1,720,977 research outputs found
Sharing in Action: The Systemic Concept of the Environment in Aleksandr Bogdanov
Full text linkThis paper discusses the novelty of Aleksandr Bogdanov’s approach, which combines the systemic perspectives employed in his Tektology, the general science of organization (1913–1922). In this work, Bogdanov places particular emphasis on the concept of the environment and situates the process of ‘organization’ in a shared social context. The interaction among social agents, and between them and their contextual surroundings, implies a cybernetic relationship. The environment is, in fact, regarded in terms of both its influence in shaping human living conditions and its plasticity in being transformed by human labour for specific purposes. Likewise, in Tektology, Bogdanov considers not only the social context but also biological and ecological systems that foster an emergent relationship between organisms and their environments. On the one hand, the environment favours biological organisms best adapted to its conditions; on the other hand, the environment is seen as a portion of space (ecosystem) in which populations live and continuously modify the biogeochemical conditions of that system. By referring to biological, ecological and cognitive levels of cybernetic organization, I argue that Bogdanov’s tektological polymorphic idea of the environment embraces different dimensions of the systemic discourse, and can also be useful in understanding the process of knowledge creation underlying the idea of a proletarian culture
Planetary Environing: The Biosphere and the Earth System
Full text linkAnthropocene; Environment and sustainability; Environmental humanities; Environmental media; Indigenous; Media studie
The Evolution of the Anthroposphere: Historicizing Geoanthropology
Full text linkAfter briefly introducing the ongoing debate about the Anthropocene from an interdisciplinary point of view—with a focus on the lack of common ground among different scholarly communities in addressing the Anthropocene as a geo-cultural notion—the article attempts to frame geoanthropology as a novel interdisciplinary approach that can help overcome tensions between the sciences and the humanities. It does so by providing two examples of geoanthropological investigation: first, the experimental project Anthropogenic Markers; second, an attempt to historicize geoanthropology through the exploration of historical efforts to perceive nature as integrated with humanity. The first case, Anthropogenic Markers, shows some of the historical contexts, epistemic settings, and conceptual contributions of Anthropocene geology, thus exploring ways of combining the anthroposphere and the geosphere without losing sight of the different local and political contexts. The second case introduces the concept of ‘epistemic evolution’, crucial to understanding geoanthropology from a historical perspective, and combines it with the notion of the ‘noosphere’, particularly in the elaboration provided by Russian geochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky. The noosphere is described as a new phase of biosphere evolution in which humans have become aware of their ability to reshape the Earth, especially through the invention of modern technologies. In this respect, the noosphere is characterized by the emergence of a new awareness that integrates cultural and geological forms of agency in their epistemic and co-evolutionary aspects. The noosphere appears as a global process oriented towards understanding the world as an integrated system, which is a precondition for any attempt to rematerialize and rebalance the role of humanity in the Earth System
Historical Geoanthropology
Full text linkIntroduction to the special issue on Historical Geoanthropology. Our inquiry moves from the conviction that quite recent geoanthropological developments cannot be fully understood without reconstructing their origins with methods deriving from the historical and cultural disciplines, socio-economic history, and the history and philosophy of technology. We believe that humanistic research has the potential to show the interconnectedness of dimensions—social, political, intellectual, scientific, and environmental—that characterize humanity in the Anthropocene, and, possibly, to open up new social-ecological perspectives
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
- …
