The Dictionary of Human Geography (180 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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science park
A particular form of growth pole established by property developers or, sometimes, research institutions to promote technology transfer and investment in new industries, usually in conjunction with a uni versity and sometimes with regional and/or local government support. The goal is to cap italize on knowledge clusters in scientific and technological expertise by ensuring that innov ations are developed locally, generating jobs for the local or regional economy and contrib uting to the institution?s costs (see also know ledge economy). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Massey, Quintas and Wield (1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
scientific instrumentation
Scientific instru ments are purpose built material tools used by investigators to disclose, measure and represent aspects of the natural world. A sub set of these devices devoted to surveying has been used in cartography, astronomy, navi gation, land survey, geodesy and related geo graphical practices. Dating back at least to the activities of Vitruvius in the first century bce, but particularly since the development of prac tical mathematics during the Renaissance, such instruments as the astrolabe, compass and theodolite were progressively refined until they were substantially replaced by the more recent use of signals from satellite systems, which deliver immediate calculations of exact locations (Bennett, 1987). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A useful distinction can be made between instrumentation for geography and geograph ies of instrumentation. In the former case, scientific instruments have been used in the garnering of the globe?s geographically dis tributed data and, routinely, to produce maps. Variations in terrestrial magnetism, for example, were the subject of much concern to Edmund Halley who, it was said, set about ?the rectifying of geography?, by using his own instruments to determine longitude and pro duce charts of magnetic variation (Fara, 2005, p. 69). Similar matters occupied the attention of Alexander von Humboldt, who travelled through South America with a remarkable range of instruments chronometers, sextants, dipping needles, a cyanometer (for measuring the blueness of the sky), barometers, thermo meters, rain gauges, aeromotors, theodolites and used the data they delivered to construct his famous isoline maps, which were designed to facilitate the interdisciplinary transfer of data (Dettelbach, 1999; Godlewska, 1999). The fundamental role of instruments in the geographical project and its colonial preoccu pations was enshrined, during the Victorian period, in the Royal Geographical Society, which began systematic courses on surveying in 1879 (Collier and Inkpen, 2003). Of course, these practices raised a range of epistemo logical problems, rotating around who could be trusted to deliver reliable information (see trust), how distant observers were to be regulated and what were the appropriate instruments to use in distant places. In an attempt to address such problems, the Society published its Guide to travellers in many successive editions, in the hope of bringing discipline and order to distant observers, and thereby to secure testimonial credibility (Driver, 2001b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This latter concern about how to manage the harvesting of global data for geography is intimately connected with the whole subject of (NEW PARAGRAPH) the geographies ofinstrumentation. The use of survey instruments and the regulation of observers in the production of geographical knowledge can be thought of as an inherently spatial strategy; it aims to conquer distance by bringing together widely distributed data and thereby integrating local knowledge into global networks. Just exactly what goes on as instrumental findings circulate from local site to global space constitutes a crucial set of questions in the geography of knowledge. During the enlightenment, ships? captains collected magnetic measurements and returned them to the Royal Society. In the nineteenth century, atmospheric circulation data returned from hundreds of ships to the US Navy?s Depot Charts and Instruments were used by Matthew Fontaine Maury to construct his 1855 Physical geography of the sea (Burnett, 2005). At such key venues centres of calculation, as Bruno Latour (1987) calls them universality is constructed from particularity. But that conceptual cir cuitry is only achieved by industrious labour and careful management. The need to cali brate instruments, to normalize fieldwork, to discipline the senses of observers and to ensure metrological standardization are all procedures that are needed to turn instrumen tal readings in particular places into geograph ical patterns of worldwide scope (Livingstone, 2003c). And of course the standardized data, calibrated apparatus and normalized proced ures that emerge from centralized nodes in the network are themselves, in turn, ?assimilated and interpreted in each local context? (Golinski, 1998, pp. 138 9). It is therefore noteworthy that historians of science have begun to speak of the ?geography of precision? (Schaffer, 2002), which identifies the inher ently geographical nature of instrumental epis temology and the means by which ?universal knowledge? is made out of ?local knowledges? (see indigenous knowledge). Further geo graphical scrutiny of the role of instrumental practice in the production of (geographical) knowledge is urgently needed. dl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bourguet, Licoppe and Sibum (2002); Living stone (2003c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
scientific revolution(s)
An abrupt cognitive transformation in a tradition of scientific enquiry that radically reinterprets existing data, identifies new problems and methodolo gies, and establishes fertile lines of novel enquiry. By thus emphasizing discontinuities in the history of science, the idea of scientific revolutions runs counter to the standard cumulative understanding long championed by positivists and others who insisted that sci entific progress comes about through the inductive accumulation of new data and the routine application of scientific method (see logical positivism; positivism). While the idea of scientific revolutions was put forward in the mid nineteenth century by William Whewell, its most celebrated advocate was Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 account, The structure of scientific revolutions, advanced a mechanism for understanding revolutionary science. To Kuhn, scientific fields embody paradigms traditions with historical exem plars that express the standard theories, con cepts and practices of a particular science. At certain points in time a new paradigm arises which is incompatible, and incommensurable, with its predecessor on account of the truly radical nature of the transformation. Kuhn?s model has been challenged from various quar ters, and while he himself insisted that it was not applicable to the social sciences, it has nonetheless been applied in various ways to the evolution of human geography and, most notably, by the architects of the quantitative revolution that inaugurated spatial science (Mair, 1986; see also geography, history of). (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the term may also refer to a particular period in Western history, conventionally described as ?The Scientific Revolution?, which has been widely regarded as of pivotal significance in the emergence of modern sci ence. The expression was introduced in the 1930s to give unity to the period centring on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centur ies, when figures such as Galileo, Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton trans formed natural philosophy by their application of mathematical principles and experimental methods to understanding nature. Favouring mechanical explanations, such figures cham pioned first hand observation of nature over the scholastic authority of figures such as Aristotle. This typification of ?the scientific revolution?, however, has been challenged more recently by scholars stressing continu ities with medieval metaphysics, diversities of outlook exhibited by key figures in the period and the continuing influence of a variety of magical perspectives on practitioners of the new natural philosophy. This has led some historians to query whether there ever really was such a thing as ?the? scientific revolution. As Shapin (1996, p. 1) audaciously put it in the introduction to his revisionist account, ?There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.? (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers and others working on this period have also come to stress the spatiality of natural philosophy at the time, and the different ways in which what has come to be called The Scientific Revolution was consti tuted in different arenas (Livingstone and Withers, 2005). At the global scale of East and west, at the continental scale of European regionalism, and at the micro scale of dedicated scientific venues such as the laboratory and observatory, the new science was prosecuted in different ways. The influ ence of Chinese alchemy on medicine and the significance of Islamic geodetic methods on practical mathematics, the markedly different rhetorical spaces of the Italian court and the Royal Society, where scientific engagements were staged, the contrasts between knowledge producing practices in the laboratory compared with the field, and differences across europe in styles of patronage, pedagogic traditions, conduits of intellectual transmission and expressions of religious devotion all conspire to render troublesome the identification of something called ?The Scientific Revolution? as an essential singularity. Scientific revolu tions have their own histories and their own geographies. dnl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kuhn (1970 [1962]); Livingstone (2003c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
search behaviour
The process of seeking out and evaluating alternative courses of action. In spatial decision making, searching as in the selection of a new home is often constrained by the frictions of distance, so that actors operate within spatially delimited search spaces containing a subset only of all the options available to them. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
secession
The transfer of political control of a piece of territory from one polity to a new or existing polity. Commonly, the term relates to a region within an existing state aiming either to become part of another state or to function as an independent state. The process may be peaceful or manifest itself through terrorism and guerilla war. Contemporary examples include northern Italy (Giordano, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and Chechnya. Increasingly, the pro cess has been explored at the local level as local state units seek to secede from the authority of metropolitan units (Purcell, 2001). cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Macedo and Buchanan (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Second World
A term that emerged during the cold war to describe the communist, industrial states of the Warsaw Pact (formerly the Eastern bloc) in contrast to the countries of NATO. In time it came to refer to the centrally planned economies and communist party states of Central and Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria), the Former Soviet Union states from the Baltics to the Black Sea (e.g. Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova and the Ukraine), Russia, the Caucuses and the former soviet states of Central Asia (e.g. Kazakhstan), as well as China and other Maoist and Marxist states in the third world. With the widespread collapse of communism since 1989, however, the term has fallen out of favour. Former ?Second World? states are now members of the European Union, experimenting with liberal political and economic systems, or pur suing market socialism (see post socialism: see also Pickles and Smith, 1998; Smith, 2005). jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH)
secondary data analysis
In contrast to primary data analysis, this involves data col lected by different researchers than those undertaking the analysis. The advantages are potentially a great deal of saving of time and resources, and thereby it is possible to extend the scope of a study well beyond the means of a lone researcher or even small teams. The disadvantage is that concepts may not be oper ationalized in the manner that the secondary analyst would ideally like. There are a number of sources of such data, which include data collected for primary research that has been subsequently made available to other researchers (see data archive). It is increas ingly a requirement of grant awarding that this is done. Another source is when a large scale data collection is undertaken on behalf of the wider social science community. Important examples of these are the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, begun in 1968, a longitu dinal study of a representative sample of US individuals and the family units in which they reside, and the British Household Panel Survey began in 1991 which is part of the European Community Household Panel. Geographers have been able to link neigh bourhood data to the individual data from the panels without compromising confidential ity (Bolster, Burgess, Johnston, Jones, Propper and Sarker, 2006). Researchers in the UK are also fortunate to have the birth cohort stud ies, which follow individuals from birth; the most recent Millennium Cohort has a clus tered design so that local geographies can be researched (www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/mcs/). Another source is through record linkage of adminis trative data; this is likely to become of increas ing importance as part of evidence based policy whereby data are collected and dis seminated on small local areas; a substan tial and growing example of this is the Neighbourhood Statistics website (http:// neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/) which has, for example, linked claimant count data to local areas to provide an annually updated measure of income poverty. The potential for such admin istrative data is immense but is challenging because all sorts of bias are likely to be present. An important recent development has been the use of a model based approach to the use of records from different sources. Thus Jackson, Best and Richardson (2008) were able to use an overall multi level model to combine detailed individual survey data from the Millennium Cohort Study with large scale administrative data from the National births register, elaborat ing the model to handle a range of biases. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In Britain, the UK Data Archive (http:// www.dataarchive.ac.uk/) is the major reposi tory of digital social science data; while in the USA, this role is filled by the Inter University Consortium for Political and Social Research (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/); globally such archives are organized into the International Federation of Data Organizations (http:// www.ifdo.org/). All these websites have exten sive search capabilities for identifying data being sought. King (1995) has gone further in his call that to ensure scientific integrity, replication data sets need to be made available that include all information necessary to reproduce empirical results; including soft ware code for the particular analysis that has been undertaken. This is now being made manifest in the Virtual Data Centre (http:// thedata.org/). Secondary analysis of qualita tive data has been of less importance but its use is growing (Heaton, 1998). kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Boslaugh (2007); Heaton (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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