1,721,415 research outputs found
The Pyramid of Knowledge: Tracing the Roots of the Intellectual Background of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento
Full text linkIn the first page of the 1657’s diary of the
Accademia del Cimento, Alessandro Segni, at
the time secretary of the group of scholars,
depicted twelve volumes stacked pyramidally.
The author's name is inscribed on the edge of
the books, except on the penultimate one,
where only the words 'Nova Filosofia' appear.
The authors are arranged in a sort of ideal
progression of natural philosophy, starting with
Aristotle, and ending with Galileo.
The list that is thus configured encourages the
refletion on the epistemological value of
author-only lists, that in this case reveal how the
academics of the Cimento perceived themselves
and their activity.
The talk proposed will focus on the
reconstruction of the natural-philosophical
background – especially in the meteorological
field – of the circle of scholars, taking as a
star ng point this peculiar “pyramid of
knowledge”, to analyze then the various intellectual legacies in the space of the Grand Duchy
of Tuscany during the seventeenth century
Taming tempestuous Ziz. Weather knowledge in the early modern Italian peninsula
Full text linkThe Florentine Accademia del Cimento is the first European society to put experimentation at the core of scientific activity and to be supported by a public power. It lasted only ten years (1657-1667), the same years that saw the establishment of societies of greater fame and longevity such as the Royal Society and the Académie Royale des Sciences. But what exactly was its intellectual and philosophical-natural substratum? Starting from an epistemological analysis of some lists of books and authors, one of which was codified in a symbolic representation of a sort of pyramid of knowledge – moving from Aristotle up to Galileo – this intervention aims to re-trace the intellectual background of the Academy, especially from the point of view of meteorology. In fact, the use of such lists was not only functional to define the identity of the Academy through a collectivity of philosophers of the past, but also to build an experimental programme, which was influenced by works ranging from the Timaeus and the Meteorologica to Cabeo's Commentaria and the production of the Paracelsian medical doctors.
It is also important to look at the absences on these lists: the exclusion of certain authors and works in favour of others is in fact another valuable source for reconstructing the Academy's philosophical and intellectual background, providing us with precious indications about the position the academics wanted to occupy in the European scientific panorama.
This kind of analysis will therefore make it possible to develop a reflection on the relationship between the public power, the various actors involved and the experimental programme of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II and his brother Leopold. In fact Ferdinand II, had already set up the first European meteorological network, the Rete Medicea, and brought together a circle of courtiers-natural philosophers to carry out experiments and speculations almost entirely in the meteorological field
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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