1,721,099 research outputs found
Sensory explorations of Roman material culture: a disability perspective
No full textThis paper introduces a disability perspective to sensory explorations of Roman material culture. Exploration of the senses often assume a non-disabled, adult perspective; however, a person’s experience is greatly impacted by their body and whether an environment is designed to include different bodies. The paper presents an interdisciplinary, osteoarchaeological approach to exploring the sensory experiences had by people with impairments. To illustrate, the paper explores two case studies of people with impairments, whose skeletal remains were found at the Alington Avenue cemetery, Dorset, UK. Whilst there are limitations to a person’s ability to understand what it is like to stand in another’s shoes, even small insights can prove enlightening to both our understanding of the past and how we think about our disabling world today. This paper is a call for further research in this field
Three stories and a funeral: multiple narrative fictions exploring disAbility osteobiography in Roman Dorset
No full textPaleopathological study uses complex terminology, including medical jargon, to describe and understand a disease process and/or diseased individual. Such terminology might not be comprehensible and accessible to non-bioarchaeologists, including similarly affected individuals. This is especially the case when considering the interplay of disease with disability. How is disability defined, recognized and understood in past peoples? Can this be communicated using non-traditional mechanisms? Developing other or non-standard mechanisms for communication of bioarchaeological and paleopathological studies is vital for public understanding of and engagement with the discipline. This project studied a small cemetery assemblage from Roman Alington Avenue in Dorset. Osteobiographies were developed for those buried within the cemetery, and then, following grounding in disability theory and using a feminist standpoint theory approach, three interweaving fictive narratives were written about three specific individuals. One of these three was an individual previously diagnosed as having Langer type mesomelic dwarfism (Rogers 2002:154-157). In writing the narratives, the implications of the constructions of possible bodily impairment and socially constructed views of disability were considered. Through this writing, focusing on bodily materiality and object-relations, the constructive effects of the interactions between the three people themselves and between them and their physical and social environments became clear regarding Roman views of disability, thereby producing new knowledge and understanding. This paper explores the potential of integrated narrative fiction to enable communication of the implications of putative disability in one past group
Dis/ability stories from Roman Dorset: an integrated osteobiography approach
No full textThe primary aim of this study is to develop and demonstrate an approach through which human skeletal remains can be used to explore impairment and disability in the past in a theoretically informed way. This study addresses a frequent trope in osteoarchaeological publications in which unusual palaeopathological specimens are investigated as isolated case studies, which are often decontextualised and uncritically presumptive about the resulting disability (Dettwyler 1991). This thesis presents the integrated osteobiography approach; a form of microhistory which aims to develop an understanding of a life experience using osteological data integrated and contextualised with any and all available clinical, historical and archaeological data. The dis/ability as a continuum perspective provided a key theoretical underpinning of the thesis. This view of disability understands that everyone has an aspect of their identity related to their body and its ability to perform as expected and desired in their social and physical environment. This view challenges the commonly held attitude that disability affects a minority of people. The dis/ability as a continuum approach also helps visualise bodies as ever-changing entities, the abilities of which can vary throughout a lifetime (Zakrzewski et al. 2017). The approach also encourages a broader perspective of what is considered a possible impairment, helping to prevent our modern preconceptions of what an impairment is affect our view of the past. Feminist theory has also been highly influential to this thesis, from influencing the theoretical foundation to the communication style. Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of ‘entanglement’, helps visualise dis/ability as one aspect of an individual’s personhood which is interacting and mutually impacting other aspects, such as age and gender. Feminist scholarship has also influenced the author’s use of a situated knowledge approach, which encourages openness and honesty about a researcher’s motivations and experiences surrounding their subject matter, and reflects on how this may impact the study. This integrated osteobiography approach is applied to the 3rd -4 th century cemetery site of Alington Avenue, Dorset, UK, from which 37 skeletons form the dataset. Osteological, mortuary, archaeological and clinical insights are melded together to create the osteobiography accounts. Three of the osteobiographies are selected for inclusion in the main thesis for the stories they can tell. AA766 is a skeleton of a biological female which exhibited Langer type mesomelic dwarfism. This skeleton provided the unusual opportunity to track the well-documented development of an impairment alongside the known life course stages for a Romano-British female, as well as consider the experience of a lived environment from a shorter stature viewpoint. AA852 acquired a trauma necessitating an arm amputation shortly before death. For this case, the concept of the ‘disabled corpse’ was coined, exploring the impact of acquired bodily difference on the burying community and their behaviour. Finally, through skeleton AA210, a more familiar set of palaeopathology is examined and the impact of older age on dis/ability is considered. This case study fulfils the desire to explore the impact of more ordinary palaeopathology alongside the extraordinary, and assesses the potential issues surrounding not being recognised as different or disabled. Partly to help integrate the different data set types and partly to help improve accessibility of the study, three fictive narratives were written, portraying the burial of AA852 at Alington Avenue. These fictive narratives help explore experience of the palaeopathology identified with proper citation in the form of footnotes. The thesis demonstrates how the integrated osteobiography approach can be used to explore dis/ability in the past in a theoretically nuanced manner. Osteobiography has been argued to offer a more democratic vision of the past (Robb et al. 2019). This thesis hopes to contribute to this democratic vision, not only in the people who are studied, but also in the readership encouraged by the more accessible format
Theorising DisAbility in Egyptian bioarchaeology
No full textWhat is disability, and how do we identify it in a bioarchaeological context? Within paleopathology and bioarchaeology, disability has often been viewed from a modern medicalised model standpoint, with focus placed on skeletal changes and impairments, but the field of bioarchaeology is intrinsically social in nature. People experience physical impairments but are not necessarily disabled by those impairments. In ancient Egyptian contexts, the medical papyri provide a view of the emic understanding and treatment of bodily difference in the Egyptian past, but this concept of difference does not map directly onto modern etic understandings of physical bodily difference, and may not map to skeletal impairment identifiable from bioarchaeological study. All potential impairments should be understood in contextual terms as putative disorders that are contingent on the local situation in which the affected individual lived and in which the surrounding community operated. For example, dyslexia is only a difference within literate societies. Even when considering disability as enabling a focus to be placed on the ability to undertake actions (disAbility), there is still a fluid boundary between disabled and able-bodied, with shading and gradations along the continuum of disAbility depending on the actions and activities of the individuals involved. The temporal aspects and duration of impairment must also be considered as disAbility is not static, but rather changes along the life course. DisAbility in past populations must be viewed using an emic lens
Getting to grips with 3D printed bones: using 3D models as ‘diagrams’ to improve accessibility of palaeopathological data
No full textThis short report details a sub-project of ‘Stories through Skeletons’ an interdisciplinary venture undertaken by the Osteoarchaeology and Bioengineering departments at the University of Southampton. As part of this project, the team has been exploring the potential of using 3D printing technology to improve accessibility of palaeopathological data to a wider audience, through the production of tactile aids. To test this idea, models were created of Langer type mesomelic dwarfism exhibited in a skeleton from the Romano-British cemetery site of Alington Avenue, Dorset, UK. The 3D models were used as props during osteoarchaeology conference presentations and have proved useful to visually impaired and non-disabled audiences alike.Methods used to create the 3D models and the feedback received from the preliminary showing of the models at conferences are outlined, including the development of the idea of the 3D models as ‘diagrams’. This highlights the creation of accessibility tools as another potential use of 3D technology in the field of osteoarchaeology and in so doing, adds the issue of accessibility to the ethical debates surrounding the use of 3D modelling technology in physical anthropology more broadly
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
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