Download or read book Inscribing Science written by Timothy Lenoir and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of inscription and writing figure prominently in all levels of discourse in and about science. The description of nature as a book written in the language of mathematics has been a common trope since at least the time of Galileo, a metaphor supplemented in our own day by the characterization of DNA sequences as the code for the book of life, decipherable in terms of protein semantic units. An important recent direction in the fields of science and literature studies is to consider such descriptions as more than metaphoric, as revelatory of the processes of signification in science more generally. Nearly everywhere we look, the "semiotic turn” is upon us. Recent science and technology studies have been characterized by a rich diversity of research directions, manifesting several trends apparently counter to one another. On the one hand stands the rich tradition of detailed microstudies of experiments, instruments, and scientific practice; on the other hand are grouped studies grander in scope, aimed at examining science within the framework of cultural production. This volume of sixteen essays seeks common ground among these different approaches by juxtaposing work from historically focused science and literature studies with work inspired by poststructuralist philosophy and semiotics. The contributors are Gillian Beer, Lisa Bloom, Robert Brain, Lorraine Daston, Richard M. Doyle, David Gugerli, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Friedrich Kittler, Timothy Lenoir, Alex Pang, Philip Prodger, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Robin Rider, Brian Rotman, Simon Schaffer, and Bernhard Siegert.
Download or read book Science Based Innovation written by A. Styhre and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-02-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge management has become a well-known term, but science-based innovation remains relatively unexploited. Bridging the gap between knowledge management theory and studies of science of technology, such as in the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology firms, this book provides a timely insight into the innovation of the knowledge economy.
Download or read book Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book written by Rosalind Brown-Grant and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.
Download or read book Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice written by Andrew Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is archaeology an art or a science? This question has been hotly debated over the last few decades with the rise of archaeological science. At the same time, archaeologists have seen a change in the intellectual character of their discipline, as many writers have adopted approaches influenced by social theory. The discipline now encompasses both archaeological scientists and archaeological theorists, and discussion regarding the status of archaeology remains polarised. In this 2001 book, Andrew Jones argues that we need to analyse the practice of archaeology. Through an analysis of archaeological practice, influenced by recent developments in the field of science studies, and with the aid of extensive case studies, he develops a new framework which allows the interpretative and methodological components of the discipline to work in tandem. His reassessment of the status and character of archaeology will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals.
Download or read book Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life written by Sarah Kember and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of artificial life.
Download or read book Performing Knowledge 1750 1850 written by Mary Helen Dupree and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time when knowledge and its modes of transmission were reconsidered and reworked in fundamental ways. Social and political transformations, such as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, went hand in hand with in new ways of viewing, sensing, and experiencing what was perceived to be a rapidly changing world. This volume brings together a range of essays that explore the performance of knowledge in the period from 1750 to 1850, in the broadest possible sense. The essays explore a wide variety of literary, theatrical, and scientific events staged during this period, including scientific demonstrations, philosophical lectures, theatrical performances, stage design, botany primers, musical publications, staged Schiller memorials, acoustic performances, and literary declamations. These events served as vital conduits for the larger process of generating, differentiating, and circulating knowledge. By unpacking the significance of performance and performativity for the creation and circulation of knowledge in Germany during this period, the volume makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary German cultural studies, performance studies, and the history of knowledge.
Download or read book Making Stars Physical written by Stephen Case and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-11-03 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Stars Physical offers the first extensive look at the astronomical career of John Herschel, son of William Herschel and one of the leading scientific figures in Britain throughout much of the nineteenth century. Herschel’s astronomical career is usually relegated to a continuation of his father, William’s, sweeps for nebulae. However, as Stephen Case argues, John Herschel was pivotal in establishing the sidereal revolution his father had begun: a shift of attention from the planetary system to the study of nebulous regions in the heavens and speculations on the nature of the Milky Way and the sun’s position within it. Through John Herschel’s astronomical career—in particular his work on constellation reform, double stars, and variable stars—the study of stellar objects became part of mainstream astronomy. He leveraged his mathematical expertise and his position within the scientific community to make sidereal astronomy accessible even to casual observers, allowing amateurs to make useful observations that could contribute to theories on the nature of stars. With this book, Case shows how Herschel’s work made the stars physical and laid the foundations for modern astrophysics.
Download or read book My Mother Was a Computer written by N. Katherine Hayles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.
Download or read book Digital Da Vinci written by Newton Lee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Science is art,” said Regina Dugan, senior executive at Google and former director of DARPA. “It is the process of creating something that never exists before. ... It makes us ask new questions about ourselves, others; about ethics, the future.” This second volume of the Digital Da Vinci book series leads the discussions on the world’s first computer art in the 1950s and the actualization of Star Trek’s holodeck in the future with the help of artificial intelligence and cyborgs. In this book, Gavin Sade describes experimental creative practices that bring together arts, science and technology in imaginative ways; Mine Özkar expounds visual computation for good designs based on repetition and variation; Raffaella Folgieri, Claudio Lucchiari, Marco Granato and Daniele Grechi introduce BrainArt, a brain-computer interface that allows users to create drawings using their own cerebral rhythms; Nathan Cohen explores artificially created spaces that enhance spatial awareness and challenge our perception of what we encounter; Keith Armstrong discusses embodied experiences that affect the mind and body of participating audiences; Diomidis Spinellis uses Etoys and Squeak in a scientific experiment to teach the concept of physical computing; Benjamin Cowley explains the massively multiplayer online game “Green My Place” aimed at achieving behavior transformation in energy awareness; Robert Niewiadomski and Dennis Anderson portray 3-D manufacturing as the beginning of common creativity revolution; Stephen Barrass takes 3-D printing to another dimension by fabricating an object from a sound recording; Mari Velonaki examines the element of surprise and touch sensing in human-robot interaction; and Roman Danylak surveys the media machines in light of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “the medium is the message.” Digital Da Vinci: Computers in the Arts and Sciences is dedicated to polymathic education and interdisciplinary studies in the digital age empowered by computer science. Educators and researchers ought to encourage the new generation of scholars to become as well rounded as a Renaissance man or woman.
Download or read book Who Wrote the Book of Life written by Lily E. Kay and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technologyand consequently as a book of life. This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the book of life metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been, they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s). Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic book of life.
Download or read book Writing the Past written by Gavin Lucas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do archaeologists make knowledge? Debates in the latter half of the twentieth century revolved around broad, abstract philosophies and theories such as positivism and hermeneutics which have all but vanished today. By contrast, in recent years there has been a great deal of attention given to more concrete, practice-based study, such as fieldwork. But where one was too abstract, the other has become too descriptive and commonly evades issues of epistemic judgement. Writing the Past attempts to reintroduce a normative dimension to knowledge practices in archaeology, especially in relation to archaeological practice further down the ‘assembly line’ in the production of published texts, where archaeological knowledge becomes most stabilized and is widely disseminated. By exploring the composition of texts in archaeology and the relation between their structural, performative characteristics and key epistemic virtues, this book aims to move debate in both knowledge and writing practices in a new direction. Although this book will be of particular interest to archaeologists, the argument offered has relevance for all academic disciplines concerned with how knowledge production and textual composition intertwine.
Download or read book Assembling Health Care Organizations written by K. Lindberg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-07-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assembling Health Care Organizations combines an institutional theory perspective with a materialist view of the technologies, devices, biological specimens, and other material resources mobilized and put to work in health care work.
Download or read book Darwin s Psychology written by Ben Bradley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book ever to examine the riches of what Darwin himself wrote about psychological matters. It unearths a Darwin new to science, whose first concern is the agency of organisms-from which he derives both his psychology, and his theory of evolution.
Download or read book Audible Infrastructures written by Kyle Devine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate from our computers and phones, at any time of day. The tools for playing and making music, such as records and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase and use. And when we no longer need them, we can leave them at the curb, where they disappear effortlessly and without a trace. These casual engagements often conceal the complex infrastructures that make our musical cultures possible. Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste this book provides a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and political-economic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of. In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History written by Kathryn Brown and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.
Download or read book Old Books and New Histories written by Leslie Howsam and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-09-16 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in the culture and history of the book are a burgeoning academic specialty. Intriguing, rigorous, and vital, they are nevertheless rooted within three major academic disciplines - history, literary studies, and bibliography - that focus respectively upon the book as a cultural transaction, a literary text, and a material artefact. Old Books and New Histories serves as a guide to this rich but sometimes confusing territory, explaining how different scholarly approaches to what may appear to be the same entity can lead to divergent questions and contradictory answers. Rather than introduce the events and turning points in the history of book culture, or debates among its theorists, Leslie Howsam uses an array of books and articles to offer an orientation to the field in terms of disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinary tensions. Howsam's analysis maps studies of book and print culture onto the disciplinary structure of the North American and European academic world. Old Books and New Histories is also an engaged statement of the historical perspective of the book. In the final analysis, the lesson of studies in book and print culture is that texts change, books are mutable, and readers ultimately make of books what they need.
Download or read book Framing Finance written by Alex Preda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In Framing Finance, Alex Preda looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably. As Preda discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and Preda reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But Preda also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, Framing Finance ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.
