A HISTORIC NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ARTS SPACE: THE LITTLE INDIA EXPERIENCE

Many cities around the world are redeveloping their neighbourhoods as arts and cultural precincts. Urban industrial zones and lower‐income residential areas have taken on new life as arts neighbourhoods in a bid to attract high‐yield visitors, propel their creative industry and brand themselves as attractive to investors and residents. This article has two aims. Conceptually it explores the notion of arts urbanization – the creation of arts spaces in cities and the socio‐spatial dynamics which they embody. Empirically, the concept is tested using the case of Singapore's Arts Housing Scheme. Under this scheme, historic ethnic precincts take on new roles as arts and creative belts. While the scheme has yielded some success by way of fostering spaces of identity and inspiration for artists, it has also generated social concerns and spatial challenges. Singapore's Little India offers an empirical setting to explore this concept. The paper argues that geography matters to the arts and that arts‐led urbanization creates distinct spatial configurations in cities. For this reason, a greater understanding of and research into arts neighbourhoods and their socio‐spatial dynamics are essential if we are to aspire to sustainable and sensitive development of cities and their creative communities.     

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ‘BEST RELATIVE FIT FACTOR’ WHEN EVALUATING ELEMENTAL CONCENTRATION DATA OF POTTERY DEMONSTRATED WITH MYCENAEAN SHERDS FROM SINDA,CYPRUS

Neutron activation analysis of pottery was established at Bonn in 1983 and has since become one of the primary archaeometry‐based analytical techniques at the facility. A brief history of the laboratory and a discussion of the best relative fit procedure for pottery is provided. When comparing concentration data for pottery, a best relative fit should always be considered. This mathematical procedure generally results in ‘sharper’ concentration patterns and improves the separability of chemically not very different compositional groups. This is demonstrated for a set of 30 Late Cypriot (Myc. IIIC1) pottery samples from Sinda, Cyprus, which allow formation of a good reference pattern for this site. Applying factors in the range of 0.82–1.43, a number of samples from Egypt and Palestine can be assigned with high probability to a Cypriot origin.     

THE HISTORY OF THE LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY INSTRUMENTAL NEUTRON ACTIVATION ANALYSIS PROGRAMME FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL MATERIALS

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory pottery provenance group developed standards and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) methods that are used at many archaeometry laboratories around the world. The background and development of ‘Standard Pottery’ and of methods for INAA are described. Early pottery provenance studies are described, and other research programmes, involving obsidian and magmatic mixing, the origin of the stone used for the Colossi of Memnon, and the ‘Plate of Brass’, are mentioned. Research work by the Laboratory included the discovery of the world‐wide iridium anomaly and extensive subsequent research on what has come to be known as the ‘Asteroid Impact Theory’. Characteristics of the analytical programme for pottery provenance work, including overall aims, precision and accuracy, intercalibration, and irradiation and measurement protocols, are discussed. New research areas developed in the past 15 years, to broaden the usefulness of chemical compositional data for archaeological investigation, and examples of recent work, are described. This research, which makes use of high‐precision X‐ray fluorescence analysis in addition to INAA measurements on sample splits, includes distinguishing the products of different workshops located at the same production site, studies on the significance of the distribution of silver in archaeological pottery and the use of high‐precision chemical compositional data as an aid for making chronological distinctions.     

Mapping the audit traces of interdisciplinary collaboration: bridging and blending between choreography and cognitive science

ABSTRACT

Two long-term sci–art research projects are described and positioned in the broader conceptual landscape of interdisciplinary collaboration. Both projects were aimed at understanding and augmenting choreographic decision-making and both were grounded in research conducted within a leading contemporary dance company. In each case, the work drew upon methods and theory from the cognitive sciences, and both had a direct impact on the way in which the company made new work. In the synthesis presented here the concept of an audit trace is introduced. Audit traces identify how specific classes of knowledge are used and transformed not only within the arts or sciences but also when arts practice is informed by science or when arts practice informs science.     

Showing and telling science – the integrated use of literature and images in the works of Erasmus Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt

ABSTRACT

In recent years, both the fields of literature and science and visual culture of science have addressed the importance of different visual and literary elements and their roles in establishing meaning and communication in science. In this article, I explore how visual and textual elements work to establish a narrative of plants in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) and in Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1804). These two scientists employed literary and visual elements in order to construct their visions of the nature of plants in a time when the ideals of Enlightenment science gave way to a more holistic view of integrating the sciences and the arts. I, therefore, also discuss the analytical approach of integrated readings between the literary and visual elements of science.     

RETHINKING RACE HISTORY: THE ROLE OF THE ALBINO IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT LIFE SCIENCES1

The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment‐era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: the vast majority of eighteenth‐century thinkers who were engaged in theorizing the human were often far more preoccupied with preserving a belief in an essential human sameness than they were in creating categories of essential difference. This article charts the problem of a potential human sameness as it related to questions of category, biological processes, and the human and non‐human through an examination of a neglected and key construct in the eighteenth‐century life sciences, the albino. The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the nègre blanc—quite literally a “white Negro”—was a racial throwback, a reversion to a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a prototype white variety. The significance of the concept nègre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of the nègre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.     

Strukturwandel der Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus

National Socialism brought about profound changes for the German academic system. Forced emigration not just sent outstanding scholars into exile, thus closing down promising research venues. In fact, it changed the entire climate of scientific inquiry by removing intellectual outsiders from the scene, whose absence usually precludes any success of innovative research. In most disciplines this led to a dominance of just a few academic ‘schools’ and paradigms, which severely harmed intra‐discipline accountability and innovation. The academic bureaucracy worked more effectively than has been assumed for a long time: practice‐oriented research enjoyed massive state support, and huge research projects outside the universities flourished. At the same time the National Socialists looked ambivalently at the universities themselves. They savored the legitimizing functions of the arts and sciences, and yet they distrusted the professors as exponents of the bourgeois world of old. Contrary to the blooming sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, the arts and humanities had a hard time demonstrating their practical applicability. In order to prove their worth by means of giving advice to the political sphere, they formed interdisciplinary combines, which were massively funded by the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’. The ‘Deutsche Wissenschaft’, which has been incorrectly marginalized in numerous accounts, served in part to provide a Weltanschauung justification for these networks. While the German academic community in 1945 tried to pick up the threads of the a‐political self‐ understanding of the 1920s, in fact there were numerous continuities to academic life before and after 1945. Among them were the encompassing loss of international contacts, the strengthening of hierarchical structures, and the importance of feasibility criteria for the culture of innovation. The arts and humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) could not regain the lost territory of significance, which they had suffered during the Third Reich. It is mainly their development which showed an amazing persistence of national socialist patterns of view and of concepts of the enemy, which in turn as late as 1968 inspired in part the anti‐bourgeois thrust of the critique of the academic world.     

RETHINKING THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF THE ARTS

The paper presents a critical discussion of the current debate over the social impacts of the arts in the UK. It argues that the accepted understanding of the terms of the debate is rooted in a number of assumptions and beliefs that are rarely questioned. The paper goes on to present the interim findings of a three‐year research project, which aims to rethink the social impact of the arts, with a view to determining how these impacts might be better understood. The desirability of a historical approach is articulated, and a classification of the claims made within the Western intellectual tradition for what the arts “do” to people is presented and discussed.     

Die Fotografie – ein neues Bildmedium im Wissenschaftspanorama des 19. Jahrhunderts. Einführung in das Symposium

Photography – a novel medium of scientific representation in the XIXth century array of arts and sciences. To delve into various nineteenth century academic disciplines under the heading ‘photography in the arts and sciences’ as did last year's annual conference of the History of Science Society – the interest in such a topic only partly stems from the ‘iconic turn’ that has generally enlarged the scope of the social sciences in recent years. A more poignant feature in any such present day study will probably be a basic scepticism facing the fact that in public use photographs have been manipulated in many respects. Yet, while shying away from any simple success story, a historically minded approach to changing ‘visual paradigms’ (Historische Bildwissenschaft) has begun to emerge. In this context, it has proved of considerable heuristic value to reconsider the role of early photography in an array of science, arts and technology: Since the reliance on the traditional ways of sketching reality persisted, in many an instance where photography was introduced, the thoughts the pioneer photographers had about their new, seemingly automated business, call for close attention. Thus scholarship sets up a parallel ‘discussion room’; the lively debate on the benefit of academic drawings as opposed to photographic portraits is a case in point. Some fairly specialised reports on photographically based analyses, such as electron microscopy, point to a borderline where the very idea of representation as a correspondence of reality and imagination gets blurred. Even though any ‘visual culture’ will have to shoulder the ‘burden of representation’, it is equally likely that it will offer a deeper sensibility for the intricacies entailed in the variegated ways of illustrating or mapping chosen subjects of scientific interest. Scholarship may thus somewhat control the disillusionment that by now has become the epitome of writing on photographic history. Provided with a renewed methodological awareness for the perception process and its photographic transition, historians may strike a better balance between the ever present tendencies of a realistic and an aesthetic way of picturing the world we live in.     

THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE

This rich collection analyzes science in the archives over the past several thousand years. The chapters work together to tell stories of ambitious attempts to provide timeless data for science, which will be used for generations to come—ranging from ancient astronomy to geology to life‐logging and the development of web search. They also demonstrate convincingly that archives are powerful forces across the sciences—every science discussed has an archival base—which partly determine what kind of general knowledge claims can be made by future generations: it is hard to read an archive askance. The collection works best as a series of individual chapters, though some work is done to indicate where they speak to one another. It is a pity that there was not more input from archivists themselves in the project: their noninclusion means that some archival issues (especially what goes on with data after it gets into the archive—how it gets cleaned up, changed, reorganized) are treated somewhat lightly. The collection does provide a very useful set of tools for thinking about scientific archives. It is also an excellent introduction to the peculiarities of scientific archives—one that reflects back on the use of archives in history in general.     

Composing Einstein: exploring the kinship of art and science

Abstract

The work Albert Einstein published in 1905 led to a revolution in physics and the way nature is explained. At the same time, his physics touches on profound existential questions which are also dwelt upon in the arts. This article addresses the relatedness of music and physics, art and science. The point of departure is my composition The Einstein Resoundings, and how writing it refined my sensitivity to the deeper layers of creative effort. I discuss points of contact between the spheres of music and physics: the phenomenon of quantum leaps, continuous and discontinuous structures in tone and atom, and the role of continuity and discontinuity in the act of creation. My reflection on the kinship of art and science is based on the notion of complementarities. This allows a double perspective on art and science as different in regard to activity and language, but similar in regard to their mutually complementing characters.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

Prospects for,and Challenges of,Research Design and Training in Cross‐Disciplinary Environmental Management Research

Research in coupled human and natural systems can be quite a cross‐disciplinary endeavour, requiring the combination of diverse concepts, methods, and approaches. While there is a wide recognition of the importance of incorporating different viewpoints, perspectives, and disciplines in achieving positive environmental and social outcomes, the methods through which such research is designed, specifically the processes engaged in, are largely absent from the literature. This presents challenges in research training for students in the field. This paper uses the example of a recent student project examining the management of Temperate Highland Peat Swamps on Sandstone to consider how research training might address project design, conceptual challenges, and methodological choices. The goal of this project was to build improved understanding of the role of context in the adaptive management of these endangered ecological communities from Commonwealth to micro‐local scales. The paper explores the complexities of integrating approaches and methods drawn from both social sciences and environmental sciences. Rather than providing a definitive ‘how to guide’ for conducting integrative cross‐disciplinary research, it offers food for thought on the processes involved in creating a research project which transcends boundaries between social science and environmental science that are easily entrenched in research training that is compartmentalised along discipline lines.     

Deep hanging out in the arts: an anthropological approach to capturing cultural value

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project carried out from September 2013 to March 2014 by five researchers at the University of Leeds (UK), who paired off with five audience-participants and engaged in a process of ‘deep hanging out’ at events curated as part of Leeds’ annual LoveArts festival. As part of AHRC’s Cultural Value project, the overarching aim of the research was to produce a rich, polyvocal, evocative and complex account of cultural value by co-investigating arts engagement with audience–participants. Findings suggested that both the methods and purpose of knowing about cultural value impact significantly on any exploration of cultural experience. Fieldwork culminated in the apparent paradox that we know, and yet still don’t seem to know, the value and impact of the arts. Protracted discussions with the participants suggested that this paradox stemmed from a misplaced focus on knowledge; that instead of striving to understand and rationalize the value of the arts, we should instead aim to feel and experience it. During a process of deep hanging out, our participants revealed the limitations of language in capturing the value of the arts, yet confirmed perceptions of the arts as a vehicle for developing self-identity and -expression and for living a better life. These findings suggest that the Cultural Value debate needs to be reframed from what is currently an interminable epistemological obsession (that seeks to prove and evidence the value of culture) into a more complex phenomenological question, which asks how people experience the arts and culture and why people want to understand its value. This in turn implies a re-conceptualization of the relationships between artists or arts organisations and their publics, based on a more relational form of engagement and on a more anthropological approach to capturing and co-creating cultural value.     

Visualisierungen in der deutschen Geographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Beispiele Robert Schlagintweit und Hans Meyer

Visualization in 19^th‐century German geography: Robert Schlagintweit and Hans Meyer as examples. – Visual representations of nature formed an essential part of 19^th‐century earth sciences. In particular, colonial photography – as a visual source, and as an instrument of the construction of national identities – serves essential research interests of current history and social sciences. The present paper is a case study on the role and function of photography in German geography of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It focuses on the work of the Munich geographer Robert Schlagintweit (1833–1885) and the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer (1858–1929); the early history of photography in India and the function of images in the geographical exploration of overseas territories are discussed. Although there is nearly half a century between the work of R. Schlagintweit and H. Meyer, their photography shows remarkable parallels. The ideas of both on the practice of visualization are rooted in pedagogic and didactic concepts as well as in popular science. For both geographers photography was essentially a technical help, which often needed graphic revisions. And they both preferred photography to depict people and buildings (compared, for instance, to landscapes). Concerning the more comprehensive question of how far their photography transmitted a specific German ‘image of abroad’, it is indicated that such a specific image should have its essential roots in a peculiar visual culture of German earth sciences in the first half of the 19^th century. Thus the paper offers a starting point for further studies discussing the change from a ‘Biedermeier image’ of foreign cultures to a more ‘colonial’ one in 19^th‐century German geography.     

Going unscripted: A call to critically engage storytelling methods and methodologies in geography and the medical‐health sciences

Geography and the medical‐health sciences have long histories of engaging the humanities. The last decade has seen for both disciplines a significant growth in theoretical frameworks, pedagogic strategies, and research methods that draw upon visual and literary arts, critical self‐reflection, creative tools and expressions, and even direct engagement or partnership with artists, curators, authors, theatre‐practitioners, and other professionals in the arts. Both geographers and medical‐health professionals, then, are increasingly (re)making and understanding various worlds through the humanities. In this paper we explore the histories of humanities in both geography and the medical‐health sciences, especially medicine: we argue the two disciplines have much to learn from each other's engagement and work with the humanities. Focusing on the increasing use of narrative and storytelling in both disciplines, we argue that deployment of humanities‐based frameworks and impulses must not be taken up without careful and critical analytical reflection. Finally, we ground our theoretical explorations with empirical examples from recent community‐based work about the risks and benefits of storytelling and visual arts when looking at the health geographies of Indigenous and settler peoples in Northern British Columbia.

De manière impromptue : vers une démarche critique sur les méthodes de mise en récit et les méthodologies en géographie et en sciences médicales et de la santé

L'intérêt pour les sciences humaines par la géographie et les sciences médicales et de la santé s'inscrit dans une longue tradition. Au cours de la dernière décennie, les deux disciplines ont connu une importante croissance de cadres théoriques, de stratégies pédagogiques et de méthodes de recherche qui font appel aux arts visuels et à la littérature, à l'autoréflexion critique, à des outils et modes d'expression novateurs, voire même à une participation directe ou à des partenariats avec des artistes, conservateurs, auteurs, praticiens de l'art dramatique et d'autres professionnels du domaine des arts. Autant les géographes que les professionnels de la médecine et de la santé contribuent de plus en plus à (re)constituer et comprendre divers mondes à travers les sciences humaines. Cet article brosse un tableau historique des sciences humaines tant en géographie qu'en sciences médicales et de la santé, en particulier la médecine : nous soutenons que les deux disciplines ont beaucoup à apprendre l'une de l'autre sur l'intérêt que chacune porte aux sciences humaines. En mettant l'accent sur le recours grandissant par les deux disciplines à la narration et à la mise en récit, nous faisons valoir l'idée que le déploiement des cadres et des impulsions fondés sur les sciences humaines ne peut pas être envisagé sans mener au préalable une réflexion analytique minutieuse et critique. Enfin, nous fondons cette étude du champ théorique sur des exemples empiriques tirés de travaux réalisés à l'échelle communautaire sur les risques et les avantages de la mise en récit et des arts visuels quand on se penche sur les aspects géographiques de la santé des peuples autochtones et colonisateurs dans le nord de la Colombie‐Britannique.     

Science in space vs space science: The European utilisation of spacelab∗

Abstract

Spacelab is the conventional name given to a manned laboratory to be carried onboard NASA's Space Shuttle, which was built in Europe under the aegis of the European Space Agency (ESA). This paper deals with the initiatives undertaken in Europe to establish a utilisation programme for Spacelab, in particular for its first flight, planned as a joint ESA/NASA demonstration mission. Two main factors will be discussed, which prevented ESA from establishing a sizeable Spacelab utilisation effort. Firstly, owing to the cost escalation of the Spacelab development programme and to NASA's charging policy for access to the Shuttle system, which did not foressee any preferential treatment to European users, most ESA member states were reluctant to commit funds in support of a long term experimental programme with the new space facility. Secondly, in a situation characterized by strict budgetary constraints, the established European space science community strongly opposed the inclusion of the new research fields opened up by Spacelab (e.g. life and material sciences in micro‐gravity condition) within the framework of ESA's scientific programme.     

KLAVS RANDSBORG AND THE NINTH CENTURY AD

Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9^th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast‐changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio‐economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the post‐correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg's groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post‐war approaches to Europe's post‐classical narrative.     

ON THE WHITE AND COLOURED MARBLES OF THE ROMAN TOWN OF CUICUL (DJEMILA,ALGERIA)

This paper reports the results of an archaeometric study of the local and imported marbles found in the Roman town of Cuicul (now Djemila, Algeria), a research project funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union. Of the few imported coloured lithotypes that have been found, four are of Greek origin and one was imported from Asia Minor. In addition, two other classical Roman coloured stones found on the site are probably of local North African origin (most likely one from Numidia and one from Algeria). With regard to the grey and white marbles employed in the statuary and architecture, petrographic study in thin section and the δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O isotopic data emphasize the frequent use of the local fine‐grained lithotype from Filfila (Skikda) together with imported Greek lithotypes (i.e., Pentelic marble, the dolomitic variety of Thasian marble, and Parian marble from Lakkoi) as well as different varieties of the so‐called ‘greco scritto’, whose provenance in some cases still remains uncertain. In fact, the petrographic and geochemical features of the marbles do not always match those known for the classical ‘greco scritto’ from the quarry of Cap de Garde, near Annaba (Algeria).     

THE DETERMINATION OF BRICK PROVENANCE AND TECHNOLOGY USING ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES FROM THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES*†

This work applies established analytical techniques from the physical sciences to Irish brick, in order to gather evidence of ceramic technologies, provenance and sources of raw materials. Petrographic microscopy, X‐ray diffractometry and scanning electron microscopy with an energy‐dispersive X‐ray diffraction attachment were used to study the brick of Rathfarham Castle, Dublin, built c. 1618, where clay brick was introduced in 1771. Local clay was fired in the laboratory and analysed in a similar manner. The petrography of the pointing mortar was studied in order to gather evidence of ceramic provenance. This paper concludes that the brick was hand‐ moulded with a silica‐based, predominantly non‐calcareous clay of glacial origin, gathered locally, including fluxes and a high percentage of non‐plastic material. The mineralogy and petrography of the brick, together with the presence of pebbles and a coarse matrix, suggest that the raw clay was probably gathered from a glacial deposit. The presence of abundant pebbles and colour inhomogeneities suggests a lack of processing of the raw clay. The brick was probably fired in clamps at top firing temperatures ranging from 750°C to above 900°C. Transformation of limestone temper involving the breakdown of calcite and the generation of calcium silicates, and the new formation of plagioclase, high‐temperature quartz, hematite and spinel were revealed. The presence of spinel in ‘hot spots’ indicates that fuel was added to the raw clay in order to assist firing.