現時点では大学内部からしかアクセスできないが、以前は誰でも自由にこのスピーチ・ムービーにアクセスできた。2005年夏、横国大でネットサーフィンをしていた時、ふとハーバード大学CGAのWebサイトを見つけ、この学長スピーチ・ムービーに辿りついた。このムービーを見た瞬間、「こっ、ここに行きたぃ！」と強く思うほど、自分にとっては印象的なスピーチだった。
具体的には、「アカデミックにおけるGISのこれからの方向性」、そして、「ハーバードが、なぜこのタイミングでGISセンターを設立したのか？ハーバードはGISに何を期待しているのか？」を、学長が自身の言葉で明確に、力強く語っている。彼の専門である経済学をもとに、GISの重要性を説いているところが興味深い。
以下は、15分のスピーチ・ムービーをもとに、エ（ト）ロイ・ファウラー氏協力のもと、独自に文字化したものだ。英語ですが、一読の価値アリです。
May 5, 2006 『History and Revival of Geography at Harvard』
Welcome Remarks Video of presentation by President Lawrence H. Summers より。
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This is an important day for Harvard, and it’s even possible that it’s important day beyond Harvard. Someone has said that when Harvard takes a step, it blazes a past. Sometimes that the case, sometimes it’s not, but might be the step here.By embracing new geography, I think Harvard is taking important step today. Before I do anything else, I want to thank Jack Dangermond for his vision, energy and support. I want to thank Peter Bol who has been the faculty leader of this project, and who is done remarkable job, for all his energy and for his vision.
Harvard’s history with geography has not been a tale of an avoid happiness. One of my predecessors examined Harvard’s efforts in geography with a withering gaze some years ago, and the conclusion of his examination, they were no more. One can debate whether that’s a wise or an unwise action. What it said about social science of geography as it stood at that point, what it said about other less attractive personal aspects that may of entered the decision making.
But that’s the past, and geography is a very different field today, and it’s increasingly at the center of a very wide range of intellectual concerns. We start a certain number of interdisciplinary programs designed to bring people together across different fields at Harvard, but what I’m struck by looking out this crowd, is we have Humanists like Professor Kune and Professor Angle here, we have social scientists like Professor Samson and Professor King here, we have scientists like Professor Goodman here, my understanding is the Professor Shrag would be here a little later. So it’s a reflection at the first level on the importance of what we are doing here, on the importance of geography, on the importance of the kind of work that national geographers do that there is such a wide and broad interdisciplinary representation here.
I know a little about this in the context of my own field, where if you thought about Economics and all the things Economics sought to explain and discuss. What you would be struck by until very very recently to some extent it’s still, true today… there are lots of economic observations you can try to explain: Why are there these things called interest rates? Why is there this thing called the stock market? why are some people rich, why are some people poor, why are there shortages, or sometimes surplus other time, why are there booms sometimes, and why are there busts other times. If you take any introductive economics course, you will learn a set of theories that explain all of the phenomena I just described.
Here is another phenomenon. If you look at the land area of the Great Plains, it’s all more less to same and yet about 95 % of economic activity takes place in about 5 % of the space. And you can sit through all of the introductive economics, you can graduate as an undergraduate, and then graduate as a PhD, for almost any university economic program, and not be exposed even to the fact that that’s an interesting observation, let alone to what are the most convincing explanations for it. And yet if you think about it, it’s something that’s absolutely central to the organization of economic life, it’s something that must obviously bare on everything from economics of housing, to the economics of transportation, to the economics of international trade between different places. There is now a new economic geography that’s seeking to shed light on these issues that has made considerable progress. But if you had to think about all of the really important phenomena economically, surely the one that has the highest ratio of importance to amount studied in academy is Economic geography.
There’s another related observation of role of place in social science. I reminded of seeing Professor Samson here. We have the notion in economics indeed in much of social science of individualistic rationality that we all are born with our preferences and those preferences shape our demands and shape our behaviors, and then they all interact to make some kind of equilibrium, and that’s the economy. And yet we are all creatures of our social environments, and the social environments that affect us most are the social environments that are closest to us. So questions of our neighborhood, our place how it evolves, how it makes us evolve, how our evolution affect other places are something central importance that’s too is part of new geography.
I’ve used you these examples in a little bit of details because they are actually near things that I know a little bit about. But there are others, in some ways even larger questions that this new geography will open up for us. What have been the deep forces, the really deep forces that have shaped the way in which human history has unfolded. Why is it that in one continent, there are ten times as many people per acre as in another continent, and those people are ten times as rich? Why are some areas of the world much more prone to war than other areas of world? Why do people live longer if they are luckily enough to be born in some areas of the world, then in others? We are starting to develop answers to these questions, that go beyond one story, after another, one data point one story that approach to deep history. That kind of thing whether he got right or he got wrong, which is a very matter of debate, that’s represented by Jared Diamond “Guns, Germs and Steel" that has the prospect of fundamentally enhancing our understanding.
That’s yet the another aspect why I think an effort like the one that embarked on here is very very important, that goes to the nature of scientific inquiry. Freeman Dyson once suggested there are two views of the history of science. One is the view to which I was exposed to my high school training and which I suspect most intuitive to all of us. There these paradigms that come from hypothesis that have been confirmed for a while, that go along, eventually people start to detect anomalies within the paradigm, enough anomalies build up, people don’t know quite what to do, some genius comes alone and proposes a new theory, that explains the anomalies and opens up new questions and we declare progress. What might be called Cunean view of progress science.
That’s different view, which Daison labeled the Galisonian view of history of science, after a colleague of Peter Galison. It’s a view that emphasizes centrally tools. Yes that’s lot of stuff about hypothesis and so forth, basically, when people looked telescope and saw there were moons orbiting Jupiter, then they understood the answer, not everything was revolving around the earth. When somebody invented microscope and looked into a microscope and they saw cells, and they knew something very important that they did not know before. One can extend the metaphor out to the particle accelerator, computerized genomic sequencing, or the Hubble telescope. The point is that the development of new tools just to open up huge areas of inquiry that lead to new hypothesis that lead to progress, and that the fundamental engine is the less the anomaly and theoretical insight, then the tools that change the nature of the questions that are being asked. It seems to me that’s very much represented here as well, with the tremendous new power of Geographic Information Systems that make it possible for us to construct models of everything for Gary King’s Voting district, Peter Bol’s China in the 3rd century, in ways that we didn’t have before.
So whether it’s history, whether it’s social science, whether it’s tools space science, this is an opportunity to explore a vast and not virgin intellectual territory, but an intellectual territory that can now be approached with new perspectives, new tools and newly important ways. That’s why this is a very important initiative for our university. And the Provost and I’ve been thrilled to lend our support to it, and I expect very very important things would come out of it in the future.
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※ 上述の文章はCGA公式発表のものではなく、ムービー画像をもとに著者が自主的に文字化したものです。スピーチをそのまま文字にしたので、文章として表記すると不自然な表現も含まれていますし、筆者の聞き間違いなどが含まれている可能性もあります。
≪写真 2008年9月までのハーバードCGA。写真・上の建物の３階で、定量社会科学研究所（the Institute for Quantitative Social Science）の一角を“間借り”している感じであった。≫
↓ハーバード大GIS研究の歴史がまとめられています。
