1,721,048 research outputs found
Trust and efficacy taking to the streets in times of crises : variation among activists
No full textOur analysis is based on data of surveys taken at demonstrations in seven Western European countries (Belgium, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland) from 2009 till 2012, at a time when Europe has been experiencing widespread crisis. We focus on 61 demonstrations with a leftist orientation. A comparative analysis of these cases will enable us to address the following research questions, which are important for furthering our understanding of the interaction between critical citizens and representative democracies in times of high street mobilizations critical of the political institutions performances in time of crisis (della Porta and Mattoni 2014): Are protestors’ attitudes of trust and collective efficacy equally represented among socio-graphic features? Is the optimum mix of mistrust and collective efficacy influenced by the process of collective identity building and/or network relations? Do institutions and their performances, in time of crisis somehow shape protestor’s trust and collective efficacy
Life-history interviews
No full textLife history interviews allow to investigate political participation diachronically, as a long-lasting social activity articulated through the different phases of a life trajectory and forms of engagement. What characterizes the study of political participation through this qualitative methodological tool is, above all, an emphasis on agency, contextualization, and transformation. This chapter introduces the epistemological assumptions of the life history interviews (social–constructionist and symbolic–interpretative), how they have been applied to investigate political participation, in particular from scholars studying unconventional forms of political participation, and identifies the steps for conducting these with activists (planning interviews, selection, preparing a guideline and conducting the interview, transcribing and analyzing). It concludes by highlighting a possible way forwards for the study of political participation by adopting life history interviews
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
Medioevo è innovazione: breve storia della fava (Vicia faba L.) alla luce dei nuovi dati archeobotanici.
No full textThe Middle Ages as an Era of Innovation: A brief history of the fava bean in light of the latest archeo-botanical data. LaThe broad bean or fava bean (Vicia faba L.) was one of the first plants to be domesticated. The cultivation of this legume made it possible for man to have readily available a high protein food, animal fodder and a natural fertilizer for the fields. These features, along with the ease with which it could be grown and the production cycle in alternative to grains, determined its wide use for millennia and its broad geographic range. The purpose of this study is to summarize the knowledge we now have of this legume and relate it to the new and important data that has emerged from archeo-botanical research. The geographical range we refer to includes Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the Near East from Prehistory to the post-Medieval period, with particular focus on the developments starting in the late Middle Ages in Southern Italy. The analysis of the data confirmed the circulation of the small grain fava bean starting in the earliest phases of domestication. This size remained essentially the same for thousands of years. However, starting in the early Middle Ages, there was a significant increase in the size of the bean which was recognized only several centuries later in the agronomy treatises which refer to them as fava minuta and fava grossa. Later, from the Late Middle Ages to the early Modern Era, there was a new phase of varietal improvement of the bean which probably led to that which the Flemish botanist Lobelius in 1591 called Faba major recentiorum.La fava (Vicia faba L.) è stata tra le prime piante a essere domesticata. La coltivazione di questo ortaggio ha permesso all’uomo di avere facilmente a disposizione alimenti altamente proteici, foraggio per gli animali e fertilizzante naturale per i campi. Questi aspetti, unitamente alla facilità di coltivazione e al ciclo di produzione alternativo a quello dei cereali, ne hanno determinato il largo impiego per millenni e la diffusione su ampia scala geografica. Lo scopo del nostro lavoro è sintetizzare le conoscenze già note su questa leguminosa e relazionarle con nuovi e importanti dati, emersi soprattutto dalla ricerca archeobotanica; l’orizzonte geografico di riferimento è l’Europa, il Bacino del Mediterraneo e il Vicino Oriente, mentre quello cronologico va dalla Preistoria al post Medioevo, con un focus particolare su quanto accadde a partire dall’alto Medioevo in Italia meridionale. L’analisi dei dati ha confermato la circolazione di due forme di fava a grana piccola sin dalle prime fasi della domesticazione. La taglia sarebbe rimasta sostanzialmente stabile per millenni, a partire dall’alto Medioevo, invece, si registra un deciso incremento dimensionale, che verrà recepito alcuni secoli dopo anche nella trattatistica agronomica (cf. fava “minuta” e “grossa”). Infine, tra il basso Medioevo e la prima Età Moderna, si registra una nuova fase di miglioramento varietale che, probabilmente, portò a quella che il botanico fiammingo Lobelio nel 1591 citerà come Faba major recentiorum
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
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