1,720,965 research outputs found
Introduction
Full text linkThis introduction sets the agenda for the volume by arguing for a closer look at fifteenth-century north India, a period of multilingualism, vernacularization, the evolution of script conventions, and the emergence of specialist literary and cultural producers who served new patrons. It charts the changing political landscape of the period, with its new towns and regional polities, showing how the new contenders for power from upwardly mobile martial groups were gradually brought under more settled, bureaucratizing regimes. Against prevailing wisdom, it argues for a continuum between oral and literary cultures, and for recovering histories embedded in texts and images generally dismissed as mythic or religious. It delinks religion from script while drawing attention to the proliferation of religious groups and vocabularies in the period
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
Envoys, Epistles, and Artefacts between Persianate Courts: A Cultural History of Diplomacy in the Early Modern Islamicate World
No full textIn this dissertation, I examine the shifting forms and meanings of diplomatic practice among the courts of the Mughal state and Deccan sultanates in South Asia and the Safavid empire in Iran that communicated in Persian roughly between 1580 and 1630 and make five related claims. First, I argue that diplomacy was a performative exercise by the ambassador (īlchī), formulated through constantly evolving ethical principles and aesthetic sensibilities shaped by Persianate cultural ethos (adab). Ambassadorial performance was not governed by codified manuals but informed by practices of corporeality and norms of sociability that were transmitted textually and were continually reconfigured by temporal and spatial contingencies. Second, the envoy’s temperament, subjectivity, diverse skillsets, and overlapping identities shaped their perception and execution of the diplomatic mission (risālat) and affected its outcome. I unpack the intricate relationship between imperial service (khidmat) and diplomatic mediation (sifārat) that an envoy was supposed to perform. Third, diplomatic encounters were performed not only in the royal court but held in various kinds of courtly spaces that were rendered performative and competitive using tangible objects and ephemeral substances. I illustrate how their layouts modulated the nature of interactions between the participants and determined appropriate forms of etiquette and conduct. I extend this analysis to explicate the relation between ceremonial and diplomatic protocol and demonstrate the ways in which reception and departure ceremonies accorded to emissaries were innovatively used by contestants to alter existing power dynamics between themselves. Fourth, materiality in diplomacy was discernible beyond gift-giving practices such as extraction and presentation of tribute, transfer and sale of objects associated with a potentate’s sovereign status, and acquisition of rarities that had to be procured through special purchasing missions. Finally, epistolary compositions (inshā’) that constituted the bedrock of diplomatic correspondence form the bulk of primary sources of this dissertation besides other genres of courtly literature. I argue that rather than being formulaic and rhetorical in nature, inshā’ offers epistemological and conceptual frameworks to reconstruct the figure of the envoy, underscores the channels of diplomatic communications, and delineates the cultural flows that emissaries fostered
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
After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India
No full textTimur invaded northern India in 1398 but returned to Samarkand a year later. In 1555 the Timurid emperor Humayun came back to India after being forced into exile in Persia and re-established Mughal rule in northern India. Between these two significant dates stretches an era largely consigned to oblivion-the 'long' fifteenth century. The Mughal dynasty has long occupied a pre-eminent position in research on Indian history. It has also been credited with ushering in a radically new age of innovation in art, literature, and statecraft. But what of the period before the Mughals?With the empire-centred study of history privileging periods of political centralization, the multi-centred fifteenth century has remained relatively unexplored and undervalued. After Timur Left presents a path-breaking interdisciplinary set of writings on the politics, languages, religions, literatures, and arts of the fifteenth century. Together they reveal it to be a period of considerable political and social mobility, of cultural connectivity and consolidation, of innovation in literature and language choices, and of new forms of religious organization and expression
Early Hindi Epic Poetry in Gwalior
Full text linkThe Hindi poet Vishnudas produced a Hindi version of the Ramayana in 1442 at the court of the Gwalior ruler Dungarendra Singh. This, the earliest known Hindi Ramayana encoded aspects of the political and cultural of mid-fifteenth century Gwalior while offering us a case study of vernacularization in the same period. The chapter shows that Vishnudas’ epic was intended for a Rajput court (with an emphasis on courts and battles), and through a comparison with Valmiki’s Rāmāyaṇa, demonstrates that while Vishnudas was familiar with the Sanskrit text, it was probably through oral retellings rather than the written text. It further suggests that Vishnudas’ rendering was the textualization of an oft-performed vernacular oral version of the Ramayana
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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