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Making a Factory Observatory: Mount Wilson, Regional Development, and the Environment in Southern California, 1900--1930
No full textThis dissertation tells the story of the founding and development of Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) during the early twentieth century. Located in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Los Angeles in Southern California, this astronomical observatory was founded in 1904 by astrophysicist George Ellery Hale with financial funding from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. I consider MWO as a factory of science: an observatory that efficiently produced a variety of astronomical knowledge. Hale was the factory manager who led the effort to locate a suitable site for the factory observatory, secured patrons, built the infrastructure, hired scientific workers, and expanded his enterprise by marketing his scientific resources and products. In doing so, I extend the focus from prominent astronomers and instruments typically associated with MWO to include the role of sociocultural and natural environments in shaping scientific practices.I argue that MWO was not a scientific inevitability but a regional contingency that reflected Southern California's sociocultural and natural environment. Emphasizing Hale's management style, which he had honed from a young age, I show that the site survey and regional patrons played a vital role in securing the Carnegie Institution's patronage to establish the factory observatory. The trail widening up Mount Wilson served as establishing infrastructure, an example of tangible regional investment, and a case of how white settlers used marginalized immigrant labor to accelerate the development of Southern California. By examining how astronomers, telescope operators, and human computers created scientific products, I highlight the nuanced gender dynamics of the scientific workers and how spatial layouts enforced existing sociocultural norms. I explore how the factory observatory expanded and gained prominence in the scientific community through the astronomers' use of unique scientific resources at the observatory, such as the Snow Solar Telescope and the 60-inch reflector telescope. By taking such a view, I connect Hale and MWO with the industrialization of the United States during the nineteenth century, the growth of Chicago and Southern California during that time, the role of sociocultural biases and assumptions, and the utility and limitation of the natural environment posed
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The Global Environmental Moment: Sovereignty and American Science on Spaceship Earth, 1945-1974
Get PDFThis dissertation argues that the still-existent political contours of international engagement on global environmental issues were forged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in what I call the global environmental moment, during planning for and in the actions taken surrounding the first intergovernmental conference on the world environment: the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), held in Stockholm Sweden in June 1972. Throughout the prior years of planning for the UNCHE, relatively less developed nations of the global South, led by Brazil, demanded that all environmental efforts must support--not limit--endeavors toward economic development, and along with other members of the Unite Nations, refused to relinquish their national sovereignty for the sake of global environmental protection. Ultimately, the UNCHE produced a Declaration, an Action Plan, and a new United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to coordinate environmental planning within the UN; yet these outward successes institutionalized non-binding, disjointed, and underfunded efforts that split the global North and South over the means for attaining global environmental protection. With the UN conference refusing to alter the status quo of geopolitical organization and impotent against stemming the environmental impact of economic development, large numbers of non-governmental organizations, politically active scientists, and environmental advocates of all stripes also descended on Stockholm to voice their own opinions on the causes and solutions to ongoing environmental degradation. Yet, the alternative conferences in Stockholm where these outliers met also fractured in political conflicts between advocates for the global South and those promoting environmental remedies popular in the global North. Collectively, the collapse of the global environmental moment amid these political and ideological differences created the historical ruts in which debate on global environmental issues have continued to tread ever since
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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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