‘Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity,Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground

This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, virtuality is no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world.     

Sailing virtual canoes across Oceania: revisiting island accessibility

Understanding sailing conditions is a basic requirement for understanding the two periods of settlement of the distant islands of Oceania, initially from the Bismarck Islands off New Guinea as far as Samoa and later from Samoa throughout East Polynesia. The question of a “navigational threshold” between these two worlds is the focus of this paper. A computer simulation is presented that quantifies the difficulty of sailing virtual canoes in the differing wind conditions in both areas. The model demonstrates substantial differences in ease of voyaging up to and beyond Samoa. That this measure is so markedly different between these two worlds gives support for the hypothesised pause between the discovery and settlement of islands West and East of Samoa.     

(Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology

Building virtual models of archaeological sites has been seen as a legitimate mode of representing the past, yet these models are too often the end product of a process in which archaeologists have relatively limited engagement. Instead of building static, isolated, uncanny, and authorless reconstructions, I argue for a more active role for archaeologists in virtual reconstruction and address issues of representational accuracy, personal expression in avatars and peopling the virtual past. Interactive virtual worlds such as Second Life provide tools and an environment that archaeologists can use to challenge static modes of representation and increases access to non-expert participants and audiences. The virtual model of Çatalhöyük in Second Life is discussed as an ongoing, multivocal experiment in building, re-building, and representing the past and present realities of the physical site.     

GUEST ESSAY: THINKING LIKE A GEOGRAPHER

Compared to the geographic wasteland south of your border, geography appears to have fared well in Canada, both as a formal discipline extending our understanding by illuminating the human and physical worlds, and as a subject taught at all levels to create informed and aware citizens. I known you think much remains to be done, and perhaps things always look a bit greener on the other side of the hill, but I hope you will not mind my somewhat envious gaze. In fact, when I received the five volumes of the 'curriculum guideline' for geography, issued by the Ontario Ministry of Education for the intermediate and senior divisions of your high schools (ome 1988), my feelings were not so much envy as panic, a panic that rapidly induced something close to intellectual paralysis. Because in a moment I can only describe now as utterly weak and foolish, I started to read them, only to learn that your senior students 'analyze, interpret … explain … design and develop networks, systems and simulations that involve six or more variables' (ome 1988, A12).
In retrospect, I still think my panic was justified. After 30 years of hard post-doctoral work I have reached the point where I can think about the interactions of maybe three variables, but hardly the combinatorial possibilities of six. Such ineptness would mean that I might just squeeze into your tenth grade and from there slowly work my way over the next two years towards those Olympian heights of analytical thought where dwell Ontario's high school graduates.     

Clusters and Industry 4.0 – do they fit together?

Industry 4.0 heralds the profound transformation of business models by enabling the fusion of virtual and real worlds and the application of digitization, automatization and robotics in manufacturing. We review the basic premises of Industry 4.0 and map them against the clusters’ features with the aim to establish the kind of relations between these two categories. By exploring the likely impact of clusters on Industry 4.0, our discussion revolves around the broader question of the role of regional ecosystems in industrial transformation. Clusters, thanks to the advantages such as knowledge base and mechanisms, agglomeration economies and externalities (labour pool and critical mass of firms) and favourable more stable, less uncertain environment of trust and cooperation, may facilitate the digital transformation, particularly its phasing-in and testing phases. Notwithstanding this potential, it should be stressed that not all clusters would be able to play such prominent role. Only these equipped with adequate knowledge base and providing some expertise in the field of IT solutions, robotics, automatics, and so on, i.e. the technologies crucial to Industry 4.0 seem predestined to contribute to the emergence of fully fledged industrial internet. Despite seemingly some inconsistency between these two categories, clusters can facilitate the business transformation towards Industry 4.0.     

Immersive Visualization and Curation of Archaeological Heritage Data: Çatalhöyük and the Dig@IT App

Advanced data capture techniques, cost-effective data processing, and visualization technologies provide viable solutions for the documentation of archaeological heritage and material culture. Work at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Çatalhöyük has demonstrated that new digital approaches for capturing, processing, analyzing, and curating stratigraphic data in 3D are now feasible. Real-time visualization engines allow us to simulate the stratigraphy of a site, the three-dimensional surfaces of ancient buildings, as well as the ever-changing morphology of cultural landscapes. Nonetheless, more work needs to be done to address methodological questions such as follows: can three-dimensional models and stratigraphic relationships, based on 3D surfaces and volumes, be used to perform archaeological interpretation? How can a 3D virtual scenario become the interface to cultural data and metadata stored in external online databases? How can we foster a sense of presence and user embodiment in the simulation of ancient cities and archaeological sites? This article aims to provide viable solutions to the methodological challenge of designing a comprehensive digital archaeological workflow from the data acquisition and interpretation in the field to a three-dimensional digital data curation based on interactive visualization, searchable 3D data, and virtual environments. This work describes the results we achieved developing the application Dig@IT, a multi-platform, scalable virtual reality tool able to foster archaeological data analysis, interpretation, and curation in a realistic and highly interactive virtual environment.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Hidden Histories in Geography: A politics of inclusion and participation

Many geographers benefit from the support of unheralded teachers whose inspiration leaves important marks on their thinking. This paper considers the legacy of Jan Monk's professional contribution in terms of her fostering of wider structures that support the development of a disciplinary capacity for and commitment to good educational practice, her work in researching and bringing to light the hidden disciplinary roles of women in the development of the discipline, particularly in the USA, and the place and significance of her early work in Australia at the intersection of geography and indigenous studies. It concludes that her insistence on the importance of place and context, her attention to people's own sense of place in shaping their relations with each other and their wider worlds, continues to provide a powerful starting point for benchmarking our work as teachers, mentors and researchers.     

The open black box: the role of the end‐user in GIS integration

Formalist theories of knowledge that underpin GIS scholarship on integration neglect the importance and creativity of end‐users in knowledge construction. This has practical consequences for the success of large distributed databases that contribute to spatial‐data infrastructures. Spatial‐data infrastructures depend on participation at local levels, such as counties and watersheds, and they must be developed to support feedback from local users. Looking carefully at the work of scientists in a watershed in Puget Sound, Washington, USA during the salmon crisis reveals that the work of these end‐users articulates different worlds of knowledge. This view of the user is consonant with recent work in science and technology studies and research into computer‐supported cooperative work. GIS theory will be enhanced when it makes room for these users and supports their practical work .     

A Turke turn’d Quaker: conversion from Islam to radical dissent in early modern England

The study of the relationship between the anglophone and Islamic worlds in the seventeenth century has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years, and much attention has been given to the cultural anxiety surrounding “Turning Turke”, conversion from Christianity to Islam, especially by English captives on the Barbary coast. Conversion in the other direction has attracted far less scrutiny, not least because it appears to have been far less common. Conversion from Islam to any form of radical dissent has attracted no scholarship whatsoever, probably because it has been assumed to be non-existent. However, the case of Bartholomew Cole provides evidence that such conversions did take place, and examining the life of this “Turke turn’d Quaker” provides an insight into the dynamics of cross-cultural conversion of an exceptional kind.     

From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective

Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global-historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. In this process of vernacularization, new vernacular forms of philological learning appear to have played a crucial role. Building on Bourdieu's work, I will try to analyze the Ottoman cosmopolitan as a pre-modern form of linguistic domination, and vernacularization as a form of resistance. Moving beyond Bourdieu, I will be arguing for a genealogical approach that is alive to premodern non-European philological traditions, and to the historically variable relation between (philological) knowledge and power.     

HISTORY'S DEMARCATION PROBLEM

In his 1998 book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomír Dole?el put forth a theory of narrative fiction based on the interdisciplinary framework of possible worlds. In Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage, Dole?el takes his earlier theory further and applies it to historiography as well, with the specific aim of showing how the study of history might be defended against the postmodern challenge via the use of possible worlds (PW) semantics. Dole?el's book is essentially an argument against the postmodern views expressed by Roland Barthes and Hayden White, who have claimed that fundamentally, there is no difference between fictional and historical narratives. According to Dole?el, this difference can be saved if the focus of attention is shifted from the textual features of these narratives to the fictional or historical worlds that the narratives project. Dole?el's comparison of fictional and historical worlds to each other is quite illuminating and thorough. However, the question remains whether the application of PW semantics does anything besides offering a detailed analysis of the structure of the different types of narrative worlds. After all, one should not overlook the perhaps more practical way of differentiating between historical and fictional narratives through their institutional status. Furthermore, we argue that by focusing on the properties of the end products, that is, the resulting narratives, Dole?el concedes too much to postmodernists. A stronger way to give postmodernists a taste of their own medicine would be to argue that the rules that historians follow in the process of generating, constructing, and evaluating weighed causal explanations (or historical models of the past) are fundamentally different from whatever rules govern the generation and construction of fiction.     

Cultural geographies of the contact zone: Gaels,Gallsand overlapping territories in late medieval Ireland

In writing about the social and cultural geographies of the past, we frequently reinforce notions of difference by using neatly delineated ethnic terms of reference that often superscribe the complexities of reality on the ground. Referring to ‘Gaels’ and ‘Galls’, demarcating ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worlds in late medieval Ireland, is but one example. We often exaggerate, too, the boundedness of geographical space by speaking more of frontiers and less of overlapping territories. Using the context of late medieval Ireland, I propose in this paper the application and broadening of the concept of the contact zone—prevalent in postcolonial studies for a number of years—to address this specific issue of overstating social and cultural geographical cohesion and separation in the past. The use of the concept of the contact zone in geography has been largely confined to the modern period, which in the extant literature has received priority for various reasons, not least of which is the wider availability of source material. However, in this paper, I suggest that its relevance to the study of the medieval period is equally as strong, and perhaps its application can serve to deflect our imaginings of earlier geographical worlds as somehow more static and less complicated, and instead open the possibility of reading the fluidity and interconnections of the more distant past.     

Moving pictures: from ethnographic to autoethnographic documentary in the internationalization of the geography curriculum

Documentary films have often taken a pivotal role in strategies to internationalize (geography) curricula and classrooms, being used as a method of bringing the world to the classroom. These documentaries overwhelmingly take ethnographic form. Problematically, the documentary gaze is characteristically that of an outside film crew and narrator mediating relationships between the “subjects” of the documentary and the ways they are heard and seen. Yet other forms of documentary also exist, including those offering autoethnographic perspectives to viewers. Autoethnographic documentaries offer a highly promising resource for internationalization of the geography curriculum, providing careful, analytic, theoretically-informed understandings of documentarians’ own worlds – which may be in the next neighbourhood or on the other side of the planet. This paper reviews documentaries as curriculum-internationalizing learning-and-teaching resources before going on to examine the flaws of “traditional” ethnographic documentary in this endeavour. It makes the case for greater – though not necessarily exclusive – use of autoethnographic films in our work to educate global citizens and provides some preliminary resources for locating and evaluating this form of film. As such it contributes not only to critical pedagogy surrounding internationalization of the geography curriculum but also to filmic geography.     

The Role of Nondeclarative Memory Systems in the Inference of Long-Term Population Continuity

Recent theoretical work on the transmission of cultural behavior has focused on how and why information is transmitted. Less work has been done on the particular behaviors being transmitted. Here, I argue that the kind of behavior being transmitted can have a greater effect on the conservation of behavior than how or why the behavior was transmitted. Specifically, behaviors such as motor skills and habits, which are stored in nondeclarative memory, are more likely to be conservatively maintained over longer periods of time than declarative memories, which include easily changeable ideas and plans. Thus, behaviors, as manifested in artifact traits, are more or less likely to be maintained over time depending on where in the memory systems they are remembered. In sum, not all artifact traits have equivalent value when interpreting the spatial and temporal distribution of artifact traits.     

The Sherrington–Cushing connection: A bench to bedside collaboration at the dawn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

British physiologist Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) and American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) were seminal figures in the history of neuroscience. The two came from different worlds, one laboratory-based and the other largely clinical. Their scientific intersection, beginning in July 1901, provides a glimpse into a nascent form of “bench to bedside” collaboration, which carried with it the potential to extend the arm of neurophysiological experimentation from Sherrington’s laboratory to Cushing’s operatory. I reviewed extensive primary source materials archived at Yale University School of Medicine Library. Sherrington viewed Cushing’s bedside work as an opportunity, in humans, to extend his bench-side physiological observations on higher primates, at times almost directing Cushing in the clinic. Cushing would indeed take Sherrington’s observations on apes and extend them to his patients, and the work would eventually overturn the prevailing notion that the motor and sensory cortex were intermixed across the Rolandic fissure.     

Getting the best of both worlds? Britain,the EU and migration policy

In perhaps unexpected ways Britain has become quite closely linked to key aspects of EU migration and asylum policy. This could be a rather surprising outcome given that the UK is outside Schengen, opted out of the free movement, asylum and migration provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty and remains fixed on the maintenance of border controls at ports of entry to the UK. However, the differential and conditional engagement that has developed with EU migration and asylum policy has been described by Tony Blair as ‘getting the best of both worlds’. What could it mean to get the best of both worlds? Can the ‘two worlds’ of Britain and Europe be so neatly distinguished? To answer these questions the article surveys the extent of British engagement with EU migration and asylum policy and explains when, how and why the UK has opted into key aspects of it, particularly the more coercive components concerned with asylum and border controls.     

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.