(Un)Informed Voting? A Test of Compulsory Voting Feedback Effects

Compulsory voting is known to increase turnout and produce a more representative electorate, but there is considerable debate about whether it stimulates political learning. Analyses of political knowledge using cross‐national and intranational observational data arrive at mixed conclusions. Experimental research is similarly inconclusive. We attempt to reconcile these disparate results by employing a novel experiment that tracks political learning during real elections and randomly assigns some people to receive a punitive threat for failure to cast an in‐person vote. We demonstrate that compelled voter participation can increase voter participation and political learning, but also prompts anger.     

LOCAL PUBLIC SERVICES COSTS AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FLORIDA COUNTIES

Theory suggests that the spatial distribution of development within a local jurisdiction affects the costs of providing local public services. We use GINI coefficients to characterize these distributions at the county level and estimate the effects on real per capita expenditures from reductions in the spatial concentration of all buildings and nine alternative types of development. We also estimate the effect on expenditures from expansions in the developed area of a county. The results obtained from a panel of Florida counties confirm our theory and suggest that the geography of development within a county affects public services costs.     

Archaeological Excavations of the Medieval Royal Kincardine Landscape,Aberdeenshire, Scotland

KINCARDINE PARK is among the earliest and largest medieval parks in Scotland. It was royally owned and is believed to have served as a hunting park throughout the 13th and 14th centuries. Nearby are the ruins of Kincardine Castle, considered to be associated with the park, and one of the first Scottish stone-built castles. This paper presents the results of excavations conducted in the park landscape, and at the stone-built Scottish castle. New insights are provided on how medieval Scottish parks were constructed and used, and the cultural significance of these monuments is explored.     

Dacura: A new solution to data harvesting and knowledge extraction for the historical sciences

New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as complex, inter-related knowledge allowing rapid search and retrieval of highly specific data without the need of a lookup table. Dacura automates the generation of tools to help non-experts curate high quality knowledge bases over time and to integrate data from multiple sources into its curated knowledge model. Together these features allow rapid harvesting and automated evaluation of Internet resources. We provide an example of Dacura in practice as the software employed to populate and manage the Seshat databank.     

Surveying Coastal Archaeological Sites Damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Rhode Island,USA

Supported by the U.S. National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund program, the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission administered surveys of coastal archaeological sites damaged by 2012's Hurricane Sandy in Rhode Island, USA. This project documented the transformative effects of Hurricane Sandy on coastal archaeological sites, evaluated the eligibility of many of those sites for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, and provided new insights into ancient Native American coastal occupation. Notable project limitations include incomplete property access, bureaucratic delays, and a Tribal collaboration that fell short. Because preserving most of these erosion-prone sites through shoreline stabilization is unlikely, management efforts will consider preemptive archaeological salvage excavations. This case study may prove useful to archaeologists worldwide who are managing coastal sites threatened by rising sea levels and storms of increasing intensity and frequency.     

Illuminating spaces in the classroom with qualitative GIS

As social and postmodern ontologies continue to shape our definition of space, undergraduate instructors have struggled to incorporate these paradigms in the geography classroom. Recent research suggests that practical applications using field work, qualitative research, and geographic information science can augment students’ understanding of these spatial ontologies. Qualitative GIS holds promise as a means to integrate these methods in geographic education, yet there are no signs to date that the methodology has transitioned from research to teaching. This paper details our attempt to incorporate qualitative GIS into an undergraduate urban field studies course in lieu of a strictly lab-based GIS assignment. We outline our approach before discussing students’ engagement with the assignment in greater depth. Drawing from field experiences and deliverables across four terms, we argue that teaching from a qualitative GIS framework can effectively communicate the fundamentals of modern spatial theory and geographic research methods to students as they investigate problems in the field. We also note recurring challenges to mixed-methods teaching for students unfamiliar with the new methods presented. We close by discussing avenues for instructors in different circumstances, e.g. personal skills sets and class characteristics, to consider qualitative GIS in their classrooms.     

POLLUTION ABATEMENT EXPENDITURES AND REGIONAL MANUFACTURING ACTIVITY*

ABSTRACT. Using a sample of 63 SMSAs for the years 1974, 1978, and 1982 I find weak support for the argument that environmental regulations retard economic activity. Regression analysis of the relationship between per unit total and air pollution abatement expenditures in the manufacturing sector of these SMSAs and manufacturing employment and earnings levels reveals that these associations are negative but that the magnitudes are relatively small. For example, 10 percent higher per unit total pollution abatement costs are associated with, on average, 1064 fewer manufacturing workers (0.17 percent of total regional employment) in Sun Belt SMSAs during 1982.