“Seeking Information from the Lips of People”: oral history in the archives of Qatar and the Gulf region

The turn to oral history in Qatar and the Arabian (also known as Persian) Gulf is not a rejection of traditional archival authority as has been the case in other parts of the world. In the Gulf, oral history has been embraced out of a desire to fill the silences of the largely unwritten record attributable to previous low levels of literacy and strong oral traditions in the region. Today, oral history is seen as the best method to capture details about traditional ways of life during the pre-oil era. After discussing archival concerns about the evidentiary nature of oral histories, this paper explores how it has come to be a crucial documentation tool in the Gulf, adapted to the specific nation building and cultural heritage priorities of the region.     

Granularity of algorithmically constructed publication-level classifications of research publications: Identification of topics

The purpose of this study is to find a theoretically grounded, practically applicable and useful granularity level of an algorithmically constructed publication-level classification of research publications (ACPLC). The level addressed is the level of research topics. The methodology we propose uses synthesis papers and their reference articles to construct a baseline classification. A dataset of about 31 million publications, and their mutual citations relations, is used to obtain several ACPLCs of different granularity. Each ACPLC is compared to the baseline classification and the best performing ACPLC is identified. The results of two case studies show that the topics of the cases are closely associated with different classes of the identified ACPLC, and that these classes tend to treat only one topic. Further, the class size variation is moderate, and only a small proportion of the publications belong to very small classes. For these reasons, we conclude that the proposed methodology is suitable to determine the topic granularity level of an ACPLC and that the ACPLC identified by this methodology is useful for bibliometric analyses.