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    An Interview with Cass R. Sunstein: Author of The World According to Star Wars

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    The guest editors of special issue 12, Jason W. Ellis and Sean Scanlan, interview Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, where he is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is the author of many books, including the bestseller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler). His 2016 book The World According to Star Wars attempts to understand the Star Wars universe in ten chapters through the lenses of Sunstein’s academic interests, namely: culture, sociology, psychology, behavioral science, and political science. The book is both personal and theoretical, practical and academic. It takes accurate measure of the genesis of the movies, the movies themselves, and briefly, but trenchantly, it examines concepts such as reputational cascades and speculates on what Star Wars can teach viewers about constitutional disputes

    An Interview with Masoud Yazdani, editor of London-based Intellect Books

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    Sean Scanlan conducted an email interview with Masoud Yazdani, the editor of Intellect Books, an independent academic publisher in the fields of creative practice and popular culture, whose aim is to publish scholarly books and journals that provide a vital space for widening critical debate in new and emerging subjects. An Interview with Masoud Yazdani, editor of London-based Intellect Books by Sean Scanlan

    An Interview with Michael Betancourt, author of Agnotology & Crisis in Digital Capitalism

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    Sean Scanlan, NANO's editor, interviews artist, curator, art historian and critical theorist Michael Betancourt to discuss the nature of agnotology, a term that means the “creation of uncertainty and ambivalent ‘fact’; it is a competitive tool incompatible with the idealized ‘free market’ of capitalism.” Betancourt is skeptical of Big Data and the ways that the consumers who unknowingly “produce” data for business interpretation are increasingly becoming transformed into a “token of exchange (valorized) by the database.

    A Brief Introduction on Peer Review: New Possibilities

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    From the classroom, to the lab, to the studio, to industry, and to the academy, evaluating work is part of everyday life. Whether we call it critiquing, refereeing, or peer reviewing, the goals are the same: to make the object under review better, to verify that its claims are not false, or at the very least, to ascertain that the object has some merit. Jenna Pack Sheffield’s note "Open Peer Review: Collective Intelligence as a Framework for Theorizing Approaches to Peer Review in the Humanities" discusses the definition of “open peer review” and looks at various ways it’s been used to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the process. This issue of NANO includes interviews with three editors who share their ideas about the shape of current peer review problems and what the future might look like for academics, tenure review boards, and publishers. First, Sean Scanlan conducted an email interview with Masoud Yazdani, the editor of Intellect Books, an independent academic publisher in the fields of creative practice and popular culture, whose aim is to publish scholarly books and journals that provide a vital space for widening critical debate in new and emerging subjects. Second, Sean Scanlan interviews Aaron Barlow, of New York City College of Technology, who shares his views on the problems of traditional peer review. Third, NANO assistant editor Rebecca Devers interviews Martha J. Cutter, the former editor of MELUS, about the complexities of processing, reviewing, and publishing a journal that receives in over 300 submissions each year

    An Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play

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    An Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play, by Sean Scanlan. Matthew Kaiser, the author of The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford UP, 2012) says that “[c]ompetition is the disease from which modern life suffers,” and that “[c]ompetition is the only cure” for this suffering. This contradictory pairing seems to get at the heart of his thesis: play, as a totalizing, umbrella-like concept, emanates from a host of philosophical, political, and scientific work produced by Victorians who posed many of their ideas of play in sports metaphors, competitive logics, and narratives of struggle. Kaiser goes beyond the dichotomy of competition and play/competition or play, by stating “I’m interested in the totalizing potential of both concepts, the way that play, or competition for that matter, swallows the world whole, becomes in the minds of so many people, the organizing principle of reality, whether of culture or nature or consciousness, or of all three.

    An Interview with Aaron Barlow, editor of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors

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    Aaron Barlow shares his views with Sean Scanlan on the problems of traditional peer review. Barlow is Faculty Editor of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). According to Barlow, his own views on business-as-usual peer review and academic publishing are becoming more radical the more he studies its issues. His key concepts are openness and change. Fear has the potential to hold back young scholars, but, according to Barlow, the winds have changed so much that people performing tenure review would have to strongly argue against a candidate who breaks new ground in open publishing. Barlow is hopeful about the future and encourages scholars to seek newer publishing format

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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
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