Distance and disturbance: travel, exploration and knowledge in the nineteenth century

How should informationa bout distantp laces be collected?H ow should it be made available to the reading public? And how far could it be trusted? Such questions were posed by the expansion of exploration and travel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the leading scientific authorities, the making of accurate observations, the use of precise instruments, the methodical collection of specimens and the writing of narratives provided the principal means by which knowledge itself could travel. Yet the relationship between metropolitan science, travelw riting and field observationr emained fraughtw ith difficultyT. his essay considers a variety of ways in which the experience of disturbance shaped the culture of exploration during the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on writing, collecting and sketching

Scientific exploration and the construction of geographical knowledge: hints to travellers

The business of scientific exploration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved more than simply the routine collection of geographical facts; it required the mobilisation of a wide range of cultural resources, in both its conduct and its representation. It could also be profoundly unsettling, as much for the explorers as the explored. How to explore, how to observe in the field, and indeed the very status of the explorer’s knowledge, were matters of contention. As Dorinda Outram has argued, the practice of exploration raised troubling questions about the relationship between movement, seeing and knowing, not only questions of authority (how can the explorer be trusted?) but also questions of identity (will exploration change us?). The Royal Geographical Society, established in 1830, sought to acquire the status of a scientific society and also to provide a public forum for the celebration of a new age of exploration. These two roles were not easily reconciled. In this paper, I consider the history of Hints to Travellers, the Society’s celebrated guide for prospective explorers, in the context of a wider European discourse of instructions to travellers on how and what to observe. On my understanding, this particular text appears less as a coherent assertion of a geographical way of seeing than as an unstable attempt to resolve some fundamental dilemmas: how was observation to become reliable? What were the limits of ‘geographical’ knowledge? And, above all, what attitude should the scientific establishment have towards the untrained traveller? Hints to Travellers was an attempt to exert authority on a field that was already too large and diverse to be mastered. The history of the Society’s faltering attempts to discipline the growing public interest in aspects of exploration demonstrates, I argue, a fundamental ambivalence over the relationship between popular and specialist forms of geographical knowledge

Shipwreck and salvage in the tropics: the case of HMS Thetis, 1830–1854

In 1830, the British frigate HMS Thetis was wrecked at Cabo Frio, on the Brazilian coast. A British naval force was subsequently despatched to undertake a major salvage operation which lasted for well over a year. The substantial textual and visual archive associated with the case of the Thetis raises wider questions about the entanglement of naval, scientific, artistic, financial and legal concerns in an age of British maritime expansion. If the loss of such a ship brought into question the capacity of the British to act at a distance, it also provided an opportunity to mend and strengthen the networks of power and knowledge. The sources of error exposed by the disaster were to be subject to investigation by numerous authorities, including hydrographers keen to refine their charts and sailing directions and Fellows of the Royal Society seeking to advance the claims of science, as well as the Admiralty itself, in the judicial setting of a court martial. We focus here especially on narratives of the wreck and the salvage of the Thetis, and the significance of their repeated tellings of the story after the event; and on the evidential and representational status of the visual images of the scene in sketches, maps, charts, diagrams, engravings and paintings

David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain : From Chadwick to Booth, 1834-1914

This book, the latest in the Seminar Studies in History published by Longman mainly for students, provides a concise introduction to the enormous historical literature on Poor Law policy during the long nineteenth century. The book, which includes 92 pages of text, a bibliography, selected key documents and other supporting materials, focusses on three main themes : the evolution of Poor Law policy, in England, Wales and (notably) Scotland ; the nature of the workhouse institutional regime ; ..

New approaches to the study of human brain networks underlying spatial attention and related processes

Cognitive processes, such as spatial attention, are thought to rely on extended networks in the human brain. Both clinical data from lesioned patients and fMRI data acquired when healthy subjects perform particular cognitive tasks typically implicate a wide expanse of potentially contributing areas, rather than just a single brain area. Conversely, evidence from more targeted interventions, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or invasive microstimulation of the brain, or selective study of patients with highly focal brain damage, can sometimes indicate that a single brain area may make a key contribution to a particular cognitive process. But this in turn raises questions about how such a brain area may interface with other interconnected areas within a more extended network to support cognitive processes. Here, we provide a brief overview of new approaches that seek to characterise the causal role of particular brain areas within networks of several interacting areas, by measuring the effects of manipulations for a targeted area on function in remote interconnected areas. In human participants, these approaches include concurrent TMS-fMRI and TMS-EEG, as well as combination of the focal lesion method in selected patients with fMRI and/or EEG measures of the functional impact from the lesion on interconnected intact brain areas. Such approaches shed new light on how frontal cortex and parietal cortex modulate sensory areas in the service of attention and cognition, for the normal and damaged human brai

Distinct causal influences of parietal versus frontal areas on human visual cortex: evidence from concurrent TMS-fMRI

It has often been proposed that regions of the human parietal and/or frontal lobe may modulate activity in visual cortex, for example, during selective attention or saccade preparation. However, direct evidence for such causal claims is largely missing in human studies, and it remains unclear to what degree the putative roles of parietal and frontal regions in modulating visual cortex may differ. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) concurrently, to show that stimulating right human intraparietal sulcus (IPS, at a site previously implicated in attention) elicits a pattern of activity changes in visual cortex that strongly depends on current visual context. Increased intensity of IPS TMS affected the blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) signal in V5/MT+ only when moving stimuli were present to drive this visual region, whereas TMS-elicited BOLD signal changes were observed in areas V1–V4 only during the absence of visual input. These influences of IPS TMS upon remote visual cortex differed significantly from corresponding effects of frontal (eye field) TMS, in terms of how they related to current visual input and their spatial topography for retinotopic areas V1–V4. Our results show directly that parietal and frontal regions can indeed have distinct patterns of causal influence upon functional activity in human visual cortex. Key words: attention, frontal cortex, functional magnetic resonance imaging, parietal cortex, top--down, transcranial magnetic stimulatio

Colonial copyright and the photographic image : Canada in the frame

Under Colonial Copyright Law, the British Museum Library acquired a substantial collection of Canadian photographs between 1895 and 1924, taken by a variety ofamateurs and professionals across Canada. Due to the agency of individual photographers, the requirements of copyright legislation and the accumulating principleof the archive, the Collection displays multiple geographies and invites variousinterpretations. Chapter 1 discusses the development of Colonial Copyright Law and its application to photographic works, examining the extent to which the collection was born of an essentially colonial geography of knowledge. The chapter outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis in relation to scholarship on colonial regulation, visual economies and Canadian historical geography. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the evolution of the Collection and provides a discussion of research strategy, focussing on how its diverse contents may inform understandings of Canada's changing landscape, cities and people. The substantive core of the thesis examines the contents and genres represented in the collection through a series of linked studies. Chapter 3 considers the photographic representation of Canadian cities, focussing on the use of the camera in Victoria and Toronto to explore the political and commercial aspects of urban change. Chapter 4 explores the interaction of the camera and the railroads, two technologies at the cutting edge of modernity, examining how photography both promoted the railway and depicted the impact of railway disasters. Chapter 5 explores the visual economy of the photographic image through the medium of the postcard, with reference to the Canadian National Exhibition and the Bishop Barker Company of aviators. Chapter 6 considers a variety of views of Native American peoples, the result of the intersection of various photographic impulses with Colonial Copyright Law. The final chapter returns to the Collection as a whole to consider its agency in the digital age.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEconomics & Social Res Council (ESRC)GBUnited Kingdo