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    All Things Pointing Home

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    Thomas Wolfe has written, "All things on earth point home"¦." I wonder how often we recognize this truth.  Sometimes, it seems, we do in fact have to return home to remember who we are.  In The Autobiographical Demand of Place: Curriculum Inquiry in the American South, Brian Casemore suggests we do precisely this: interrogate our past in order to understand our present and that future awaiting us.  By bravely stepping out of a dominant narrative of Southerness and into risky psychoanalysis, Casemore attempts this understanding of identity as a conscious being struggling with difficult (or guilt-ridden) desire and knowledge. In doing so within an at times intense public reflection, he successfully leads us into our own introspective unsettling while asking us to step out of our narcissisms, our own superficial definitions of place, and out of our own identities in order to discover and confront our own understanding of who we think we have become

    We Became Teachers: The Influence of Personal Reading on Curriculum Understanding

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    The books we care about are part of us (Sumara 1996, 2002). It is the story of this literary experience as told by three currently practicing English teachers that interests me when I ask, "How does a teacher's personal reading inform his or her understanding of curriculum?" Seeking the representation of this story, I employ qualitative methods that value unique perspectives, interpretations, and the presence of my subjectivity (van Manen, 1990; Seidman, 2006; Jardine, 2006). The combined use of autobiography—in the tradition of currere (Pinar, 1975)—and the hermeneutic method (Heidegger, 2008; Nakkula & Ravitch, 1998) best matches this responsibility. By representing the profound impact of personal reading on my teaching of literature, I contribute my autobiographical voice and story to this study. This dissertation is influenced by contemporary literary theory, Sumara's (1996, 2002) scholarship on reading and curriculum, and Rosenblatt's (1994, 1995) reader response theory. Data collection follows Seidman's (2006) discussion of semi-structured conversations, analysis is performed with attention to van Manen's (1990) qualitative human science design, and representation is carried out following Seidman's (2006) description of participant narrative profiles. I begin this analysis by exploring two super-ordinate themes: personal reading and curriculum understanding. Sub-themes in the area of personal reading are unique. Sub-themes representing curriculum understanding are consistent across participants. These sub-themes include a teacher's definition of curriculum, professional identity, and teaching of literature. Analysis reveals a recognizable relationship between each teacher's personal reading and curriculum understanding: each teacher's personal reading experience is reflected in his or her teaching of literature. Through its exploration of the relationship between personal reading and curriculum understanding, this study provides a glimpse into the tangled intricacies of curriculum. Since many reading experiences described in this work were born outside of the classroom, this study confirms the perspective that curriculum includes all learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom. Beyond this confirmation, this study reaffirms several key components of teaching and learning: the fundamental function of literature to interrupt familiarity, the role of teacher as interrupter, and the respect for existential experience as a source of scholarship

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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

    Author Index

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