GIS Methods in Time-Geographic Research: Geocomputation and Geovisualization of Human Activity Patterns

Over the past 40 years or so, human activities and movements in space‐time have attracted considerable research interest in geography. One of the earliest analytical perspectives for the analysis of human activity patterns and movements in space‐time is time geography. Despite the usefulness of time geography in many areas of geographical research, there are very few studies that actually implemented its constructs as analytical methods up to the mid‐1990s. With increasing availability of geo‐referenced individual‐level data and improvement in the geo‐computational capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to operationalize and implement time‐geographic constructs. This paper discusses recent applications of GIS‐based geo‐computation and three‐dimensional (3‐D) geo‐visualization methods in time‐geographic research. The usefulness of these methods is illustrated through examples drawn from the author's recent studies. The paper attempts to show that GIS provides an effective environment for implementing time‐geographic constructs and for the future development of operational methods in time‐geographic research.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.     

《人文地理》100期刊用文章统计分析

截至2008年4月,《人文地理》出版满100期,在出版100期之际对该刊22年来刊发的2102篇论文、论文第一作者和引文进行了统计分析,以揭示载文量的时空分布特点,展示该刊作者群的基本特点,确定该刊活跃作者群的数量和比例,归纳出人文地理科学工作者利用文献的基本特点和规律,掌握我国人文地理研究队伍的变化及发展状况,并对《人文地理》期刊的发展提供有益的参考。     

Ethnogeography: towards liberatory geography education

In the context of education in England, an argument is put forward that Geography, as it is conceptualised in the National Curriculum, does not connect to either primary school pupils or their teachers. Reasons for this are explored and a proposal is made for a new paradigm for primary geography: ethnogeography. This proposal parallels work on ethnomathematics, which provides a political agenda to the study of maths and itself draws from Paulo Freire's politicization and consciousness raising through adult literacy. This pattern is applied to learning in geographical education. Drawing on the findings of a recent research project, a case is argued for ethnogeography and the implications for primary Initial Teacher Education courses, learners and the curriculum in primary schools and are considered.     

Eruvim: Talmudic places in a postmodern world

Lodged in the heart of Western urban space, eruvim are religious enclaves important to Orthodox Jewish culture. Eruvim enable acceptable behaviours on the Sabbath as defined by Talmudic theological dogma. Work, and the carrying of all objects associated with work, is prohibited in public spaces on the Sabbath by the Talmud, yet within the boundaries of the eruv, many such restrictions are relaxed, facilitating social interaction and community cohesion. This paper examines the religious and spatial dimensions of eruvim, including the obsessive detail paid to the demarcation of their boundaries, which serve as metaphorical walls and doorways. It also explicates the local politics through which private space is effectively extended into public space. Conceptually, the paper situates the topic within broader concerns about diasporic Jewish identity, which is threatened by assimilationism, slow demographic growth and secularization. It invokes recent theories concerning the spatialization of consciousness and subjectivity, noting the recent growth of eruvim as part of the global surge in ethnic identity that has emerged as a backlash to postmodern capitalism.     

Merchants' attitudes to work in the Barcelona of the later Middle Ages: organisation of working space,distribution of time and scope of investments

The debate concerning the attitude to work of medieval and renaissance merchants has been one of the most intense in twentieth-century historiography. Arising from the publication of the classic works of the sociologist Max Weber, the debate entered the field of historiography proper after the appearance of articles by Werner Sombart and Henri Pirenne. In the 1950s and 1960s, the works of Yves Renouard and Armando Sapori centred discussion on the development of a specifically mercantile culture in the Italy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this historiographic context, the article below is an attempt to approach, through original sources, the figure of the merchant in late medieval Barcelona. These sources are inventories, wills, and marriage contracts, through which is offered a three-dimensional analysis of the professional culture of such a merchant; the concept of professional space; the organisation of time; and the bearings of his commercial and patrimonial investments. The result of this analysis is an attempt to reinterpret the decadence of Barcelona at the end of the fifteenth century through the notion of work entertained by those involved in commerce, attempting by this means to merge the consideration of economic and cultural matters. It is also a proposal for a model of analysis of professional categories, which on so many occasions have been left to one side because of the preponderance of more traditional questions such as those concerning society, economics or politics.     

Development Imperative,Terrae Incognitae: a Pioneer Soil Scientist 1912–1951

James Arthur Prescott was a prominent soil scientist whose career responded to an increasingly complex, recognisably Australian web of interpenetrating spatial scales, served to promote revolutionary global advances in his chosen field, and in the process negotiated the blurred boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research. Encounters with this instructive life suggest that, while resolutions of pivotal anxieties might turn on ineluctably personal qualities, they also reflect a dynamic interplay between international, imperial, national and state contexts. Prescott's innovative contributions to soil science, fruits of a tenaciously consolidated career, influenced resource appraisal and environmental management across a prodigious continental expanse. A sustained focus on local and regional development brought him into contact with a wide range of contemporaries, including pioneering geographers, and culminated in his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.