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In his Vite (1568), Giorgio Vasari systematically describes the lives and works of some 250 painters from the Italian Renaissance. This paper focuses on the survival of these artists’ reputations in the past four centuries. The length of the entries in seven famous art histories written between 1550 and 1996 is used as a proxy to measure these reputations. Though some artists appear, disappear or...
In this article, we use the ‘post-Bourdieu’ debate on cultural omnivores as the overall framework for an exploration of patterns in cultural participation within Flanders. The data stem from the 2002 and 2003 survey of the Department for Planning and Statistics of the Flemish government. Latent Class Analysis yielded a six-cluster solution as the optimum. These six different patterns of cultural participation...
The fact that women are more likely than men to participate in traditional high status leisure activities constitutes one of the most consistent findings in the empirical study of cultural choice. Most explanations of this phenomenon point to the role of early socialization and society-wide cultural norms, but surprisingly, the more proximate influence of labor force participation and embeddedness...
The purpose of this research is the explanation of differences in cultural participation of adolescents of different ethnic backgrounds. Six hundred ninety-eight Dutch and ethnic minority adolescents in a large city in the Netherlands filled in a questionnaire about their active cultural participation (e.g., playing musical instruments, dancing, acting, drawing) and receptive cultural participation...
This empirical study addresses a problem in the analysis of free indirect style, one of the linguistic forms used for the presentation of narrative viewpoint. Free indirect style, or the presentation of speech, thought and perception has been a contentious issue in linguistic and literary scholarship inviting conflicting theoretical accounts. The empirical study reported here contributes to this debate...
Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction posits that social class differences in cultural capital and habitus begin in early childhood and cumulate over time. While the theory maintains popularity in sociological research, no consistent empirical relationship between cultural capital and the reproduction of educational inequality has been established in American research. This study focuses on a...
Readers are exposed to an enormous number of new book releases each year of all genres and subgenres (fiction, reference, technical, art, religious, children, etc.). In this context, getting their attention while they are wandering in a library and stimulating their interest for a new release are issues of great importance for publishers. The study presented in this article used an experimental approach...
This work builds on explanatory theories of cultural consecration that stress institutional agency and its discourse, in particular upon Allen and Lincoln's (2004) study of the 1990s consecration of some American sound films. It contributes new analyses of the role of auteur theory in such consecration by means of novel measures of directorial status grounded in Sarris (1968). Directorial status emerges...
This research demonstrates how context, the location of reception, an often-overlooked component of interpretation, is central to understanding evaluations of cultural objects, specifically art. Two cases of mildly debated sculptures in San Francisco – Mark di Suvero's “Pax Jerusalem” and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's “Cupid's Span” – are analyzed in order to ascertain the role context...
Using a new interdisciplinary approach funded by the AHRB Research Innovations Grant Scheme we studied the process of poetry reading using the empirical methods drawn from psycholinguistics. Previous research has shown that the reading process is genre-specific, i.e. readers make a genre decision and adapt their reading strategies accordingly. For poetry reading, findings suggest that surface textual...
Contributing to previous research that has identified differences in connection speed, user skill, and experience as mechanisms affecting digital divides among Internet users, this paper explores whether location of use should be considered a factor that limits or facilitates individual efforts to apply the Internet toward beneficial activities. At some locations, Internet users enjoy high levels...
From the end of the 1990s onwards the digital divide, commonly defined as the gap between those who have and do not have access to computers and the Internet, has been a central issue on the scholarly and political agenda of new media development. This article makes an inventory of 5 years of digital divide research (2000–2005).The article focuses on three questions. (1) To what type of inequality...
Although implicit within the notion of the ‘digital divide’ there have been surprisingly few empirical studies of those who make little or no use of information and communications technology (ICT). In particular, we have only a partial understanding of the social circumstances and detailed social patterning of the non-uptake and non-use of new technologies such as computers and the Internet. Are non-users...
Research on digital divide phenomena has produced opposing theoretical frameworks. This study pits the disappearing digital divide approach against the emerging digital differentiation approach and empirically tests the validity of their predictions regarding adolescents’ internet use and their tendency towards ubiquitous internetting. Multivariate analyses of a survey of 749 Dutch adolescents aged...
Most research on the digital divide has focused on its socio-demographic correlates. Results indicate that age, gender and education, in particular, are major factors structuring the digital divide. So pervasive is the presence of age differences in the literature that many observers believe that the digital divide is basically a generational phenomenon that, in time, will disappear as younger computer...
While previous work has found cognitive ability to be strongly associated with whether older adults use the Internet, we consider whether cognitive ability also differentiates basic aspects of use. Four measures of use are considered: having high-speed access, length of time since initial household adoption, self-reported time using the Internet, and whether any of the respondent's Internet use involves...
This article proposes a framework for studying material culture, such as fashionable clothing, based on an analysis of the processes that lead to the creation and attribution of symbolic value. Five types of analyses are outlined: (1) analyses of material culture as a type of text that expresses symbols and contributes to discourses and to cultural repertoires; (2) analyses of systems of cultural...
The relation between clothes and identity is explored from the perspective of consumption and of fashion production. Both directions are illustrated by contemporary sociological debates, as well as by empirical data collected in the city of Milan through accounts, focus groups, and in-depth interviews.The decline of precise clothing distinctions anchored to social class and occupation corresponds...
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