Cet article analyse les ancrages spatiaux de la temporalité industrielle à Datong, ville moyenne du Shanxi, surnommée « capitale du charbon ». Le centre-ville, qui a fait l’objet d’un plan ambitieux de remodelage urbain autour du thème de la « vieille ville » historique et culturelle entre 2008 et 2013 ayant impulsé une opération colossale de démolition-reconstruction, a été délaissé au cours d’une période de transition politique difficile. Parallèlement, dans le district minier, l’entreprise d’État Tongmei, poumon économique de la ville, (...) avait absorbé de nombreux sites miniers. En 2006, les mineurs qui habitaient à proximité dans des logements auto construits, inconfortables et précaires, ont été relogés dans un nouveau quartier, construit et entretenu par Tongmei. Mais à partir de 2013, l’entreprise a ralenti son activité suite à l’effondrement des cours du charbon. Les lieux portent les traces de ces temporalités, de l’expansion au déclin. Le centre-ville fait apparaître les différentes étapes de sa construction et de sa destruction. Les mines sont devenues des terrains inconstructibles parsemés de ruines résidentielles où les derniers habitants attendent d’être pris en charge. Dans ces deux quartiers, l’espace urbain témoigne d’une attente prolongée, sans échéance claire. Les lieux permettent d’ethnographier les temporalités de la reconversion inachevée de Datong, en revenant sur la temporalité politique de l’aménagement urbain, la temporalité économique de la transition du charbon et la temporalité sociale de l’urbanisation à travers ces deux opérations de rénovation urbaine, massives mais restées inachevées. (shrink)

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a (...) large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets. (shrink)

Neuroimaging technologies have improved our understanding of deception and also exhibit their potential in revealing the origins of its neural mechanism. In this study, a quantitative power analysis method that uses the Welch power spectrum estimation of functional near-infrared spectroscopy signals was proposed to examine the brain activation difference between the spontaneous deceptive behavior and controlled behavior. The power value produced by the model was applied to quantify the activity energy of brain regions, which can serve as a neuromarker for (...) deception detection. Interestingly, the power analysis results generated from the Welch spectrum estimation method demonstrated that the spontaneous deceptive behavior elicited significantly higher power than that from the controlled behavior in the prefrontal cortex. Meanwhile, the power findings also showed significant difference between the spontaneous deceptive behavior and controlled behavior, indicating that the reward system was only involved in the deception. The proposed power analysis method for processing fNIRS data provides us an additional insight to understand the cognitive mechanism of deception. (shrink)

Ces Lecons X abordent le phenomene humain hors de la conception toute faite repandue par les doctrines de la transparence. Ici, il s'agit de considerer chaque civilisation et ses facades sociales a l'instar d'un Texte, comme montage langagier, et de reconnaitre la condition theatrale de l'espece douee de parole. Dans cette perspective se revelent les structures dogmatiques du sujet et de la societe qui, du fait du langage, s'entre-appartiennent. La rehabilitation d'une tradition de pensee portee par le terme antique de (...) dogma, transmis par la Grece a l'Occident jusqu'a l'ere industrielle, rouvre des chemins longtemps verrouilles et remet a l'ordre du jour la question immemoriale: que veut dire instituer l'animal humain? Au carrefour de ces chemins: la suprematie de la relation d'identite / alterite, avec ce qu'elle postule du cote du lien d'image, objet des grandes manoeuvres religieuses et politiques. Ainsi, prendre en compte la vie de la representation comme ressort de la fonction d'instituer entraine a interroger les procedures genealogiques d'acces a la realite, les systemes normatifs differencies et, du meme pas, a decouvrir la face cachee du principe de Raison. Sont mises au jour la fragilite humaine et les incertitudes de l'edification sociale. Les echafaudages inventes par l'anthropos pour la reproduction et la survie ne sont intelligibles que mis en rapport avec la dimension de l'Ancetre, autrement dit du Temps, cette vision des lointains, marqueur des civilisations: scenario fondateur, elaboration des attaches au present, horizon de l'inconnu a venir. Cette donnee basique donne relief aux domaines qui sont strategiques parce qu'ils touchent au destin des montages instituants a l'echelle de l'espece: religion, techno-science-economie, regles et preceptes du droit. A notre epoque de deraisonnement multiforme, ou les individus sont malmenes et guettes par la menace de perdre pied, il convient de porter le regard sur ces constructions de discours - poussees de facon recurrente au delire meurtrier, de nos jours sous des formes inedites - et sur leur portee structurale. Si la notion d'anthropologie, aujourd'hui figee et si galvaudee que j'hesitai a la reprendre, peut retrouver vigueur, ce sera au prix du depassement de l'impasse a laquelle a finalement abouti cette discipline: a quoi sert le penser? Reprenant le theme, longuement medite, d'anthropologie dogmatique, ce livre invite le lecteur a s'aventurer sur les sentiers non balises par la doxa contemporaine, oublieuse de son site historial et de ses sources.P. L. (shrink)

Dans la première moitié du xixe siècle en Angleterre, autour de Charles babbage (1791–1871), John F. W. Herschel (1792–1871), George Peacock (1791–1858), Duncan F. Gregory (1813–1844), Augustus de Morgan (1806–1871), George Boole (1815–1864), et d'autres auteurs moins connus, un réseau d'algébristes renouvelle singulièrement la conception de l'algèbre, à tel point que leur travail est le plus souvent interprété comme émergence des travaux sur l'algèbre abstraite. Comme ces algébristes sont également des réformateurs impliqués dans la réorganisation de la science, il s'agira (...) de proposer de ces travaux une lecture plus contextuelle, afin d'éclairer leur inscription parmi les effects de la Révolution industrielle (1760–1830), et d'analyser leur rôle de médiation culturelle entre les racines d'un savoir universitaire fondé sur la fidélité aux Anciens, et de nouvelles formes d'élaboration des connaissances. Une médiation marquée par un premier rapprochement entre algèbre et logique. (shrink)

Inspired by Heidegger’s concept of the clearing of being, and by Wittgenstein’s ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds—the "site of the social"—as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki’s analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individualist, holistic, and structuralist accounts that (...) have dominated social theory since the mid-nineteenth century. A special feature of the book is its development of the theoretical argument by sustained reference to two historical examples: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s and contemporary day trading on the Nasdaq market. First focusing on the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illuminate basic ontological characteristics of the social site, Schatzki then uses the sharp contrast with the complex and dynamic practice of day trading to reveal what makes this approach useful as a general account of social existence. Along the way he provides new insights into many major issues in social theory, including the nature of social order, the significance of agency, the distinction between society and nature, the forms of social change, and how the social present affects its future. (shrink)

Cet inédit issu du fonds d’archives Henri Lefebvre est la retranscription d’une conférence prononcée en 1959 qui porte sur l’évaluation des enjeux des luttes paysannes, mal saisis selon l’auteur. Il est augmenté d’une présentation qui insiste sur l’inscription de ce thème dans un programme précoce qui, attaché à la question de la rente foncière dans la perspective des textes de jeunesse de Marx, alimentera la réflexion lefebvrienne sur les formes sociales comme fondements de la sociologie historique de Marx. Selon Lefebvre, (...) les travaux incessants de Marx sur la dissolution de la propriété collective au cours de l’histoire et hors du contexte européen sont à la fois inaboutis et insuffisamment compris, alors qu’ils faisaient une place plus importante au socialisme paysan. (shrink)

This binary also speaks more generally to how we tend to conceive of the relation between place and space: As many scholars have pointed out, place often comes valued as "the sphere of the everyday, or real and valued practices," or "a locus of denial" trailing ideas of the "closed, coherent, integrated as authentic, as 'home', a secure retreat" (Massey 2005, 5-6). Doreen Massey's descriptions speak to our perceptions of a center, of a core toward which energy flows, and in (...) so doing marking, in Michel de Certeau's words, "an instantaneous configuration of positions. (shrink)

The PhD is concerned with the construction of site knowledge and how this is transformed into knowing where and how to intervene in a river system close to ecological collapse. It involves three overlapping topics: • Site knowledge and its impact upon the design process • Development of tools and techniques appropriate for working on a particular type of site condition: the threshold between land and water • Transitory: the impact of dynamic processes and events on inhabitation (...) Site knowledge emerges from a process of investigating a location. It is generated by on-site and off-site operations. This involves the architect in a dynamic set of relationships - between encounters on the ground in the here and now, with more remote encounters with the site from the studio and archive. This mode of site study amplifies the impact of scale shift and it exposes the variable and provisional status of a location, while also providing a way of operating in environments that can be considered dynamic. The PhD is premised upon the need for a work to relate to its surrounding environment. The hinged meaning between the terms a site and to site have relevance to the design process. A site, as a noun, suggests a specific place, such as a plot of land, whereas the verb to site, suggests that a work will be placed in relation to other things. Site knowledge is thus generated through the act of describing a place, through the act of making drawings and other descriptions of that place. It generates ways of conceptualising a site and leads to action: knowing how and where to intervene in a location. The River Murray provided a context for the project work of the PhD. Research led to tools for recording and interpreting the impacts of flood events on the settlements on the riverbanks that were protected by levees that worked against the natural forces of the system. The research culminated in a range of designs that demonstrated how to integrate town and tourist developments into the re-established cyclical flows necessary for the health of the system. (shrink)

An awareness of the significance of location in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge has brought a new dimension to recent work on the sociology of science. But the importance of speech in scientific enterprises has been less well developed. This article explores the idea of `spaces of speech' by underscoring the connections between location and locution. It develops a case study of how Darwinian evolution was talked about in different sites using examples from Ireland and the American South (...) during the latter part of the 19th century. These reveal how sites enable and constrain what may be said, and heard, about particular scientific claims, and how they are crucial to understanding the circulation of scientific claims in public arenas. (shrink)

This book introduces a set of methods and techniques for studying mathematical theories and relating them to each other through the use of Grothendieck toposes.

Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produce an aggressively normative 'official reality', the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are thought, constructed, and instantiated, forcefully seeking to overcome the contemporary moment's deficit of (...) conceptualizing alternate realities, its apparent fear of imagining possible new and compelling futures, and beginning the arduous task of producing the political dynamics necessary for actual construction. Implicit in this dynamic between the conceptual and the possible is the question of how thinking intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies and structures of the world that loom before us. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no confidence in any 'given' that could guarantee our labours, how do we even envisage the construction site(s) of possible worlds, and with what kind of diagrams, tools, and languages can we bring them into being? (shrink)

본 논문은 여성주의적 실천의 한 방식으로서 장소 특정적 예술이 가질 수 있는 가능성을 미학적 관점에서 탐구하는 것을 목표로 한다. 현대예술의 일반적인 형식중의 하나로서 자리잡은 장소특정적 예술은, 장소라는 요소가 비판적 예술 실천(수행)에서 어떻게 문제적이 되는지 장소적 실천 일반에 대해서 시사하는 바가 크다. 그 중에서도 본 논문은 장소와 여성주의적 실천의 관계를 다루며, 이를 위해, 2000년대 이후 한국 여성예술가의 네 개의 장소특정적 예술들 - 예술가의 서사와 담론이 중심이 되어 장소화나 특정 장소 선정이 이루어지는 두 가지 경우, 특정 지역 관련 기획전시의 경우, 특정 지역연구 (...) 프로젝트의 경우-을 대표 사례로 고려하였다.BR 모더니즘 예술의 매체 특정성과 대조적으로, 장소 특정성은 예술이 놓여있는 사회제도적 장소에 대한 의식과 질문이 주요동기가 되기 때문에, 비판적 문화실천으로서 여성주의적 실천의 가능성이 탐색될 수 있다. 예술에서의 장소특정성이 여성주의적 실천으로 기능하기 위해서 우선적으로 선행되어야 할 것은 장소 혹은 장소정체성이라는 개념에 대한 재해석이다. 장소란 특정 지리적 입지에 교차하는 다양한 사회적 관계라는 비판지리학자 매시Massey의 주장에 따른다면, 장소를 재구성하고 재해석하는 행위는 모두 정치적 행위이며, 예술에서 지역적 정체성이라는 요소의 활용 역시 젠더나 인종, 지역 문제에 대한 진보적 실천의 방식이 될 수 있다. 여성주의적으로 의미있는 장소적 예술실천에서 중요한 것은 이처럼, 우선적으로는 관계적 장소개념에 의해 기존의 지역정체성이 역사적으로 어떻게 구성되었는지의 해체와 재해석, 즉 특정 장소 정체성에 대한 여성주의적 관점에서의 적극적 재해석이다. 또한 장소특정적 예술의 많은 형태가 특정 장소나 지역 연구프로젝트라는 특수한 예술 형식과 관련된다. 이같은 지역연구 프로젝트는 여성예술가(집단)가 그 지역 정체성을 재해석하는 것 뿐 아니라, 그 지역에 살고 있는 여성 공동체의 삶에 개입하게 된다. 따라서 장소특정적 실천이 여성주의적으로서 유의미하게 위해 중요한 두 번째 요소는, 타자로서의 예술가가 지역 공동체와 관계함에 있어 어떤 위치를 취하고 어떤 방식을 택할 것인가에 대한 미학적, 윤리학적 성찰이라고 할 수 있다. (shrink)

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Merton's concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent models for (...) the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS. (shrink)

Monitoring of clinical trials is important to ensure adherence to protocol, to safeguard the rights of research participants and to achieve compliance with principles of good clinical practice. Recent regulatory changes in India require Ethics Committees to keep an oversight of ongoing clinical trials including on-site monitoring. In this article, we share the experience of on-site monitoring of clinical trials by the Ethics Committee of a tertiary care, academic and research centre in India. We found a large number (...) of shortcomings in the areas of informed consent, adverse events, insurance and reimbursement, which would not have been detected by off-site document review. Interestingly, many shortcomings were also not detected by on-site monitoring arranged by clinical trial sponsors. We therefore conclude that on-site monitoring of ongoing clinical trials is a highly important activity for Indian Ethics Committees. (shrink)

In the present study, ordinary kriging and support vector machine have been used to develop three dimensional site characterization model of an alluvial site based on standard penetration test results. The SVM is a novel type of learning machine based on statistical learning theory, uses regression technique by introducing ε-insensitive loss function has been adopted. The knowledge of the semivariogram of the SPT values is used in the ordinary kriging method to predict the N values at any point (...) in the subsurface of the site where field measurements are not available. The comparison between the SVM and ordinary kriging model demonstrates that the SVM model is superior to ordinary kriging model in predicting N values in the site. (shrink)

Les sites internet santé français relèvent-ils de la vulgarisation scientifique et médicale? Et, si tel est le cas, dans quelle acception du terme « vulgarisation »? Comment ce média transforme-t-il la recherche d’information sur les questions de santé? Il permet une nouvelle forme de vulgarisation, où l’utilisateur définit lui-même le degré de vulgarisation souhaité. Cette autonomisation affranchit davantage de la normativité imposée par les vulgarisateurs, qui jusqu’alors choisissaient et limitaient contenus et forme des textes. Outre une fonction informative, quels sont (...) les autres usages de ces sites? Qu’apportent-ils d’autre que la consultation d’ouvrages ou de revues sur la santé? Ils offrent (notamment grâce aux échanges sur les forums de discussion) une autre vision de l’information santé : moins verticale, elle remet en question les traditions de paternalisme médical, encore passablement ancrées en France, et s’opposent ainsi à la normativité du discours médical, où le savoir est transmis de manière unilatérale, des professionnels de la santé et du médicament vers le grand public. (shrink)

Les sites internet santé français relèvent-ils de la vulgarisation scientifique et médicale? Et, si tel est le cas, dans quelle acception du terme « vulgarisation »? Comment ce média transforme-t-il la recherche d’information sur les questions de santé? Il permet une nouvelle forme de vulgarisation, où l’utilisateur définit lui-même le degré de vulgarisation souhaité. Cette autonomisation affranchit davantage de la normativité imposée par les vulgarisateurs, qui jusqu’alors choisissaient et limitaient contenus et forme des textes. Outre une fonction informative, quels sont (...) les autres usages de ces sites? Qu’apportent-ils d’autre que la consultation d’ouvrages ou de revues sur la santé? Ils offrent (notamment grâce aux échanges sur les forums de discussion) une autre vision de l’information santé : moins verticale, elle remet en question les traditions de paternalisme médical, encore passablement ancrées en France, et s’opposent ainsi à la normativité du discours médical, où le savoir est transmis de manière unilatérale, des professionnels de la santé et du médicament vers le grand public. (shrink)

Présentation d'une pensée qui synthétise les savoirs des Lumières et prépare les idéologies contemporaines, du socialisme au libéralisme industriel, et des disciplines comme la sociologie, le management ou la science politique. Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, surtout, peut être considéré comme le fondateur de la religion scientifique, industrielle et technologique contemporaine.

To discover affects within Husserl’s texts designates a difficult investigation; it points to a theme of which these texts were forced to speak, even as they were explicitly speaking of regional ontologies and the foundations of sciences. For we may at first wonder: where can affection find a positive role in the rigor of a pure philosophy that seeks to account for its phenomena from within the immanence of consciousness? Does this not mean that the very passivity and foreignness of (...) affect will be overlooked; will it not be continually linked to a Vorstellung that issues as a ray of the pure ego? That is, will the phenomenological account of affect be reduced to the cognition of an object, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests? Yet there are affects in Husserl’s texts that maintain their autonomy and resist subsumption to an objectivating intentionality.We may see this in the Lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: in the longitudinal intentionality of retention, through which consciousness becomes aware of its elapsed phases without making them into objects—a passive synthesis that gives the flow of time-constituting consciousness the form of a continually deferred auto-affection.1We find it again as early as the fifth Logical Investigation, 2 providing us with the impetus to radicalize Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

Dès que l’on décide de travailler sur la pensée de Jeremy Bentham se pose la question de l’édition des textes d’une part, et de leur disponibilité d’autre part. Dès que l’on décide d’utiliser internet comme un outil de recherche se pose la question de la gratuité ou non des informations d’une part, et des droits d’auteur des textes présents d’autre part. Ces quatre questions sont inextricablement liées à l’heure des projets de bibliothèques universelles. Le but de ce court article n’est (...) pas d.. (shrink)

Jecker et al. (2024) propose seven ethical principles to guide international bioethics conferencing, applying them to the selection of Qatar as the location for the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics...

ArgumentIn the decades following World War II, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titledActivity Analysis of Production and Allocation. New ideas in optimization theory, linked to linear programming, developed from the conference's papers. The authors’ history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of postwar science in-between National Laboratories (...) and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The authors argue that the conference signaled the birth of a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques un-interrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics. (shrink)

The idea of culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade as the result of a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. But at the very same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized by anthropologists, the people they study are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance (...) of place in the global space of relations which mold the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture. (shrink)

The concept of “site” is at the center of current debates in theories of social practices as well as in cultural anthropology. It is unclear, however, how to assess the associated methodological assumption that overriding social structures or cultural formations can manifest themselves in sites. The article draws on the conception of social practices and introduces the notion of “publicness” in order to explicate how and why sociality and social structures can be accessed through “siting”. Sites as well as (...) social practices, it is claimed, have to be conceptualized as essentially public and thus principally observable phenomena. This assumption of publicness implicit to both site ontology and theories of social practices is unfolded on the basis of a praxeological reformulation of the paradigm of joint attention elaborated in developmental psychology. To avoid presentist misinterpretations, we then conceptualize sociality as chains of practices across time and space, drawing on the works of Theodore Schatzki, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Bruno Latour. The public carriers of practices (artifacts, symbols, media, bodies) and the translocal structures they establish acquire particular significance in these approaches. In a further step, we present some methodological consequences of the “publicness assumption” and support our arguments by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's study on Distinction. (shrink)

The Algerian writer Malika Mokeddem embeds her novels in the geography of a desert that belongs ever more to the past of the nomadic immediate ancestors of her main characters. Object of nostalgic yearning, this desert past and the nomads peopling it also necessitate flight, especially for women, trapped there in a patriarchal culture and society whose violence has been perpetuated into that of contemporary Algeria - also often aimed against women. Besides a few strong older women able to take (...) advantage of their age and status to help their juniors, these novels principally set on stage young women or girls whose accidental or perilously self-willed access to education and - above all, writing - frees them from binding traditions even while, for most, such writing is akin to the nomadic traveling of their ancestors (as `writing' on the desert's very body). Even so, because it is a revolt against such traditions, their writing is the site and actuality of fraught struggle and pushes them into the `nomadism' of literal exile, across seas themselves often envisaged as wider deserts. (shrink)

Visions of and narratives about the future energy system influence the actual creation of innovations and are thus accompanying the current energy transition. Particularly in times of change and uncertainty, visions gain crucial relevance: imagining possible futures impacts the current social reality by both creating certain spaces of action and shaping technical artifacts. However, different actors may express divergent visions of the future energy system and its implementation. Looking at a particular innovation site involving multiple stakeholders over an 8-year (...) period, we empirically analyze the collective negotiation process of vision making, its shifting over time, and how visions eventually unfold performativity. Adopting a process perspective, we identify four different phases and the respective functions of visions and visioneering related to the site’s development by exploring the question: Why do certain visions gain importance and eventually lead to substantial changes of the project in process? Qualitative data from documents and interviews analyzed with reference to science and technology studies show the interweaving conditions that influence the visioneering and the linkage to the actual development of material artifacts. Against the backdrop of innovation projects, this paper explores visioneering as an ongoing, transformative and collective process and reveals its moments of stabilization. (shrink)

Site‐specific or target‐specific mutagenesis of viral DNA genomes, using a selectable marker system is a powerful tool for the analysis of the function of specific regions of large DNA genomes. Through these techniques the construction of vectors capable of delivering vaccines for the prevention of infectious disease in humans and animals is possible.