The precarious conviviality of water mills

Social institutions such as the water-powered grain mills of Ottoman Cyprus are elaborately interconnected with a wide range of human and non-human players, from millers and villagers to water, gradient, stone and climate. When participants recognize their mutual dependencies and operate according to social and environmental limits, then following Ivan Illich we can call these watermills convivial tools. The European-owned sugar plantations, mills and refineries of medieval Cyprus, by contrast, divided and alienated their workforce, and their demands for water, labour, soil and fuel surpassed what their landscape and society could provide. They are, then, unconvivial tools. Conviviality is always precarious: it needs continual negotiation, conflict and compromise, as well as an acceptance of the mutual dependence of all participants, non-human and human. This politics of conviviality is particularly urgent in times of social and ecological crisis

Global peasant, local elite: mobility and interaction in Ottoman Cyprus

This article challenges the polarization, still common in accounts of Ottoman Cyprus and elsewhere, of an oppressed, isolated peasantry and the power and connectedness of the elite. By integrating archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence, it examines the specific mechanisms of production, exchange and movement across the Cypriot landscape. The patterns of activities of the peasantry show not just a deep rooting in their community landscape but also a striking mobility and agency: they had a significant ability to negotiate, participate and protest in the distributed power system of the Ottoman empire, and show intense movement and widespread connections across the island and beyond. The elite participated in a series of regional and Mediterranean-wide networks, and had many opportunities to increase their wealth, political power and social position. But they were also deeply embedded in agricultural production and in the land. The landscape of Ottoman Cyprus, then, is characterized by intense interaction at all levels, by a highly connected peasantry as much as by a localized elite

Walking from Dunning to the Common of Dunning

On 30 June 2016 I walked from Dunning to the Common of Dunning in the Ochil Hills of Perthshire in central Scotland. My overt aim was to trace the route of the 18th-century (and earlier) cattle and their herders from the lowland farms and estates of Dunning to their shared summer grazing up on the Common of Dunning. Much more than that, though, I wanted to experiment with new ways of engaging with and writing about landscape, moving away from the representation of a supposedly external landscape through photographs, maps and text. Instead, my idea was to use those same media to communicate a landscape performed as an active engagement among topography, plants, birds, soils, camera, my walking and sensing body, turf and stone dykes, fieldwalkers, farmers, rocks, colleagues, GPS satellites, memories, weather and many, many more

Attending to place and time: Seasonality in Early Modern Scotland and Cyprus

Far from being a simple annual round determined by the calendar, seasonality in human societies is a complex system of interdependence between humans and non-humans. It requires close attentiveness to the variability of soils, weather, topography, plants, and animals across both time and space. In this article, the author investigates mobile systems of interdependence that take advantage of topographical and seasonal variation. He uses a range of case studies from early modern Scotland and Cyprus, focusing on summer grazing in the uplands and lowland agriculture carried out by mountain communities. After a comparative discussion of seasonality, the article examines the role of topography and movement, and then puts the ‘margins at the centre’ in order to highlight the central role played by seasonal activity and movement in rural society

Tagging and linking lecture audio recordings: goals and practice

Making and distributing audio recordings of lectures is cheap and technically straightforward, and these recordings represent an underexploited teaching resource. We explore the reasons why such recordings are not more used; we believe the barriers inhibiting such use should be easily overcome. Students can listen to a lecture they missed, or re-listen to a lecture at revision time, but their interaction is limited by the affordances of the replaying technology. Listening to lecture audio is generally solitary, linear, and disjoint from other available media. In this paper, we describe a tool we are developing at the University of Glasgow, which enriches students' interactions with lecture audio. We describe our experiments with this tool in session 2012-13. Fewer students used the tool than we expected would naturally do so, and we discuss some possible explanations for this

Encountering the past through slag and storytelling

No abstract available

On the Rapid Estimation of Permeability for Porous Media Using Brownian Motion Paths

We describe two efficient methods of estimating the fluid permeability of standard models of porous media by using the statistics of continuous Brownian motion paths that initiate outside a sample and terminate on contacting the porous sample. The first method associates the "penetration depth" with a specific property of the Brownian paths, then uses the standard relation between penetration depth and permeability to calculate the latter. The second method uses Brownian paths to calculate an effective capacitance for the sample, then relates the capacitance, via angle-averaging theorems to the translational hydrodynamic friction of the sample. Finally, a result of Felderhof is used to relate the latter quantity to the permeability of the sample. We find that the penetration depth method is highly accurate in predicting permeability of porous material

Polarity effects on breakdown of short gaps in a point-plane topology in air

Electrical breakdown in air in a point-plane topology involves complex processes that are still not fully understood. Unlike uniform-field topologies, the highly-divergent fields produced by point-plane topologies create pre-breakdown corona with volumetric space charge. It is known that space charges developed by corona discharge have significant impacts on the breakdown voltage in non-uniform electrode topologies. With large inter-electrode gaps (>cm) the breakdown voltage for a HV point cathode in air at atmospheric pressure is noticeably larger than a HV point anode. However, this paper shows that in shorter point-plane gaps in air (less than ~10 mm), in the air pressure range 0.1-0.35 MPa, an HV point anode has a similar breakdown voltage which eventually is surpassed by the HV point cathode as the inter-electrode gap is increased. The inter-electrode gap at which the HV cathode has a higher hold-off voltage is found to be dependent on the gas pressure and radius of the point electrode

Interdisciplinary approaches to a connected landscape: upland survey in the Northern Ochils

The key to understanding a landscape is through its connections, which tie together people and environment within and beyond that landscape and across many different periods. This is particularly true of the northern face of the Ochil Hills in central Scotland, which is characterised by dense networks of connections between lowlands and uplands, local and regional. To trace those connections we integrate the results of walkover survey, aerial archaeology, excavations, documentary analysis and place name analysis, revealing significant continuities and differences in the networks and relationships that have connected this landscape across time and space. Iron Age hillforts used their prominence and monumentality to guide people along very specific routes across the Ochils. Regular seasonal movements of cattle and herders in the medieval and post-medieval periods were closely related to the agriculture and settlement they encountered on the way: this interaction can be clearly seen in the elaborate intertwining of paths, braided cattle tracks, farmsteads and enclosures, most strikingly in the 18th century. Such intricate connections across the landscape are equally keyed in to the specifics of particular locations and to much broader networks and historical change