1,720,986 research outputs found
“I Kind of Got Dragged into Global History”: An Interview with Jan de Vries
No full textOn the morning of 30 May, freshly arrived from Wageningen, Professor Jan de Vries arrives at Leiden University. Later this day, he will be giving a lecture, to a full room, on his take on the so-called Great Divergence debate, but beforehand he has kindly agreed to an interview with Itinerario. Apart from him, present are three graduate students, the authors of this piece, and Professor Jos Gommans of Leiden University, in whose office we are, and whose grandmother's stately chair serves as the interviewee's place of honour. Over fresh cups of coffee, an amiable but wide-ranging conversation unfolds . Professor Jan de Vries, of the University of California, Berkeley, is a respected economic historian with a long career reaching back to the 1970s. His work has taken on such diverse topics as Dutch rural economy in the Golden Age, European urbanisation and, in his widely influential book The Industrious Revolution, the developments that in his view paved the way to industrialisation in Europe. Lately his work has also taken a global turn, as he has addressed topics such as the Great Divergence and globalisation in history . There are so many people named Jan de Vries. Helped by Wikipedia, we first thought we had somehow overlooked your early career as a motor driver! Yes, even in Berkeley there is more than one of us. If you look at the telephone book, you'll find three of us. One was even at the university [University of California, Berkeley]. He was an electrical engineer who worked in the space science laboratory which was affiliated with the university. Many years ago I had a telephone call in my office from a Dutchman who said, “Jan, I am waiting here for you.” And after a little bit he said, “you are Jan de Vries the electronicus [electronic engineer], right?” I answered “no, I am Jan de Vries the historicus [historian].” Later I met my name-sake and we still see each other periodically
Preacher, Trader, Soldier, Spy : Studying Transimperial Individuals through their Occupational Roles
Full text linkIncreased scholarly interest in ideas, goods and people that crossed the boundaries between modern empires (c. 1850-1914), known as transimperial history, has directed attention to microhistorical cases of individuals with transimperial careers. Such life trajectories are interesting in themselves, but their representativeness and broader significance for modern imperial history is often unclear. This article argues that occupational categories form a useful ‘meso-level’ of analysis between micro- and global history in the study of transimperial actors, recognizing individual agency but also larger trends. A variety of occupations, in a wide sense, led individuals to cross imperial borders, ranging from engineering to missionary work and anti-colonial activism. Individuals within these occupational groups often had similar backgrounds and opportunities and played specific roles in the different colonial societies in which they operated. At the same time, they possessed considerable room for maneuver, with both their professional identities and nationality serving as flexible tools for self-advancement. Occupational roles allow the historian to study global imperialism without being limited by a geographical focus on one nationality or empire
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
Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe
No full textThis open access book provides a thought-provoking new perspective on European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. It does so by inquiring how smaller European powers and regions at the margins of the continent integrated into a globally interconnected world that was heavily shaped by their more powerful European neighbours. Case studies on Nordic, Eastern and Central European regions uncover how countries such as Sweden, Serbia or Switzerland became imperial, despite having no or only short-lived overseas colonies of their own. By uncovering the structures and networks that enabled these regions to actively participate in and benefit from the imperial world around them, these case studies also reveal a crucial dynamic of European imperialism that has rarely been analysed in extant historiographies of Empire and Europe: the fact that 19th-century European imperial subjugation of almost the entire planet was driven not only by undeniable rivalry and competition among the greater European powers, but also necessarily depended on collaboration and exchanges across national and imperial boundaries. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
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
Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe. At the Margins of Empire, 1800-1950
No full textThis book provides a thought-provoking new perspective on European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. It does so by inquiring how smaller European powers and regions at the margins of the continent integrated into a globally interconnected world that was heavily shaped by their more powerful European neighbours. Case studies on Nordic, Eastern and Central European regions uncover how countries such as Sweden, Serbia or Switzerland became imperial, despite having no or only short-lived overseas colonies of their own. By uncovering the structures and networks that enabled these regions to actively participate in and benefit from the imperial world around them, these case studies also reveal a crucial dynamic of European imperialism that has rarely been analysed in extant historiographies of Empire and Europe: the fact that 19th-century European imperial subjugation of almost the entire planet was driven not only by undeniable rivalry and competition among the greater European powers, but also necessarily depended on collaboration and exchanges across national and imperial boundaries
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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