Mapping the realm: A New Look at the Gough Map of Britain (c.1360)

The mid-fourteenth century map of Britain known as the ‘Gough’ map is the earliest extant depiction of the island in geographically recognizable form. Hitherto, however, interest in the road or route patterns marked on the map has meant that the map's extraordinarily rich settlement geography has not received the attention it merits and that, consequently, the point of the map may have been missed. The availability of a digital scan of the map coupled with the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) software provides the opportunity for a new look at the Gough map and the questions it poses. Attention in this article is directed to the settlement geography it shows, and in particular to the map's 654 cities, towns, villages, castles and monasteries. Their geographical positions as given on the manuscript are compared with their modern equivalents to shed light on some of the basic questions—the map's place of origin, the purpose or purposes for which it was made and the circumstances of its production—that have posed such a challenge for scholars. Our preliminary conclusion is that the key to understanding the original primary role of the Gough map lies in its accurate but selective depiction of the settlement geography of fourteenth-century Britain.

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using words as Data

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our “language-blind” word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.

Analysing spatio-temporal change by use of national historical Geographical Information Systems: Population change during and after the Great Irish Famine

Several countries have made large investments in building historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) databases containing census and other quantitative statistics over long periods of time. Making good use of these databases requires approaches that explore spatial and temporal change.

Breaking the boundaries: Geographical approaches to integrating 200 years of the Census

The census and similar sources of data have been published for two centuries so the information that they contain should provide an unparalleled insight into the changing population of Britain over this time period. To date, however, the seemingly trivial problem of changes in boundaries has seriously hampered the use of these sources as they make it impossible to create long run time series of spatially detailed data. The paper reviews methodologies that attempt to resolve this problem by using geographical information systems and areal inter-polation to allow the reallocation of data from one set of administrative units onto another. This makes it possible to examine change over time for a standard geography and thus it becomes possible to unlock the spatial detail and the temporal depth that are held in the census and in related sources.

The spatial turn: geographical approaches in the history of science

Over the past decade or so a number of historians of science and historical geographers, alert to the situated nature of scientific knowledge production and reception and to the migratory patterns of science on the move, have called for more explicit treatment of the geographies of past scientific knowledge. Closely linked to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies and connected with a heightened interest in spatiality evident across the humanities and social sciences this ‹spatial turn’ has informed a wide-ranging body of work on the history of science. This discussion essay revisits some of the theoretical props supporting this turn to space and provides a number of worked examples from the history of the life sciences that demonstrate the different ways in which the spaces of science have been comprehended.

Cartographic veracity in medieval mapping: analyzing geographical variation in the Gough Map of Great Britain

This article explores statistical approaches for assessing the relative accuracy of medieval mapping. It focuses on one particular map, the Gough Map of Great Britain. This is an early and remarkable example of a medieval “national” map covering Plantagenet Britain. Conventionally dated to c. 1360, the map shows the position of places in and coastal outline of Great Britain to a considerable degree of spatial accuracy. In this article, aspects of the map's content are subjected to a systematic analysis to identify geographical variations in the map's veracity, or truthfulness. It thus contributes to debates among historical geographers and cartographic historians on the nature of medieval maps and mapping and, in particular, questions of their distortion of geographic space. Based on a newly developed digital version of the Gough Map, several regression-based approaches are used here to explore the degree and nature of spatial distortion in the Gough Map. This demonstrates that not only are there marked variations in the positional accuracy of places shown on the map between regions (i.e., England, Scotland, and Wales), but there are also fine-scale geographical variations in the spatial accuracy of the map within these regions. The article concludes by suggesting that the map was constructed using a range of sources, and that the Gough Map is a composite of multiscale representations of places in Great Britain. The article details a set of approaches that could be transferred to other contexts and add value to historic maps by enhancing understanding of their contents.

Reducing Drifts in the Inertial Measurements of Wrist and Elbow Positions

In this paper, we present an inertial-sensor-based monitoring system for measuring the movement of human upper limbs. Two wearable inertial sensors are placed near the wrist and elbow joints, respectively. The measurement drift in segment orientation is dramatically reduced after a Kalman filter is applied to estimate inclinations using accelerations and turning rates from gyroscopes. Using premeasured lengths of the upper and lower arms, we compute the position of the wrist and elbow joints via a proposed kinematic model. Experimental results demonstrate that this new motion capture system, in comparison to an optical motion tracker, possesses an RMS position error of less than 0.009 m, with a drift of less than 0.005 ms-1 in five daily activities. In addition, the RMS angle error is less than 3??. This indicates that the proposed approach has performed well in terms of accuracy and reliability.