Disciplinary Sectors Research Articles

Do Historical GIS and Digital Humanities Walk Hand in Hand?

In a number of countries today, borrowing from a discussion that originated in Anglo-Saxon countries, there is an increasingly insistent discussion of historical GIS as one of the stars of the digital humanities galaxy. The reasoning has been addressed, albeit with some delay and distinctly by disciplinary sectors, in a number of contributions and congresses and has seen the prevalence of a substantial acceptance of this thesis that pegs historical GIS as a component of the macro-sector of digital humanities. An alternative reading on the real convenience of maintaining a rather disciplinary distance between both is offered for the purposes of cognitive growth. It is therefore not a question of establishing primaries or hegemonies of one over the other but rather a “call to arms” (historians, geographers, urban planners, archaeologists, ecologists, etc.) by leveraging the scientific heterogeneity (interdisciplinarity), offering space for common dialogue. Thus, through the uniting of different forces that individually remain partial and marginal in the use of historical GIS will it be possible to consider real growth that can enable an effective enrichment of geographical-historical-cartographic research based on the use of GIS in face of the digital humanities.

Interdisciplinary research by accounting scholars: An exploratory study

There is a growing consensus around the pivotal role of interdisciplinary research (hereafter IDR) in achieving innovative results and addressing the challenges of modern societies, whose solutions are often beyond the scope of a single discipline. This paper builds on this literature to explore the trends in IDR and its evaluation in research quality assessments in the context of accounting studies by Italian scholars, even in comparison with disciplinary research. This exploratory study covers a da- taset of all articles published by Italian accounting scholars in international journals indexed in Scopus from 1985 to 2015 (1,233 articles). We operationalise IDR as diversity in the subject area of journals where the articles are published and diversity in the disciplinary sector of coauthors. Thus, the novelty of this article is that instead of using a single indicator of IDR, we consider the interaction of two alternative perspectives of analysis. The main findings reveal a relevant increase in disciplinary and interdisciplinary articles, with a comparatively smaller increase for IDR. Additionally, we observe that IDR by Italian accounting scholars is strongly oriented towards medical publi- cations. Regarding quality evaluation, the findings show a significantly higher eval- uation of disciplinary studies compared to IDR according to the criteria followed by the national assessment exercise (VQR). This explorative study contributes to the debate on IDR in two different ways. On the one hand, our study shows a relatively low growth of IDR in the under-re- searched context of social sciences in a non-Anglo-Saxon setting, where national research evaluations have stimulated radical changes in the features and outlets of scientific production. On the other hand, our results are consistent with the view that papers with a clear disciplinary focus receive comparatively higher evaluations be- cause the standards established for assessment are usually defined within the disci- pline.

Fashion confronting unrelated sectors: the ideal model of manufacturing symbiosis between industrial systems

This study aims to reflect on a possible symbiosis between the fashion system and unrelated companies focused on reducing textile waste. Recent developments in the fashion system, in terms of the organizational network, highlight the importance of collaboration, or vice versa of competition enhancement mechanisms. The highly innovative and creative skills and tasks concentrate much of the value in the creation phase, characteristic of emerging sectors such as creative ones. The methodology will be carried out through a review of the reference literature, with a critical, constructive, and real analysis on strategies for the construction of this symbiosis. It is expected to contribute to a reflection on the development of collaboration and cooperation skills in an interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary approach, for the training and preparation of fashion design professionals, requiring a greater commitment from Academia in the creation of interactions and interrelationships with still very different disciplinary sectors.

Fashion Confronting Unrelated Sectors: The Ideal Model of Manufacturing Symbiosis Between Industrial Systems

This study aims to reflect on a possible symbiosis between the fashion system and unrelated companies focused on reducing textile waste. Recent developments in the fashion system, in terms of the organizational network, highlight the importance of collaboration, or vice versa of competition enhancement mechanisms. The highly innovative and creative skills and tasks concentrate much of the value in the creation phase, characteristic of emerging sectors such as creative ones. The methodology will be carried out through a review of the reference literature, with a critical, constructive, and real analysis on strategies for the construction of this symbiosis. It is expected to contribute to a reflection on the development of collaboration and cooperation skills in an interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary approach, for the training and preparation of fashion design professionals, requiring a greater commitment from Academia in the creation of interactions and interrelationships with still very different disciplinary sectors.

Gender inequalities in research funding: Unequal network configurations, or unequal network returns?

Despite longstanding discussions and consequent improvements of gender representation in academia, the number of women working in academic research, their performance and their recognition still indicate the persistence of gender inequalities. Of the various mechanisms that may drive such inequality the one that relates the structure of research collaborative networks to the rewards that these networks facilitate is intriguing. If social networks play a role in academic performances and women are under-recognized compared to men, what are the mechanisms that relate networks to gender inequalities in academia? Do men and women obtain equal returns from similar network structure, or do women have to build different networks to obtain similar returns?This article contributes to the theoretical debate that aims to disentangle the mechanisms by which social networks may affect gendered success. We do so by looking at networks of collaborations to research projects in 10 years of public funding in Italy. We use a permutation t-test analysis to see if men and women, who are equally successful in getting funded for a high number of projects, build equal or unequal collaborative networks, and if these differences vary across disciplines with more or less tenured women. Our methodological contribution proposes an innovative way of measuring brokerage and constraint in one mode projections of bipartite networks, highly clustered and valued, and measures gender homophily by taking into account the higher or lower number of women available for collaborations in different disciplinary sectors. We find that men and women build similar collaborative networks; we also find that the more women are tenured in a discipline, the more they occupy higher ranks and lead research projects. When women’s presence and high-rank roles increase, we see that men’s collaborative networks are significantly more heterophilous, although women do not seem to significantly increase their collaborations with other women.We then regress the individual measures of network structure and composition against the average amount of money scholars receive per project and we interact each measure with gender, to observe if women obtain similar returns to men by building equal collaborative networks. Our results show that despite the similarities in network configurations in nearly all disciplines women still receive less funding than men. This suggests that an increased representation of women in academic fields is not enough to reduce inequalities. Our results are not directly generalizable to other international contexts, but the mechanisms that favor academic returns and exacerbate inequalities, and our methodological approach, are portable to other scientific and organizational contexts where collaborations are key to produce success.

Ricognizioni archeologiche nella chora di Herakleia (Basilicata)

The Post-graduated School of Archaeological Heritage of Matera annually promotes, within the project CHORA, Laboratories of Archeaology in Basilicata, the campaigns of intensive archaeological survey in the territory of the ancient chora of Herakleia, between the rivers of Akiris and Siris, together with the stratigraphic excavation on the hill of S.M. d’Anglona (ancient Pandosia). These are two actions of a unitary landscape archaeology project characterized by a highly integrated approach: the archaeological activity, in collaboration with other disciplinary sectors, is linked to the themes of identifying the agricultural resources of the ancient territory of Herakleia

Beyond the Disciplinary Sector: Theories, Methods and Topics of Latin American Sociology over the last 25 Years

This essay is a contribution to the existing debate on the progress of sociological scientific production over the last 25 years (1991-2016). In contemporary society, the exponential developments consolidate or refute the sense of the implementation of theories, methods and topics in the sociological sciences. Besides, Sociology addresses new topics that require an innovative empirical framework, beneficial on understanding the complexity of reality and to respond to any new challenges. Starting from an analytical assessment of the report 25 Anos de Sociologia , edited by Alexis Romero Salazar (2017), this article aims to highlight the progression of several disciplinary sectors of Latin American sociological production. Whereas it is difficult to include all the sociological areas in this overview, the choice fell on the following: education, family, religion, economy, political processes, communication, migration and – last but not least – the recognition of the empirical significance of social imaginary.

Bridging cultural studies and learning science: An investigation of social media use for Holocaust memory and education in the digital age

Scholarly research has produced an astonishing number of studies that investigate social media use in many disciplinary sectors (McCrory et al., 2020; Wilson et al., 2012). According to a recent ar...

The impact of collaboration on research about rural buildings and landscape: A case study in Italy

The importance of collaboration among peers in science is widely investigated: an essential issue is the relevance of credits shared among scholars for the good faith and cooperation in research projects. Despite its significance, so far in Italy the usefulness of collaboration in research activities is not taken in due consideration by both scientific community and research assessment bodies. In this study, the main aim is at investigating the actual up today extent of scientific collaboration among colleagues belonging to the Italian Scientific Disciplinary Sector (SDS) “AGR10 Rural buildings and agro-forest land planning”. We focus on research projects dealing with territory, landscape and rural buildings with the scope of raising consciousness on the key role of collaboration with other SDSs, international institutions or organizations. We harvested data through an on-line questionnaire about several research projects, scrutinized the responses, and found that the core area of current research developed by AGR10 colleagues includes topics concerning the analysis and planning of landscape. Furthermore, we found that the design of international project proposals attains mostly rural buildings and rural heritage analysis, reuse and enhancement, rural buildings and landscape integration, and rural buildings design. While the size of partnerships on international research activities is still limited, as for external synergies the SDS AGR01 ‘Agricultural Economics and Rural Appraisal’ is the most representative, and other SDSs involving ‘Ecology’ and ‘Informatics’ deserve to be mentioned. So, this study has been designed with the secondary aim of stimulating Italian -as well as other international- scientific communities in promoting similar investigations concerning the importance of collaboration and cross-fertilization for successful research activities. As a major output, official national or international research assessment authorities would be provided by a method for better appreciating the usefulness of collaboration and interdisciplinarity.

Psychology and psychopathology of the mask

The following are reflections of a clinical psychologist and a psychotherapist; first of all it’s important to remember that the task of the disciplinary sector is to find applications of the clinical report, hence the gaps, that other scholars will find, derive from the precise professional context that does not intend to avoid drawing on other knowledge to improve the care in suffering; also the therapeutic plan, of a clear analytical inspiration, wants to obtain from the culture those necessary cues for the amplifications that make the original psychotherapy according to the thought of C.G Jung.

Mainstreaming human and large carnivore coexistence through institutional collaboration.

Achieving coexistence between large carnivores and humans in human-dominated landscapes (HDLs) is a key challenge for societies globally. This challenge cannot be adequately met with the current sectoral approaches to HDL governance and an academic community largely dominated by disciplinary sectors. Academia (universities and other research institutions and organizations) should take a more active role in embracing societal challenges around conservation of large carnivores in HDLs by facilitating cross-sectoral cooperation to mainstream coexistence of humans and large carnivores. Drawing on lessons from populated regions of Europe, Asia, and South America with substantial densities of large carnivores, we suggest academia should better embrace the principles and methods of sustainability sciences and create institutional spaces for the implementation of transdisciplinary curricula and projects; reflect on research approaches (i.e., disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary) they apply and how their outcomes could aid leveraging institutional transformations for mainstreaming; and engage with various institutions and stakeholder groups to create novel institutional structures that can respond to multiple challenges of HDL management and human-large carnivore coexistence. Success in mainstreaming this coexistence in HDL will rest on the ability to think and act cooperatively. Such a conservation achievement, if realized, stands to have far-reaching benefits for people and biodiversity.

Improving Sustainability in Architectural Research: Biopsychosocial Requirements in the Design of Urban Spaces

There is an ever increasing interest in identifying the links between architecture and public health and in how urban design can positively influence the latter. The psychology of sustainability and sustainable development represents an innovative research area as a recent contribution to sustainability science and its trans-disciplinary configuration. The research topic deals with the importance and the centrality of the user-centered approach in the observation of the relationships among mankind, technological systems, and built environments, for projects that guarantee the conditions of physical, mental, and social well-being. Starting from the plurality of different disciplinary sectors, from anthropometry and sociology to psychology, “human experience” and user’s expectations are explored, understood, and systematized. The analysis of the relationship between health and urban design has allowed researchers to identify design strategies to improve the level of urban livability. The city of Pisa is the case study; mobility within the city is redefined through various levels of the use of space so that paths and areas of inclusion and socialization are re-valued, while new scenarios for some urban spaces open up. In this perspective, the design strategies synthetically follow two main directions: the re-appropriation of these places by the citizens and, at the same time, the promotion of their well-being from both a physical and psychological point of view.

Da indeterminação do mundo: os santos, o mar, a luz

In this paper, I suggest that we confront the arguments of symbolic precedence with those of utilitarian reason in the relations of societies with the sea. In order to do so, the text explores multiple chronological layers and thematic nuclei of various disciplinary sectors, taking as a starting point the domain of funerary boats and navigation in the reports of the arrival by sea of founding saints relics, such as S. James and S. Vicente. This theme has several replicas and variants presumably connected with political interests associated with the sacralization of the ocean and the resources it may provide (‘good to eat, good to think’…). It also has shown enduring expression in some narratives from today’s popular religiosity. I take randomness and indeterminacy as a fundamental epistemological issue that not only is characteristic of lifestyles and beliefs associated to the oceanic interfaces, but that also concerns all human beings across cultures. Accordingly, the text emphasizes scopic dimensions and cognitive processes, identifying some elements that refer to the experience of light, atmosphere, and the lived continuities between the aquatic and celestial elements. Inspired by the principles of autopoietic theory, this proposal explores recent and innovative theoretical perspectives in Anthropology and beyond, seeking for an alternative equation to the determinism of both initial arguments.

Disciplinary homogeneity in university departments following the Gelmini law: an exploratory analysis through social networks

The aim of this work is to evaluate the implementation of the Gelmini law; a law that has reorganized the universities into departments in order to create homogeneous scientific centres in the various fields of research. The methodology used to analyse the change in the structure of departments following the new regulation considers the social networks that unify the subject areas according to their current position. With the help of these social networks, we try to understand whether the new departments are really homogeneous research centres or instead are modelled on the previous faculties. The present work has been carried out in relation to the universities of the Abruzzo region and the sectors interconnected with Area 13 on the list of italian university disciplinary sector see Appendix (which contains the fields of economics and statistics), and we can extend the results to other Italian universities. We highlight: (1) the interactions between the scientific discipline sectors and the departments; (2) the definition of a cosector data matrix (binary and weighted ties); and (3) the hierarchical analysis of the cliques of the scientific discipline sectors. We discuss and compare the results to find out the reasons why the universities have still not become homogenous research centres.

Creating Peace Across Borders: The East-West Path to Unity

This article is based upon autobiographical narratives of two students exploring their experiences in finding commonality through an institutionalized domestic and international student community. Both students’ paths intersected at the East-West Center (EWC), an independent, public, nonprofit organization formed by the US Congress in 1960 with the goal of bringing people together through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. The co-authors describe various factors that facilitated cultivating inner peace and minimize imposed oppressive tendencies. In particular, they analyze the importance of a learning environment that motivates each student to deeply reexamine their relationship to cultural and disciplinary boundaries, through exposing them to multifaceted perspectives. Their conclusions highlight the importance of EWC as a place where bothdomestic and international students can build dialogue, debate, and learn from each other, across disciplinary sectors in a relaxed setting. EWC, with its unique diplomatic-building environment, is a learning prototype that has the potential to unify global diversity through developing unique partnerships of empowerment.

(R)EXISTÊNCIAS ALIMENTARES: Investigando modos de produção de subjetividade através das práticas alimentares na cidade contemporânea/FOOD RESISTANCE: Investigating modes of production of subjetivity through eating practices in the contemporary city.

O artigo parte de uma discussão do campo dos estudos da Subjetividade (GUATTARI, ROLNIK, 2010), para refletir sobre os modos de produção subjetiva, através das práticas alimentares no contexto da cidade contemporânea. Buscaremos refletir sobre como a cidade – movida por um crescente fenômeno de urbanização em conexão com a modernização/mecanização das práticas agrícolas – amparada pelo desenvolvimento capitalista, produz práticas alimentares como reflexo e reprodução deste modo de desenvolvimento. Ao mesmo tempo em que pode ser possibilidade de reinvenção dos modos de vida dispostos neste contexto atual, fazendo apostas numa éco-lógica (GUATTARI, 1990; SANTOS, 2002), como reinvenção das práticas de cuidado de si e da cidade (FOUCAULT, 2006b). AbstractThe article begins with a discussion of the field of studies of Subjectivity (GUATTARI, ROLNIK, 2010), to reflect on subjective modes of production, through eating practices in the context of the contemporary city. It aims to explore the transformations that have occurred in the last century in the context of cities and their consequences in the logic of the production of food practices. Such reflection will be woven based on the cartographic method (PASSOS, KASTRUP, ESCÓSSIA, 2014ª, 2014b, FONSECA, NASCIMENTO MARASCHIN, 2012), supporting the cartography of the multiplicity of discourses and food practices present in the context of the contemporary city. The article is based on a bibliographical review involving discussions of the human and social sciences that can expand the field of discussion, presenting already, the perspective that this field does not fit within specific disciplinary sectors. As a result of the analyzes, it is possible to show that the growing urbanization phenomenon in connection with the modernization / mechanization of agricultural practices - supported by capitalist development - produces food practices as a reflection and reproduction of this mode of development. Resulting in the constitution of the habit of eating as a mere act of consumption, one among so many products on the shelves of the market. At the same time, it is possible to see the act of eating as a possibility of reinventing the ways of life in this current context, making bets in an eclogical (GUATTARI, 1990; SANTOS, 2002), as a reinvention of the practices of self care and (Foucault, 2006b).Keywords: subjectivity; city; food practices.

Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of self-citations, i.e. citations of one’s own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists’ behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science’s main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.

The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy

This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity .

The scientific production of Italian agricultural engineers: a bibliometric network analysis concerning the scientific sector AGR/10 Rural buildings and agro-forestry territory

According to a worldwide well-known attitude, also in Italy, the assessment of scientific production in the last decades has been progressively based on the analysis of the impact through bibliometric variables. Various data sets, such as Scopus by Elsevier and Web of Science by Thomson Reuters, are designed and maintained to index a steadily increasing range of essays: mostly journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. The indexing relays on the capacity to evaluate and update specific impact measures by keeping track of the citations representing the relations between the essays. The related opportunity to interpret bibliographic systems as research and development (R&D) networks attracted the interest of scientists operating, beyond the field of bibliometric analysis, in the realm of social networking. Network analysis belongs to mechanical statistics and is able to make sense of interconnected systems including very large sets of nodes and links. In this paper, we present a network approach to the review of the scientific production in the time period January, 2003-June, 2016 of Italian agricultural engineers, namely scientists belonging to the Italian ministerial scientific disciplinary sector AGR/10 - rural buildings and agro-forestry territory. Starting from 238 articles indexed in the Web of Knowledge database and published by 87 AGR/10 scholars, we apply four network analysis approaches to the study of the citations among articles, the most influential journals and topics, the co-authorship, the most favourite keywords with their evolution in time, and the communities’ pattern. We discover that Italian agricultural engineers are interlaced in a sparse network with a still limited tendency toward citing each other and are inclined to team up in established research groups based on a single university. As for the dualism between rural buildings and territory, we document on a relevant expansion of the issues related to landscape analysis and planning and a continuous renewal of studies concerning the relation between rural buildings and biomass and energy management. We advance that Italian agricultural engineers are not confronted anymore with two monolithic macro themes, i.e. building design and landscape analysis and planning. Instead, the complexity and interplay between these two domains has dramatically increased in a somehow diverging universe of even more specialised and trans-scale topics.

Il Voto standardizzato per l'esercizio VQR 2004-2010

The indicator for University Departments based on the research assessment exercise VQR 2004-2010. In this paper the authors describe an indicator (called Standardized Score) for the evaluation of university departments based solely on the quality of the research-related products presented in the framework of the Italian research assessment exercise VQR 2004-2010. This indicator is built by normalizing with the Italian disciplinary sectors (SSD), thus taking full advantage of the information collected by ANVUR. It has the advantage of comparing and sorting, according to research quality, departments very different form each other both in terms of number of members and/or disciplinary sectors (SSD) thereof. This indicator is complementary to those provided by ANVUR according to the Ministry rules, for it provides support to different needs and it is not normalized over research areas (Aree CUN). The paper describes the concepts behind the Standardized Score indicator, its characteristics, the questions it aims to answer and the possible limitations of its application.