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.     

TEMPORAL and SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF CANADIAN INVENTIVE COMPANIES and THEIR INVENTIONS: AN ISSUE OF OWNERSHIP

Inventing is an important prerequisite for industrial economies to remain technologically competitive. Yet it is not well known how inventive companies of domestic or foreign ownership can affect a nation's technological base and, ultimately, its spatial-economic system. The present study examines this relationship in Canada by investigating the performance of its indigenous and foreign-owned inventive companies at the national, subnational, and urban levels. The results indicate that: (1) Canada's indigenous inventive companies are distinct from their foreign-owned counterparts in that they are generally smaller, are more apt to have teams of inventors, are more likely to develop product inventions, have come to manage a greater share of this nation's inventions, and are increasing their role in key Canadian industries; and (2) geographically, Canada's two largest cities and its core region were adversely affected by the declining inventiveness of American-controlled companies during the 1980s. L'esprit ?invention est une nécessité pour que les économies industrielles restent en conditions de concurrence technologique. Cependant, on connaît très peu de la manière que les entreprises inventives de propriété domestique ou étrangère affectent la base technologique ?un pays et, enfin, affectent son système spatio-écono-mique. La présente étude considère ces rapports au Canada au niveau national, sous-national et local, en exminant les performances des entreprises inventives indigènes et étrangères. Les résultats indiquent (1) qu'au Canada les entreprises indigènes et inventives diffèrent de leurs analogues étrangers: en général elles sont plus petites, ont plus tendance à consister en équipes ?inven-teurs, sont plus susceptibles de développer les inventions produites, produisent une plus grande part des inventions canadiennes, et sont en train ?augmenter leur rôle dans les industries canadiennes; et (2) que le déclin de ?esprit ?invention dans les entreprises dirigées par les américains a affecté défavorablement les deux villes les plus grandes au Canada, ainsi que la partie centrale du pays, pendant les années 1980. Mots-clés: invention, Canada, propriétéétrangère, technologie, produit     

Outdoor lighting design as a tool for tourist development: the case of Valladolid

Practices of outdoor illumination have dramatically changed in the last decades as functional lighting has progressively given way to a more qualitative vision of light. Its traditional role for security purposes has been progressively matched by the use of illumination for city beautification. This is now a major consideration for new lighting strategies. As a result, a growing number of European cities explicitly include the development of nocturnal tourism among the objectives of their lighting policies. However, little attention has been paid by academic research to this growing trend. Focusing on the internationally renowned lighting project ‘Ruta de los Rios de Luz’, this research paper explores the use of lighting design for tourism purposes. Through interviews with individuals who played an important role in the project, the discussion below scrutinizes the lighting design decisions and the economic, environmental and political objectives that inspire the growing utilization of spectacular forms of illumination for tourism purposes.     

Fostering place-based innovation and internationalization – the new turn in German technology policy

Since the mid-1990s German technology policy has experienced a paradigmatic shift from standard grant schemes towards a region-oriented and competition-based R&D policy. Currently, a new policy experiment, the InterClust contest, is under way, trying to simultaneously foster place-based innovation, R&D internationalization and the internationalization of innovative places. The current paper analyses the new policy, relating it to the recent literatures on heterogeneous firms and on cluster-life cycles, and presents results from a firm survey performed in 21 winner regions of InterClust. Findings show that the new funding scheme takes insights from recent theoretical developments into account and addresses important impediments to firm and cluster internationalization. Although it is too early for an overall assessment, it is argued that the long-term impact will critically depend on the inflow of heterogeneous knowledge and the strength of intra-regional mobilization effects.     

桂平博物馆馆藏东汉双耳铜甑铸造工艺及其保护修复研究

广西桂平博物馆藏东汉铜甑对于研究广西地区青铜器冶铸技术的发展具有重要的研究价值。但器物长期保存于潮湿环境中,矿化严重、保存状况较差,亟须保护修复。本研究应用X射线影像观察、金相显微镜、扫描电镜及能谱分析、模拟实验验证等方法研究了器物的铸造工艺、合金成分以及锈蚀产物成分。结果表明该器物为整体铸造成形,器物铸造时使用了轮制技术、刮板造型工艺以及铸后刻纹的工艺,箅部范块制作过程是用器身模翻制器身范后脱模,将器身模的圈足部分切下,然后在圈足泥模上刻出箅部型腔。在此基础上,遵循最低限度干预原则,力求将传统的文物修复手段与现代修复理念相结合,通过除锈、修补等保护修复措施后,不但提高了器物的整体稳定性,而且达到了可以展陈,发掘文物潜在价值的要求。     

The Influence of Dowel-Bearing Strength in Designing Timber Pegged Timber Joints

ABSTRACT

The employment of timber pegs in timber structure joints is a widespread technology in the field of timber frame building in the United States, where the Timber Frame Engineering Council has published a special Standard to supplement the National Design Specification for Wood Construction. The authors have been studying the possibility of supplementing the Eurocode 5 design formulas, thought for timber joints with metal connectors, with specifications needed for a reliable design when employing timber pegs. The field of application envisaged is that of restoring timber structures and results obtained until now are quite encouraging. In this step of the research, more attention has been paid to deformation process: fir and chestnut samples have been tested to determine their dowel-bearing behavior with steel and ash timber peg while double-shear plane joints made of the same wood species, and fastened with steel as well as timber pegs, have been analyzed.     

When Epistemic Communities Fail: Exploring the Mechanism of Policy Influence

Epistemic communities are an established concept in the study of international relations but can also explain policy change at the domestic level. This article asks why some epistemic communities manage to convince decision makers of their preferred policies while others do not. It suggests that the reason lies in the causal mechanism of epistemic communities' influence on decision makers, mediated by decision makers' demand for expert input. Most epistemic communities scholarship focuses on single case studies where the communities' influence on policy was strong and clear, leading to an overestimation of the groups' influence. To help correct this probable bias, this article compares a successful case of epistemic community influence (health technology assessment in Poland) with an unsuccessful example of the same policy (in the Czech Republic). The juxtaposition allows for unpacking of the necessary parts of the causal mechanism (emergence of an epistemic community, its activity, access to decision makers, and successful suasion) and separating them from the crucial scope condition. Decision makers' uncertainty about the policy issue at hand has traditionally been the key scope condition for epistemic communities but the successful Polish case demonstrates that epistemic communities can be influential even in highly certain areas of routine policymaking, leading to a reconceptualization of uncertainty as policymakers' demand for expert input. Demand can originate from various sources, but any change of it affects individual parts of the causal mechanism, leading to a success or failure of epistemic communities' policy enterprise.     

Knowledge Production,Urban Locations and the Importance of Local Networks

This paper analyses the relationship between knowledge production and urban locations in industrial design, a knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS). KIBS concentrate in urban locations. This is often explained by the co-location of client firms and market access in large cities. Recent research on knowledge production, however, reveals that knowledge productive networks are significant for both the competitiveness and location of KIBS. Thus, to understand the urban location of industrial design, it is important to analyse how knowledge production is organized within the industry. Industrial design is concentrated in urban locations, but most of its clients are located elsewhere. Hence, it seems that industrial design firms concentrate in urban locations mainly because their knowledge networks include specific types of formal and informal local social networks.     

Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social laboratories

The insights of feminist science and technology studies (STS) into the constructed and situated nature of knowledge have proved crucial to informing feminist geography. Since the rise of emotional geographies, feminist methodologies no longer simply reflect on questions of positionality, partiality, and power relations, but also on the role of emotions in the field. In this article, we argue that a feminist STS perspective has much to offer when thinking about the way emotions are engineered, controlled, and negotiated in research processes. Our engagement with what we call ‘social laboratories’ – i.e., spaces in everyday life where (experimental) research is conducted with human beings – advances debates in feminist geography, as these laboratories crystallize the emotional entanglements feminists encounter in the field. Looking at economic experiments in Ghana and fertility clinics in Mexico, we discuss the difficulties of doing feminist fieldwork in these experimental research spaces. We argue that the constant negotiation of emotions and ethics is crucial to access, assess, and do fieldwork in research settings that do not adhere to feminist ideals, but nevertheless have gendered effects on women's and men's lives. Rethinking ‘the place of emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005, in Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246, Aldershot: Ashgate) through social laboratories forges instructive links across feminist/emotional geographies and social studies of science.