A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

Migration and market wage risk

The author presents an approach to the analysis of labor migration that incorporates the role of market wage variability as a source of information in individual migration decisions. "The focus...is on quantifying the effects of the origin market acting through amenities and the share of market-specific wage variability as it affects forecasts of alternative wages and forecast precision. A subsample of employed males...from the [U.S.] National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLS) age 16 to 22 years is used for estimation. The empirical results are consistent with the theoretically predicted relationship between migration propensities and regional differences in the information content of wages. In addition, the results provide evidence that risk aversion deters migration given uncertainty, measured by forecast precision, about alternative market wage levels."     

THE BEGINNINGS OF ISLAMIC STONEPASTE TECHNOLOGY*

A multidisciplinary programme of research on Islamic pottery has been focused on questions of the dating, provenance and technology of Islamic pottery. One particular question has been the development of stonepaste, a material made primarily of crushed quartz with added frit-glass and clay. The combination of the different approaches of this study has revealed early foundations for the technology in ninth-century AD Iraq, apparently originating in the clay ceramic rather than the ‘Egyptian faience’ tradition. Subsequent and final practice developed in tenth- and eleventh-century AD Egypt. This technology becomes the primary body for all fine Islamic ceramics.     

Weighted Spatial Adaptive Filtering: Monte Carlo Studies and Application to Illicit Drug Market Modeling

This paper introduces a pattern recognizer, similar to weighting schemes used in combining time series forecasts, for use in spatial adaptive filtering applied to estimating multivariate cross-sectional models. The pattern recognizer enhances the ability to automatically detect and estimate parameters with discontinuous or sharp gradient changes over geographic contexts. Results from Monte Carlo studies suggest that the weighted spatial adaptive filter is at least as accurate as the unweighted filter for cases having smoothly changing parameters, but superior for cases having discontinuous, step-jump parameters. A case study on illicit drug-market activities using census tract-level data from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, further illustrates the advantages of the weighted filter.