Suchergebnisse

Papers presented at a mini-meeting-cum-workshop held at Visva-Bharati University with support from Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Web 2.0 represents a revolution in terms of the possibilities it offers for facilitating communication and collaboration between users – something that has become increasingly common in the world of research. A mere few years ago, the information produced by scientists and scholars remained in the hands of a very limited circle of institutions and publishers, as if it were a guarded secret. Today that secret is being shouted from the rooftops and shared with the rest of the scientific community in order to make it more accessible and to allow new advances. A clear example of this can be found in the social sciences, where there is a constant increase in the production of articles and materials that in turn serve for the pursuit of further research, thereby promoting the continuous development of scientific knowledge. This new situation is being fostered by the proliferation of tools and applications that make it possible, but also by a change in mentality towards a philosophy of exchange and open access.

In this article, we will examine this phenomenon using a methodological system based on the analysis of platforms for the exchange of scientific knowledge, and especially social networks (both general and specialising in the social sciences), in order to demonstrate their potential in a society that is becoming increasingly aware of the need to overcome physical or institutional boundaries and move forward together.

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

This paper analyses two closely related but different concepts, digitization and digitalization, first discussed in an encyclopedia article by Brennen and Kreiss in 2016. Digital Humanities mainly uses the first term, whereas business and economics tend to use the second to praise the process of the digitalization of society. But digitalization was coined as a critical concept in 1971 by Wachal and is sometimes used in post-colonial studies. Consequently, humanist scholars are invited to avoid the "path of least resistance" when using digitalization, and to explore its critical potential. The paper concludes by considering the effect of the digitalization perspective and by expressing author's point of view on the issue.

Behavioral geography encompasses a broad field of human geography that became influential during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged in reaction to the "quantitative turn" associated with the spatial sciences paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s. A fundamental goal of behavioral geography is to understand how and why people perceive environments in the way they do, and how these perceptions influence actual spatial behavior. Behavioral geography, which was largely responsible for introducing behavioralism to human geography, is best thought of as an approach rather than as a separate subdiscipline, given the breadth of philosophical perspectives, research foci, and methodologies that it fostered. Behavioral approaches in human geography were applied to a range of topics, including natural hazards, urban and rural residents' cognition of their built and natural environments, and people's affective belonging to place. Although segments of the approach were criticized for their, inter alia, positivism, lack of scientific rigor, and failure to challenge the status quo of society, the behavioral approach to human geography facilitated a greater engagement with philosophical and epistemological issues, forged productive interactions and relationships with cognate disciplines, and helped lay the conceptual and methodological groundwork for human geographers to engage with contemporary social, environmental, and political issues of public policy relevance.