injurious language, anti-racism, gay and lesbian activism, and the practice of critical reflection, I show that arguments about racism in Latvia are not only about whether there is racism in Latvia or not, but also about how public reflection on racism matters for the collective life of Latvians in the current historical moment; or how arguments about intolerant language are not only about which words are injurious and which are not, but also about the historical conditions that enable the question of injury to be posed at all; or how arguments about gay and lesbian politics are not only arguments about normative morality, but also about different conceptions of self and associated forms of political engagement. Most importantly, I show that arguments about the ways in which Latvians should relate to ethnic, racial, or sexual identities are profoundly shaped by concerns that the injunction to publicly reflect on the problem of intolerance misrecognizes the demands that the recent and injurious Soviet past places upon public and political life in the present. The dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2005 and 2008 on the implementation of the European Union funded National Program for the Promotion of Tolerance, which was launched in 2004. My primary research object was the practices through which the problem of intolerance was introduced, addressed, and contested as a matter of public reflection and conduct. My field site was therefore constituted, on the one hand, by the activities of a network of government institutions and human rights and minority organizations that aimed to address problems such as racism, homophobia, and intolerant speech, and, on the other hand, by ordinary Latvians' responses and reflections on these issues.While my ethnographic research focused on the discourses and practices of tolerance that have emerged in the Latvian public sphere during the last seven years, my work is not primarily aimed at a critical examination of tolerance as a particular kind of political rationality. Rather, I am interested in arguments about tolerance that unfold in a specific historical conjuncture in Latvia at the intersection of the Soviet past and the European present. Moreover, I am interested in the kind of political subjects and relations between them that are constituted through arguments about tolerance and what they tell us not only about the post-Soviet Latvian present, but also about the European present more generally. In analyzing the discourses and practices of tolerance, my aim is thus threefold: (1) to trace how the historical community of Latvians is constituted through arguments about tolerance; (2) to show that this historical community of Latvians cannot simply be characterized as animated by deeply rooted nationalism, but is rather an effect of political subjectivation that unfolds at the intersection of imperial, colonial, and communist trajectories; and (3) to show how the historical specificity of public and political life in Latvia illuminates the possibilities and limitations of particular analytical frameworks, such as that of nationalism, as well as of liberal political culture in Europe
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