Scholarly Objectivity Research Articles

Introduction into the international research project “In search of a legal model of self-employment in Poland. A comparative analysis

The purpose of the present article is to present to the readers the key concepts underlying the international research project funded by the National Science Centre and led by Prof. Tomasz Duraj titled “In Search of the Self-Employment Model in Poland. A Comparative Analysis”. The chief research task undertaken by the project participants is a complex legal analysis of self-employment – not only from the perspective of Polish regulations and case law, but also with regard to solutions existing in international and Union law as well as in selected European countries. The area of study covered such legal systems as those of the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, as well as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Most centrally, the results of the study will serve to develop an original legal model of self-employment in Poland, which will redefine the special status of the self-employed in an optimal way. The final result of the international research project are two twin studies to be published by Lodz University Press, one in Polish, in the form of a multi-author monograph, and the other in English, as two issues of the journal Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica. The present article demonstrates the scale, significance, and implications of self-employment as an atypical form of providing work, as well as the key scholarly objectives of the international research project and its importance for legal theory and practice. Next, the author discusses the concept and the plan of research work adopted in the project, the research methods applied, and the publication and popularization activities carried out by the project participants. The research undertaken under the project is innovative. This is because until now, no such large-scale study into the legal conditions of self-employment in Poland has been carried out. The final conclusions drawn in the research project make a significant contribution to the development of the theory of labour law and social security law, enriching the academic discourse in this area. An added value for Polish scholarly work is the organized study of foreign regulations on self-employment in selected European countries. Moreover, the de lege ferenda remarks prepared in the research project may be helpful to the Polish authorities in developing new legal solutions in the area of self-employment.

Lithuanian Obscene Paremias: Peculiarities of Recording and Publication

The article deals with obscene paremias in terms of their usage, recording and publication; besides, the prevailing interwar attitude of the society and scholars towards these obscene folklore pieces is also revealed. This empiric study is based on archived materials and articles from interwar periodicals; it strives to reveal several different perspectives, i. e. those of folklore bearers, collectors and researchers. The analysis of the obscene paremias, including certain aspects of using this limitedly public kind of folklore, the history of its collection and publication enabled re-consideration of problematic questions raised by the obscene folk compositions and noting the changing attitude towards this kind of folklore in the nowadays folkloristics. Apparently, the most significant turn in the process of collecting was affected by the guides for folklore collecting published since the 1920s, since they emphasized that various kinds of folklore were worth recording, regardless of their ethical merits. Besides, the folklore collectors were encouraged to record not only the texts of the paremias, but also all the subsidiary information, related to the recorded variants. Observations and commentaries by informants and recorders constitute the very important and nearly the only available materials elucidating the situations of using the obscene paremias.
 Obviously, changes in the prevailing ideology resulted in shifting character of censoring, along with altered boundaries of morality. For instance, certain paremias considered immoral in the middle of the 19th century, were not censored when reprinted in the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, certain words that were considered proper in the 19th century, were censored in the first half of the 20th century. There is still no unanimous and clear agreement on the ways of dealing with the obscene folklore, although with time, researchers’ attitudes shift towards the scholarly objectivity. This shift is obvious in the fundamental collection of the “Lithuanian Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases”, the recent volumes on which include obscene variants of paremias (contrary to the first volumes).

Activism and Objectivity in Political Research

There are two opposed views on the proper relationship between academic research and political activism. The first argues that academics who study politics must remain objective, hence precluding activism. The second argues that academics can and should also be political activists, hence precluding scholarly objectivity. This article argues against an assumption shared by these otherwise opposing positions: that activism and objectivity are incompatible. It conceptually identifies and then normatively defends a form of objectivity characterized by active engagement with evidence that is what Max Weber calls “inconvenient” for one’s existing beliefs and commitments. Far from being incompatible with political activism, this form of objectivity is essential to its success. Since scholars, activists, and scholar-activists alike would all benefit from active engagement with inconvenient evidence, I conclude that academic institutions should promote this form of objectivity among both activist and non-activist scholars, while political organizations should promote the same virtue among both academic and non-academic activists.

Philosophy and History, Customs and Ethics

Philosophy and History, Customs and Ethics Hui-Chieh Loy (bio) Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. By Tao Jiang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is a serious tour de force of a study. In many ways, I am reminded of Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao and Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China—but updated. A signal difference is that it is more constrained in its coverage of figures, texts, and especially in having the topical focus upon moral-political philosophy. At the same time and within the chosen (narrower) confines, it often examines its subject in greater detail and draws on more recent discussions. One neat thing that Jiang does is to deliberately weave in explicit discussions of how each subsequent thinker or text incorporated or criticized ideas associated with earlier thinkers. (I formulated it this way since there isn't enough historical evidence about who-actually-read-what in the ancient world, citation practices being what they were.) In this regard, I am especially heartened to read, for example, the sections on "Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi" (3.3.2), and "Mohist Elements in Han Feizi's Thought" (7.3.3). By no means should the desultory remarks below be counted as a full review or assessment (impressionistically, this is the sort of book I will recommend that my grad students read—there, I've said it). Think of them as humble shards of pottery thrown in the hope for some jade in response. To make my task more focused, I will comment on the Sinology versus Philosophy distinction, and Jiang's treatment of the Mohists. I. Philosophy and History of Philosophy An important part of Jiang's Introduction is devoted to discussing the situation of Chinese Philosophy as a field in the Western Academy, caught between Sinology on the one hand and academic Philosophy on the other. Due to the different scholarly objectives and norms in the two disciplines, scholars working on Chinese Philosophy often find themselves caught [End Page 420] between two distinct audiences who demand different things. Jiang's aim is to propose an "interpretive model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy. These objects are related and at times overlap, but they are also often irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers" (p. 7). In general, I am highly sympathetic to the distinctions Jiang draws. But I do wonder if we need to step back and start from a wider context involving what is potentially a deeper divide. Now, it is entirely a caricature but the joke around the water cooler is that philosophers—especially those of a more "analytic" bent—often exude the attitude that they are not in the business of reading old books. Their project is one focused on issues and problems and puzzles that are ultimately about the natural and human world, rather than about texts and their interpretation, or even the historical thinkers themselves. To give some obvious examples, the intellectual questions they see themselves as answering are the likes of: • Can we know that God exists, if God exists at all? • What is the nature of moral claims? Do they admit of truth and falsity? • How is causation related to possibility? • Is a logic that dispenses with the law of non-contradiction viable? • What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? • Is abortion morally justifiable? Sometimes the questions they ask even infringe on the results and insights from nearby fields, for instance linguistics and the natural and empirical sciences: • What is time? • Can a presentist conception of time be made consistent with contemporary physics? • What is the nature of consciousness? How is it related to physical neural states or informational computational processes? • Can computers be sentient? • How is morality related to the passions? • In what sense is a political order that does justice to diversity of moral beliefs...

Corrected: The Cost of the Necklace in Dorothy Parker’s “The Standard of Living”

STATEMENT OF CORRECTION This brief essay by Fredrik Tydal has been republished in volume 4, number 2. The original text here, through no fault of the author, was somewhat corrupted during internet transmission, and the result was the deletion of parts of the quotations from the story. Since accuracy is a prime scholarly objective, especially with regard to primary works, we thought it best to reprint the entire essay. We express our apologies to Professor Tydal and to our readers for not catching the deletions at an earlier stage. The corrected essay can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5325/studamershorstor.4.2.0218.

Daggers at the Throat of Democracy: Democratic Erosion in the US and Abroad

AbstractNineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics (2021), edited by Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli, and Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas (2021), edited by Adriana Angel, Michael L. Butterworth, and Nancy R. Gómez, both examine the complex relationship between rhetoric and democracy. In terms of their immediate scholarly objectives, these volumes clearly succeed. Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics, a 24-essay collection that employs a broad range of rhetorical approaches both classical and contemporary, provides a more comprehensive overview of rhetorical activism during that period in US history than any book published to date. Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas, with its 11 essays written by scholars from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the US, who write not only about conditions in those countries but also in Cuba, Guatemala, and Venezuela, contains a range of perspectives in one volume that, to my knowledge, does not exist anywhere else. Taken together, both collections also provide compelling insights into the democratic erosion currently taking place around the world by illustrating how the intersection of violence, white supremacy, and religion pose an existential threat to democracy, particularly in the US.Taken together, both collections analyze rhetoric in vastly different times and places to identify and illuminate how the intersection of violence, white supremacy, and religion pose an existential threat to democracy, particularly in the US.

Collegium Biblicum… et Coranicum

This article argues – on the occasion of Collegium Biblicum’s 75 anniversary – that qurʾānic studies belong to an important and longstanding scholarly object of investigation in biblical studies – in the past, present, and future. The article sets out with three sections. The first outlines a striking resemblance between the qurʾānic and the biblical universes. The second exemplifies how the Qurʾān stages itself in dialogue with the biblical tradition. The third sketches some characteristic Christian responses to the Qurʾān. The article then proceeds to outline how Danish university theology from early on engaged with the Qurʾān and its language, Arabic. The penultimate section summarizes state-of-affairs since year 2000 and the last section points to current trends and future scenarios and hopes.

Unveiling 100 years of digitalization as a scholarly object

Digitalization is frequently mentioned in government policies and academic discourse where it is often being associated with expectations of societal rebirth and large-scale changes. However, little attention has been given to evolutionary aspects of the phenomenon of digitalization. Thus, in this paper, we aim to contribute by focusing on the concept of digitalization in a structured manner and answering the following question: How has the concept of digitalization travelled throughout academic discourse? To focus on digitalization as a scholarly object, we utilized bibliometric analyses of research articles ranging across 10 decades. We produced bibliographic maps of keywords and co-citation networks of sources and performed visual cluster analysis of these maps using techniques from VOSviewer and ScientoPy bibliometric software. This operation was conducted to facilitate discussion on the evolution of digitalization from a semi-genealogical perspective and to open up a discussion on continuity, density, convergence, and digitalization as a signifier. By combining bibliometric data with genealogical analysis, we identified how digitalization has traveled from specific contexts (medical use and information conversion) to a more general use after the turn of the millennium. Moreover, a pattern of convergence during the last decade surfaced, where digitalization has become associated with ideas of a digitally transformed society. Through these findings, this paper contributes to current literature on digitalization with a novel analysis of the term’s evolution.

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

Project-Based Learning for Graduate Students in Digital Humanities

This essay reports on a five-year summer internship sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University that sought to apply computer science pedagogy in project-based learning [PBL] to digital humanities training of graduate students from diverse humanities disciplines and programs. While much student training in the field tends to occur in academic courses or workshops devoted to particular tools and methods, this program used the iterative process of project development to design an inclusive, efficient context for graduate students with limited experience with technology to learn digital humanities skills appropriate to their professional and scholarly objectives. Describing the framework of PBL computer science pedagogy, the essay considers the technology learning objectives of a broad variety of projects undertaken by 50 MA and PhD students from disciplines ranging from English and History to Fine Arts and Linguistics. Emphasizing the role of peer-learning and cultural differences between STEM and humanities learning contexts, the essay draws on the program coordinators' teaching experience and student commentary to assess learning outcomes of a PBL approach for the professional and scholarly development of humanities graduate students.

The FAIR principles in practice for publishing data and other scholarly objects

The FAIR principles in practice for publishing data and other scholarly objects

Pen Pals

Pen Pals

Unmaking Africa—the Humanities and the Study of What?

This essay addresses what I take to be a paradox in Africa’s constitution as a scholarly object of inquiry. The study of Africa renders Africa both visible and invisible. When the humanities—and the social sciences—appear beleaguered, solving this paradox may hold the key to understanding what we need to say we are studying for us to say what we are good for. What is left over when we remove Africa from the stock of knowledge the humanities produce?

Folklore and Politics: Inherent Connections and Entrenched Stigmas

The author of the article tackles the long-neglected issue of relationship between folklore and politics. This problem is so heavily underresearched in Lithuanian folkloristics that one can draw only on the works by foreign colleagues or on interdisciplinary studies. This poses the main question to deal with in the current article: why is political nature of folklore and its research ignored or even stigmatized in the Lithuanian folklore studies?“Everyone has known since the Grimms that folklore is politics”, Linda Dégh stated over two decades ago (1999: 527). True, folklore as a notion and as a discipline appeared along with the concept of nationalism, both serving the independence of oppressed nations. The development of folklore collection, publication, archiving, and promotion, along with related institutions, was initially meant to serve formation of the national states and fostering of their identity. Therefore, these processes have been quite similar in different countries, especially those of the Central and Eastern Europe, characterized by similar history and economic development. Indeed, popular traditions and historic folklore may be conceived as product of agrarian-pastoral culture; creative forms an expressions elaborated by peasants have been for decades considered the only and true folklore. However, only educated people, descendants of the enriched peasant class, were able to shape the traditions of their ancestors into a coherent whole to serve the national ideology and use it as means of gaining power.Power relations have come into play especially from the middle of the 20th century, when folklore was selectively used by authoritarian regimes (including Nazis, Soviets, and others) to serve their needs, primarily – to legitimize their existence and policies by demonstrating that these regimes were “natural climax of a historical process” (Mugniani 2016: 25). Numerous abuses and distortions of folklore by authoritarian regimes in many ways tarnished it in the eyes of the contemporaries and descendants; e.g., even the term “folk” has acquired negative significance in many post-Soviet countries. According to the author, the current negative attitude towards any associations of folklore with politics (or ideology) in Lithuania may partly be the result of the previous abuse of folklore by the Soviet authorities.Another reason for this stigmatization of politics in the context of folklore research may be a misconstrued striving for scholarly objectivity: folklore researchers are supposed to display maximum impartiality in collecting and analyzing their data. However, this imperative is practically impossible to implement; as shown by the author, folklore is part of the current media and social discourse in many ways. Its nature is dialogical, discursive, so it can be used or adapted to argue for or against various relevant issues, to educate society, to shape its attitudes and opinions, or simply to liven up communication. Folklore has always been means of cultural communication, and its ambivalent functioning can be properly appreciated only by taking into account the multiple power relations in a given society.

Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children

Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children

Real-Time Bibliometrics: Dimensions as a Resource for Analyzing Aspects of COVID-19.

Dimensions was built as a platform to allow stakeholders in the research community, including academic bibliometricians, to more easily create and understand the context of different types of research object through the linkages between these objects. Links between objects are created via persistent identifiers and machine learning techniques, while additional context is introduced via data enhancements such as per-object categorisations and person and institution disambiguation. While these features make analytical use cases accessible for end users, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted a different set of needs to analyze trends in scholarship as they occur: Real-time bibliometrics. The combination of full-text search, daily data updates, a broad set of scholarly objects including pre-prints and a wider set of data fields for analysis, broadens opportunities for a different style of analysis. A subset of these emerging capabilities is discussed and three basic analyses are presented as illustrations of the potential for real-time bibliometrics.

The financial market of ideas: A theory of academic social media.

Millions of scholars use academic social media to share their work and construct themselves as legitimate and productive workers. An analysis of Academia.edu updates ideas about science as a 'marketplace of ideas'. Scholarly communication via social media is best conceptualized as a 'financial market of ideas' through which academic value is assigned to publications and researchers. Academic social media allow for the inclusion of scholarly objects such as preprint articles, which exceed traditional accounting systems in scholarly communication. Their functioning is based on a valorization of derived qualities, as their algorithms analyze social interactions on the platform rather than the content of scholarship. They are also oriented toward the future in their use of data analytics to predict research outcomes.

Pride and Prejudice (radio broadcast)

<i>Pride and Prejudice</i> (radio broadcast)

Editorial

As is widely known, in recent years the impact factor of scientific journals has been the main indicator of their quality, based on the premise that a citation is a quality reference. Expressly, given the unfeasibility of another type of qualitative analysis, more easily quantifiable criteria are used. In order to contribute to this debate, Jason Priem et al. published in 2010 the Altmetrics manifesto, questioning the current framework (Impact Factor), and visualizing some available options to measure other indicators [1]. Thus, rooted in the hashtag affordance, they initiate a debate that could help improve the scope of the impact factor and incorporate the scope of new alternative metrics or Altmetrics. The term Altmetrics refers to a set of indicators that attempt to accurately describe the interaction and impact of an article within the scientific community and is proposed as an alternative to the impact factor generating a better indicator than the relationship established with the journals publishing the article [2]. Another definition of Altmetrics considers the mechanisms of quantitative evaluation, in real time, of the social and academic impact of scientific publications and researcher influence. They represent a new method of measuring the impact of scientific research, based on new indicators that attempt to quantify the presence and dissemination of scientific activity on the social networks [3]. Lin and Fenner propose a set of alternative metrics, in which they also establish a logical evolution according to the degree of engagement between users and scholarly objects, considering five parameters [4]:

Curation as “Interoperability With the Future”: Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries

This article considers the problem of preserving research software within the wider realm of digital curation, academic research libraries, and the scholarly record. We conducted a pilot study to understand the ecosystem in which research software participates, and to identify significant characteristics that have high potential to support future scholarly practices. A set of topical curation dimensions were derived from the extant literature and applied to select cases of institutionally significant research software. This approach yields our main contribution, a curation model and decision framework for preserving research software as a scholarly object. The results of our study highlight the unique characteristics and challenges at play in building curation services in academic research libraries.