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This volume provides a history of the computer which now comes properly up to the ubiquitous age, with new chapters that look at globalization, platformitization and regulation, allowing readers to engage with the more recent takeover by computers in their historical perspective. With the growing ubiquity of computers, the subject is one of interest to many students and this will feature in history of science and technology courses, and world history courses as well as ones specifically on computing. Books on the history of computing tend to be quite technically or business focused, this covers the social and cultural history as well.
An innovative history exploring independent India's experiment fusing Soviet-inspired economic management with Western-style liberal democracy.
TechKnowledgies: New Imaginaries and Transmigrations in the Humanities, Arts, and TechnoSciences is a diverse collection of essays, a recently produced technology play by William Kennedy, art, and installations that represent, and at times resist, the ways science and technology are interacting with the arts and the humanities to produce new imaginaries and disciplinary transmigrations that gesture towards a “university” of tomorrow. As theorists’ posit new futures and call for an end to historically grounded, or discipline-based, so-called silo approaches to knowledges, a de facto reorganization of disciplinary boundaries and a migratory spirit have spontaneously infused the humanitie...
Visual evidence is the sine qua non of the modern criminal process—from photographs and video to fingerprints and maps. Siam's New Detectives offers an analytical history of these visual tools as employed by the Thai police when investigating crime. Covering the period between the late nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War, the book provides both an extended overview of the development and evolution of modern police practices in Thailand, and a window into the role of the Thai police within a larger cultural system of knowledge production about crime, violence, and history. Based on a diverse set of primary sources—police reports, detective training manuals, trial records, newsp...
Museums and the History of Computing examines the critical role that cultural organizations, such as museums and galleries, play in shaping ‘digital heritage’: the cultural heritage surrounding computer technology. Focusing on digital technologies as objects and practices that museums collect, exhibit, and preserve for the future, this book highlights how and why museums play a crucial role in preserving the rich heritage of the digital world, constructing powerful narratives that help make it relevant to the public. It demonstrates that the museum can be a powerful means of safeguarding and interpreting ephemeral and continually changing digital technology, offering new pathways for ret...
Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era. How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation. T...
With the thoroughness and resourcefulness that characterize the earlier volumes, she recounts the rich history of the courageous and resolute women determined to realize their scientific ambitions.
The history of how computers spread to over 20 nations globally in less than six decades, exploring economic, political, social and technological reasons and consequences. It is based on extensive research into primary and secondary sources, and concludes with a discussion of implications for key players in the globalized economy.
In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it into an adaptive field-based practice for all. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of informatio...