1,720,958 research outputs found
Great Australian World Firsts: the things we made, the things we did
Get PDFFrom Sir Jack Brabham (first to win a Grand Prix in a car of his own design) to Tom Angove (inventor of the wine cask), from Bruce Thompson (introduced the first dual flush toilets) to Mary Fortune (the first female author of detective fiction) - here are the world's great ideas, inventions, feats and follies - as done first, by Australians
The cyclone written into our place: the cyclone as trope of apocalypse and place in Queensland literature
Get PDFWorking within a physical landscape that has felt the impact of tropical cyclones and cyclone surges for some 6000 years, including the largest loss of life from a single cyclone in Australian recorded history, Queensland writers have for many years attempted to incorporate both the terror and the sublime of the cyclone into their sense of place. Yet, while studies have been carried out into the significance of cyclonic storms in the literature of other geographic areas, there has been surprisingly little examination until this thesis of the literature of tropical cyclones in Queensland, one of the most cyclone-prone areas in the world.
The tropical cyclone is so integral to North Queensland place and regional life that it has its own season. To successfully inhabit this place, the Queenslander must live with cyclones, incorporating them into the imaginary as well as the literal life: into the country of the mind as well as the physical environment. In this region of seasonal storm, the cyclone is a defining trope of the literary place, and so it is important to examine its significance there. Cyclones as unpredictable wreakers of chaos and destruction regularly remind us of humankind's fragility. Although warnings can be given of their approach, the severity of their impact is in the end due to those natural and invisible elements that cannot be controlled. In an effort to cope with the uncontrollable, humankind seeks meaning in the random meaninglessness of chaos and destruction. For some, cyclones are instruments of divine retribution, whereas for others they are an apocalyptic event that reveals the chance for redemption and renewal, and it is such searches for meaning within chaos that are evident in Queensland literature.
Some writers, such as Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, have seen within cyclones the Burkean sublime, the beauty within the terror. For other writers, such as Thea Astley, Vance Palmer, and Patrick White, the cyclone brings spiritual epiphany and personal revelation, while also motivating community strength and compassion as people ignore differences and work together to survive and rebuild. Some writers see the cyclone within themselves as a personal trope, as Susan Hawthorne observes in her poetry. Other writers such as Alexis Wright see a deep and abiding spiritual bond between weather and country, between people and place, which speaks of our future as well as our past. This paper, then, will examine how writers in Queensland and of Queensland have sought for meaning within their literary landscape in order to cope with the chaos of their literal place.
The metaphorics and aesthetics of tropical cyclones permeate Queensland literature. The cyclonic storm in Queensland literature reverberates with contexts of theme and setting, of plot and place, of tropes and tropics that encompass the complicated and symbiotic relations between society, nature, landscape, place and space. The cyclonic storm is a literary trope of both personal and collective awareness, of revelation within the stillness and spirituality of the cyclone's eye that enables the individual to emerge from the experience transformed. To transcend the tropical cyclone experience, one needs to be open to the epiphany of the revelation as these violent storms strip away the historic human over-growth, leaving room to re-build and for new life to grow. Cyclones can in this way narrate resilience in the face of natural disaster and allegorize the power of cultural consciousness to strengthen and unify communities and regions. Individuals and communities who have been alienated, weakened, or seemingly destroyed can be drawn closer by cyclonic events, discovering in the aftermath that which had previously been hidden, discovering hope and opportunity where previously were despond and despair. Such events and the stories of them can challenge previous human experience, thereby providing opportunity to move forward and rebuild, opportunity for the emergence of the new.
While this research is concerned with the implications of the literary cyclone in Queensland, this thesis will also recognize that cyclonic storms and the literature of those storms appear in many other regions. The search for meaning within that literature is a search in which many are engaged around the globe, as we broaden our perception through revelations about the relationship between the individual, society, and the tropical biosphere, and between weather, person, and place
Clark Gable: biography, filmography, bibliography
Get PDF"Clark Gable is a man de-classed. You can't guess in any way where he came from or what he was." Frank Taylor, producer of Gable's last film, The Misfits (1961), said this of the man who, to many people, will forever be Southern gentleman Rhett Butler of Gone with the Wind. This work tells Gable's life story, from his birth in 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio, to his death in 1960 in Hollywood. It chronicles his stage career, and of course gives information on every one of his films. His family background, his development as a person, the many romances including five marriages, and his relationships with friends and co-workers are all explored in detail. The sources used and the bibliography are fully annotated
Cyclone country: the language of place and disaster in Australian literature
No full textCyclone Country is about our place, our weather, our stories and us. It is about our search for the words through which we find meaning amid the chaos, trauma, and devastation wrought by extreme weather events. These words and stories are important, for they form a cultural language by which we maintain relationships in such dire circumstances with our place and our community that help us cope.
In this first study of its kind in Australia, Chrystopher J. Spicer discusses the function of words, story and literature in re-building cultural relationships after nature catastrophes, using as an example the literature of the Australian state of Queensland, the north and north-eastern coasts of which are characterized by the annual impact of cyclonic storms. Exploring a range of works, including Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Nobel Prize winner Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, Vance Palmer’s Cyclone, and Susan Hawthorne’s poetry cycle Earth’s Breath, he proposes that the trope of the cyclone in the Queensland literary imagination is an example of cultural response to weather in a unique regional place, for weather is written into the cultural landscape. We can better understand and enable our place by embracing the revelations of extreme weather through the literature of the region
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
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
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