Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and Geospatial Approaches for the Analysis of Historical Visual Sources and Cartographic Material

This book focuses on the use of GIScience in conjunction with historical visual sources to resolve past scenarios. The themes, knowledge gained and methodologies conducted might be of interest to a variety of scholars from the social science and humanities disciplines

Cartography

The terrestrial space is the place of interaction of natural and social systems. The cartography is an essential tool to understand the complexity of these systems, their interaction and evolution. This brings the cartography to an important place in the modern world. The book presents several contributions at different areas and activities showing the importance of the cartography to the perception and organization of the territory. Learning with the past or understanding the present the use of cartography is presented as a way of looking to almost all themes of the knowledge

New Global Perspectives on Archaeological Prospection

This volume is a product of the 13th International Conference on Archaeological Prospection 2019, which was hosted by the Department of Environmental Science in the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Technology Sligo. The conference is held every two years under the banner of the International Society for Archaeological Prospection and this was the first time that the conference was held in Ireland. New Global Perspectives on Archaeological Prospection draws together over 90 papers addressing archaeological prospection techniques, methodologies and case studies from 33 countries across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America, reflecting current and global trends in archaeological prospection. At this particular ICAP meeting, specific consideration was given to the development and use of archaeological prospection in Ireland, archaeological feedback for the prospector, applications of prospection technology in the urban environment and the use of legacy data. Papers include novel research areas such as magnetometry near the equator, drone-mounted radar, microgravity assessment of tombs, marine electrical resistivity tomography, convolutional neural networks, data processing, automated interpretive workflows and modelling as well as recent improvements in remote sensing, multispectral imaging and visualisation

Multimetal smithing : An urban craft in rural settings?

Multimetal smithing should be defined as the use of more than one metal and/or different metalworking techniques within thesame crafts-milieu. This complex metalworking has long been linked to centrality, central places and urbanity in Scandinavia.It has been extensively argued that fine casting and smithing, as well as manufacture utilizing precious metals was exclusivelyundertaken within early urban settings or the “central places” pre-dating these. Furthermore, the presence of complex metalcraftsmanship has been used as a driving indicator of the political, social and economic superiority of certain sites, therebyenhancing their identity as “centralities”.Recent research has come to challenge the universality of this link between urbanity, centrality and complex metalworkingas sites in rural settings with evidence of multimetal smithing are being identified. This shows that the relationship between thecraft and centrality (urbanity) must be nuanced and that perhaps multimetal craftsmanship should be reconsidered as an urbanindicator.The thesis project “From Crucible and onto Anvil” started in 2015 and focuses on sites housing remains of multimetalcraftsmanship dating primarily from 500-1000 AD. Within the project a comprehensive survey of sites will be used to evaluate thepresence of multimetal craftsmanship in the landscape. Sites in selected target areas will also be subject to intra-site analysisfocusing on workshop organisation, production output, metalworking techniques and chronological variances.A key aim in the project is to elucidate the conceptual aspects of complex metalworking. The term multimetality is used toanalytically frame all the societal and economic aspects of multimetal craftsmanship. Through this inclusive perspective both thecraftsmanship and the metalworkers behind it are positioned within the overall socioeconomic framework. The metalworkers,their skills and competences as well as the products of their labour are viewed as dynamic actors in the landscape and on thearenas of political economy of the Late Iron Age.The survey has already revealed interesting aspects concerning multimetal smithing and urbanity. Although the multimetalsites do cluster against areas of early urban development there are also other patterns emerging. Multimetal craftsmanship – both as practice and concept – was well represented in both rural peripheral settings and urban crafts-milieus. This means that therole of multimetality as part of an “urban conceptual package” is crucial to investigate. Such an approach will have the dual endsof properly understanding the craft and its societal implications, but also further the knowledge of the phenomenon of urbanityas a whole. Was multimetal smithing part of an “urban package” that spread into the rural landscape? Did the multimetality differbetween urban and rural crafts-milieus? How does early urbanity relate to the chronology of multimetal craftsmanship?This paper aims to counter these questions using examples from the survey of multimetal sites conducted within the thesisproject. A comparison between selected sites will be presented. The purpose of this is to evaluate the role of multimetality withinthe “urban package” and discuss the role of complex metalworking in the establishment of urban arenas of interaction in LateIron Age Scandinavia

(Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space

The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display

Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Authorial Agency in Utopias of Kaleidoscopic Perception and Sensory Estrangement

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice

Across Space and Time. Papers from the 41st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Perth, 25-28 March 2013

This volume presents a selection of the best papers presented at the forty-first annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. The theme for the conference was "Across Space and Time", and the papers explore a multitude of topics related to that concept, including databases, the semantic Web, geographical information systems, data collection and management, and more