1,720,956 research outputs found
Secondary Ecology, Tertiary World: Middle-earth’s Ecology as Played by Aotearoa
Get PDFTolkien\u27s self-declared love of nature (Letters: 165) is well-known and forms a thread that runs through all his work, to the point that Brian Rosebury (2003) posits that \u27Middle-earth, rather than any of the characters, is the hero of The Lord of the Rings\u27. John Garth (2020) points out various links between the nature of The Shire and other Middle-earth locations and England, taken, as Tolkien wrote, from \u27such life as I know\u27 (Letters: 181). However, visual adaptations of Tolkien\u27s work by Peter Jackson and Amazon have used locations in Aotearoa (New Zealand), to play the \u27character\u27 of Middle-earth on screen. These locations have their own plant species and ecologies that are often visually distinct from those found in Europe, particularly England. This paper explores the significance and possibilities of transposing Middle-earth into the ecology and landscapes of Aotearoa, the conjuration of a “new” Middle-earth, and how (if) it changes our own imaginations of Tolkien’s world
The Mariner (and his wife): Rethinking Aldarion\u27s (A)sexuality
Get PDF“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work, and cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting. However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple. This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e., he does not experience sexual and/or romantic attraction in ways considered societally normative), and is therefore constrained by a system of marriage and duty that is anathema to him and to which he does not connect in any personal way. By queering Aldarion’s (a)sexuality, this paper seeks a reading more compassionate towards both him and Erendis, understanding them as people wronged by societal expectation and ‘normality’ as characterised by the couple’s “failure” to reach a balance between their gendered characteristics. While Aldarion may not be exonerated from the harm his decisions have caused, this view shifts the blame from him personally to an amatonormative system that makes a villain of him, as well as Erendis and those around them
The Mariner (and his wife): Queering Aldarion\u27s (A)sexuality
Get PDF“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work (Fitzsimmons, 2015), cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting (Rosenthal, 2004). However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple.
This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e., he does not experience sexual and/or romantic attraction in ways considered societally normative), and is therefore constrained by a system of marriage and duty that is anathema to him and to which he does not connect in any personal way.
By queering Aldarion’s (a)sexuality, this paper seeks a reading more compassionate towards both him and Erendis, understanding them as people wronged by societal expectation and ‘normality’ as characterised by the couple’s “failure” to reach a balance between their gendered characteristics (Rawls, 2014). While Aldarion may not be exonerated from the harm his decisions have caused, this view shifts the blame from him personally to an amatonormative system that makes a villain of him, as well as Erendis and those around them
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
Asexualities, Aromantics, and Autists in Epic Fantasy by Tolkien and Goddard
Get PDFThe Mariner (and his wife): Rethinking Aldarion’s (A)sexuality Rory Queripel
“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work (Fitzsimmons, 2015), cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting (Rosenthal, 2004). However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple.
This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e. he does not experience sexual and/or romantic attraction in ways considered societally normative), and is therefore constrained by a system of marriage and duty that is anathema to him and to which he does not connect in any personal way.
By queering Aldarion’s (a)sexuality, this paper seeks a reading more compassionate towards both him and Erendis, understanding them as people wronged by societal expectation and ‘normality’ as characterised by the couple’s “failure” to reach a balance between their gendered characteristics (Rawls, 2014). While Aldarion may not be exonerated from the harm his decisions have caused, this view shifts the blame from him personally to an amatonormative system that makes a villain of him, as well as Erendis and those around them.
Wide Seas Islander, Asexual, & Autist: The Intersectional Mythopoeic Characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang Robin Anne Reid
Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series (consisting of seven interlaced sub-series containing, as of the writing of this proposal, twenty longer works [novels and novellas] and four collections of short stories) is a tour de force of mythopoeic worldbuilding, genre-blending, and queer characterization. I completely agree with Alexandra Rowland that “You [all] Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series.”
In this presentation, I analyze how Goddard’s intersectional characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang, a co-protagonist and point of view character in the “Lays of the Hearth Fire” sub-series, queers a number of the major conventions of epic fantasy while creating a strongly mythopoeic work of fantasy that writes back to Tolkien’s legendarium.
Cliopher/Kip’s intersectional identity as a Wide Seas Islander, an asexual, and an autist meets the sixth of Alexander Doty’s definitions of “queer” as:
those aspects of. . . textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorization of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (6-7).
The narrative foregrounds the importance of Kip being a Wide Seas Islander, a national identity dismissed by most of the Last Emperor’s court as “primitive,” even barbaric, and establishes the specific parameters of his asexuality in At the Feet of the Sun. Characterizing him as an autist is my interpretation of a number of his characteristics and behaviors as described in the series
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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