1,720,993 research outputs found
The taxidermist's apprentice:Stitching together the past and present of a craft practice
Get PDFHow do you witness the development and reproduction of a craft practice? This essay explores this provocation in relation to the craft practice of taxidermy and, in so doing, aims to stitch together non-representational and historical geographic concerns within the discipline. Mobilising and developing on an Ingoldian perspective on the process of skill, the author places herself in the position of apprentice to a practising taxidermist in recognition that the position of learner is a highly instructive context in which to enquire into how present-day practice relates to a representational culture charting the development of the craft in historical ‘how-to-do’ manuals. When juxtaposing contemporary ethnographies of taxidermy practice with descriptions of practice in historical ‘how-to-do’ manuals, the author shows how past and present practice resonates rather than replicates. Overall, this article aims to introduce and develop theoretical and methodological pathways for studying and storying (historical) geographies of craft and skilled practices
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
Earthwork, waterwork and the labours of drainage in an early modern English lowland
No full textThis chapter considers the drainage of the Somerset levels from the perspective of work. For centuries, the agricultural exploitation of the Somerset Levels has required the ongoing work of many hands to move earth, water and silt due to the strong tidal influence on the region’s rivers, their high sediment load and the size of the catchment. Yet histories of drainage are typically histories of schemes and schemers – of planning, engineering, opposition and resistance, and, eventually, long slow moves towards the desiccation of a landscape or region. In these histories, and the schemes they have focused on, the everyday earth- and water-work of drainage has been peripheral. The routine, seasonal and manual tasks of digging ditches, cutting weeds and controlling sluices, and the muddy hands and wet feet doing this work, have been obscured in favour of the large-scale and the infrastructural. This chapter foregrounds the routine work that has made the Somerset Levels using historical documents and oral histories, charting the changing nature of the work of drainage. Then it considers how this work has been imagined and obscured in schemes for the improvement of drainage over the last two centuries, as the problem of flooding has come to be conceived as one that could be solved with engineering and infrastructure. Often such projects have sought to design out a need for ongoing labour, have underestimated the need for ongoing labour or have suffered in the long run from the forgetting of the labour required for their maintenance. This chapter then encourages us to think of Somerset Levels not as a landscape made by a series of successive and discrete interventions, but as a landscape which has always been in the making, and unmaking, by the doing and not doing of routine, seasonal and manual labour
The Biogeographies of the Blue Bird-of-Paradise:From Sexual Selection to <i>Sex and the City</i>
Get PDFThis article takes as its starting point an encounter with a preserved blue bird-of-paradise skin. Though rare, the bird became wildly famous after it perched atop the head of Carrie Bradshaw during Sex and the City: The Movie. However, where in the movie the bird-skin acted as Carrie’s something blue, I mobilize it in this article as a “telling example” of near-extinction. This is because the blue bird-of-paradise is but one of the millions of Paradisaea that were hunted, traded, shipped, and lusted after since their earliest forms of commodification. And as the theory of sexual selection confirms, biographical entitlement cannot be assigned to a singular agent in the blue bird-of-paradise’s story, which is why this article will chart its biogeographies: from New Guinea rainforests to New York streets. Here, instead of tracing the blue bird-of-paradise’s individual commodity biography, it becomes an act of tracing and placing the bird-skin within the life and death worlds of human-animal relations that produced, mobilized, and maintain(ed) it as a commodity over time and space. In doing so, the article makes two important contributions to the field of social history. First, by conceptually focusing on the relations that produce lives, things, and worlds, it challenges the certainty that anchors the narration of biographies to the singular and anthropocentric embodiment of “a life.” Second, mapping the biogeographies of a “lively” commodity, such as a preserved bird-of-paradise, offers the opportunity of highlighting the significant role so-called natural species and histories can play in shaping human histories
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