Download or read book Displaying The Natural World for Public Curiosity written by Cheryl Ann Holzmeyer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation analyzes the U.S. science museum field over time in order to examine institutional emergence, institutional transformation, and changing patterns of science boundary-work in displaying "the natural world" to publics. It investigates the constitution of the U.S. science museum field via 19th century natural history museums and world's fairs, and the 20th century transformation of the field by industrial science museums and science center museums. Its theoretical contribution is to underscore the significance of material culture and its spatial dimensions to analyzing institutions, including patterns of boundary-work between publics and science. It argues that industrial science museums and their novel exhibitionary conventions arose as industrial material culture became framed as "applied science," and as distinct from artifacts in the existing field of natural history museums. In addition, it argues that science center museums distinguished themselves from and proliferated more rapidly than industrial science museums due not only to new constituencies mobilized on their behalf, but also due to their de-emphasis on collections, particularly of rare and historical artifacts. These changes again facilitated new exhibitionary conventions. Thus the emergence, transformation and proliferation of institutions hinge on their material cultural dimensions, on multiple levels.
Download or read book Nature Anatomy written by Julia Rothman and published by Storey Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See the world in a whole new way! Acclaimed illustrator Julia Rothman combines art and science in this exciting and educational guide to the structure, function, and personality of the natural world. Explore the anatomy of a jellyfish, the inside of a volcano, monarch butterfly migration, how sunsets work, and much more. Rothman’s whimsical illustrations are paired with interactive activities that encourage curiosity and inspire you to look more closely at the world all around you. Nature Anatomy is the second book in Rothman's Anatomy series – you'll love Nature Anatomy Notebook, Ocean Anatomy, Food Anatomy, and Farm Anatomy, too!
Download or read book Evolution and Victorian Culture written by Bernard V. Lightman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays from leading scholars, the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture is explored for the first time, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Rather than focusing simply on evolution and literature or art, this volume brings together essays exploring the impact of evolutionary ideas on a wide range of cultural activities including painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture. Broad-ranging, rather than narrowly specialized, each chapter provides a brief introduction to key scholarship, a central section exploring original insights drawn from primary source material, and a conclusion offering overarching principles and a projection towards further areas of research. Each chapter covers the work of significant individuals and groups applying evolutionary theory to their particular art, both as theorists and practitioners. This comprehensive examination of topics sheds light on larger and previously unknown Victorian cultural patterns.
Download or read book Curious Encounters written by Adriana Craciun and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.
Download or read book Animals and Ourselves written by Kathy Merlock Jackson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between humans and animals has always been strong, symbiotic and complicated. Animals, real and fictional, have been a mainstay in the arts and entertainment, figuring prominently in literature, film, television, social media, and live performances. Increasingly, though, people are anthropomorphizing animals, assigning them humanoid roles, tasks and identities. At the same time, humans, such as members of the furry culture or college mascots, find pleasure in adopting animal identities and characteristics. This book is the first of its kind to explore these growing phenomena across media. The contributors to this collection represent various disciplines, to include the arts, humanities, social sciences, and healthcare. Their essays demonstrate the various ways that human and animal lives are intertwined and constantly evolving.
Download or read book Travel Writing and the Natural World 1768 1840 written by P. Smethurst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as a starting point the parallel occurrence of Cook's Pacific voyages, the development of natural history, scenic tourism in Britain, and romantic travel in Europe, this book argues that the effect of these practices was the production of nature as an abstract space and that the genre of travel writing had a central role in reproducing it.
Download or read book Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds written by Leslie Umberger and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to personalize our surroundings is a defining human characteristic. For some this need becomes a compulsion to transform their personal surroundings into works of art. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has undertaken the mission to preserve these environments, which are presented for the first time in Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds. This colorful and inspiring book features the work of twenty-two vernacular artists whose locales, personal histories, and reasons for art-making vary widely but who all share a powerful connection to the home as art. Featured projects range from art environments that remain intact, such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in California, tosites lost over the years such as Emery Blagdon's six hundred elaborate "Healing Machines," made of copper, aluminum, tinfoil, magnets, ribbons, farm-machinery parts, painted light bulbs, beads, coffee-can lids, and more. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds is the first book to explore these spectacularly offbeat spaces in detail.From "Original Rhinestone Cowboy" Loy Bowlin's wall-to-wall glitter-and-foil living room to the concrete bestiary of "witch of Fox Point" Mary Nohl, each artist and project is described in detail through a wealth of visuals and text. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds reminds us that our decorative choices tell the world not just what we like but who we are.
Download or read book Nature s Mirror written by Mary Anne Andrei and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It may be surprising to us now, but the taxidermists who filled the museums, zoos, and aquaria of the twentieth century were also among the first to become aware of the devastating effects of careless human interaction with the natural world. Witnessing firsthand the decimation caused by hide hunters, commercial feather collectors, whalers, big game hunters, and poachers, these museum taxidermists recognized the existential threat to critically endangered species and the urgent need to protect them. The compelling exhibits they created—as well as the scientific field work, popular writing, and lobbying they undertook—established a vital leadership role in the early conservation movement for American museums that persists to this day. Through their individual research expeditions and collective efforts to arouse demand for environmental protections, this remarkable cohort—including William T. Hornaday, Carl E. Akeley, and several lesser-known colleagues—created our popular understanding of the animal world and its fragile habitats. For generations of museum visitors, they turned the glass of an exhibition case into a window on nature—and a mirror in which to reflect on our responsibility for its conservation.
Download or read book A General History of Horology written by Turner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-02 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A General History of Horology describes instruments used for the finding and measurement of time from Antiquity to the 21st century. In geographical scope it ranges from East Asia to the Americas. The instruments described are set in their technical and social contexts, and there is also discussion of the literature, the historiography and the collecting of the subject. The book features the use of case studies to represent larger topics that cannot be completely covered in a single book. The international body of authors have endeavoured to offer a fully world-wide survey accessible to students, historians, collectors, and the general reader, based on a firm understanding of the technical basis of the subject. At the same time as the work offers a synthesis of current knowledge of the subject, it also incorporates the results of some fundamamental, new and original research.
Download or read book The Politics of Curiosity written by Enrico Campo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy. The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements. The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.
Download or read book Curious Lessons in the Museum written by Claire Robins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amongst recent contemporary art and museological publications, there have been relatively few which direct attention to the distinct contributions that twentieth and twenty-first century artists have made to gallery and museum interpretation practices. There are fewer still that recognise the pedagogic potential of interventionist artworks in galleries and museums. This book fills that gap and demonstrates how artists have been making curious but, none-the-less, useful contributions to museum education and curation for some time. Claire Robins investigates in depth the phenomenon of artists' interventions in museums and examines their pedagogic implications. She also brings to light and seeks to resolve many of the contradictions surrounding artists' interventions, where on the one hand contemporary artists have been accused of alienating audiences and, on the other, appear to have played a significant role in orchestrating positive developments to the way that learning is defined and configured in museums. She examines the disruptive and parodic strategies that artists have employed, and argues for that they can be understood as part of a move to re-establish the museum as a discursive forum. This valuable book will be essential reading for students and scholars of museum studies, as well as art and cultural studies.
Download or read book Curious Collectors Collected Curiosities written by Janelle A. Schwartz and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study asks its readers to enter into an investigation of the nature of collecting as an aesthetic exercise. Spanning the sixteenth century through today, this book gathers together the work of current scholars to re-envision the task of collectors and their collections in broad strokes. Each chapter appropriates the idea of a cabinet of curiosity in order to expand its boundaries of meaning and to complicate our understanding of the acts of display and observation. These chapters also demonstrate that collecting is a universal trope which nevertheless depends on time and place for its particular expressions. Whether the collection is made up of literary texts and criticism, visual art, including mechanical reproductions, taxidermy and photography, historical travelogues, museum exhibitions, blockbuster films, or airline in-flight briefing cards, it conveys an urgent relevance to our consumer age, in which information is abundant and attention is a commodity.
Download or read book The Politics of Display written by Sharon Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy. The Politics of Display brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about 'science' and 'objectivity' are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is a well-known case in point. The Politics of Display charts the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. The Politics of Display brings together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain. This book is an excellent contribution to debates about the politics of public culture. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies and science studies.
Download or read book Places of Public Memory written by Greg Dickinson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci
Download or read book Making Modern Science Second Edition written by Peter J. Bowler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of the top-selling coursebook, seasoned historians Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus expand on their authoritative survey of how the development of science has shaped our world. Exploring both the history of science and its influence on modern thought, the authors chronicle the major developments in scientific thinking, from the revolutionary ideas of the seventeenth century to contemporary issues in genetics, physics, and more. Thoroughly revised and expanded, the second edition draws on the latest research and scholarship. It also contains two entirely new chapters: one that explores the impact of computing on the development of science, and another that shows how the West used science and technology as tools for geopolitical expansion. Designed for entry-level college courses and as a single-volume introduction for the general reader, Making Modern Science presents the history of science not as a series of names and dates, but as an interconnected and complex web of relationships joining science and society.
Download or read book Making Animals Public written by Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Animals Public: television, animality and political engagement focuses on the proliferation of animal content on television and how this has transformed how animals are known and encountered, generating unique modes of televisual animality. The book examines the multiplicity of public realities and knowledges that animals on TV have constituted: from scientific objectivity, to the unique Australian environment, to controversial victims of gross exploitation. Just as television has made animals public in very particular ways, it has also made new publics that have learnt to be affected by them. Thanks to extraordinary access to the ABC’s Natural History and general archives, the authors are able to investigate the dynamic relation between making animals public and making publics over time.
Download or read book Urban Horticulture written by Tina Marie Waliczek and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of urbanization and technological advances, public green spaces within cities are disappearing and people are spending more time with electronic devices than with nature. Urban Horticulture explores the importance of horticulture to the lives, health, and well-being of urban populations. It includes contributions from experts in researc
