bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Innovation and the Shifting Sands of Industry
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Turning to industry and company digital transformation, Chapter 5 begins with electronics and IT, a critical sector in which Japanese incumbents have struggled, but some like Hitachi have re-invented themselves, combining manufacturing with an IT platform. Specialist manufacturers have successfully integrated into global value chains (GVCs) and global platforms. The second section turns to automobiles, Japan’s leading industrial sector, which is undergoing multiple upheavals—CASE (connected, autonomous, shared, electric)—in which Toyota also seeks to distinctively combine manufacturing and IT. The third section turns to finance, from banks to fintech startups and digital currencies. A digital currency initiative also shows a distinctively Japanese approach to DX. The final section encompasses DX through startups, and through SME consortia. Together, the sections build a picture of ‘DX with Japanese characteristics’.
External Dependencies and Shifting Global Contexts
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Japan’s path to Society 5.0 will not be entirely of its own making. Chapter 9 gives an overview of Japan’s external geopolitical and economic relations and dependencies, which are influencing its internal transformation. Trade and investment relations are increasingly subject to ‘weaponization’, raising the strategic importance of economic security, and proactive economic statecraft. In the midst of US–China tensions, Japan has managed to steer a proactive path with its ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’, but it has other dependencies as well, notably in energy and food, exposed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Conversely, Japan is attempting to turn domestic transformation into export capability, especially with ASEAN countries. And relations with the EU have deepened markedly in recent years. To date Japan has been able to create a degree of synergy between its external relations and dependencies on the one hand, and its economic transformation on the other.
Wealth Inequality and Retirement Preparedness
Authors: Sabelhaus John , Volz Alice Henriques
Published: February 2024

High and rising US wealth inequality underscores the need to revisit a perennial concern in policy circles: retirement preparedness. Our cross-cohort approach to studying retirement adequacy is based on relative wealth measures, meaning how the wealth distribution of one cohort compares to the cohorts ahead of them at the same age. We introduce relative rank distributions that show where individuals are in terms of the cohorts ahead of them at the same age, and percentile point comparisons that show how wealth levels at various percentiles vary across cohorts by age. We show that Early Baby Boomers’ wealth is generally on par with or above the 1930s cohort wealth at age 60. There is, however, evidence of relative wealth declines at the bottom of the wealth distribution for Mid-Late Boomers and Gen Xers, relative to earlier cohorts at younger ages, consistent with rising wealth inequality across and within generations. Social security is an important offset to relative wealth declines at the bottom of the wealth distribution, but scheduled benefits are not expected to be fully payable for the youngest cohorts.
Introduction
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

The introduction uses the example of a royal command performance of Henry IV part 2 which was cancelled in 1836 to outline the book’s key questions about the supportive and/or disruptive relationship between Shakespeare and the royal family. This opening provocation also introduces an account of the book’s use of partial sources such as letters, diary entries, and amateur artwork, and its relationship to the Royal Archives. I address the biases of that collection and the challenges of reading against the grain of a substantial private archive. The introduction also situates this work in relation to existing work on Shakespeare and the royal family, as well as the broader field of research concerning Shakespeare and national identity, cultural memory, political propaganda, and visual and material culture.
Player Queens
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

The opening chapter examines the place of Shakespeare in private theatricals commissioned by the royal family, with a focus on Queen Victoria’s sponsorship of performances at Windsor Castle in the 1850s. The chapter argues that Shakespearean drama functioned for Victoria both as an opportunity to perform patriotic appreciation for English drama and as a means of drawing connections between past and present. In detailed readings of the archival record for performances of Hamlet and Richard II, I suggest that these performances were overdetermined or, to use Marvin Carlson’s terminology, ‘haunted’, by the personal histories of the participants and spectators and, particularly, by the spaces in which they were performed.
Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

This is the first account of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and of the period’s closet drama. The Enlightenment was passionate about theatre in all its forms, and the playhouse held a crucial place in the developing public sphere. Reading plays was a central element of that lively and combative theatrical culture. This study draws on a variety of texts—including memoirs, theoretical works, and correspondences—to show that reading plays was not simply a matter of intellection but also of emotion. The closet was the privileged site of reading drama in the period; this room was more than a site of reflection and judgement, for it fostered intense and disruptive pleasures that eluded the coercive normativity of the playhouse. This study proposes a framework—at once historically grounded and informed by queer theory—to understand eighteenth-century closeted reading. The book also examines how writers exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of closeted reading by creating plays that exceeded the confines of the playhouse and appealed instead to the reader’s imagination. Characterizing closet drama as a genre of restless dissent and passionate contestation, this book offers close analysis of several plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault’s innovative historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Restif de La Bretonne’s Le Drame de la vie (1793), an extreme, indeed unsurpassed example of closet drama.
Athens, Rhodes, and the Eastern Mediterranean
Authors: Lazar Leah
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores two challenges faced by the Athenians, through focus on the allied island polis of Rhodes: how the Athenians attempted to exploit the lucrative region of the eastern Mediterranean beyond the scope of their primary sphere of power, a region into which Rhodes was better integrated; and how Athenian power overlapped and interacted with that of the influential island in its Aegean vicinity. First, it analyses the various strategies, from military intervention to indirect extraction, employed by the Athenians to access and exploit the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Egypt. It considers the role that allied communities, including Rhodes, played in facilitating Athenian exploitation, as well as exploring the overlapping fiscality of the Athenian and Achaemenid empires, and the unusual function of Athenian coinage in regional exchange. The chapter then turns to Rhodes more specifically and its immediate context in the southern Aegean. Digging deeper into the variations in tribute assessment for Rhodes and its environs identified in Chapter 2, it explores what Rhodian power in the region may have looked like in the fifth century, and how the Athenians responded to it. Rhodian and Athenian power, it argues, were not always in competition; rather the Athenians at times tolerated local Rhodian influence, with their interests in alignment.
A polyphonic history of articulated negritude
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

In this chapter, drawing on discussions, adoptions, and adaptations of negritude in Mensagem as well as Présence Africaine, I give an account of the changing significance of negritude in the context of changing conceptions of politics during the 1950s and 1960s. I treat negritude not as a literary-cultural phenomenon with fixed political implications, but rather as articulated to the changing political visions of those decades. Rather than take negritude as the theoretical preserve and responsibility of its early architects Damas, Senghor, and Césaire, I argue that the post-war history of negritude is characterized by multilingual receptions, misreceptions, mishearings, adaption, adoption, and critique which we see not only in, but also outside, the texts of these three canonical protagonists. I treat negritude as a polyphonic (it was articulated by many people), diachronic (it evolved), and multilingual (its protagonists were not only French-speaking) cultural and social phenomenon that was underpinned by journal culture.
‘An underall strategic concept’
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

This chapter traces British grand strategy during the Second World War, including the decisions to: concentrate resources in North Africa in 1940–41; pursue the Mediterranean campaign to disperse German strength; and delay the ‘Second Front’ until the opportune moment. It challenges the idea that the UK had no grand strategy until the US entered the war. The deliberations of 1940–41 laid the foundations for what later became Anglo-American grand strategy. Winston Churchill and his military chiefs were mindful of the Wehrmacht’s fighting prowess and judged that British society could not bear casualties on the scale of the last war. As such, the return to France had to be delayed until Germany was sufficiently weakened. There was some momentum on the home front for a cross-Channel assault in 1942 and 1943, but the real pressure came from the UK’s allies. The British government was undoubtedly right to resist these premature calls.
Man-Made Law as a Refuge from Both the Devil’s Assaults and God’s Commands
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

A Man for All Seasons tells the familiar story of Thomas More’s refusal to support Henry the VIII’s plan to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn. More’s objection is not to the marriage, but to Henry’s making himself the head of the English Church in order to bring it about. This is a fine distinction, but fine distinctions are what impels the movie forward. What does one do when man’s law is in tension with God’s law? Does one rush to affirm the higher authority. Does one temporize. Does one evade the clash as long as possible. Does one embrace martyrdom or run from it? These and related questions are puzzled through by More and his many interlocutors—family, friends, foes, judges, servants—in conversations that are the film’s true action.
White Femininity—Black Masculinity
Authors: Chowdhry Prem
Published: February 2024

Through the study of a 1939 film The Rains Came, this chapter examines the complex intersections of imperialism, gender, race, and class to articulate a different understanding of the British Empire in India. The challenges of the complex historical time set for the British in India coupled with the compulsions of changing policies and other national and international pressures anticipating the Second World War necessitated the projection of a changed imperial image in cinema. The film showed the emergence of a ‘new India’ under British domination. The film emphasized the developmental side of British rule and its role of ‘trusteeship’ and was widely publicized as the ‘true face’ of modern India. Curiously, at the heart of this film lay the inflammable theme of miscegenation—a cross colour–race romance between an Indian doctor and an English lady. The chapter shows how this film used, for the first time, the complexity of the role represented by Western women in a colonial setting to promote imperialism and its ideology of innate superiority of the English race. The earlier emphasis on the ‘masculine’ nature of colonialism with its essential components of domination, control, and structures of unequal power was totally reversed. The film rejected the notion of empire solely as a male space and introduced the white female as the central catalytic agent. This emphasis on the non-threatening ‘feminine’ nature of imperialism opened the possibilities of negotiating a different agenda within the colonial setting.
The Muslim Courtesans in Colonial India
Authors: Singh Lata
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the lives and worlds of a section of Muslim courtesans who hailed from the traditional women-performing communities. Considered public women, the courtesans neither led conventional sexual lives nor did they conform to the image of the ‘respectable’ mother or wife, the quintessential inspirational figures in the nationalist discourse. By foregrounding courtesans as important and influential intellectual, cultural, and political subjects, this chapter questions the imagery of such women in the dominant ‘respectable’ middle-class nationalist discourse. The courtesans under consideration were dynamic entities who constituted the first generation of literate women and poets; participated in male-dominated mushairas; ran kothas as professional business enterprises; owned wealth and property; wielded considerable political influence; and supported the 1857 rebellion and the nationalist movement. However, as the chapter shows, the Hinduization and communalization of arts and artists embedded in the cultural nationalism of the early twentieth century and post-independence India purged the courtesans from the historical narratives of classicism of art. They were posited in the Hindu nationalist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘alien’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘decadent’, ‘morally corrupt’ Muslim other. By extension, this chapter also questions the dominant portrayal of Muslim women as a homogenous category who remained passive, oppressed, backward, and purdah- and home-bound, with no professional identity.
Introduction
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

The big questions this book asks are: What is the welfare of the eight billion people who live in the world today? How many billions are at global standards of health, education, female employment, and gender equality? Of the billions who are not, how many are making progress towards global standards of welfare? Are developing countries progressing at a fast enough rate to catch up with global standards sooner, later, or never? Even if countries are making progress, under what circumstances are they at risk of falling further behind global standard-setters? This book answers these questions by the statistical analysis of the Global Welfare Database. It contains data about health, education, and female employment in 127 countries on six continents with 95 per cent of the world’s population. Trends since 1991 show progress in almost all developing countries, but not enough for a majority to catch up with global standard-setters.
Making Progress Globally
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

This chapter sets out a model of the development of health, education, and gender equality globally that can track change across time and space. Nationally, progress requires compounding small rates of annual progress for decades; this book examines changes in welfare since 1991. Globalization is about catching up with the level of welfare of a group of countries that are doing best. To catch up requires a country to make progress at a significantly faster rate than standard-setting countries. It is easier to do so if targets are fixed, such as abolishing illiteracy, rather than open-ended, such as extending life expectancy. The Global Welfare Database provides the statistics for assessing how much progress has been achieved globally on six different welfare indicators. It covers six continents with 127 countries, including China and India, the countries with the world’s largest number of people with welfare and without welfare.
The Welfare Mix
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

The welfare mix—the collective influence of the household, the market, and the state—determines an individual’s health, education, and employment prospects. Each influence has resources and limitations. For most of history, a person’s individual and family resources have been more important for their welfare than policies of the state. The extent to which the state can finance health and education policies at global standards depends on its economy, the source of its tax revenue, and political choices its governors make about public expenditure. In developing countries the economy cannot finance all the welfare services of global standard-setters. Thus, individuals rely less on the state and more on their own household and lifestyle for health; on their own studies for their education; and on the market for employment and a cash income.
Work for Women
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

In every society both women and men spend much time working, but they do so in different ways and subject to different influences. A large majority of men are everywhere in paid employment. Because of this, a regression analysis can only account for less than one-fifth of the variation between countries in male labour force participation. By contrast, the lower level of female Participation varies much more. It is higher in the most agricultural societies and lowest in strict Muslim societies. Thus, gender inequality in employment is high in Africa and highly developed countries and low in strict Muslim societies and India. On every continent, women spend more hours than men doing unpaid household work. There is a difference of more than four hours in India and the Middle East and North Africa region, falling to two hours in highly developed countries.
Willpower as a Metaphor
Authors: Koi Polaris
Published: February 2024

Willpower is a metaphor that is widespread in both common usage and expert literature across disciplines. It informs scholarship across philosophy, psychology, and economics, as well as agents’ conceptions of the sources of success and failure in self-control. This chapter looks into willpower as a “metaphor we live by”, analyzing and exploring the consequences of the tacit information content of the willpower metaphor for agentive self-understanding and efficacy. In addition to contributing to stigma associated with self-control failures, the metaphor causally contributes to self-control failures by obscuring available self-control strategies and instructing agents to superfluous self-control efforts. As a result, the metaphor is harmful, and it ought to be put to rest.
Uncertain Abilities, Diachronic Agency, and Future Selves
Authors: Purinton Sara
Published: February 2024

Living with chronic illness can involve fluctuating between radically different bodily states depending on whether you are experiencing flareups of illness symptoms. What you can do in these bodily states can differ drastically from one another. Sometimes, these fluctuations in abilities lead to fluctuations in your values. That is, your evaluative perspective can shift when you are experiencing flareups of the illness. This can give rise to a puzzle for planning, since it is unclear what you should plan on doing when you do not have a stable set of preferences guiding your plans. This paper argues that one way to solve this puzzle is for the agent to adopt an overarching plan that mediates the conflict between her differing perspectives.
Don’t Take It Personally
Authors: Bero Stephen
Published: February 2024

“Don’t take it personally” is often said as a way of placating hard feelings or assuaging hurt feelings, or simply as advice for moving on. The voluminous theoretical literature on responsibility, blame, and forgiveness has devoted little attention to this advice or to the nature of the response it urges, yet that response is distinctive and important. After illustrating and clarifying the distinction between taking and not taking things personally, this paper locates it in an underexplored region of Strawson’s framework of the reactive attitudes, and offers some preliminary reflections on the significance and ethics of (not) taking things personally.
An Erased Experiment
Authors: Ahmad Helal Emad
Published: February 2024

Throughout the Ottoman era and during the first twenty-five years of Muḥammad ‘Alī’s rule, Egypt was subject to the provisions of Sharī‘a in the punitive field. Sharī‘a, in this regard, includes two types of punishments. The first is specified and includes executing the murderer, cutting off the hand of the thief, and flogging the adulterer, the drinker of wine, and the false accuser of the people. The second is not specified, and its discretion (ta‘āzīr) is left to the judge or the ruler. Under Sharī‘a, and in an attempt to codify ta‘āzīr, the Egyptian penal legislation movement began slowly and erratically in the late 1820s. This movement was not affected by Europe or the Ottoman Empire but was instead local in nature, adopting the method of trial and error. This chapter identifies the five stages of this legislative movement: Muḥammad ‘Alī’s penal acts, individuals’ regulations, partial legislations of Majlis al-Mashūra, partial legislations of al-Ḥaqqāniyya, and finally, comprehensive laws. The experiment ended with the British occupation of 1882, which erased all the outcomes of the local experiment and imposed foreign law on Egypt. Thus, Egypt returned to ground zero, and shortly afterward, the inadequacy of the new law for Egypt accentuated the need to amend and revise it.
From the Common Good to Public Interest
Authors: Culang Jeffrey
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores how the Islamic notion of the common good (maslaha) was displaced by the modern notion of public interest (also maslaha) in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century, as a window onto the changing relationship between subject, community, and nation in Egyptian society. In order to access this central story, it turns to the specific case of Egyptian Jews. Drawing on the fractured archives and records of this dislocated community, in addition to state-produced legal texts and periodicals, the chapter focuses on the translation of the blood libel accusation in Egypt and the campaign by the Jewish reformer Murad Faraj and his reformist peers to counter it through a shared notion of the common good. It then traces the entry of public interest into Egyptian law and its application to Jews in the form of modern antisemitism, which stands in stark contrast to the kind of intercommunal political projects that the common good sustained. As the Egyptian nation-state took form, and Arab and Jewish identifications came to be seen as incompatible, public interest contributed to transforming Jewishness in Egypt into a private interest widely seen as detrimental to the good of the nation. The chapter argues that the translation and dissemination of public interest during the liberal period initiated structures, categories, and rationalities that would prove critical to acts of exclusion after the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a republic in 1952.
Photography, Selfhood, and Cultural Modernity
Authors: Ryzova Lucie
Published: February 2024

This essay looks at the cultural work of photographs and associated practices in colonial Egypt from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on portraiture and the “local archive” (i.e., images produced by Egyptians for themselves), it considers what people did with photographs and what photographs did for people in their manifold incarnations as commodities, as media carrying a visual inscription, and as particular performances of selfhood. Through their exchange and circulation, photographs marked their wielders as modern urbanites, often signifying upward social mobility and the acquisition of urban sophistication. As media carrying visual inscription, photographs contributed not only to the reshaping of local constructions of gender but also contributed to a broader transformation in the role of visibility in society. Alongside other print technologies, they worked to normalize a new kind of eye understood as passive and purely optical and contributed to the emergence of visibility as a central preoccupation of modern forms of urban life. Most commonly, perhaps, visits to the photographer’s studio provided opportunities for the staging of a modern self through the image. Photographs became the means through which modern forms of selfhood were enacted, asserted, negotiated, and sometimes subverted. Together with novel forms of writing, photographs also provided occasions to exteriorize and examine one’s soul, realizing a desire for a singular sovereign subject as they also worked to entrench and normalize distinctly modern forms of temporality inserted into the flow of the everyday.
Hollywood on the Nile
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: February 2024

By the 1940s, the Egyptian studio system, the bastion of Arabic-language film production derided by many as “Hollywood on the Nile,” drew viewers—and prospective stars—from across the Arab world. Prior to independence, strict censorship enforced prohibitions on depictions of social ills or national aspirations. During the pivotal Nasser years (1952–70), popular entertainment intersected with a new independent “revolutionary” ethos to produce socially relevant films, even if often disguised as melodrama. These are recalled as Egypt’s “golden” years. In the late 1950s, the regime founded a public sector to promote “high” art, a measure that remained controversial, despite marked successes. After the 1967 defeat, looser censorship allowed a degree of criticism of state projects. This tug and pull between filmmakers/producers and state officials / censors has remained a constant, even as the focus of socially oriented projects has changed to reflect political, economic, and cultural tensions and transitions. Egyptian cinema, challenged in recent decades by an expanding mediascape of regional and global competition, remains influential, a font of nostalgia and a barometer of what is politically and artistically possible.
Local Enlightenment in the Colonial Period
Authors: Gershoni Israel
Published: February 2024

Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) was among modern Egypt’s most influential public intellectuals. Through the pages of his daily, al-Jarida, Lutfi al-Sayyid developed a robust and implementable plan for domesticating the Enlightenment’s principles, values, and institutions for integration into his local Egyptian environment. While mainstream historiography approaches Lutfi al-Sayyid exclusively as a Pharaonicist Egyptian nationalist, and therefore as an apologist for the British colonial cause, this article seeks to problematize and deconstruct this characterization by emphasizing three main components of his weltanschauung: Lutfi al-Sayyid as a local Enlightenment thinker, as a liberal, and as an anticolonial activist. Through a thorough reading of his expansive corpus of texts, this chapter shows Lutfi al-Sayyid’s unique method of assimilating the Enlightenment in Egypt through the process of tamsir, Egyptianization. His Egyptian nationalism departed from Pharaonicist inspiration, rejecting outright organic, primordial elements, focusing instead on an inclusive, civic basis for shaping the Egyptian national identity and self. For Lutfi al-Sayyid, the outcome, an indigenous form of Enlightenment, was part and parcel of achieving independence, progress, and self-determination, and therefore freedom, for the Egyptian nation.
State, Intellectuals, and the Past
Authors: Di-Capua Yoav
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the complex relationship between postcolonial intellectuals, the state, and the desired collective attitude toward the past. In the wake of World War II, Egyptian and Arab intellectuals identified a set of interrelated material, corporal (extreme poverty, low life expectancy, illiteracy, sickness), and ontological (anxiety, inauthenticity, absence of sovereignty and freedom) concerns that constituted the core of their collective postcolonial condition. Constructively engaging this condition via a close collaboration with the state, they believed that no sustainable, reliable, and effective social, political, or economic thought could emerge without a firm commitment to critical historical consciousness. But not everyone believed in foregrounding the pressing issues of the day in a critical, historicist, and continuous understanding of the past. Islamists, for instance, pushed for an alternative metaphysical and spiritual approach, and the state itself, with its reliance on an elementary form of nationalist historiography and its refusal to open its own historical records to the public, also proved a major obstacle for the mass adoption of critical historical consciousness. By reviewing the attitude of three generations of thinkers from diverse ideological and religious orientations toward the past, this chapter suggests that, in the context of contemporary Egyptian history and the internal struggle for basic human dignity and freedom, the right to access and interpret the past critically slowly emerged as nothing but a basic human right.
Health and Nation
Authors: Kozma Liat
Published: February 2024

In the interwar years, the Egyptian medical profession emerged as a leading national middle-class project. Egyptian doctors asserted their professional identity as they competed with foreign doctors who practiced in Egypt, and they struggled to prove themselves as equal members in the international scientific community. They saw indigenous medical research on specific Egyptian problems as a sign of local competence and, moreover, as professional independence necessary for national one. This chapter offers a social and intellectual history of the Egyptian medical profession from the late nineteenth century to World War II. First, it argues that during the decades in which medical education in Egypt was declining under colonial rule, the Egyptian medical community rebuilt itself through education in many different medical schools abroad. Second, it describes how Egyptian doctors sought to integrate themselves into global scientific conversations and regional networks. Third, it demonstrates that Egyptian doctors struggled to prove their professional competence on the international scale by conducting research on and offering solutions to Egypt’s pressing problems: child mortality, obesity, prostitution, drug addiction, and more. Finally, this chapter suggests that the re-emergence of the Egyptian medical profession was, for the most part, an effendi male project, designed to cultivate both the self and its other—particularly middle-class women, and both male and female peasants.
Cinema and Science in the Silent Era
Authors: Curtis Scott , Gaycken Oliver
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines an example of early microcinematography, Mécanisme de la phagocytose des trypanosomes, phénomène de l’accolement—Jean Comandon’s 1910 commissioned film for Pasteur Institute immunologist Constantin Levaditi—which opens onto a broader history of cinema and science. The chapter explores the professional context for Comandon and Levaditi’s partnership and the scientific protocols for using moving images while also considering the excitement scientific films generated and the importance of this enthusiasm for both popular and elite scientific knowledge. It explains the film’s scientific significance as well as the additional meanings the film acquired when taken up by journalists and other participants in popular culture. Indeed, the interactions of various media (film, lecture, the printed word) surrounding this example provide an opportunity to reassess common approaches to popularization, collaboration, and intermediality in histories of scientific representations.
Early Cinema and the Emergence of Television
Authors: Galili Doron
Published: February 2024

This chapter aims at revising common historiographic views that consider the origins of cinema and of television within different trajectories of technological development and in distinct cultural moments of the twentieth century. It starts with an assessment of what the methodological prospects of media archaeology may contribute to the study of early cinema today. Drawing on such media archaeological approaches, the chapter then demonstrates how the history of electrical transmission media (such as radio and television broadcasting) was in fact intertwined with media of recording and inscription (such as phonography, and, of course, cinema) long before the digital turn made their intersections more readily perceivable.
Biograph 1904
Authors: King Rob
Published: February 2024

Among the genres of early film, few have seemed so native to the medium as the comic chase. However it is framed—whether as “the original truly narrative genre of the cinema” (Tom Gunning) or as a “decisive shift toward fiction ‘feature’ films” (Charles Musser)—the chase comedy is viewed as one of the early signposts of cinema’s autonomy as a narrative medium. While the comic chase inaugurates something that arises from cinema’s distinct medial properties and sets cinema apart, the exact nature of that “something” depends on the historian. This chapter tests claims about the chase film by focusing on the company that effectively launched the genre in 1904, American Mutoscope and Biograph, and its three chase comedies from that year: The Escaped Lunatic, Personal, and The Lost Child. It thereby suggests a perspective on genre formation that bridges considerations of cultural practice with the insights of media archaeology.
Adorno and Religion
Authors: Angermann Asaf
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the complex but meaningful role of religious ideas and theological arguments in Adorno’s thought. It examines how, alongside his critical analyses of the manifestations of religious consciousness in modern life, Adorno continuously employs religious concepts and theological sources in his writings. Reviewing the socio-political dimensions of the uses and abuses of religion Adorno diagnoses in political and cultural life, mass media, and entertainment, the chapter explicates how, according to Adorno, religious content is often reduced to superstition, occultism, and xenophobic ideology. The chapter then turns to the more constructive, socially redemptive elements of Adorno’s perspective on religion: the resemblance of his metaphysical arguments to negative theology and his unique concept of inverse theology. Finally, the chapter illuminates the significance of religion in Adorno’s aesthetics. It is in his theory of art, the author argues, that Adorno’s thought seems most theological, yet even here it remains, after all, primarily historical and materialistic.
The Cumulation Problem in Political Science
Authors: Gerring John
Published: February 2024

There is no purpose in launching new theories if they do not lead, over time, to a cumulation of knowledge on the subject. Brave conjectures must be followed by sober analyses, and these must cumulate over time. This chapter begins with a discussion of what counts as progress in political science, and in the social sciences more generally. Next, it discusses several widely regarded agendas for achieving cumulation—centered, respectively, on laws, mechanisms, theory, and inference. It argues that none of these traditional approaches is likely to go very far on their own. The final section explores another approach, dubbed standardization. Cumulation does not just happen, especially if scholars are working hard to distinguish their own work from everything and everyone that came before. Some degree of standardization is needed. And this, in turn, requires coordination among scholars working on a subject.
A Common Paradigm in a Universe of Applications
Authors: Abi-Hassan Sahar
Published: February 2024

As an approach based on relational data, network theory offers a unique perspective brought to bear on problems that range across the arts, sciences and humanities. For social scientists in particular, networks provide a new way to look at old, as well as new problems. Social network analysis (SNA) allows us to study human behavior from an individual perspective, and as the product of the environmental structure they are embedded in. Supported by an increasingly available range of data and extensive advances in computer science, network science provides the tools for descriptive analysis, as well as inferential statistical modeling. This chapter begins with a review of several important contributions of network theory as a common paradigm, and how this has been applied to various social scientific fields—i.e., political and social networks. Thereafter, the chapter discusses the application of SNA to the area of interest group theory. Specifically, it illustrates how the organizational identity of interest groups can be shaped by their network.
The Future of Computational Social Science
Authors: Lazer David , Ognyanova Katya
Published: February 2024

This chapter outlines the current state and future trajectory of computational social science (CSS), a growing field combining tools and techniques from computer science with theories and methods from the social sciences. This fusion of approaches offers enormous possibilities to expand understanding of human society at scale. We discuss the diverse types of data used in this area of research, including text, image, audio, video, network, location, and sensor data, as well as archival, self-reported, and qualitative data. The chapter offers an overview of key opportunities and obstacles faced by researchers in this field, highlighting structural, ethical, social, and technological factors. Of particular interest at this time is an evolving crisis in data access, as platforms have greatly constricted data availability in recent years. We emphasize the importance of computational methods for theory development and discuss their capacity to expand existing knowledge, adapting classic models for a new information environment.
“O Baffled, Balked”
Authors: Wilkenfeld Jacob
Published: February 2024

This essay reads the 1860 “Leaves of Grass” cluster as a testing ground for ideas regarding a poetics of absorption in Walt Whitman’s writing. For example, in “There Was a Child Went Forth,” the speaker asserts that the world’s variegated phenomena “became part of that child who went forth every day.” Yet the 1860 “Leaves of Grass” grouping also includes poems in which the possibility of absorption as a compositional strategy is interrogated and deemed unfeasible. In particular, the essay focuses on the poems “I Sit and Look Out” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” as illustrations of a countertendency in Whitman’s work to the absorptive aesthetic that famously characterizes the speaker of “Song of Myself.” The author argues that, as a cluster whose title is eponymous with Whitman’s larger verse project, “Leaves of Grass” presents a radically skeptical reconsideration of Leaves of Grass.
The “Dark Bequest”
Authors: Tuggle Lindsay
Published: February 2024

Recalling Walt Whitman’s reverence for the “human fragments” of Civil War medical specimens, this essay by Lindsay Tuggle reflects on how her poetry interrogates the debt modern medicine owes to dispossessed bodies. These “specimens of unworldliness” and their shapeshifting afterlives constitute Whitman’s “dark bequest.” At the close of “Song of Myself,” Whitman invites the reader to glimpse an ecoerotic afterlife where decay is a precursor to transcendence. Human particles decompose and re-emerge as “divine materials.” In Whitman’s idyllic cemetery, human kinship does not end when the beloved takes her final breath. The living are bound to the dead by constellations of attachments that extend beyond the body. Whitman and his phantasmal specimens invite the reader to shift elegy beyond the singular human body, to unite in mourning those who remain “unnamed” by history.
Whitman’s Atmospheres
Authors: Waples Emily
Published: February 2024

This essay integrates ecocritical and medico-historical perspectives to investigate Walt Whitman’s atmospheres, both literal and literary. The “open air” pervades Whitman’s poetry, creating an apt climate for his rustic persona and out-of-doors sensibility. Yet for Whitman, the open air was more than a mere pleasure or metaphor: it was the key to health. Whitman frequently championed the salutary properties of freely circulating, uncontaminated air, joining prominent medical writers who stressed the necessity of proper indoor ventilation, and public health reformers who called for the sanitization of urban environments. Analyzing Whitman’s poetic deployments of atmospheric and respiratory tropes alongside his editorial writings on health, the essay examines his understanding of atmosphere not as a neutral “force of nature” but as a means to negotiate and disrupt dichotomous tensions between the body and the body politic, between self-help and public health.
Walt Whitman’s Archives
Authors: Stewart Ashlyn , Cohen Matt
Published: February 2024

This chapter considers how Walt Whitman thought about literary archives. Whitman left behind a strikingly large volume of material, with no orders to executors to destroy manuscripts. The roots of that hoard lie in the writer’s thinking about the material conditions of authorial posterity. The cosmic materialism articulated in Whitman’s poetry declared a kind of eternal existence, influenced by the notion that a writer could anticipate the assaults of time. The poet shaped the preservation of his own literary archive, through his relationship with Horace Traubel. Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden reveals Whitman enacting document transfers, framing his material remains to guide how Traubel would tell his tale. “Walt Whitman’s Archives” traces Whitman’s concern with literary archives in light of recent media archaeological theory, and concludes with thoughts about how knowing the writer’s ideas about literary preservation might influence the work of those curating his archive’s legacy today.
Taking a Page Out of Whitman’s Scrapbook
Authors: McMullen Kevin
Published: February 2024

This essay details the process of digitally reassembling a scrapbook compiled by Walt Whitman in the mid- to late 1850s. Over 1,000 pages long, and comprising sections from textbooks, magazines, newspaper clippings, and handwritten manuscripts, this artifact was organized around a central theme: the world’s cultural geography. Whitman’s reasons for creating the scrapbook are unclear and obscured even further by the fact that the document is significantly different from its original form as he compiled it; in the 1930s, more than one hundred manuscript pages were excised by a collector and sold at auction as separate items. The essay discusses how the scrapbook contributed to Whitman’s published work, shedding light on the complex interplay of the poet’s reading, note-taking, and writing processes. It concludes by exploring how Whitman’s practice of scrapbooking, as well as his self-education in world history and geography, mirrors and encapsulates his poetic oeuvre and its intentions.
Whitman’s Secret Publications
Authors: Turpin Zachary
Published: February 2024

Since Walt Whitman’s death, his secret publications have come to light with surprising regularity; this chapter details the discovery of ten such publications, each of which Whitman covertly saw into print and seemingly reminded no one of afterward. Commonalities among these rediscovered works include their publication primarily in newsprint; their appearance anonymously or under pen names; their engagement with “un-Whitmanian” genres; and their discovery by way of manuscript and bibliographic evidence. Since new digital methodologies have begun enhancing researchers’ efficacy and extending their reach into vast new digital archives, this chapter concludes by enumerating the strengths and weaknesses of some of the newest methods aiding the recovery of secret Whitman publications. These include byline searches, computational stylometry, and idiolectic analysis. Such methods promise to help turn up any number of still-missing Whitman texts, including not one but two novels, The Sleeptalker (c.1850–51) and Proud Antoinette (c.1858–60).
Defining the Role of Metaphor in Organization Studies
Authors: Cornelissen Joep
Published: February 2024

This chapter defines the concept of metaphor in the field of organization studies. The author distinguishes between linguistic, cognitive, and cultural dimensions, and elaborates how alone or together these different dimensions have given rise to different streams of research in the organization field. Besides providing an overview of past work, the author calls for more reflexivity among academics, policy-makers, and other stakeholders of organizations. The role of metaphor in contemporary management and policy making often goes unnoticed, and more debate and discussion of the metaphorical roots of many ideas is badly needed—ideally before a new metaphor has become institutionalized.
Metaphors in Action
Authors: Sackmann Sonja
Published: February 2024

Metaphors are an integral part of organizational life. They are helpful in providing a clear image for nebulous, often future situations, but they also have a seductive quality for the metaphor’s recipients. As recipients, organizational members are exposed to a metaphor without having a choice over either the metaphor or the mental image that it automatically triggers in them, including its potential implications regarding suggested actions. This chapter describes the seduction process in more detail, using two examples from organizational life. Furthermore, it explores conditions that contribute to metaphors’ higher and lower levels of seductive nature. This depends on the metaphor itself, the characteristics of the metaphor’s target, the characteristics of the metaphor’s originator, and those of the recipients and their group. The chapter also explores ways in which to counterbalance the seductive quality of metaphors.
Defining, Refining, and Redefining Metaphor
Authors: Oswick Cliff , Grant David
Published: February 2024

This chapter draws upon a recorded conversation in which the authors discussed the role and status of metaphor in organization theory with Professor Gareth Morgan. There are three mains sections to the chapter. The first reviews and reflects upon the original formulation of metaphor, offered in Images of Organization (Morgan, 1986), as a device involving the carrying over of properties from a concrete source domain (i.e., a metaphor) to a relatively abstract target domain (i.e., an organization). The second section explores an alternative perspective which draws attention to the provisional, emergent, and transitory properties of metaphor (i.e., concerning what the authors refer to as “residual patterns of understanding” and the “grab of solutions”). The chapter concludes with a discussion of the scope for complementing the dominant resonance-based approach to metaphor use (i.e., the privileging of similarity) by advocating the deployment of dissonance-based metaphorical projections (which foreground dissimilarity).