A Methodological Approach Towards Conservation

Abstract

Since conservation became a recognized discipline, professionals involved in conservation projects have tried to find the best criteria for their interventions. Often these criteria remain quite vague, based on the idea that every historic building has its own special conditions, which make its problems different from other buildings. This conviction, which is appropriate at one level, has serious consequences due to the lack of a consistent methodology. More than a lack of criteria, we might talk about a lack of 'habit' in identifying values in the Mediterranean region: the concept of values is much more widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries.

If we take a look at the history of conservation, there are a number of cases which are often used as models: for example, the Colosseum or the Arch of Titus in Rome, both interventions which are greatly admired and included in many conservation manuals. More recently there are projects which are widely accepted by the heritage conservation community as well: the paper explores the Palace of the Partal (Granada), the Villa Romana del Casale (Piazza Armerina), the theatre at Orange, and the Insula Orientalis I in Herculaneum. In this article, I suggest that there are constant elements within these conservation projects, reflecting typological, structural, constructional, functional, aesthetic, formal, historical, and symbolic values. These features represent a way of planning a conservation project and a critical methodology to judge the outcomes of the project in an objective manner. The methodology is qualitative rather than quantitative. All historic buildings have a set of values developed from their origins and throughout their history. These values can be analysed to extract the most important elements to be preserved. Analysing the values of our built heritage will allow us to create better decision-making processes.     

Spinning through the History of Technology: A Methodological Note

This paper uses the mechanisation of spinning as a case study to explain the approaches and methods employed by historians of technology, who have for too long left the Industrial Revolution to scholars in other sub-disciplines. As a result of this neglect, scholarship on the topic has seen the innovations in textile production of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the product of exceptional individuals or, more vaguely, as necessity causing invention. Instead, historians of technology study the complex causal relationship between social and technological change, including economic and trade incentives as well as contingency in the adoption of new methods and machines. This paper explains current approaches in the history of technology, including internalist and externalist analysis, technological determinism and social construction, systems theory and actor-network theory, and explains them in the concrete terms of the case.     

Methodological Foundations for Public Policy Analysis: A Review Essay

Books reviewed in this articles:
Garry D. Brewer and Peter deLeon, The Foundations of Policy Analysis
Stuart S. Nagel, Policy Evaluation: Making Optimum Decisions
David C. Paris and James F. Reynolds, The Logic of Policy Inquiry
William N. Dunn, Public Policy Analysis: An Introduction
Melvin J. Dubnick and Barbara A. Bardes, Thinking About Public Policy: A Problem-Solving Approach     

The Continuing Puzzle of Committee Outliers: A Methodological Reassessment

Crovitz, L. Gordon, and Jeremy A. Rabkin, eds., The Fettered Presidency. Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1989. Pp. xx, 335; $14.95 softbound.

Jones, Gordon S., and John A. Marini, eds., The Imperial Congress. New York: Pharos Books, 1988. Pp. xi, 366; $24.95.

Reedy, George E., The Twilight of the Presidency: From Johnson to Reagan. New York: New American Library, 1987. Pp. 200; $4.50 softbound.

Seligman, Lester G., and Cary R. Covington, The Coalitional Presidency. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989. Pp. 191; $25.00 hardbound; $11.95 softbound.     

Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures.     

文献、田野与自我:关于民俗学研究的方法论反思--以《婚姻仪礼变迁与社会网络重建》为例

民俗学研究的独特性究竟是什么？是研究对象,还是研究方法,抑或是研究视角？尽管民俗学将研究对象界定在民众上,但是如果剥离开民俗学的概念体系这个外衣,民众的内容就是人。就人而言,社会学和人类学都以其为研究对象,民俗学如何能够呈现出自己的研究特色？说得严密些,加一个限定词,民俗学研究的是民间的人,那么农村社会学、都市社会学以及人类学就不研究民间的人吗？如果民俗学研究的独特性体现在研究方法上,那么这个与众不同的研究方法又是什么？是历史学的文献研究,还是人类学的田野工作？方法是共通的,如果这个命题成立的话,那么就不能用方法来界定学科,至少对于民俗学是这样。     

Assessing the Impact of Location on Women's Labor Market Outcomes: A Methodological Exploration

Location and the nature of locally available employment opportunities is believed to shape labor force participation, job type, and wages. Analysts investigating this issue have encountered problems in operationalizing the concept of “locally available employment opportunities.” We first review the grounds for expecting a relationship between local context and employment outcomes for women and then critically assess the methods and measures that analysts have used to explore the relationship. Finally, we describe a new approach for measuring local employment context that consists of a fine-scaled measure individually tailored for each woman in the sample. Using discriminant analysis we ask whether the spatial variables measuring local employment context are important determinants of women's employment in female-dominated occupations. The results suggest that for most groups of women (defined by city or suburban residence and by sociodemographics) the spatial variables are not important. For well-educated, part-time employed women with young children, however, living in an area rich in female-dominated job opportunities increases the likelihood of having a job in a gender-typical occupation; for these women, the local employment context does affect labor market outcomes.     

The Periphery's Terms of Trade in the Nineteenth Century: A Methodological Problem Revisited

Abstract.

There is a major downward bias in the trend of most existing estimates of the periphery's nineteenth-century terms of trade. By using prices from the North Atlantic core as proxies for prices in the peripheral countries themselves, historians ignore the dramatic price convergence that took place during the nineteenth century. Measured correctly, the periphery's nineteenth-century terms-of-trade boom would appear considerably longer, greater, and more widespread than Jeffrey Williamson (2008 Williamson, J. G. 2008. Globalization and the great divergence: Terms of trade booms, volatility and the poor periphery, 1782–1913. European Review of Economic History 12:355–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S136149160800230X.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 ———. 2011. Trade and poverty: When the Third World fell behind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]) supposes, greatly reinforcing his grand narrative about the relation between globalization and the “great divergence.” Many of the details of his narrative, however, must be revised. This is illustrated by the case of India.     

Colonialism Otherwise and the Poetics of Solidarity: A Methodological Intervention De-b/ordering Kashmir

This paper reflects deeply on possibilities for developing solidarity with Kashmiri freedom struggles by mobilising a memorialisation praxis informed by poetics. We coin the term “colonialism otherwise” to describe the particular instruments and effects of postcolonial colonialism as they appear in the intimate space of family narratives, memories, and feelings. Foregrounding the works of the Kashmiri poet, essayist, and filmmaker, Uzma Falak, we write our memorialisations to respond to the poet's demands to bear witness to Kashmiri people's abjection. Our memorialisation praxis is guided by the questions: how do we know Kashmir as a place, and relatedly, what are the political limitations of our articulated solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle for azaadi?     

Post-socialist Sprawl: A Cross-Country Comparison

This paper presents a land-use change analysis of five Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We utilize CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land-Cover and Urban Audit data for two distinct time periods: 1990–2000 and 2000–2006 aggregated at urban, suburban and non-metropolitan geographies. The literature on post-socialist cities suggests that urbanization rates and patterns in the post-socialist period are quite variable and divergent, both “inter”nationally and “intra”-nationally, and we expect to find both spatial and temporal differences. We compare and contrast urbanization patterns at the national scale, using cities and their functional urban regions as the unit of comparative analysis. Our results show that unlike other eastern European countries, metropolitan areas in the former German Democratic Republic began sprawling (defined as a decline in urban density) in the 1990s. Similar changes only became visible in other CEE countries later during the 2000s. We also demonstrate that larger cities which were better connected to the political elite and more economically integrated with global investment patterns experienced more extensive urban sprawl than their smaller and mid-sized counterparts.     

Dimensional Analysis: Some Applications In Human Geography

Dimensional analysis is introduced, and applications of it to human geography are considered. Primary and secondary dimensions are selected; techniques of dimensional analysis are used to derive and check a functional relationship drawn from central place theory, to test the dimensional implications of a power function (the Pareto gravity model), to disaggregate a theoretical parameter (the exponential distance decay coefficient), and to simplify a complex system of variables in agricultural location theory to a system of dimensionless products. Difficulties inherent in the application of dimensional analysis to human geography are discussed.     

Collaborative Methods: A Comparison of Subfield Styles

Collaborative research partnerships between academic anthropologists and host or descendant communities are becoming more popular in anthropology. The reviewed books demonstrate there are different understandings of what collaboration means for professional identities and expertise across subfields. Therefore, such partnerships are unlikely to promote cross-subfield integration. Nevertheless, while their collaborative styles diverge, the reviewed authors are motivated by a shared interpretation of disciplinary responsibilities and opportunities that emerges from anthropology's longstanding commitment to fieldwork and also reflects post-World War II historical transformations. Their shared interpretation raises challenging questions for the discipline at large about professional practices like evaluation.     

From Karl von Frisch to Neuroethology: A Methodological Perspective on the Frischean Tradition's Expansion into Neuroethology**

This paper examines a tradition of eusocial insect research stemming from the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. As I show in this paper, one of the most enduring features of the Frischean tradition has been an experimental methodology developed by Frisch in the early 1910s. By tracing this methodology's use through Frisch's student, Martin Lindauer, and two of Lindauer's students, Rüdiger Wehner and Randolf Menzel, this paper illuminates a surprising aspect of ethology's development during the last half of the 20^th century. Namely, it sheds light on how the Frischean tradition, a tradition that had a complicated relationship with ethology since the discipline's formation in the 1930s, produced scientists who became leading figures in neuroethology, the most prominent contemporary field of behavioral research to retain the label of “ethology.” Some of the features that distinguished Frisch's training method from the program of classical ethology and the work of his contemporaries later helped his academic descendants adapt the method to the neuroethological program.     

Rethinking the Spatiality of Spatial Planning: Methodological Territorialism and Metageographies

This paper argues for increased attention to the role of territory and territoriality in framing sociospatial discourses in the context of spatial plan making. In particular, it is suggested that the engagement of political actors with processes of spatial planning tends to be framed within particular spatial imaginaries which reflect established political-administrative and territorial boundaries. It is contended that a critical analysis of the territorial framing of processes of spatial planning is necessary in order to understand the capacity for spatial strategies to effectively challenge and reconfigure established sociospatial imaginaries in functional or relational terms. It is suggested that spatially explicit public policy statements, such as planning strategies, may be characterized by specific assumptions of territorial space, in a similar manner to which mainstream social science has contained implicit assumptions of state-centrism. The salience of territorial spatial imaginaries is demonstrated in the case of European spatial planning and through a local case study of city-regional spatial planning and politics in the Greater Dublin Area.     

乾隆朝铸币与GDP的估算——清代GDP研究的一种路径探索

清代经济的运行与货币有着十分密切的关系。政府发行货币,提供了货币经济下清代经济发展最原始的动力,中央铸局和地方铸局的货币投入于兵饷、政府人员薪水、工程款等,从而成为GDP来源的重要部分。乾隆朝是清代铸钱量的最高峰,中央钱局铸钱成本和数量构架了清代国家经济的重要组成部分,清朝称之为"铜政"。这一国家经济运行机制对GDP的贡献应当注意。此外,基于中国传统经济模式及相应的经济学传统所提供的清代经济数据核算也是一种新的清代GDP研究的思路。     

Missionization in New Zealand and Australia: A Comparison

This paper discusses missionization in New Zealand and Australia during the nineteenth century. Despite sharing aspects of colonial history and a geographical proximity in the South Pacific, the development of missions in both countries was disparate, leading to two very different types of missions, types I have identified as the “household” mission in New Zealand and the “institutional” mission in Australia. In both types common themes can be found, concerned with the “civilizing mission,” domesticity, and gender roles. These two types of missions were replicated in other parts of the globe, such as North America and the Pacific.