scholarly journals New Spain’s Cartography within Global Geography: José Antonio de Alzate’s Maps of North America

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. e018
Author(s):  
José María García Redondo

Several printed versions of José Antonio de Alzate’s Nuevo Mapa Geográphico de la América Septentrional (1768) are known to exist. Despite his progressive changes to the map, the Mexican polymath saw it as a single “cartographic model” that he perfected over time. This article analyses his sources and working methods, as well as his contacts with other authors in New Spain and Europe. By distinguishing between mechanisms of passive and active circulation of both resources and cartographic methods, we can note an apparent change in Alzate’s practice, one which was stimulated by his interaction with, adaptation to and integration into a global geographical context.

Author(s):  
Frode Eika Sandnes

AbstractPurpose: Some universal accessibility practitioners have voiced that they experience a mismatch in the research focus and the need for knowledge within specialized problem domains. This study thus set out to identify the balance of research into the main areas of accessibility, the impact of this research, and how the research profile varies over time and across geographical regions. Method: All UAIS papers indexed in Scopus were analysed using bibliometric methods. The WCAG taxonomy of accessibility was used for the analysis, namely perceivable, operable, and understandable. Results: The results confirm the expectation that research into visual impairment has received more attention than papers addressing operable and understandable. Although papers focussing on understandable made up the smallest group, papers in this group attracted more citations. Funded research attracted fewer citations than research without funding. The breakdown of research efforts appears consistent over time and across different geographical regions. Researchers in Europe and North America have been active throughout the last two decades, while Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Middle East became active in during the last five years. There is also seemingly a growing trend of out-of-scope papers. Conclusions: Based on the findings, several recommendations are proposed to the UAIS editorial board.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Seager ◽  
Jennifer Nakamura ◽  
Mingfang Ting

AbstractMechanisms of drought onset and termination are examined across North America with a focus on the southern Plains using data from land surface models and regional and global reanalyses for 1979–2017. Continental-scale analysis of covarying patterns reveals a tight coupling between soil moisture change over time and intervening precipitation anomalies. The southern Great Plains are a geographic center of patterns of hydrologic change. Drying is induced by atmospheric wave trains that span the Pacific and North America and place northerly flow anomalies above the southern Plains. In the southern Plains winter is least likely, and fall most likely, for drought onset and spring is least likely, and fall or summer most likely, for drought termination. Southern Plains soil moisture itself, which integrates precipitation over time, has a clear relationship to tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies with cold conditions favoring dry soils. Soil moisture change, however, though clearly driven by precipitation, has a weaker relation to SSTs and a strong relation to internal atmospheric variability. Little evidence is found of connection of drought onset and termination to driving by temperature anomalies. An analysis of particular drought onsets and terminations on the seasonal time scale reveals commonalities in terms of circulation and moisture transport anomalies over the southern Plains but a variety of ways in which these are connected into the large-scale atmosphere and ocean state. Some onsets are likely to be quite predictable due to forcing by cold tropical Pacific SSTs (e.g., fall 2010). Other onsets and all terminations are likely not predictable in terms of ocean conditions.


1989 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-66
Author(s):  
Shawn D. Haley

The earliest cultures of North America produced exquisitely made fluted projectile points. Over time, projectile points became progressively more crude in form and workmanship. A common explanation for this apparent regression is that native North American stone workers “lost the art of fine flint knapping.” This hypothesis is questioned and an alternative offered. It is suggested that regression had not occurred. Rather, there had been a shift in epistemological importance away from projectile points into more relevant areas for those more recent cultures. Points simply were no longer important to them.


Author(s):  
Eric Richards

Very large numbers of people began to depart the British Isles for the New Worlds after about 1770. This was a pioneering movement, a rehearsal for modern international migration. This book contends that emigration history is not seamless, that it contains large shifts over time and place, and that the modern scale and velocity of mobility have very particular historical roots. The Isle of Man is an ideal starting point in the quest for the engines and mechanisms of emigration, and a particular version of the widespread surge in British emigration in the 1820s. West Sussex was much closer to the centres of the expansionary economy in the new age. North America was the earliest and the greatest theatre of oceanic emigration in which the methods of mass migration were pioneered. Landlocked Shropshire experienced some of the earliest phases of British industrialisation, notably in the Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale district, deep inland on the River Severn. The turmoil in the agrarian and demographic foundations of life reached across the British archipelago. In West Cork and North Tipperary, there was clear evidence of the great structural changes that shook the foundations of these rural societies. The book also discusses the sequences and effects of migration in Wales, Swaledale, Cornwall, Kent, London, and Scottish Highlands. It also deals with Ireland’s place in the more generic context of the origins of migration from the British Isles. The common historical understanding is that the pre-industrial population of the British Isles had been held back by Malthusian checks.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Laure Fayard ◽  
John Van Maanen

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and reflect on the experience as corporate ethnographers working in (and for) a large, multinational company with a remit to study and articulate “the culture of the firm.” Design/methodology/approach – The research relied heavily on interviews and some (participant) observation carried out periodically – in North America, Europe and Asia – over an eight-year period. Findings – The authors discuss how the studies were produced, received, and occasionally acted on in the firm and the realization over time of the performativity of the work as both expressive and constitutive of firm’s culture. Research limitations/implications – The increasing entanglement in the organization raises questions regarding emic and etic perspectives and the possibility (or impossibility) of “enduring detachment” or “going native” and the associated, often unintended consequences of being both outsiders and insiders. Practical implications – The authors start with the premise that ethnography is about producing a written text and conclude by arguing that ethnography is not fully realized until the writing is read. Social implications – The ethnographic reports, when read by those in the company, made visible a version of Trifecta culture that was interpreted, framed and otherwise responded to in multiple ways by members of the organization. Originality/value – Corporate ethnography is a growing pursuit undertaken by those inside and outside firms. This paper focusses on how and in what ways corporate ethnography sponsored by and written for those in the company shifts the positioning of the ethnographer in the field, the kinds of texts they produce, and the meanings that readers take away from such texts.


2015 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber D. Tripodi ◽  
Allen L. Szalanski

Many species of bumble bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Bombus Latreille) are declining throughout their ranges in North America, yet detecting population trends can be difficult when historical survey data are lacking.  In the present study, contemporary data is compared to a 1965 survey to detect changes in bumble bee distributions throughout Arkansas.  Using county-level records as a point of comparison to look for changes in state-wide occurrence among species over time, we find that state-level changes reflect national trends.  Contemporary records of Bombus bimaculatus Cresson and B. impatiens Cresson have more than tripled, while records for B. pensylvanicus (De Geer) show a decline to 61% of historical levels.  Although B. fervidus (Fabricius) has been reported infrequently in the state, misidentifications may have led to an overestimation of the state’s species richness.  In addition to an updated assessment of the bumble bees of Arkansas, we also provide new, localized information on the seasonal phenology and plant preferences of each species that can be used to guide conservation efforts.


Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh

During the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of men, women and children left Britain in search of better lives in the colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and in North America. This demographic shift was also a textual enterprise. Emigrants wrote about their experiences in their diaries and letters. Their accounts were published in periodicals, memoirs and pamphlets. The Introduction argues that emigration literature set into circulation a new set of issues surrounding notions of home at a distance, a mediated sense of place, and the extension of kinship ties over time and space. Emigration produced a monumental shift in the way in which ordinary, everyday people in the nineteenth century, regardless of whether or not they emigrated, thought about relationships between text, travel and distance. Emigration literature has contributed to the shape of the modern world as we know it today, and it provides a rare insight into Victorian conceptualisations of globalization.


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