Image et Sciences Sociales

Contrary to oral interviews, statistics or primary sources in print, the use of film does not occupy an important place in the training of social scientists. Yet, as this article argues, before film and video can become standard data gathering tools, social scientists need to reflect on the ways filming techniques are taught. To do so, this article offers an account of a filming course taught for several years to third year students at the university of Tours.     

EVOLUTION OF URBAN SYSTEMS IN THE PARETO PLANE*

ABSTRACT Distributions of city sizes are usually characterized by their Pareto index. This, however, turns out to be a rather restrictive view, for the Pareto distribution is known to become singular whenever the Pareto index becomes smaller than one, a case which is fairly frequent in empirical distributions. We show that the introduction of finite Pareto distributions in which city sizes are bounded from above solves a number of difficulties encountered by the rank-size rule and by the unbounded Pareto distribution. Combined with the use of finite Pareto distributions, the green-belt model that has been introduced previously is reexamined. It implies definite constraints for the long-run evolution of urban systems; it is in the cases of countries experiencing a process of fast urbanization that these constraints are of greatest significance. The implications of the model are confronted with empirical evidence concerning the evolution of urban systems in major industrialized countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Les techniques dans l'espace public

In this article, we intend to study the cultural transformations fostered by the commercialisation of inventions, a major process in the growth of markets and consumption in the XVIII^th century. Inventors' commercial strategies were based on intense mediatisation, combining visual languages (public shows, experiments, exhibitions) and print resources: advertisements, posters, tracts, how-to leaflets and users' books. Technical information and useful knowledge played a major part in the building of markets for inventions. This demension has seldom been stressed neither by historians of consumption nor by historians of technology. Yet, this literature that aimed to emancipate consumers and to develop their participative talents as m means to convince them to buy, expressed the success of knowledge in action, of operative sciences, based on gestures and verbs, on purposive action and projects. Whereas technological science (technologie) in the Enlightenment developed in treatises and dictionaries, it was also stemming from useful literature and commercial ephemeras that allowed appropriations.     

The hoset Project. An interdisciplinary study of a marginal settlement

On the western border of the Stj?rdal region in the province of Nord‐Tr?ndelag, Norway, at the Hoset farm in Lånke, the Department of History at the University of Trondheim, Norway, has been carrying out a detailed study of a single farm area, in cooperation with the Nordic Deserted Farms Project This study is particularly interesting since it was planned as an interdisciplinary approach, involving archaeological, pollen‐analytical, pedological and geological specialists, in addition to historians, all of which have contributed their own evidence on the cultural and natural environment and agricultural settlement history of the area from the Iron Age onward. In this way it was hoped that answers would be found to questions which have been neglected in the past by Norwegian historians, such as settlement continuity or discontinuity, farm structure, farming methods and settlement patterns in more remote areas. It was also hoped to gain more experience in the different scientific techniques, their potentialities and limitations (e.g. radiocarbon dating, pollen analysis, phospate analysis) and to foster a spirit of mutual co‐operations between the various departments within the university.