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Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces "concept‐driven sociology," a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can "distill" generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a "generic sociology" that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal "parallels" across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In the Library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, there are some books and manuscripts which were made in Japan and whose background is uncertain. One of these is (Honzo Zufu) which consists of illustrations and descriptions of plants compiled in the first half of 19th century. Kew's Honzo Zufu was exhibited in the 'Flora Japonica' show at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery on 17th September 2016 to 5th March 2017. 'Flora Japonica' showed works of contemporary Japanese botanical artists and important illustrated books of Japanese plants made between the 17th and 20th centuries. The illustrations of Honzo Zufu are also used for the Kew's Floral Illustrated Calendar 2019. In this article, we describe Kew's copy of Honzo Zufu and tell the story about how it came to be in the possession of the Library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1774, the physician‐anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783) published Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata/The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774). Issued as an elephant folio, the book is the culmination of twenty‐four years of work and includes thirty‐four plates with life‐size hyper‐naturalistic engravings by artists such as Robert Strange after drawings by Jan Van Rymsdyk. Anticipating potential critique of the book's stylistic choices, Hunter took pains in his preface to assure readers that although the book was lavishly illustrated, it was not excessively so, stating that he had 'actually kept back several drawings which had been made, and two plates which had been engraved'. The decision to exclude these extra images was based on a desire 'that the work not be overcharged'. On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Anatomia, this article takes Hunter's claim of authorial restraint as a departure point from which to examine the anatomist's construction of authorship within the illustrated book. Analysing the paratextual features of the book alongside previously unstudied contemporary reviews reveals how Hunter exerted rhetorical control over the production and reception of the book and its complex visual language. Through examination of the yet unstudied material remnants of the book's production, the drawings and prints Hunter excluded from the book are identified and examined to determine the extent to which Hunter's authorial control manifested in the material conditions of the book's production. Through the close analysis of Hunter's authorship within the context of eighteenth‐century anxieties about excess, this article offers a new understanding of the production and reception of the Anatomia as well as the collaborative process of scientific image‐making practices and book production in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insect recognition is crucial for taxonomy. It helps researchers to process tremendous and various ecology data. Most studies focus on fine‐tuning the deep learning network or altering the algorithm to enhance the identification accuracy, and some useful tools have been generated with these methods. This study focuses on the influence of image data on the recognition model. The single data set source of the existing automated identification tools is relatively simple, and the competition‐based data set released only focuses on evaluating the model at present. For the first time, this article integrates butterfly image data sets from multiple sources, covered illustrated books, and popular butterfly science websites. The image types include standard specimen images, illustrated book scan images and camera shots. In addition, these images included not only fixed poses, but also various other images of butterflies in natural poses. The size of these images is also various. The testing data set is new data that does not belong to the training set, which also verifies the generalizability of the model, indicating that in practical applications this model can identify new images. This testing method is a breakthrough compared to the previous work. We designed different data sets using the ResNet18 network to train a classifier, which achieves a validation accuracy of 86% in the end of the analysis. By adjusting the data sets, the accuracy changes as well. This study provides a method to recognize hundreds of butterfly species and analyzes the testing progress from the point of view of data. It is the first to combine butterflies from multiple countries in a single data set, with a recognition accuracy that outperforms previous experiments, to the best of our knowledge. We further analyze the testing results of butterfly recognition at the family and genus level. We perform two more experiments to demonstrate the model in the case of similar species or genus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]