Mapping the desert: Arthur Rimbaud,Charles de Foucauld,and the Société de Géographie, 1884–85

This article focuses on two disparate figures in the French colonial period in Africa, the ex-poet Arthur Rimbaud and the ex-soldier Charles de Foucauld. Between 1883 and 1884, each lived in Africa in self-imposed exile of a sort, and undertook rigorous exploration of the region to which he had relocated himself. Both composed reports on their regions of the ‘dark continent,’ and both reports were submitted to, and recognized by, the Société de Géographie back in Paris. The two geographical texts – Rimbaud's Rapport sur l'Ogadine and de Foucauld's Reconnaissance au Maroc – are watersheds of life-writing, as much as they are representations of colonial Africa observed by Frenchmen. Through comparing the two desert narratives, and considering the two authors' African lives, I argue that the process of writing about the desert actually evokes the essential character of each writer's voice, a voice to which he only found access in the desert. Finally, these voices in turn provide valuable information about the relationship between France and Africa, colonial force and colony, and about the various forms of resistance to each of those roles.     

Opacifiers in Late Bronze Age glasses: the use of ToF-SIMS to identify raw ingredients and production techniques

Time of Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) is applied to the study of four samples of opaque glass of Late Bronze Age date. The technique is uniquely capable of identifying compositional heterogeneity at a sub-micron resolution within the crystalline opacifiers dispersed through homogeneous glass matrices. It is shown that this provides crucial information on the possible raw ingredients of the opacifying inclusions used, and has the potential for highlighting regional variations in the production technology involved in creating different colours of opaque glass.     

INTRODUCTION: PROCESSES OF CHANGE IN URBAN SYSTEMS*

ABSTRACT The twenty‐first century will be one of intensified urbanization, on a scale never before experienced. How do urban systems and individual cities change and develop? The social sciences have many different approaches to analyzing the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of urban change. We inventory some of these approaches and their implications for public policy toward cities, urban change, and economic development.     

Network Location and Policy‐Oriented Behavior: An Analysis of Two‐Mode Networks of Coauthored Documents Concerning Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region*,†

This study explores how a scientist's location in science‐based policy networks can affect her policy‐oriented behaviors. In particular, we hypothesize that those scientists who fill structural holes in their networks will be more likely than others to engage in policy‐oriented behaviors. The network data are defined by scientists' coauthorship on policy documents regarding climate change in the Great Lakes. We employ a two‐mode network analysis to identify clusters of scientists who coauthored similar documents, and relative to those clusters, we identify those who fill structural holes by bridging between clusters. We find that those scientists who bridged between clusters were more likely to engage in policy‐oriented behaviors of policy advocacy and advising than were others in the network. This is an example of a link between network location and policy‐oriented behavior indicative of the broader phenomenon of how individuals exert agency, given structural constraints.