Lives Lived and Lives Told: Biographies of Geography's Quantitative Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I draw upon both biographical and sociological approaches to examine one moment in the history of geography's quantitative revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s: the publication of Brian Berry and William Garrison's paper, “The functional bases of the central place hierarchy”, in Economic Geography in 1958. The origins of that paper are traced through the life stories—the ‘lives told‘—of the two authors. In particular, I try to connect the specific life trajectories of Berry and Garrison up until 1958 with the wider social and cultural contexts in which they lived. The theoretical impetus for the study are three literatures: the first is science studies, and especially the work of Bruno Latour and his ideas of ‘black boxing’ and ‘translation’; the second is on the history and sociology of quantification; and the third is on biography, particularly scientific biography. The broader argument of the paper is that the seemingly disembodied numbers, calculations, and precisely drawn figures and graphs that increasingly inflect human geography from the late 1950s, and found in such papers as Berry and Garrison's, are socially embedded, a consequence not of a universal rationality but of specific lives and times that infuse the very substance of the works produced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".