1,720,967 research outputs found
RELIGION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. A NOTE ON THE SIMON N. PATTEN - THOMAS N. CARVER DEBATE
No full textSimon N. Patten and Thomas N. Carver were among the most influential American social scientists during the so-called Progressive Era. This paper offers a reconstruction of the debate between the two men over the religious foundations ofsocial reform. The polemical exchange between them originated in 1911 with the publicationof Patten’s The Social Basis of Religion – a book which intended to transfer Christian doctrines from the traditional basis to the realm of social science. The volume’s general reception was far from enthusiastic, and Carver joined the chorus of the critics with a rather unfavorable review which appeared in the American Economic Review. Patten rejoined with a note in 1912, where he expanded on his views on religion and evolution, both social and biological. Carver replied to Patten (but without ever mentioning his name) the same year with the publication of The Religion Worth Having. In this small, yet significant volume, Carver presented a reading of religion which differed from Patten’s in virtually all respects and that, contrary to some classic interpretations, owed far more to eugenics than to Darwinism
Norman Edwin Himes’s “Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action” (1939). The Eugenic Manifesto of a Devoted Carverian
No full textThis note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist
and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on “Eugenics and Democracy:
A Call to Action.” Himes’s discussion of eugenics and democracy has a twofold
relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists
a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the socalled
Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes’s approach
reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along “liberal” lines,
which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his
progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though Himes seemed to temper
the extremism of the earlier movement with sociological and voluntaristic language,
there was little actual change in the ultimate goals of his agenda regardless
of the apparent switch to democratic eugenics
BETWEEN SUMNER AND GALTON: A FURTHER LOOK AT ALBERT GALLOWAY KELLER’S SOCIOLOGY
No full textLargely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists
of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham
Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as
professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main
coordinates of Keller’s sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal
Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin’s mechanism of
variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner’s general scheme. Although Keller
gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements
of the typically Progressive Era preoccupations with heredity and the biological
quality of individuals. The aim of this paper is to examine in some detail Keller’s
views on eugenics and related issues, and to assess whether and to what extent these
biologically deterministic elements played a role in his Darwinian approach to
institutional change
FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS ON RACE AND EUGENICS
No full textFranklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in
the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm
commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a
biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the
Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most
sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a
discussion of Giddings’s views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American
imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our
general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations
permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and
how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently
ambiguous and often contradictory fashion
HEREDITARIANISM, EUGENICS, AND AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE INTERWAR YEARS: MEET THE CARVERIANS
No full textLike other Progressive Era reformers, Thomas Nixon Carver promoted a form of
biology-infused social science that included both eugenics and a strong version of
hereditarianism. Carver was also a charismatic teacher who trained several generations
of economists and sociologists at Harvard. In this paper we will focus on the
contribution of three of them: James A. Field, Norman E. Himes, and Carl S. Joslyn.
These authors differ in terms of style, method, and emphasis—with Field and Himes
more interested in population and birth control issues, and Joslyn in the dynamics of
social stratification. As it will be shown below, however, all of them reveal an explicit
commitment to hereditarianism and eugenics, which can be directly traced back to
Carver’s influence during their student days at Harvard
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
- …
