Disciplinary Network Research Articles

Research disciplinary interactions on scientific collaboration network in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution: Characteristics and dynamics.

Interdisciplinary scientific collaboration promotes the innovative development of scientific research. Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution (PHE) is a typical interdisciplinary subject. This study aims to explore the characteristics of discipline interaction and the temporal evolution in the field. Bibliometric analysis could be used to understand the stage of research in a particular subject. In this work, the publications on the topic in Web of Science (WoS) platform from 1999 to 2020 were selected. On the basis of social network theory, the characteristics of interdisciplinary were revealed from three perspectives. First, the disciplinary interaction network is constructed through disciplinary co-occurrence to detect the characteristics of interaction structure among different disciplines. Then the node centrality index is employed to explore the influence of disciplines in the interactive network by using network centrality analysis. Moreover, the dynamic of discipline interaction evolution is studied using blockmodeling analysis. In the field of PHE, the number of disciplines and the intensity of interaction among different subjects gradually increased in the past 20 years. Chemistry and Material Sciences are the core discipline, and they play an important role in the network. The whole network is divided into different discipline groups. The scale of the discipline group is becoming large, and the disciplinary interaction is becoming more complex. The obtained results are helpful for guiding scholars to carry out interdisciplinary interaction. The methods of detecting interdisciplinary interactive relationship could provide paths for interdisciplinary research in other fields.

Insight into the Disciplinary Structure of Nanoscience & Nanotechnology

Abstract Purpose This paper aims to gain an insight into the disciplinary structure of nanoscience & nanotechnology (N&N): What is the disciplinary network of N&N like? Which disciplines are being integrated into N&N over time? For a specific discipline, how many other disciplines have direct or indirect connections with it? What are the distinct subgroups of N&N at different evolutionary stages? Such critical issues are to be addressed in this paper. Design/methodology/approach We map the disciplinary network structure of N&N by employing the social network analysis tool, Netdraw, identifying which Web of Science Categories (WCs) mediate nbetweenness centrality in different stages of nano development. Cliques analysis embedded in the Ucinet program is applied to do the disciplinary cluster analysis in the study according to the path of “Network-Subgroup-Cliques,” and a tree diagram is selected as the visualizing type. Findings The disciplinary network structure reveals the relationships among different disciplines in the N&N developing process clearly, and it is easy for us to identify which disciplines are connected with the core “N&N” directly or indirectly. The tree diagram showing N&N related disciplines provides an interesting perspective on nano research and development (R&D) structure. Research limitations The matrices used to draw the N&N disciplinary network are the original ones, and normalized matrix could be tried in future similar studies. Practical implications Results in this paper can help us better understand the disciplinary structure of N&N, and the dynamic evolution of N&N related disciplines over time. The findings could benefit R&D decision making. It can support policy makers from government agencies engaging in science and technology (S&T) management or S&T strategy planners to formulate efficient decisions according to a perspective of converging sciences and technologies. Originality/value The novelty of this study lies in mapping the disciplinary network structure of N&N clearly, identifying which WCs have a mediating effect in different developmental stages (especially analyzing clusters among disciplines related to N&N, revealing close or distant relationships among distinct areas pertinent to N&N).

Network and actor attribute effects on the performance of researchers in two fields of social science in a small peripheral community

The aim of this study is to explore the network effects of the national and disciplinary community and actor attribute effects on the future performance of scientists in two fields of social sciences in Croatia. Based on the publication data from 1992 to 2012, extracted from three databases, we used the co-authorship network from the period 1992–2001 for the specification of nine structural effects to predict individual performance in the 2002–2012 period. Employing the auto-logistic actor attribute models allowed the inclusion of six actor attributes and the analysis of their effects simultaneously with network effects. The results show that future performance is dependent on the national and disciplinary network both in the psychology field and in the sociology field. When controlling for actor attribute effects, these structural effects play a significant role only in sociology, where activity in the network is a negative predictor and having a tie with an actor who is going to be above average in productivity is a positive predictor of the outcome. Institution type in psychology, age and the previous productivity in sociology are significant actor attribute effects. We used log-odds to demonstrate the probabilities of the outcome for three prototypical egonet structures: open, closed and complex; with different numbers of alters with attribute. Specific directions for future research are identified.

For Body, Mind and the Nation: An Archaeology of Modern Japanese Psychiatry

Abstract This paper reassesses the history of psychiatry in Japan through application of the theory of disciplinary power by Michel Foucault. The society of the early Meiji era (1868-1912) is defined as a disciplinary society within the scope of discourses on punishment and general social reforms. By focussing on a close reading of both canonical and marginalised fragments of psychiatric texts, this analysis reveals their constitutive character for the establishment of psychiatric discourses. These texts, rooted in biological psychiatry, are shown to stress the hazard that mental illness presented to the nation. Recourse to juridical problems, which derive from enacting a European model of law, provides an explanation for the necessity of psychiatry as a social institution. The key point is to identify a discursive break between two major legal acts dealing with the confinement of the mentally ill: the Mental Patients Custody Act of 1900 and the Mental Hospital Act of 1919. The first deals mainly with administrative issues, while the latter was formed under the influence of an emerging psychiatric power. The Mental Hospital Act refines the disciplinary network operating in the social space, while blurring the discursive fissure between traditional care and psychiatric techniques.

Disciplined Mobility and the Emotional Subject in Royal Dutch Lloyd's Early Twentieth Century Passenger Shipping Network

This paper examines the disciplined mobility and emotional geographies of “between-deck” passengers in Royal Dutch Lloyd's early Twentieth Century passenger shipping network. Specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the network was established and with the efforts made to maintain it. It is found that such a disciplinary network furthers the firm's goal of shipping healthy and productive bodies for corporate profits and that transhipment facility Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam was integral to the performance and maintenance of such a transnational disciplinary network. The key consequence of such disciplined mobility was the creation of an emotional passenger-migrant subject shaped in relation to the power of corporate, cultural and other authorities in maritime travel and migration. In identifying this historic network of disciplined mobility and its emotional subject, this paper seeks to reveal the emotional geographies relating to mobile subjectivities and the power relations associated with their historically significant travels.

Nomadic concepts in the history of biology

The history of scientific concepts has firmly settled among the instruments of historical inquiry. In our section we approach concepts from the perspective of nomadic concepts (Isabelle Stengers). Instead of following the evolution of concepts within one disciplinary network, we see them as subject to constant reification and change while crossing and turning across disciplines and non-scientific domains. This introduction argues that understanding modern biology is not possible without taking into account the constant transfers and translations that affected concepts. We argue that this approach does not only engage with nomadism between disciplines and non-scientific domains, but reflects on and involves the metaphoric value of concepts as well.

Networking Magic: Andrew Lang and the Science of Self-Interest

This article examines Andrew Lang’s anthropological writings on magic and religion in relation to a broader network of literary and sociological discourses. Lang’s work, along with that of others, highlights the labors nineteenth-century anthropologists expended to segregate magic from science, religion, and utilitarian action in the capitalist public sphere. Despite such efforts at segregation, however, nineteenth-century anthropological writings expose the genealogical continuities between magic, science, religion, and self-interest. These continuities, the essay contends, also surface in anthropology’s sibling discourses: literature and political economy. Lang’s contemporaries, such as H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, drew on anthropological findings in their fictional representations of magical rites and beliefs either in rural Britain or at the colonial periphery. Magic’s proximity to science, religion, and capitalist self-interest also undergirds Herbert Spencer’s systems theories and reverberates in the political economists that drew on Spencer’s work. The essay thus demonstrates not only how Lang functions as a node within a broad disciplinary network, but also how the concept of magic traverses numerous discursive fields.

The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays (review)

Reviewed by: The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays Bruce Heiden Andrew Faulkner, ed. The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xv + 400 pp. 2 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $160. This volume, according to its editor, is intended to fill the need for a companion to the Homeric Hymns, but “[it] is more than just a companion. It aims not only to evaluate the state of scholarship on the Hymns but also to advance it” (23). Actually, the collection falls far short of a satisfactory companion, and its influence could set back scholarship on the Hymns to before Clay’s pioneering ensemble reading of the major Hymns in The Politics of Olympus (Princeton, 1989). Since the volume’s title promises “interpretative essays,” it might be ungenerous to dwell upon its shortcomings as a companion. But only a few of its fourteen contributions could even be described as “interpretative,” except loosely. Almost all focus upon putative facts, some of them imaginary. The editor’s introduction is symptomatic of problems that beset the entire collection. A survey of recent scholarship on the Hymns sketches representative positions of what is styled a “debate,” which to Faulkner apparently means that all views worth mentioning get equal time, none are ever legitimately invalidated, and consensus forms around a hypothetical middle ground. Faulkner divides the field into four categories, “Oral Poetics,” “Dating and Language,” “Performance and Function,” and “Genre, Panhellenism, and Local Connections,” a misleading division since a single research paradigm, traditional oral poetics, defines most of the issues here distributed among three of the categories (the first, third, and fourth). Faulkner’s historical sketch of oral poetics conventionally accords seminal status to Parry and Lord, but it takes no notice of Nagy, and an inexperienced reader would never suspect how much current work on archaic Greek poetry, including much in the present volume, emanates from this one scholar’s program. As for intellectual influences originating outside philology, Faulkner recognizes none at all; his survey makes no mention of structuralism, and more importantly, no mention of the functionalist sociolinguistics channeled into classical Greek scholarship by Gregory Nagy and (somewhat differently) by Claude Calame, both contributors to this very volume. On the other hand, Faulkner acknowledges the importance of Clay’s Politics quite explicitly, but still misleadingly, for he summarizes the book’s thesis but passes over the analytic framework on which (in principle) it rests. He then proceeds to tabulate a few dissenting positions, again without analyzing their premises or merits. All this conveys an impression that academic research on the Hymns has no programs, methods, or standards, that the [End Page 521] field consists of numerous independent researchers who spontaneously converge around a limited repertoire of questions, and that disciplinary authority belongs to a consensus of prudent experts rather than investigative rigor or hegemonic theory. From an editor who sees the academic landscape in this way, we get a collection of articles whose main purpose appears to be that of assembling and projecting consensus. Readers will learn what a certain disciplinary network thinks to be in vogue at the present time (itself), but not much about the Homeric Hymns, and certainly not much about the four major hymns that have prompted the most study and contemplation. Besides the editor’s introduction, the volume features contributions by Martin West (speculative reconstruction of the fragmentary first Hymn to Dionysus), Nicholas Richardson (survey of issues in recent work on the Hymn to Demeter), Mike Chappell (survey of arguments for and against the Hymn to Apollo being a composite), Athanassios Vergados (argument that the Hymn to Hermes effects the god’s epiphany obliquely), Pascale Brillet-Dubois (the Hymn to Aphrodite as an intertextual dialogue between “Aphroditean” and “Iliadic” poetics), Dominique Jaillard (the epiphanic framework of Hymn 7 to Dionysus), Oliver Thomas (thorough reading of the Hymn to Pan), Andrew Faulkner (allusions to the hymns as evidence of the collection’s contents and circulation in certain periods), William D. Furley (the Homeric Hymns as a departure from authentic religious hymns), Jenny Clay (the existence of a genre of Olympian narrative), Nancy Felson (confrontations between Zeus and his children in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Hymn to Apollo, and Hymn...

Reading Korean Public Administration: An Application of Lacanian Four Discourses

The article attempts to make a discourse analysis on Korean public administration research for the past half century, in terms of Jacque Lacan's theory of the four fundamental discourses. Of the four discourses, the master discourse and university discourse are dominant, while the analytic discourse and hysteric discourse are marginalized. Previous studies have served or justified the three master signifiers in Korean public administration (the hierarchical political power, capitalism, and the U.S. public administration), with little attempt to challenge and change those master signifiers. Some structured mechanisms, like the hierarchical structure of governance and the tripartite disciplinary network, have contributed to the discourse (re)production. The article argues for making efforts to dissolve those reproduction mechanisms, and for a change of discourses in Korean public administration research.

Natural histories of infectious disease: ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science.

During the twentieth century, disease ecology emerged as a distinct disciplinary network within infectious diseases research. The key figures were Theobald Smith, F. Macfarlane Burnet, René Dubos, and Frank Fenner. They all drew on Darwinian evolutionism to fashion an integrative (but rarely holistic) understanding of disease processes, distinguishing themselves from reductionist "chemists" and mere "microbe hunters." They sought a more complex, biologically informed epidemiology. Their emphasis on competition and mutualism in the animated environment differed from the physical determinism that prevailed in much medical geography and environmental health research. Disease ecology derived in part from studies of the interaction of organisms - micro and macro - in tropical medicine, veterinary pathology, and immunology. It developed in postcolonial settler societies. Once a minority interest, disease ecology has attracted more attention since the 1980s for its explanations of disease emergence, antibiotic resistance, bioterrorism, and the health impacts of climate change.

The Swedish National Graduate School in Scientific Computing (NGSSC)

The Swedish National Graduate School in Scientific Computing (NGSSC) was founded in 1996, and has so far admitted 75 graduate students in five nationally announced admission rounds. The aim of NGSSC is to produce PhDs with skills in strategically important disciplines together with a broad knowledge of numerical and computational techniques, and to spread the use of computations into new areas of research. NGSSC consists of both a geographical and a disciplinary network and focuses on providing core knowledge on advanced computational techniques to graduate students in application fields. This presents some special challenges to the program, such as developing its own identity and dealing with the very different backgrounds of the students. The NGSSC activities focus on a package of specially developed courses, tailored for student groups with very mixed backgrounds. The courses are given in intensive format, and are compulsory for the students participating in the program.

The geopolitics of the police: Foucault, disciplinary power and the tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department

This paper uses the insights of Foucault to analyze the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as an agency of discipline. It takes Foucault's injunction to study the ‘how’ of power seriously, using insights from ethnographic fieldwork with the Los Angeles Police Department to assess Foucault's general formulations concerning disciplinary power. The fieldwork reveals that the LAPD does indeed engage in a series of technologically and organizationally sophisticated practices to monitor and control the populace. However, it also reveals the need to remember Foucault's more cautionary programmatics in analyzing an agency such as the LAPD; dynamics both internal and external to the police organization limit the reach of its surveillance capacities. The disciplinary network of the LAPD is much more restricted, complex and contradictory than a simplistic Foucauldian reading would suggest.

European aeronautical supercomputing network (EASNet): a presentation

Abstract The aeronautical industry depends on heavy numerical simulation for performance optimization of aircraft being designed. In Europe, aircraft conception more and more depends upon effective cooperation between a number of industry partners. An effective way to enhance global competition is to encourage activation of the best simulation tools, existing across this community, for the definition of a given product. This need results in a requirement for broadband transEuropean networking: 10 Mb and up. Eight organizations have joined forces to define and validate the basis of such a “disciplinary network” of the nineties. What does Europe offer to interconnect 100 Mbit, 1000 Mbps existing LANs?