1,720,979 research outputs found
Bounded by the Sea: An Interdisciplinary Environmental History of Early Medieval Brittany
No full textPh.D.In some ways, the sixth to tenth centuries were turbulent for Brittany, bringing political changes and military conquests, including by the Bretons, Franks, and Vikings. Yet, throughout the early Middle Ages, Brittany’s inhabitants relied on resources drawn from their natural environment, such as grain, wood, pasture, fish and salt, to maintain stability and build wealth. An interdisciplinary approach, combining written sources with evidence from archaeology and paleoecology, helps to bring this environmental history into clearer focus. Breton written accounts, largely hagiographies, texts relating to the saints, and charters, records of the possessions and legal rights of ecclesiastical institutions, make frequent references to the natural world. Meanwhile, preserved plant matter — pollen, seeds and wood — found in archaeobotanical assemblages, provide an independent natural archive of Breton land management and vegetation change. When layered together, these datasets allow for a more complete and continuous view of land use in early Middle Ages than we are used to.
This dissertation reveals that early medieval Bretons utilized a range of intertwined land use practices, designed to make simultaneous use of waters, woodlands, farmlands, meadows, and pastures. Bretons selected their techniques in accordance with local environmental conditions, for instance sowing tolerant grains on acidic soils or pasturing livestock on otherwise unproductive wetlands. The intensity of Breton land use practices varied throughout the first millennium, as, following a notable phase of rewilding in Late Antiquity (c. 200-500 AD), renewed and unprecedented human impact on the natural landscape increased between c. 500-1000 AD and particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries. These patterns are linked to changes in the region’s social and political make-up, as first the Breton migrations brought new settlers into the region and galvanized an explosion in new monastic foundations, and later Carolingian influence led to an encroachment on Brittany’s natural resources. Viking incursions in the region, meanwhile, did not undo these trends towards agricultural intensification, suggesting that Brittany’s local communities, and the lands they farmed, remained more resilient than their elite landlords. By following visible traces on the page and the landscape, what follows recovers this complex history
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Infectious Disease History in Twentieth Century Africa
No full textPh.D.This dissertation employs novel approaches in the field of historical epidemiology to reinterpret past disease events in twentieth century Africa. Employing methods from epidemiology, medical anthropology, and evolutionary biology enables us to answer an essential historical question: how did pathogens operate in the past? Chapter 1 argues for the application of approaches widely unfamiliar to the historical study of infectious disease in humans and animals to demonstrate that the answers are found where historians of medicine and disease rarely look for them. Multidisciplinarity expands the interpretive power of disease history, more accurately captures the complex reality of historical pathogen behavior in the African environment and, in turn, renders the past more operable for the present and future.Chapter 2 employs a syndemic approach to reinterpret 1926-1932 patient records at Hospital Schweitzer in Gabon where dysentery pathogens belied a more complex web of illness and harmful colonial practices which made outcomes much worse for the timber laborers caught in the center of this infectious confluence. Chapter 3 turns to applications of evolutionary biology and phylogenetics to interrogate the foot-and-mouth disease virus—one of the most infectious animal pathogens known to modern veterinary science—to better understand how deeply its roots intertwined in the vast populations of cattle and sylvatic ruminants across the landscapes of eastern Africa. Focusing on the most epizootiologically important region of the Great Lakes, for the first time in Chapter 4, the histories of the foot-and-mouth disease virus are sketched through colonial veterinary records in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya from 1914-1961. These histories enabled the application of phylogenetics and syndemics, in Chapter 5, to better interpret how the foot-and-mouth disease pathogen operated in this critical region. The detection of a previously unidentified panzootic in 1954 became possible through the multidisciplinary approach and, in turn, enabled greater comprehension about how the virus reacted to other important pathogens, the practices of African and European livestock owners, and the myriad species living in the Great Lakes region
Catch Me? Yes, You Can: Examining 1918 Pandemic Narratives
No full textM.A.L.S.The 1918 Influenza Pandemic narrative is the conduit through which popular and academic scholarship understand this pandemic – unchanged since it was crafted by historians in the 1970s. However, the 1918 pandemic was a complex event that demands collaboration among disciplines to bring the range of available evidence and perspectives to bear in the analysis. This thesis offers a partial corrective to the framework of this narrative, using an interdisciplinary approach to bring together historical themes and cutting-edge research from an array of disciplines – bacteriology, demography, disease history, economics, epidemiology, geography, infectious disease research, microbiology, statistics, and virology – to create a more transparent account of the 1918 pandemic. This thesis highlights issues around comorbidities, coinfections, and prior infections; updates US mortality estimates; discusses the three most popular origin stories; and revealed that the flu did not, contrary to popular historical opinion, indiscriminately kill, nor did it kill alone
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
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