The curriculum in Britain, Ireland, and the colonies.(chap.5)

The article deals with the specificity of historiographic narration, discussed partly on the grounds of a polemic with the works of Hayden White. The main theses focus around the notions of distance and genre. Literature and historiography are juxtaposed against each other to emphasise their shared unstability and genre flexibility that contradict the essential genre theory. Micro-histories and literary histories are considered from the view-point of diverse constructions of distance, conceived as a combination of formal, emotional, ideological and cognitive elements that shape a sense of the reader's involvement in the past. The scale of the distance which ought to accompany a near and dense description enables to discern certain types of micro-historical narratives.

Histories, micro-and literary. Problems of genre and distance

Abstract The objectivistic philosophical assumptions which underlie contemporary research in accountancy, as well as economics and elsewhere, are challenged and an interpretive alternative is proposed. A “hermeneutical” view of decision-making is examined, first with regard to science in general, and then concerning the human sciences in particular, and finally with regard to economics. Human decisions are not seen as objective, mechanical or behavioristic but as meaningful utterances of minds, as part of a bidirectional communicative process. That is, scientific decisions, like everyday decisions, are mutually interpretive processes of communication in language. Although it is true that much of mainstream neoclassical economics is incompatible with this interpretive approach, the “Austrian” school can be seen as an interpretive version of neoclassicism. This school of economics indicates a way to understand the communicative function the accounting “language” itself serves in the economic process. The professional judgments made by both accounting researchers and practicing accountants, then, are treated as “matters of interpretation,” but as not, thereby, arbitrary.

The accounting of interpretations and the interpretation of accounts: the communicative function...

The theory and methods of space syntax can help rebalance the prevailing cultural
perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach
that emphasises maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded
in built forms The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space
syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban
movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past, that can help in the
interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial
culture In this article the authors explain how space syntax, an theory and method originally
developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to
research in social and urban history The key principles of the method are explained by
clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information
Systems) and through a worked example of a research undertaken into political meeting
places A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space
syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also
demonstrates the range of innovative contributions this interdisciplinary approach is able to
advance A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a
space syntax perspective

Mapping spatial cultures: contributions of space syntax toresearch in the urban history of the nineteenth-century city

To the realists.—You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it … But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality’, for example-—oh, that is a primeval ‘love’ … Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Two, extract from Section 57)

`Narrative and perspective; values and appropriate emotions?

In this book, published posthumously, R. G. Collingwood considers how the modern idea of history has grown up from the time of Herodotus to the present day. To Collingwood, 'history is not contained in books and documents, it lives only as a present interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian when he criticizes and interprets those documents, and by so doing relives for himself the states of mind into which he inquires'.

R. G. Collingwood

Papers

历史的观念 = The idea of history