Download or read book The Reality of Artifacts written by Michael Chazan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artifacts are hybrids, both natural and cultural. They are also an essential component in the process of human evolution. In recent years, a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive science, sociology, art history, and anthropology, have all grappled with the nature of artifacts, leading to the emergence of a renewed interdisciplinary focus on material culture. The Reality of Artifacts: An Archaeological Perspective develops an argument for the artifact as a status conferred by human engagement with material. On this basis, artifacts are considered first in terms of their relationship to concepts and cognitive functions, and then to the physical body and sense of self. The book builds on and incorporates the latest developments in archaeological research, particularly from the archaeology of human evolution, and integrates this wealth of new archaeological data with new research in fields such as cognitive science, haptics, and material culture studies. Making the latest research available for the general reader interested in material culture, while also providing archaeologists with new theoretical perspectives built on a synthesis of interdisciplinary research, this book is suitable for courses taught at both graduate and undergraduate students, and is broadly accessible.
Download or read book Creations of the Mind written by Eric Margolis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour. Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen
Download or read book Object Stories written by Steve Brown and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-five archaeologists each tell an intimate story of their experience and entanglement with an evocative artifact.
Download or read book How Artifacts Afford written by Jenny L. Davis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies—but, Jenny Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses. The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the question from what objects afford to how objects afford, for whom, and under what circumstances. Davis shows that through this framework, analyses can account for the power and politics of technological artifacts. She situates the framework within a critical approach that views technology as materialized action. She explains how request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow are mechanisms of affordance, and shows how these mechanisms take shape through variable conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Putting the framework into action, Davis identifies existing methodological approaches that complement it, including critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), app feature analysis, and adversarial design. In today's rapidly changing sociotechnical landscape, the stakes of affordance analyses are high. Davis's mechanisms and conditions framework offers a timely theoretical reboot, providing tools for the crucial tasks of both analysis and design.
Download or read book Artifacts and Organizations written by Anat Rafaeli and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artifacts in organizations are ubiquitous but often overlooked. The chapters in this book illustrate that artifacts are everywhere in organizational life. They prevail in how offices are decorated, language is used, business cards are designed, and office cartoons are displayed. In addition, artifacts can be seen in the name of an organization and its employees, products, buildings, processes, and contracts, and they represent people, organizations, and professions. Artifacts and Organizations suggests that artifacts are neither superficial nor pertinent only to organizational culture. They are relevant to a rich and diverse set of organizational processes within and across multiple levels of analysis. Artifacts are shown to be integral to identity, sense-giving and sense-making processes, interpretation and negotiation, legitimacy, and branding. The book seeks to communicate that artifacts are often much more than what is currently recognized in organizational research. The four sections of this edited volume address various aspects of what is known about and known through artifacts. Together, the full set of chapters challenge the field to move beyond a narrow conceptualization and understanding of artifacts in organizations. This book leads students to embrace the full complexity and richness of artifacts. In addition, the text seeks to inspire those who focus on artifacts as symbols to delve deeper into the complexities of artifacts-in-use, for individuals, organizations, and institutions.
Download or read book All That She Carried written by Tiya Miles and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives. WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly “A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
Download or read book Artifacts of Lanedon written by John M Ferrone and published by John M. Ferrone. This book was released on 2024-07-03 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world called Lanedon, five Artifacts enabled the High Council to keep the evil Lord Maligor at bay for centuries. But Maligor is cunning, and he has used powerful sorcery to open a portal to a parallel world where he has hidden the sword Aurcrin—the greatest of the Artifacts—so it can never again be used against him. This other world is a place called Earth. Krem Connelly just graduated from a college preparatory school in the Chicago area. His life has been a lot like his name: odd and obscure. But unbeknownst to Krem he happens to be a bloodline descendant of a special family in a parallel world. While backpacking in France, he finds a sword that was never meant to be discovered. When he grabs it, it opens a portal to a place called Lanedon. Upon stepping through he begins a journey to pursue a destiny that he does not understand, that only he can fulfill, and that will determine the fate of Lanedon. He must find the other bloodline descendants and help them acquire their Artifacts if they are to defeat Maligor. He must also discover his true self and come to terms with the history he has lived on Earth, and the history he has inherited in Lanedon.
Download or read book Archaeological Typology and Practical Reality written by William Y. Adams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the various ways in which field archaeologists set about making and using classifications to meet a variety of practical needs. The authors discuss how humans form concepts. They then describe and analyse in detail a specific example of an archaeological classification, and go on to consider the theoretical generalizations that can be derived from the study of actual in-use classifications.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture written by Ivan Gaskell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.
Download or read book Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans Constructing Identity in Early America written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a mid-eighteenth-century group, the so-called Pennsylvania Germans, build their cultural identity in the face of ethnic stereotyping, nostalgic ideals, and the views imposed by outside contemporaries? Numerous forces create a group's identity, including the views of outsiders, insiders, and the shaping pressure of religious beliefs, but to understand the process better, we must look to clues from material culture. Cynthia Falk explores the relationship between ethnicity and the buildings, personal belongings, and other cultural artifacts of early Pennsylvania German immigrants and their descendants. Such material culture has been the basis of stereotyping Pennsylvania Germans almost since their arrival. Falk warns us against the typical scholarly overemphasis on Pennsylvania Germans' assimilation into an English way of life. Rather, she demonstrates that more than anything, socioeconomic status and religious affiliation influenced the character of the material culture of Pennsylvania Germans. Her work also shows how early Pennsylvania Germans defined their own identities.
Download or read book Body of Artifacts written by Abby McCormick and published by Abby McCormick. This book was released on 2023-09-13 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did I get here? A regular, human guy with some skill with a Sabre, surrounded by my genie girlfriend, my best friend who's love interest is the genie who's lamp I'm trying to steal, and my father- the leader of the Order of Assassins, and his henchman. It sounds like a bad joke. Only it's life or death. In this thrilling fantasy, follow Alex as he joins forces with his father, Cornelius, leader of the enigmatic Order of Assassins, to locate a powerful genie vessel. Together with a motley crew, they venture into the world's largest museum, a labyrinth of secrets and danger. Alex faces a moral dilemma: should he free his beloved genie girlfriend Layla or fulfill his promise to liberate friends from a nefarious cult? "Body of Artifacts" blends heist, fantasy, and moral quandary, delivering action, suspense, and intricate world-building. Explore a world where magic and intrigue collide, choices have dire consequences, and the ultimate heist could reshape destinies. If you love heists, magical adventures, and moral dilemmas, don't miss this third "Rise of Jinn" installment. Join Alex and allies in their quest for freedom, justice, and the power to alter history.
Download or read book Reconstructing Design Explaining Artifacts written by Jeroen de Ridder and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical artifacts are both plain physical objects and objects that have been purposefully made for a purpose; they have a physical structure and a technical function. As a result, they belong equally in a purely physical conceptualization of the world, in which human intentions and goals seem to have no place, and in an intentional conceptualization, which is used to describe and understand people and their mental lives. This book explores how this observation plays out in the contexts of artifact design and explanation of how artifacts fulfill their function. It addresses the following questions: How do designing engineers get from a functional description of desired behavior to the concrete object that is the result of a design process? What do explanations of how an artifact fulfills its function look like and do they differ from explanations of natural systems?
Download or read book Symbols and Artifacts written by Pasquale Gagliardi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of 18 papers from an international conference in Milan, June 1987, organized by the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. Details how corporate artifacts are invested with meaning, are related to control, and can be used as cultural indicators in research. Among the topics are office design, housing modifications, computer systems, and the space shuttle. Fairly devoid of specialist jargon.
Download or read book Archaeology Artifacts and Antiquities of the Ancient Near East written by Oscar White Muscarella and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 1094 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology, Artifacts and Antiquities of the Ancient Near East follows the evolution of the author’s scholarly work and interests and is divided into several categories of interrelated fields. The first part deals primarily with excavations and associated artifacts, issues in ancient geography and the identification of ancient sites in northwest Iran, the author’s research involving the culture and chronology of the Phrygian capital at Gordion in Anatolia, and the chronology and Iranian cultural relations of a site in the Emirate of Sharjah. Part two is wide-ranging and includes chapters on Aegean and ancient Near Eastern cultural and political interconnections, the role of fibulae in revealing cultural and chronological matters, and the gender-determined usage of parasols and their recognition in excavated contexts. There are also articles specifically concerned with “Plunder Culture” and the forgery of both objects and their alleged proveniences. "At 1,088 pages, this volume provides a wonderful sample– chosen by Muscarella himself – of forty papers spanning the author’s career and many interests...This volume is so rich that it contains something for everyone." D.T. Potts, NYU, Bibliotheca Orientalis lxxIII n° 3-4, mei-augustus 2016
Download or read book The Aesthete in the City The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Artifacts Representations and Social Practice written by C. Gould and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own. His diverse philosophical interests and main themes have ranged from constructivism and realism in the philosophy of science to practices of representation and the creation of artifacts in aesthetics; and from the development of human cognition and the historicity of modes of knowing to the construction of norms in the context of concrete social critique. Or again, in the history of philosophy, his work spans historical approaches to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as contemporary implications of their work; and in applied philosophy, problems of education, medicine, and new technologies. Marx's philosophical theorizing moves from the highest levels of abstraction to the most concrete concern with the everyday and with contemporary social and political reality. And perhaps most notably, it is acutely sensitive to the importance of historical development and social practice. As a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel at Columbia, Marx developed an exemplary background in both the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy and subsequently combined this with a wide acquaintance with analytic philosophy. He is at once aware of the requirements of system and of the need for rigorous and careful detailed argument.
Download or read book Reading Asian Art and Artifacts written by Paul Nietupski and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins with the understanding that, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, Asian art and material artifacts are expressive of cultural realities and constitute a 'visible language' with messages that can be read, interpreted, and analyzed. Asian art and artifacts are understood in their contexts, as 'windows' into cultures, and as such can be used as a powerful pedagogical tool in many academic disciplines. The book includes essays by scholars of Asian art, philosophy, anthropology, and religion that focus on objects held in ASIANetwork schools. The ASIANetwork collections are reflective of Asian societies, historical and religious environments, political positions, and economic conditions. The art objects and artifacts were discovered sometimes in storage and were sometimes poorly understood and variously described as fine art, curiosities, souvenirs, and markers of events in a school's history. The chapter authors tell the stories of the collections, and the collections themselves tell stories of the collectors. This volume is intended for use in many disciplines, and its interpretive structures are adaptable to other examples of art and artifacts in other colleges, universities, and museums. An online database of some 2000 art objects held in the ASIANetwork schools' collections supplements this book.
