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Neva Vandersall Oral History
No full textNeva Vandersall lived in Egypt from 1923 to 1961, the wife of science and mathematics professor Herbert “Van” Vandersall, who was the longest serving (1920-1961) of the American University at (in) Cairo’s first generation of faculty members. Neva Vandersall recounts how they met, her husband’s joining AUC in 1920 as the university opened, and their delaying marriage until he was appointed as a permanent faculty member in 1923. She recalls that after his year of graduate study in Chicago they married and moved to Cairo and started a family, having a baby son and daughter in the mid-1920s. Neva describes the residential arrangements for their family (like other AUC families), in an apartment in a building near the university and later in the School of
Oriental Studies Building on campus. She discusses aspects of raising her children in Cairo, like the orphaned Armenian girl they hired as a live-in nursemaid, their schooling, and AUC families with children spending time together. Social life and recreation are covered, from teas and formal dinners to desert field trips to summers spent in beach huts. She also tells of the baby health clinic in a poor neighborhood where she and others connected with AUC volunteered.
Neva Vandersall describes the AUC campus and offers a sketch of its student body in the 1920s, including their elite social background, students’ participation in athletics, and the enrollment AUC’s first female student, with comments on how coeducation resulted in the social interaction of young men and women which was uncommon in Egypt. Neva gives an account of her family’s experience of World War Two, including her son’s difficulty finding ship passage back to Egypt from a Boy Scout trip in Europe, their furlough in the United States from 1942 to 1944 and Van’s work for a period with the Manhattan Project in Chicago, their return to Cairo and then evacuation with other university personnel and families to Khartoum, Sudan in the summer of
1944, and the Vandersalls’ subsequent route back to the U.S. by air via Nigeria and South America. Their last years at the university are also recalled, from the diminished missionary aspect of AUC, the government’s restrictions on missionary work and the number of AUC
American faculty members, and Van’s retirement from AUC. She outlines her family’s life in the United States, Van’s teaching at a college in North Carolina, and the couple ultimately settling in Maryland. Finally, she tells about their participation in the life of the Christian Community Presbyterian Church in Bowie, Maryland, whose 25th Anniversary was the occasion for the oral history. There is no audio available for this interview
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
Herbert Vandersall and Neva Godin Vandersall Oral History
No full textHerbert Vandersall was one of the earliest faculty members at the American University in Cairo, teaching science courses as well as performing various administrative roles from 1920 to 1964. Vandersall outlines AUC’s administration in the university’s early years, with its limited scale and the establishment of new units and procedures (as Vandersall did in his role as first Registrar), and he describes leading figures like President Charles Watson, Deans Robert S. McClenahan and Russell Galt, and Extension Division Director Wendell Cleland, including their vision, accomplishments and conflicts; relations with American missionaries in Egypt is mentioned as well. The role of U.S.-based staff and the Board of Trustees, relations between the faculty and board, and the contributions of particular trustees are discussed; the coded telegraph communication with those in the U.S. is mentioned. Units like the Extension Division (including its program of public events at Ewart Hall), the School of Oriental Studies (its Arabic teaching program, and Arabists on its faculty), and Faculty of Education (director Amir Boktor, the Journal of Modern Education) are also described. Vandersall speaks about the faculty, including their backgrounds and how Egyptian (including some alumni who got graduate degrees in the U.S.) and short-term American faculty were recruited, and covers figures like William Eddy (who went on to lead the U.S. Office for Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA) and later Dean Worth Howard, discussing the pair’s role in developing English language study at AUC. Vandersall, who taught physics and mathematics, recounts his own efforts, with others, in establishing the science program and laboratory facilities, and shares teaching anecdotes. A view of AUC students is provided, in the classroom and beyond, as Vandersall tells of student academic and personal habits and discipline (including the role of the zabit or gatekeeper and the prohibition on on-campus political demonstrations like one pro-Saad Zaghloul episode in the 1920s); he also mentions their participation in physical education, which AUC introduced to Egypt. The coming of female students to AUC is addressed, including advocacy by Vandersall and others in the face of resistance to co-education by some AUC administrators. AUC’s campus and its surrounding neighborhood are described, including funding for and construction of new buildings like Ewart Hall and the Hill House hostel (with which he had significant involvement such as supervising the European architects and contractors; he recounts opposing its later conversion to a library); he also mentions the suburban campus farm property. He offers a view of the changing political context of AUC’s presence in Egypt, from its legal status under British rule, to the climate of the pro-independence movement, relations with the Egyptian government, and administrator and faculty expressions of support for Palestinians (like a 1948 joint letter to US President Truman). Vandersall expresses regret about what he calls diminished commitment by later AUC personnel, and that due to AUC’s foreign, missionary roots it was never fully accepted in Egypt, especially by Muslims, despite a focus on character building rather than proselytizing. Neva Vandersall, like other faculty wives in university’s early years, played a visible role in the community. She and her husband speak of AUC’s dining room and student hostel residence halls, and aspects of the social life of the AUC community. She also gives an account of two health clinics supported by volunteer AUC faculty and wives, one for children's’ eye health in the Sayeda Zeinab district and another for farmers near the pyramids
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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