“Seeking Information from the Lips of People”: oral history in the archives of Qatar and the Gulf region

The turn to oral history in Qatar and the Arabian (also known as Persian) Gulf is not a rejection of traditional archival authority as has been the case in other parts of the world. In the Gulf, oral history has been embraced out of a desire to fill the silences of the largely unwritten record attributable to previous low levels of literacy and strong oral traditions in the region. Today, oral history is seen as the best method to capture details about traditional ways of life during the pre-oil era. After discussing archival concerns about the evidentiary nature of oral histories, this paper explores how it has come to be a crucial documentation tool in the Gulf, adapted to the specific nation building and cultural heritage priorities of the region.     

Statistics in the service of comparative education

International Review of Education - A realistic consideration of the part that statistics can play in the study of comparative education must regard as the first desiderata the development of...     

A Geohistorical Study of ‘The Rise of Modern Science’: Mapping Scientific Practice Through Urban Networks, 1500–1900

Using data on the ‘career’ paths of one thousand ‘leading scientists’ from 1450 to 1900, what is conventionally called the ‘rise of modern science’ is mapped as a changing geography of scientific practice in urban networks. Four distinctive networks of scientific practice are identified. A primate network centred on Padua and central and northern Italy in the sixteenth century expands across the Alps to become a polycentric network in the seventeenth century, which in turn dissipates into a weak polycentric network in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century marks a huge change of scale as a primate network centred on Berlin and dominated by German-speaking universities. These geographies are interpreted as core-producing processes in Wallerstein’s modern world-system; the rise of modern scientific practice is central to the development of structures of knowledge that relate to, but do not mirror, material changes in the system.

Frequency-coordinate vector diagram

From the standpoint of circuit synthesis as well as for a fundamental comprehension of circuit behavior, it is desirable to be able to visualize the response of a circuit over an extended frequency range by means of a geometrical construction. Mathematically, the response of a circuit can be expressed with the La Place transform theory as a function of the complex frequency variable, p = α + jωw, in which a is the decrement and ω is the “real” angular frequency. Physically, the nature of the real-frequency response is usually not discernible by casual inspection of the mathematical function. This paper develops a means of visualizing this frequency response readily through the construction of a vector diagram from the response function.