Download or read book An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion written by W. Bainbridge and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates principles of Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs), by running avatars based on eleven deceased members of one family through ten highly diverse virtual worlds from the violent Defiance to the intellectual Uru: Myst Online, from the early EverQuest to the recent Elder Scrolls Online.
Download or read book Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion written by Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the implementation difficulties of researching religion online and reflects on the ethical dilemmas faced by sociologists of religion when using digital research methods. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, global case studies draw on the use of social media as a method for researching religious oppression, religion and identity in virtual worlds, digital communication within religious organisations, and young people's diverse expressions of faith online. Additionally, boxed tips are provided throughout the text to serve as reminders of tools that readers may use in their own research projects.
Download or read book Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion written by Vít Šisler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.
Download or read book Postmortal Society written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were. Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to ‘cheat’ death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the ‘immortalisation’ of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding ‘immortality’ in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies. A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity’s attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.
Download or read book Star Worlds written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking look at the paradox of technology to both liberate and enslave our current culture by noted scholar William Sims Bainbridge
Download or read book Cultural Science written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by Business Expert Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book explores the new relationships connecting computer science, social science, and the humanities. In our time of great and uncertain change, business, government, and education must partner in many forms of technical and cultural convergence–for the benefit of both human welfare and economic recovery. This innovative book explores the new relationships connecting computer science, social science, and the humanities. One popular form of artificial social intelligence, recommender systems, can become a far more valuable tool for research on the arts, beginning with movies and computer games, then extending to all the other art forms. While artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for description of physical reality, it must become both social and cultural if it is to be a valued tool of human expression. Many new developments offer opportunities and challenges for both industry and government policy. This book shows how artificial intelligence and related information technologies can converge successfully with the social sciences and humanities, so together they can achieve maximum benefits for people.
Download or read book Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds written by Kiran Lakkaraju and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cross-disciplinary exploration of MMOs and other complex online worlds melds work from computer science, psychology and social science.
Download or read book Virtual Sociocultural Convergence written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the remarkable sociocultural convergence in multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds, through the unification of computer science, social science, and the humanities. The emergence of online media provides not only new methods for collecting social science data, but also contexts for developing theory and conducting education in the arts as well as technology. Notably, role-playing games and virtual worlds naturally demonstrate many classical concepts about human behaviour, in ways that encourage innovative thinking. The inspiration derives from the internationally shared values developed in a fifteen-year series of conferences on science and technology convergence. The primary methodology is focused on sending avatars, representing classical social theorists or schools of thought, into online gameworlds that harmonize with, or challenge, their fundamental ideas, including technological determinism, urban sociology, group formation, freedom versus control, class stratification, linguistic variation, functional equivalence across cultures, behavioural psychology, civilization collapse, and ethnic pluralism. Researchers and students in the social and behavioural sciences will benefit from the many diverse examples of how both qualitative and quantitative science of culture and society can be performed in online communities of many kinds, even as artists and gamers learn styles and skills they may apply in their own work and play.
Download or read book Family History Digital Libraries written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modern era, every family and local community can cultivate its own history, endowing living people with meanings inherited from the people of the past, by means of today’s computer-based information and communication technologies. A new profession is emerging, family historians, serving the wider public by assisting in collection and analysis of fascinating data, by teaching talented amateur historians, and by producing complete narratives. Essential are the skills and technologies required to preserve and connect photos, movies, videos, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, artefacts and even architecture such as homes. Online genealogical services are well established sources of official government records, but usually not for recent decades, and not covering the valuable records of legal, medical, and religious organizations. Information can be shared and interpreted by family members through oral history interviews, social media, and online private archives such as wikis and shared file depositories. This book explores a wide variety of online information sources and achieves coherence by documenting and interpreting the history of a particular extended American family on the basis of 9 decades of movies and videos, 17 decades of photographs, and centuries of documents. Starting now, any family may begin to preserve their current experiences for the historians of the future, but this will require social as well as technical innovations. This book is the essential resource, providing the fundamental principles, effective methods, and fascinating questions required to make our past live again.
Download or read book Security and Sovereignty in the North Atlantic written by L. Heininen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The North Atlantic continues to be an area of international strategic significance regionally and globally. This study explores the strong processes of sovereignty, as well as new independent states and micro-proto-states that are forming in the region.
Download or read book Tao and Trinity Notes on Self Reference and the Unity of Opposites in Philosophy written by S. Austin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese Tao and the Western Trinity have a fundamental unity of theme: the unity of opposites. Both are connected with problems as broad and diverse as how to describe the entire universe, how a system can talk about itself, the relationship between symbols and realities, and the nature of signs and sacraments.
Download or read book Prospects and Challenges of Free Trade Agreements written by Doren Chadee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-26 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the effectiveness of free trade agreements (FTAs) in unlocking international business opportunities in member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It takes an institutional perspective in explaining the existence and effects of non-tariff barriers and how FTAs can address these barriers to attract foreign investors.
Download or read book Virtual Local Manufacturing Communities written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by Business Expert Press. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deeply explores production-capable social media channels, based on thousands of hours of observation and extensive collection of statistical data, extracting hypotheses that may generalize to the real-world distributed manufacturing of the near future. Distributed manufacturing offers the promise of bringing jobs back to local communities, producing goods that are personalized or harmonize with distinctive cultures, and thereby reversing significant aspects of the globalization that has dominated in recent years. Large corporations may still have important roles to play, but in collaboration with local workshops, providing machinery, software, databases of designs, and communication media suitable for a diverse and dynamic workforce. For years, a set of computer simulation laboratories has flourished, in which millions of people have used virtual machines to produce a great variety of products: massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Their systems are highly diverse, complex, and provide information capable of serious social science analysis. This book deeply explores 30 of these production-capable social media, based on thousands of hours of observation and extensive collection of statistical data, extracting hypotheses that may generalize to the real-world distributed manufacturing of the near future. This book begins with an overview of this universe of online virtual worlds then demonstrates the principles of virtual manufacturing, modes of work-related communication, socio-economic structures and dynamics, and the function of artificial intelligence in these human-technology systems. It concludes with consideration of the large-scale technical and cultural variation illustrated both by individual examples and by the rather large industry in which they have long been successful.
Download or read book Managing Cultural Heritage written by M. Magliacani and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managing Cultural Heritage explores managerial and governance issues within the cultural heritage sector, with particular regard to the ecomuseum. Moreover, a social accountability model is supplied to ecomuseums in order to be accountable towards its shareholder, the local community.
Download or read book The Role of Strategic Intelligence in Law Enforcement written by J. Coyne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes how strategic intelligence can support decision-makers in national policing organizations to anticipate transnational organized crime (TOC). The authors examine case studies from Australia, Canada and the UK, and argue for the development of empirically-grounded intelligence theory to aid the policy process and law enforcement.
Download or read book A Cultural History of British Euroscepticism written by M. Spiering and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are the British so Euro-sceptic? Forget about tedious treaties, party politics or international relations. The real reason is that the British do not feel European. This book explores and explains the cultural divide between Britain and Europe, where it comes from and how it manifests itself in everyday life and the academic world.
Download or read book Modelling in Public Health Research written by E. Mansnerus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the development and use of mathematical models in public health research and policy. By introducing a life cycle metaphor, the author provides a unique perspective on how mathematical modelling techniques have increased our understanding of the governance of infectious risks in society.
