The Dictionary of Human Geography

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correspondence networks (Ogborn, 2002); the

significance of field trials in the production of

agricultural knowledge (Henke, 2000); the

reciprocal connections between buildings and

the building of scientific knowledge (Gieryn,

2002); and the geography of the commodifi-

cation of bio-information (Parry 2004).

The list could be extendedad libitum. Special

issues of contributions by geographers to the

British Journal for the History of Science(2005)

under the guest editorship of Simon Naylor,

and ofInterdisciplinary Science Reviews(2006) on

‘putting science in its place’, bear witness to the

interdisciplinary richness of these developments.

In the light of all this, there are good

grounds for suggesting that science studies

can coherently be thought of as a branch of

historical geography. In keeping with this

sentiment, Simon Schaffer (2005) has recently

urged that it was the cartographic impulse

itself that helped construct what we think of

as modern science (seecartographic reason;

cartography). Courtesy of several ‘big pic-

ture’ accounts of science history (such as those

of Whewell, Bernal and Needham) that sought

to graphically chart scientific development, it

was – as Schaffer (2005) pointedly observes –

‘mapswhich invented what science was’. At a

more popular level, Simon Jenkins, writing in

the Guardian (Friday, 20 January 2006),

delivers confirmatory judgment, no less pro-

vocatively quipping that ‘All scientists are

geographers. That is why maps are the most

sacred tools of science.’ dnl

Suggested reading

Golinski (1998); Livingstone (2003c).

science park A particular form ofgrowth

poleestablished by property developers or,

sometimes, research institutions to promote

technology transfer and investment in new

industries, usually in conjunction with a uni-

versity and sometimes with regional and/or

local government support. The goal is to cap-

italize on knowledgeclustersin scientific and

technological expertise by ensuring thatinnov-

ationsare developed locally, generating jobs

for the local or regional economy and contrib-

uting to the institution’s costs (see alsoknow-

ledge economy). sw

Suggested reading

Massey, Quintas and Wield (1991).

scientific instrumentation Scientific instru-

ments are purpose-built material tools used

by investigators to disclose, measure and

represent aspects of the natural world. A sub-

set of these devices devoted tosurveyinghas

been used incartography, astronomy, navi-

gation, land survey, geodesy and related geo-

graphical practices. Dating back at least to the

activities of Vitruvius in the first centurybce,

but particularly since the development of prac-

tical mathematics during the Renaissance,

such instruments as the astrolabe, compass

and theodolite were progressively refined until

they were substantially replaced by the more

recent use of signals from satellite systems,

which deliver immediate calculations of exact

locations (Bennett, 1987).

A useful distinction can be made between

instrumentationforgeographyand geograph-

ies ofinstrumentation. In the former case,

scientific instruments have been used in the

garnering of theglobe’s geographically dis-

tributed data and, routinely, to producemaps.

Variations in terrestrial magnetism, for

example, were the subject of much concern

to Edmund Halley who, it was said, set about

‘the rectifying of geography’, by using his own

instruments to determine longitude and pro-

duce charts of magnetic variation (Fara, 2005,

p. 69). Similar matters occupied the attention

of Alexander von Humboldt, who travelled

through South America with a remarkable

range of instruments – chronometers, sextants,

dipping needles, a cyanometer (for measuring

the blueness of the sky), barometers, thermo-

meters, rain gauges, aeromotors, theodolites –

and used the data they delivered to construct

his famousisolinemaps, which were designed

to facilitate the interdisciplinary transfer of

data (Dettelbach, 1999; Godlewska, 1999).

The fundamental role of instruments in the

geographical project – and its colonial preoccu-

pations – was enshrined, during the Victorian

period, in the Royal Geographical Society,

which began systematic courses on surveying

in 1879 (Collier and Inkpen, 2003). Of course,

these practices raised a range ofepistemo-

logicalproblems, rotating around who could

be trusted to deliver reliable information (see

trust), how distant observers were to be

regulated and what were the appropriate

instruments to use in distant places. In an

attempt to address such problems, the

Society published itsGuide to travellersin many

successive editions, in the hope of bringing

discipline and order to distant observers, and

thereby to secure testimonial credibility

(Driver, 2001b).

This latter concern about how to manage

the harvesting of global data for geography is

intimately connected with the whole subject of

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SCIENCE PARK