1,721,075 research outputs found
Mount Etna, Sicily: Vulnerability and resilience during the pre-industrial era.
No full textMount Etna is one of the world's few continually active continental volcanoes and its frequent flank eruptions have been recorded since classical times. These studies have generated a vast literature which, not only enables the impact of eruptions, recovery from them and aspects of human vulnerability and resilience to be brought into focus, but also provides information that allows an assessment to be made of the interplay between environmental, economic and social forces which has shaped this area into Sicily's most distinctive region. In this paper we argue that a unique agriculturally-based society, largely developing indigenously and without significant outside assistance, evolved during a long pre-industrial era, which stretched from late antiquity until the 1950s. In terms of loss-bearing, responses were also typically pre-industrial, with the 1923 eruption denoting the close of this period. Responses were managed with relatively little outside help or intervention. The 1928 eruption marked a transition, after which responses involved progressively greater State intervention. In the pre-industrial era eruptions were managed at three levels: through limited State involvement; by mutual support within village communities, in which religious belief and explanations for losses provided both a social cement - the church often providing leadership and pastoral support - and a context in which losses could be explained; and by family and extended family groups. Finally we argue that these indigenous mechanisms of coping hold important lessons about how disasters on Etna may be managed today
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
Continuity in the face of a slowly unfolding catastrophe:the persistence of Icelandic settlement despite large-scale soil erosion
No full textSoil erosion in Iceland since people first settled the island about 1,100 years ago has fundamentally changed some 15-30% of the island’s total surface area. This provides a unique case to evaluate the consequences of a slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe that has affected, and is continuing to affect a primary means of subsistence for a whole society. Buffered by the sufferings of regions of Iceland, individual farms and particular social groups, Icelandic society as a whole has endured through subsistence flexibility, social inequalities, and the ability to tap into larger provisioning and economic networks. This demonstrates how an adaptable people can confront challenges through social organisation and by diversifying their impacts ecosystems. In the medium term—multi-century timescales—this can be an effective, if costly, strategy, in terms of both the environment and society. Soil conservation is now a national priority, woodland is returning, and climate warming is opening up more potentials for Icelandic arable agriculture. However, the slow catastrophe of Icelandic soil erosion is still unfolding, with the perspective of the longue durée it is evident that decisions made in the Viking Age and medieval period still resonate, constraining future options for resilience and adaptive flexibility
Continuity in the face of a slowly unfolding catastrophe:the persistence of Icelandic settlement despite large-scale soil erosion
No full textSoil erosion in Iceland since people first settled the island about 1,100 years ago has fundamentally changed some 15-30% of the island’s total surface area. This provides a unique case to evaluate the consequences of a slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe that has affected, and is continuing to affect a primary means of subsistence for a whole society. Buffered by the sufferings of regions of Iceland, individual farms and particular social groups, Icelandic society as a whole has endured through subsistence flexibility, social inequalities, and the ability to tap into larger provisioning and economic networks. This demonstrates how an adaptable people can confront challenges through social organisation and by diversifying their impacts ecosystems. In the medium term—multi-century timescales—this can be an effective, if costly, strategy, in terms of both the environment and society. Soil conservation is now a national priority, woodland is returning, and climate warming is opening up more potentials for Icelandic arable agriculture. However, the slow catastrophe of Icelandic soil erosion is still unfolding, with the perspective of the longue durée it is evident that decisions made in the Viking Age and medieval period still resonate, constraining future options for resilience and adaptive flexibility
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
- …
