Gallic war songs (II): Marcus Cicero, Quintus Cicero, and Caesar’s invasion of Britain

This article assembles and examines the evidence for the poetic outputs of Marcus and Quintus Cicero related to Caesar’s invasion of Britain. Following the establishment of a relative chronology of the evidence for their work, it is argued that Quintus Cicero most likely produced a fabula praetexta (not an epic poem, as commonly assumed). His brother, in turn, wrote an epic, based on Quintus’ eye-witness reports. Careful analysis of the ancient discourse about this piece reveals insights in Cicero’s poetic workshop and the creation of ‘archival truth’ through narrativising historical events in epic poetry. Finally, a case is made for greater attention to financial affairs between Caesar and the Ciceros that happen to coincide with the drafting process of their respective literary works.

Facts, scope, style: a guide to writing papers for IEEE transactions on consumer electronics

In a previous article, I wrote a brief piece on how to enhance papers that have been published at one of the IEEE Consumer Electronics (CE) Society conferences to create papers that can be considered for publishing in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics (T-CE) [1]. Basically, it included some hints and tips to enhance a conference paper into what is required for a full archival journal paper and not fall foul of self-plagiarism. This article focuses on writing original papers specifically for T-CE. After three years as the journal’s editor-in-chief (EiC), a previous eight years on the editorial board, and having reviewed some 4,000 T-CE papers, I decided to write this article to archive and detail for prospective authors what I have learned over this time. Of course, there are numerous articles on writing good papers—some are really useful [2], but they do not address the specific issues of writing for a journal whose topic (scope) is not widely understood or, indeed, is often misunderstood.

Performing right: legal constraints and Beckett’s plays on BBC television

Drawing on BBC archival documentation, this article outlines how BBC television versions of Beckett’s plays were affected by copyright. Rights to record and broadcast original drama for the screen differ from those governing adaptations of existing theatre plays. Rights can be assigned for specific territories and periods of time, and are negotiated and traded via complex contractual agreements. Examining how Beckett’s agents and the BBC dealt with rights sheds new light on the history of his work on television.

Thomas Heywood: just in time

The scholarly study of the dramatic works and career of Thomas Heywood has increased significantly in the last fifty years but still lags far behind that of his contemporaries Shakespeare and Jonson. Labelled the ‘prose Shakespeare’ by Charles Lamb in the early nineteenth century, Heywood seems to have been considered by scholars and publishers to be a ghostly figure who haunted the early modern theatrical world. In fact, recent research using archival records shows the ways in which Heywood is at the centre of an extensive and highly networked professional industry.

Change in the archive: Blanchot's 'L'Entretien infini'

Today we are faced with the problem of how to relate the archives of deconstructionist thinkers to their thought, which seems opposed to historically-oriented or genetic criticism. This article is the first to look comprehensively at the gestation of Maurice Blanchot's L'Entretien infini, including the work's page-proofs which were made available in 2009. I thus address the multiple processes of change at work throughout Blanchot's writing, with change being a process whose importance goes beyond any single new form of writing resulting from it. My presentation of the archival material is contextualized via a discussion of the notion of L'Absence de livre (the project's working title). Rather than being a straightfoward incompleteness or fragmentation, this notion establishes a fraught relationship between such ideas and what it calls ‘le Livre’.

The Italian academies 1525-1700: networks of culture, innovation and dissent

The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, and scholarly debate throughout Italy between 1525-1700. They were fundamental in establishing the intellectual networks later defined as the ‘République des Lettres’, and in the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe, through print, manuscript, oral debate and performance. This volume surveys the social and cultural role of Academies, challenging received ideas and incorporating recent archival findings on individuals, networks and texts. Ranging over Academies in both major and smaller or peripheral centres, these collected studies explore the interrelationships of Academies with other cultural forums. Individual essays examine the fluid nature of academies and their changing relationships to the political authorities; their role in the promotion of literature, the visual arts and theatre; and the diverse membership recorded for many academies, which included scientists, writers, printers, artists, political and religious thinkers, and, unusually, a number of talented women. Contributions by established international scholars together with studies by younger scholars active in this developing field of research map out new perspectives on the dynamic place of the Academies in early modern Italy. The publication results from the research collaboration ‘The Italian Academies 1525-1700: the first intellectual networks of early modern Europe’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is edited by the senior investigators.

International films and international markets: the globalisation of Hollywood entertainment, c.1921-1951

The international appeal of Hollywood films through the twentieth century has been a subject of interest to economic and film historians alike. This paper employs some of the methods of the economic historian to evaluate key arguments within the film history literature explaining the global success of American films. Through careful analysis of both existing and newly constructed data sets, the paper examines the extent to which Hollywood's foreign earnings were affected by: film production costs; the extent of global distribution networks; and also the international orientation of the films themselves. The paper finds that these factors influenced foreign earnings in quite distinct ways, and that their relative importance changed over time. The evidence presented here suggests a degree of interaction between the production and distribution arms of the major US film companies in their pursuit of foreign markets that would benefit from further archival-based investigation.

Mediating culture in the Italian literary field, 1940s-1950s: an introduction

This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context where to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s-1950s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors, and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse.

Whatever it takes: rivalry and unethical behavior

This research investigates the link between rivalry and unethical behavior. We propose that people will engage in greater unethical behavior when competing against their rivals than when competing against non-rival competitors. Across a series of experiments and an archival study, we find that rivalry is associated with increased use of deception, unsportsmanlike behavior, willingness to employ unethical negotiation tactics, and misreporting of performance. We also explore the psychological underpinnings of rivalry, which help to illuminate how it differs from general competition, and why it increases unethical behavior. Rivalry as compared to non-rival competition was associated with increased status concerns, contingency of self-worth, and performance goals; mediation analyses revealed that performance goals played the biggest role in explaining why rivalry promoted greater unethicality. Lastly, we find that merely thinking about a rival can be enough to promote greater unethical behavior, even in domains unrelated to the rivalry. These findings highlight the importance of rivalry as a widespread, powerful, yet largely unstudied phenomenon with significant organizational implications. Further, the results help to inform when and why unethical behavior occurs within organizations, and demonstrate that the effects of competition are dependent upon relationships and prior interactions.

Soft balancing in the Americas: Latin American opposition to U.S. intervention, 1898–1936

In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, scholars of international relations debated how to best characterize the rising tide of global opposition. The concept of “soft balancing” emerged as an influential, though contested, explanation of a new phenomenon in a unipolar world: states seeking to constrain the ability of the United States to deploy military force by using multinational organizations, international law, and coalition building. Soft balancing can also be observed in regional unipolar systems. Multinational archival research reveals how Argentina, Mexico, and other Latin American countries responded to expanding U.S. power and military assertiveness in the early twentieth century through coordinated diplomatic maneuvering that provides a strong example of soft balancing. Examination of this earlier case makes an empirical contribution to the emerging soft-balancing literature and suggests that soft balancing need not lead to hard balancing or open conflict.

The evolution and heterogeneity of outward foreign direct investment from Latin America

The PhD dissertation investigates the rise of emerging country multinationals (EMNEs), a phenomenon that has opened up a series of research themes and debates. The main debate in this field is the extent to which the theories/frameworks on foreign direct investment (FDI), which have been developed from investigations on multinationals from developed countries, is relevant in explaining outward FDI from EMNEs. This debate is sparked by research suggesting that EMNEs supposedly do not hold the characteristics that are seen as a prerequisite to engaging in FDI. The underlying theme in this PhD is that the field should move away from a one size fit all categorisation of EMNEs, and explore the heterogeneity within EMNEs. Collecting data through various databases, archival articles and annual reports, there was an examination of the internationalisation process of 136 Latin American Multinationals (LAMNEs). The research explores the differences in internationalisation trajectories and global strategies and classifies firms into one of four categories. The four categories that LAMNEs fall into are: Natural-Resource Vertical Integrator, which are firms that are in resource seeking sectors; Accelerated Global, which depict firms that have become global over a very short period of time; Traditional Global, which are EMNEs that have internationalised at the same pace as developed country MNEs and Local Optimisers that only acquire or internationalise to developing countries. The analysis also looks at which decade LAMNEs engaged in FDI, to see if LAMNEs that internationalised during the 1970s and 1980s, during a time when Latin America had a closed economy, was different to LAMNEs that internationalised during the Washington consensus era of the 1990s or to firms that have only just internationalised within the last decade. The findings show that LAMNEs that internationalised before 1990 were more likely to adopt Local Optimiser strategies. However, more LAMNEs that started to internationalise during the 1990s started to adopt Traditional Global strategies, although Local Optimisers were the most prominent strategy. From 2002, there was more prominence of Accelerated Global strategies and a lot more heterogeneity among LAMNEs. Natural-Resource Vertical Integrator LAMNEs, tended to start to internationalisation process during the 1970s/1980s. Despite the rise of EMNEs, and by extension LAMNEs opting to use cross border merger and acquisitions (M&A), there is little research on whether this entry mode has been successful. Contrary to the argument that EMNEs are “internationalising successfully” through this strategy, the findings show that these firms are highly geared and are running less efficiently against their Western competitors. In comparison, LAMNEs internationalising through a more gradual approach, are outperforming their Western competitors on efficiency and are not highly geared- i.e. do not hold a lot of debt. The conclusion of the thesis is the emphasis of moving away from evaluating firms from their country or region of origin, but rather through the global strategy they are using. This will give a more a robust firm level of analysis, and help develop the understanding of EMNEs and international business theory.

Sermon notes and manuscript communities

Any reader of manuscript catalogues knows how common the unhelpfully vague entry “sermon notes, 17th-century” can be. This essay explores whether we can find in sermon notes the kinds of textual communities that have been found through the reconstruction of other routes of manuscript circulation. It will unpick what those laconic catalogue entries mean, and distinguish the different kinds of sermon notes found in our archival collections (some derived from the original preacher, some from hearers, some from readers of manuscript and printed copies). The physical forms of different sorts of “sermon notes” alerts us to the different types of authors who created these manuscripts, and the different purposes involved in preserving an oration in textual form, purposes which included fostering the creation and maintenance of communal identities among the self-consciously godly or Catholic recusants.

MOLES3: implementing an ISO standards driven data catalogue

ISO19156 Observations and Measurements (O&M) provides a standardised framework for organising information about the collection of information about the environment. Here we describe the implementation of a specialisation of O&M for environmental data, the Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES3). MOLES3 provides support for organising information about data, and for user navigation around data holdings. The implementation described here, “CEDA-MOLES”, also supports data management functions for the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, CEDA. The previous iteration of MOLES (MOLES2) saw active use over five years, being replaced by CEDA-MOLES in late 2014. During that period important lessons were learnt both about the information needed, as well as how to design and maintain the necessary information systems. In this paper we review the problems encountered in MOLES2; how and why CEDA-MOLES was developed and engineered; the migration of information holdings from MOLES2 to CEDA-MOLES; and, finally, provide an early assessment of MOLES3 (as implemented in CEDA-MOLES) and its limitations. Key drivers for the MOLES3 development included the necessity for improved data provenance, for further structured information to support ISO19115 discovery metadata export (for EU INSPIRE compliance), and to provide appropriate fixed landing pages for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the presence of evolving datasets. Key lessons learned included the importance of minimising information structure in free text fields, and the necessity to support as much agility in the information infrastructure as possible without compromising on maintainability both by those using the systems internally and externally (e.g. citing in to the information infrastructure), and those responsible for the systems themselves. The migration itself needed to ensure continuity of service and traceability of archived assets.

White youth: the Far Right, Punk and British youth culture

‘White Youth’ recovers and explains the relationship between far-right organisations and British youth culture in the period between 1977 and 1987. In particular, it concentrates on the cultural spaces opened up by punk and the attempts made by the National Front and British Movement to claim them as conduits for racist and/or ultra-nationalist politics. The article is built on an empirical basis, using archival material and a historical methodology chosen to develop a history ‘from below’ that takes due consideration of the socio-economic and political forces that inform its wider context. Its focus is designed to map shifting cultural and political influences across the far right, assessing the extent to which extremist organisations proved able to adopt or utilise youth cultural practice as a means of recruitment and communication. Today the British far right is in political and organisational disarray. Nonetheless, residues tied to the cultural initiatives devised in the 1970s–80s remain, be they stylistic, nostalgic or points of connection forged to connect a transnational music scene.