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Researchers of traditional storytelling are largely limited to existing indices for the discovery of stories. These indices rarely include geo-indexing, despite a fundamental premise of folkloristics that stories are closely related to the physical environment. Consequently, it is often difficult for folklore researchers to address questions that relate story topics to geographic location. To address this problem, we propose WitchHunter, a suite of tools for the geographically based exploration of a large folklore corpus (>30,000 stories). WitchHunter presents visual representations of the latent semantic connections between stories in a map-based navigation and discovery environment. These visualizations of the relationship between places and a first-level approximation of story topics can be used by researchers to build and refine research questions. We illustrate the usefulness of this environment through a series of experiments related to legends about witches, cunning folk, ghosts, revenants, hidden folk, and other supernatural phenomena. Keywords AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Space and place, publications, World Wide Web, language, IN MAY OF 1898, THE DANISH FOLKLORIST Evald Tang Kristensen collected the following story from Jens Peter Pedersen, an impoverished lathe-turner from the small town of Ilbjaerge in northern Jutland: [...]

North America is covered by a multi-scalar patchwork of vernacular regions. These regions can be geographically large enough to cover many states (The Midwest or the South) and small enough [...]

Events with contested provenance and form delimit the territory of this illustrated narrative. I trace out a triangle from the site of my research in central Siberia to the geographical [...]

Nearly two decades have passed since my first professional experience, and upon reflection--and with more time and advanced study--I have reasoned that gaining a deeper understanding of our own, individual [...]

Taking the late Ottoman port and boomtown of Smyrna/Izmir as a case study, I interrogate a priori concepts of cosmopolitanism in historical studies, choosing to be 'archivally cosmopolitan' by working from the ground up to interpret primary sources for what they can illuminate about social complexities in the imperial port. A view from the hinterland, well studied as the agricultural economic base of Izmir, presents an Ottoman cultural geography that embraces the city and complicates its 'Europeanized' image. A mainstay of daily life--music--reflects this cultural intermixing as well as the social stratification of an entertainment world, a dimension often filtered out of maritime, progressive, Eurocentric historiographies. Recovering stories from inland urban space, I aim to contribute to a dialogue about cosmopolitanism and the extent to which its commonplace usage obscures cultural histories. Keywords: cosmopolitanism, Izmir, Mediterranean, music, Smyrna, Turkey., Music cafes. You see a random poster there: 5 men and 8 young women in a new German group. You can guess what sort of show this was. Just like [...]

A significant topic in human geography is time-space compression, which winds through discussions of globalization (Agnew 2001; Dicken 2007), telecommunications (Graham 1999; Licoppe 2004; Tsatsou 2009), and relational space (Kitsch [...]

A claim commonly made today is that Britain's minorities live isolated 'parallel lives' in inner cities which have become ethnic ghettos. Does the evidence confirm such dangerous lack of integration? This article argues that a basic misunderstanding about population change underlies these claims. Changing ethnic composition in Britain is more about different rates of natural change than different directions of migration. This misunderstanding makes changing the ethnic mix of neighbourhoods an unrealistic policy goal.

In January 2010 we learnt that within London the best-off 10th of the population each had recourse to 273 times the wealth of the worse-off 10th of that population (Hills et al. 2010, An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK Report of the National Equality Panel, Government Equalities Office, London). It is hard to find any city in an affluent country that is more unequal. This wealth gap did not include the assets of the UK super-rich, who mostly live in or near London. In April 2010 the Sunday Times newspaper reported the wealth of the richest 1000 people in the UK had risen by an average of [pounds sterling]77 million each in just one year, to now stand at [pounds sterling]335.5 billion. Today in the UK we are again as unequal as we were around 1918. For 60 years we became more equal, but for the last 30 years, more unequal. Looking at inequality trends it is very hard, initially, to notice when the party of government changed. However, closer inspection of the time series suggests there were key times when the trends changed direction, when the future was much less like the past and when how people voted and acted appeared to matter more than at other times. With all three main parties offering what may appear to be very similar solutions to the issue of reducing inequality it seems unlikely that voting in 2010 will make much of a difference. However, today inequalities are now at unsustainable extremes. Action has been taken such that some inequalities, especially in education, have begun to shrink. The last two times that the direction of trends in inequalities changed, in the 1920s and 1970s, there were several general elections held within a relatively short time period. Inequality is expensive. The UK is not as well-off as it once was. It could be time for a change again. Which way will we go? KEY WORDS: inequality, UK, race, health, wealth, votes

A hypothesis is nested within a more general hypothesis when it is a special case of the more general hypothesis. Composite hypotheses consist of more than one component, and in many cases different composite hypotheses can share some but not all of these components and hence are overlapping. In statistics, coherent measures of fit of nested and overlapping composite hypotheses are technically those measures that are consistent with the constraints of formal logic. For example, the probability of the nested special case must be less than or equal to the probability of the general model within which the special case is nested. Any statistic that assigns greater probability to the special case is said to be incoherent. An example of incoherence is shown in human evolution, for which the approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) method assigned a probability to a model of human evolution that was a thousand-fold larger than a more general model within which the first model was fully nested. Possible causes of this incoherence are identified, and corrections and restrictions are suggested to make ABC and similar methods coherent. Another coalescent-based method, nested clade phylogeographic analysis, is coherent and also allows the testing of individual components of composite hypotheses, another attribute lacking in ABC and other coalescent-simulation approaches. Incoherence is a highly undesirable property because it means that the inference is mathematically incorrect and formally illogical, and the published incoherent inferences on human evolution that favor the out-of-Africa replacement hypothesis have no statistical or logical validity. approximate Bayesian computation | coalescence | logic | nested clade analysis | statistics doi/10.1073/pnas.0910647107

The rural American West is a rapidly changing region. Geographers often use the Old West and New West to describe the economic, cultural, and environmental shifts happening within the communities [...]

Voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) have long played a major role in US immigration, acting as intermediaries between government and individuals. This research demonstrates how VOLAGs impact the migration patterns of African [...]

The geography of religion has received limited research attention within cultural geography in the UK. The present research employs a statistical-cartographic approach to provide a detailed mapping of the geography [...]

A large literature in cultural geography, history, and sociology has discussed the different, constantly shifting, and mutually defining constructions of 'Europe,' 'Eastern Europe,' and more recently the 'New Europe,' focusing [...]

Cultural geography is increasingly intersecting with critical and popular geopolitics to analyse how sociocultural constructions of space and place arise within, and play a role in shaping, geopolitical processes (e.g., [...]

Based on the need for advanced treatments of high-resolution urban morphological features (e.g., buildings and trees) in meteorological, dispersion, air quality, and human-exposure modeling systems for future urban applications, a new project was launched called the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT). NUDAPT is sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and involves collaborations and contributions from many groups, including federal and state agencies, and from private and academic institutions here and in other countries. It is designed to produce and provide gridded fields of urban canopy parameters for various new and advanced descriptions of model physics to improve urban simulations, given the availability of new high-resolution data of buildings, vegetation, and land use. Additional information, including gridded anthropogenic heating (AH) and population data, is incorporated to further improve urban simulations and to encourage and facilitate decision support and application linkages to human exposure models. An important core-design feature is the utilization of Web portal technology to enable NUDAPT to be a 'community' based system. This Web-based portal technology will facilitate the customizing of data handling and retrievals (www.nudapt.org). This article provides an overview of NUDAPT and several example applications.

Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis' [D.sub.2] and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology. KEY WORDS dental morphology; biohistory