ResearchBlogging.org News

Krystal D’Costa selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the social sciences, including anthropology, research, and philosophy. She blogs about the anthropology of urban life at Anthropology in Practice.

• In 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would later bear his name, Manhattan was a lush, verdant island–a bit different from what it is today. This image has often captivated my imagination. Eric Michael Johnson evokes a similar sense of awareness as he peels back the layers of Yosemite’s identity in a guest post on Reconciliation Ecology. Eric reveals the ways the idea and encouraged image of a pristine wilderness overlooks how conservation efforts erased a large portion of the park’s history from public memory, and changed the land forever.
• Twitter has yielded some interesting data, as reported by Richard Littauer on A Replicated Typo: Tweets have linguistic markers tied to geography–and this is evident even without the obvious tell of geotagging. What this means is that we can pick out the textual equivalent of regional speech. It’s exciting because it gives us another way to understand languages in the digital age.
• Urban residents exhibit no small number of unique behaviors, and fast walking is certainly one of them. On Evolving Economics, Jason Collins reviews a few studies that attempt to explain this fast walking trend. The review weaves together an interesting mix of answers to address the complexity of communities.

I’ll be back next Thursday with more research from the social sciences.