Augmenting the landscape scene: students as participatory evaluators of mobile geospatial technologies

This paper provides a two-phase study to compare alternative techniques for augmenting landscape scenes on geography fieldtrips. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay; a custom-designed mobile field guide; a locative media app on a smartphone; a virtual globe on a tablet PC; a head-mounted virtual reality display, and a geo-wand style mobile app. In one field exercise the first five techniques were compared through analysis of interviews and student video diaries, combined with direct observation. This identified a particular challenge of how to direct user attention correctly to relevant information in the field of view. To explore this issue in more detail, a second field exercise deployed “Zapp”, a bespoke geo-wand-style app capable of retrieving information about distant landscape features. This was evaluated using first-person video and spatial logging of in-field interactions. This paper reflects upon the relative merits of these approaches and highlights particular challenges of using technology to mimic a human field guide in pointing out specific aspects of the landscape scene. We also explore the role of students acting as design informants and research co-participants, which can be mutually beneficial in promoting a critical appreciation of the role of technology to support learning about the landscape.     

Index for Volume VII (1960)

Abstract

Martine Debaisieux, ed. Le Labryinthe de Versailles: Parcours critiques de Molière à La Fontaine. A la Mémoire d'Alvin Eustis. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 215 pp.

Albert W. Halsall. Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xxvii + 251 pp. $60.00.

K. M. Sibbald, ed. Guill én at McGill: Essays for a Centenary Celebration (Ottawa Hispanic Studies 19). Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1996.

Maria Teresa de Feitas and Claude Leroy, eds. Brésil L'Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998. 392 pp.

Adrianna M. Paliyenko. Mis-reading the Creative Impulse: The Poetic Subject in Rimbaud and Claudel, Restaged. Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. xvi + 205 pp.

Danièle de Ruyter-Tognotti and M. van Strien Chardonneau, eds. Le roman francophone actuel en Algérie et aux Antilles. (Cahiers de recherches des instituts néerlandais de langue et de littérature françaises 34). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 161 pp. $26.00.

Patricia E. Grieve. Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 240 pp.

Donald E. Schurlknight. Spanish Romanticism in Context. Of Subversion, Contradiction and Politics: Espronceda, Larra, Rivas, Zorrilla. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. 178 pp.

Joyce Tolliver. Cigar Smoke and Violet Water: Gendered Discourse in Emilia Pardo Bazán. Lewisburg, Penn., and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Press, 1998. 219 pp.

John C. Wilcox. Women Poets of Spain, 1860–1990: Toward a Gynocentric Vision. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xix + 366 pp.

Pedro Guerrero Ruiz and Veronica Dean-Thacker. Federico García Lorca: El color de la poesía. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, 1998. 212 pp.

Gerardo Diego. Obras completas: Prosa. Tomos IV, V. (Memoria de un poeta, vol. 1, 2.) Edited by Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997. 816 pp., 802 pp.     

SOME HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE “DOWN EAST” ROUTE

For over three centuries, explorers and privateers, fishermen and planters, job seekers and tourists have plied the “Down East” route–bearing witness to the close connection between New England and Atlantic Canada. Today the traditional “good neighborliness” is threatened by a series of complex issues: American ownership of recreational land, environmental problems and jurisdictional disputes. This article seeks to place these present controversies in perspective by a historical overview of some key factors which have contributed to the interdependence of the two regions.     

AN APPRAISAL OF THE SOVIET CONCEPT OF THE TERRITORIAL PRODUCTION COMPLEX

The paper, contributing to one of the research goals of the Commission on Industrial Systems, International Geographical Union, provides an appraisal of the Soviet approach to spatial organization of the economy known as the territorial production complex. The authors review the genesis of the concept, definitional criteria, and its practical formation and operation, making occasional comparison with Western approaches to spatial economic organization. An unresolved problem for Soviet planners is the provision of a coordinating administrative authority for each territorial complex that would integrate the activities of individual industrial ministries involved in the creation of the complex; the current thinking of Soviet planners is illuminated by a recent statement appended to the paper. (For a previous Western view of Soviet regional development models, see G. A. Huzinec in Soviet Geography, October 1976.)     

The accumulation of stochastic copying errors causes drift in culturally transmitted technologies: Quantifying Clovis evolutionary dynamics

The archaeological record is the empirical record of human cultural evolution. By measuring rates of change in archaeological data through time and space it is possible to estimate both the various evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to the generation of archaeological variation, and the social learning rules involved in the transmission of cultural information. Here we show that the recently proposed accumulated copying error model [Eerkens, J.W., Lipo, C.P., 2005. Cultural transmission, copying errors, and the generation of variation in material culture and the archaeological record. Journal of Anthropology archaeology 24, 316–334.] provides a rich, quantitative framework with which to model the cultural transmission of quantitative data. Using analytical arguments, we find that the accumulated copying error model predicts negative drift in quantitative data due to the proportional nature of compounded copying errors (i.e., neutral mutations), and the multiplicative process of cultural transmission. Further, we find that the theoretically predicted rate of drift in long-lived technologies is remarkably close to the observed reduction of Clovis projectile point size through time and space across North America.     

The Oral Historian as Memorist

This paper explores some issues in relation to oral historyand memory that emerge in Alessandro Portelli's The Order HasBeen Carried Out. I examine the contemporary role of the oralhistorian, the relationship between the present and the pastin memory work, and make some comments about how we might articulatethe field of oral history with memory studies more closely forthe enrichment of both.     

Antiquarianism,archaeology, and aporetic immanence in Beckett’s prose

Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.