Tobler’s Law in a Multivariate World

Tobler’s first law of geography is widely recognized as reflecting broad empirical realities in geography. Its key concepts of “near” and “related” are intuitive in a univariate setting. However, when moving to the joint consideration of spatial patterns among multiple variables, the combination of attribute similarity and geographical similarity that underlies the concept of spatial autocorrelation is much harder to deal with. This article uses the notion of distance in multiattribute space to explore and visualize the connection between “near” and “related” in a multivariate context. We approach this from a global, local, and regional perspective. We outline a number of ways to combine different visualization techniques and introduce a new local neighbor match test for multivariate local clusters. We illustrate the methods by means of Guerry’s classic data set on moral statistics in 1833 France.     

Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women’s lives—even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints—are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women’s lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men’s days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women’s everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel’s military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border.     

Beyond Metrics: Reappraising York’s Hungate “Slum”

Much of the excitement generated in Britain since 2007 by the York Archaeological Trust’s excavations of the city’s Hungate neighborhood, which Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree characterized as a “slum” in his pioneering poverty survey of 1901, derives from the unexpected volume and variety of material evidence uncovered about life in a poor community within a modern industrial city. Such material evidence and its often uncertain relationships to other historical data can enhance analysis by complicating understanding of the past, rather than echoing conventional wisdom. Findings from Hungate can thus contribute to nuanced understandings of urban social disadvantage not only at the neighborhood level in this one particular British city, but at the larger scales of analysis that encompass the growth of cities and interacting urban regions in Britain and around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These understandings have contemporary relevance for a world in which over half of humanity now lives in urban areas, as misconceptions about “slums” continue to undermine efforts to reduce urban inequality.     

From ‘Breathless Catalogue’ to ‘Beyond Text’: A Hundred Years of Children’s Folklore Collecting

This lecture draws attention to research into children’s folklore in Britain from the last century, stressing its potential to inform understandings of contemporary childhoods, particularly children’s play. The emphasis is on archival sources, such as the collections of Norman Douglas, James Ritchie, and Iona and Peter Opie. The changing nature of contemporary evidence, such as children’s self-produced films of their play shared on YouTube, is also illustrated, and the importance of a multimodal approach stressed. The author compares the historical sources with the collectors’ published work, and highlights the need for rigour in appraising these differing forms of evidence.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

The flourishing of transit art globally reflects a widespread belief in the power of aesthetic practices to promote infrastructural and civic revitalisation. This article analyses how transit art engages spaces and practices of publicness and how art explores ideas of mobility in Toronto. It argues that while arts are frequently deployed to reproduce status quo relations of power and to bolster elite and exclusionary forms of urbanisation, they can also work to challenge these. Through the notion of infrastructural citizenship, I show how arts can unsettle grounds of public space and public life and illuminate the contentious relations that cohere in public transit space. Overall, I claim that transit networks are a key platform through which the politics of public art are staged and that despite existing constraints, there are many affordances for transit art to critically intervene into neoliberal urban processes.     

Innovation and Function of the Terracotta Warriors of Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum

Terracotta warriors are an important part of the burial system of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum and are the funerary objects of military themes. The appearance of terracotta warriors broke through the architectural structure of burial pits in early tombs, expanded the scale and object of burial, and realized the complicated and hierarchical concept of burial. Its emergence is related to the blending of the pre-Qin tradition and the concepts at that time, such as the change of the concept of human sacrifice, the rise of the burial of figurines, the change of the concept of funerary objects and objects for the living, etc., together with the ruling strategy of the Qin Empire and Emperor Qin Shi Huang himself, which contributed to the formation of terracotta warriors.