Tools

Some years ago I put together a summary of what I thought under the heading of 'Access to Tools' from my Goals and Methods of Teaching (Education is something you do to yourself)

(for some other important connections, see excerpt from 1968 Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth in its present incarnation, as an occasional and struggling magazine)

To give us a place to start exploring an array of tools, consider a word with a multitude of facets, and any number of connections to the worlds of Human Geography: development...and ask what does it mean?. How does it make sense to approach doing that, keeping in mind that our intention is to link the conceptual territory up with 'geography of human cultures'?

• Dictionaries are often good places to start, but the fun only begins when you start working with specialized dictionaries, because it's not so much definition we want as unpacking, exegesis, elaboration of semantic domains....

  Cassell's Dictionary of Word Histories: develop to unfold, to bring to light gradually; Old French développer, from Latin DIS + base represented by Old French voloper to envelop/wrap up, of unknown origin

  Alas, Raymond Williams' Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (PE1580 .W58 --but currently checked out to a professor. Not exactly a dictionary, but a book every educated person should be aware of) has no entry for 'development'. (Consider buying this for your very own library)

  Dictionary of the History of Ideas finds 279 'works' (e.g., PROGRESS IN THE MODERN ERA: 56 matches; HISTORIOGRAPHY : 53 matches; and so on...)

  Oxford English Dictionary:

  I. The process or fact of developing; the concrete result of this process.

  1. A gradual unfolding, a bringing into fuller view; a fuller disclosure or working out of the details of anything, as a plan, a scheme, the plot of a novel. Also quasi-concr. that in which the fuller unfolding is embodied or realized.
  2. Evolution or bringing out from a latent or elementary condition; the production of a natural force, energy, or new form of matter.
  3. The growth and unfolding of what is in the germ; the condition of that which is developed:
  4. Gradual advancement through progressive stages, growth from within.
  5. A developed or well-grown condition; a state in which anything is in vigorous life or action.
  6. The developed result or product; a developed form of some earlier and more rudimentary organism, structure, or system.

  II. Technical uses.

  7. Geom. The action of unrolling a cylindrical or conical surface, the unbending of any curved surface into a plane, or of a non-plane curve into a plane curve.
  8. Math. The process by which any mathematical expression is changed into another of equivalent value or meaning, and of more expanded form; the expanded form itself.
  9. The action of developing a photograph; the process whereby the latent image on the exposed film is rendered visible by the chemical precipitation of new material on the surface.
  10. Mus. The unfolding of the qualities or capacities of a musical phrase or subject by modifications of melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, etc., esp. in a composition of elaborate form, as a sonata; the part of a movement in which this takes place.

  11. attrib. development area, any of several areas designated by the Distribution of Industry Act of 1945 as places suffering or liable to suffer from unemployment, where new industries, etc., are encouraged.

  Hence developmen'tarian, de'velopmentist, nonce-wds., one who holds a theory of development or evolution in biology, theology, etc.; an evolutionist.

• Encyclopedias are sometimes quite useful for conceptual material like what we're trying to amass for 'development':

  The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] has no entry for 'development' ...interesting in itself, perhaps a case of The Dog in the Nighttime? (if the phrase is unfamiliar, see the reference to 'Silver Blaze'

  What about the current Encyclopedia Britannica? Here's the search result.

  ...but see also Wikipedia entries (Wikipedia is an essential bit of cyberinfrastructure to understand, to use for all sorts of purposes, and to watch as an unfolding process)

• Books are obviously important:

  Annie ought to be an early stop in any exploration of a topic, because it's our best means to get into locally-held collections of accumulated knowledge. Annie itself is just a pointer: the really interesting stuff happens when one starts pulling books off shelves and mining their content... but where can Annie get us if we're trying to grasp the semantic domains of 'development'?

  Annie: KW 'development' 18206 hits; SU 'development' 680 hits, 213 categories (many 'development banks'; SEE 'economic development'; SEE 'rural development projects'; many 'developmental' [mostly sciences])
  A title search gets 253 hits, and inspecting them is an education in itself. NB that the TI search gets you into the TABLES OF CONTENTS --so you see records for books with chapter titles containing the word 'development'

  Before we leave the subject of books and their contents, we need to take a quick look at Amazon.com and an epoch-making development that only JUST happened. If I log in to amazon.com as myself (and they know me well...) and search for "concept of development" I get something miraculous for the Sen book... in fact, 'of' complicates this feature, because amazon treats it as a stop word, one so common that it isn't indexed... but still I DO get the page(s) of the Sen book where the phrase shows up

• And then there's the Web... and our problem here is that there's just too much, so we need some productive strategies. We might as well start with

  Google: it seems obvious that a search for 'development' in Google would be ...well, foolish. 132 million hits --but the topmost line says

  " Category: Science > Social Sciences > Economics > Development " ..which leads to sublistings for Economics, one of which is Development Economics... which may or may not be the "answer" we need...

  I found it useful to try a phrase search (enclosing words in double quotes) for

  "concept of development" --which produces 13,000+ hits, but does start us off on a productive path. Among the particularly toothsome (and, taken together, very useful) results from this search, which I couldn't have found in any way but an Internet search:

  Introduction to the Concept of Human Development John Martinussen International Development Studies, Roskilde University

  THE RELATION BETWEEN CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT from Organization of American States

  Enlarging the concept of development (C.T. KURIEN, a review of Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1999 [HD75 .S455 1999 and presently checked out]) Learning from the New Concept of Development: Rio+5 Special Focus Report prepared by: AIESEC Costa Rica

  Note on the Concept of Development from MSc in Environment & Development Education, Iran Virtual Library

  Each of the above could be seen as a digression from the 'goal' of defining 'development', but a moment's thought suggests that there are other ways to think... and this search turned up phrases like "sustainable development" that make us realize there's more we need to search for... (see The Three Dimensions: Defining sustainable development from United Nations Industrial Development Organization, for example...)

  While Google is certainly the biggest and most frequently consulted means to access the wonders of the Web, there are others you should know about and explore the utility of, since they offer different presentations of the same territory, and represent different strategies for visualizing the semantic space we're exploring. At the moment, I'm exploring both Kartoo and Vivisimo:

  • Kartoo

  • Vivisimo
  On my own machine I have installed Grokker --but I'm not sure how to demo it in P302...

  Internet Explorer "Quick Search Add-Ons"

• eHRAF

  A 'quick search' for "development" retrieves 19672 matches within 1806 documents ...and drops us into a list of Cultures grouped by Region (Afica, Asia, etc.). Thus, we find for Iban, OC06, 320 matches in 26 documents. We can retrieve those 26 ...or should be able to... (I could retrieve the links to all the Iban sources in eHRAF). There's also a subject list, with these connotations for 'development':

  Development aid, 179
  DEVELOPMENT AND MATURATION, 856
  Development and research, government sponsored, 654
  Development and research, in applied science, 816
  Development and research, in theoretical science, 815
  Development of military weapons, 711
  Development trends, urban, 369
  Development, economic, as a general economic process, 433
  Development, economic, planning and development for, 179
  Development, embryonic, ideas about, 843
  Development, mental and age, ideas about, 856
  Development, mental and age, ontogenetic data, 145
  Development, personality, 155
  Development, power, 371

  ...each links to other subject categories, and to results for various listed Cultures --thus, I find 70 matches in 11 documents for 'Development, economic, as a general economic process' for the Iban... and for 'Development trends, urban', 201 matches in 5 documents for the Iban.

• JSTOR

  Pretty obviously, the take on 'development' in politics and economics and anthropology and geography (to say nothing of philosophy and history and music...) is likely to be pretty different

  These from a search for the phrase "concept of development" in the Geography subsection of JSTOR:

  Toward a Geographical Concept of Development (in Applied Geography) Harold A. Wood Geographical Review, Vol. 67, No. 4. (Oct., 1977), pp. 462-468.

  Conceptualizing Development Space in Africa D. R. F. Taylor Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 63, No. 2. (1981), pp. 87-93.

  Reflections on Third World Development: Ground Level Reality, Exogenous Forces, and Conventional Paradigms Lawrence A. Brown Economic Geography, Vol. 64, No. 3. (Jul., 1988), pp. 255-278.

  Introduction: Development Theory and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism Richard Peet; Michael Watts Economic Geography, Vol. 69, No. 3, Environment and Development, Part 1. (Jul., 1993), pp. 227-253.

  Development Thinking: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice Anders Narman Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 79, No. 4, Current Development Thinking. (1997), pp. 217-225.

• Cultural Survival Quarterly

  many ways to search (e.g., 'chiapas')...

  Cultural Solutions To Human Needs By Moles, Jerry Issue 25.3

  Going Under: Indigenous Peoples and the Struggle Against Large Dams By Fisher, William F. Issue 23.3

• The Globalist

At the end of the exercise, wonder aloud... should we do the same thing for 'modernization' ?