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Offering a conceptual framework for teaching the visual arts (K-12 and higher education) from a cultural standpoint, the author discusses visual culture in a democracy.
The first collection of scholarly essays on women and art in Canadian history.
The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between...
The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future “Whether you’re reading this for a nostalgic romp or to understand the dawn of the internet, The Modem World will delight you with tales of BBS culture and shed light on how the decisions of the past shape our current networked world.”—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens Fifteen years before the commercialization of the internet, millions of amateurs across North America created more than 100,000 small-scale computer networks. The people who built and maintained these dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of...
In a remarkably short time, electronics has penetrated almost every aspect of modern life and the pace of development in the field shows no sign of slackening. One of the first books to cover electronic inventions in depth, Electronic Inventions and Discoveries: Electronics from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Present Day, Fourth Edition traces the development of electronics from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Spanning a period of two and a half centuries, the book presents a mini-encyclopedia full of valuable information on practically all inventions in electronics from 1745 to 1996. This fourth edition has been brought up-to-date and made more attractive by a complete redesign ...
Genocide in Rwanda, instability in the Middle East, anarchy on the Internet -- insecurities abound. But do they occur "naturally, " or are they, as this pathbreaking volume suggests, cultural and social productions? Bringing together scholars from political science and anthropology, this collection of essays redirects long-standing views on culture as both a source of insecurity and an object of analysis. The authors present studies whose topics range from traditional security concerns, such as the Cuban missile crisis, the Korean War, and he Middle East, to less conventional issues, including the Internet and national security, multiculturalism and regional economy in New Mexico.
Even as "network" has become a contemporary keyword, its overuse has limited its analytic usefulness. In the enthusiasm that orbits the concept, the network is too easily taken up as a term that we should already know. Patrick Jagoda claims that we do not, in fact, know networks, in part because of their very ubiquity and variety. His book shows how a range of popular aesthetic forms mediate our experience of networks and yield up greater insight into this critical concept. Each chapter of "Network Aesthetics" considers how a different contemporary genre makes sense of decentralized network structure, from fiction, film, and television to popular videogames such as Introversion's "Uplink," experimental games such as Jason Rohrer's "Between," and emergent transmedia storytelling forms such as "Alternate Reality Games." Jagoda wants to show that network aesthetics, in all of these cases, are not simply the quality of a genre; more substantively, they are a critical corollary to an era in which interconnection has become a key cultural framework. "Network Aesthetics" cuts through the cliches of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life.
The book offers guidance to aspiring historians at every stage and in every walk of life, from practical advice on tackling and organizing projects to recommendations for finding and using resources of all kinds, whether at the local library or historical society or on the world wide web. It is intended to be a serious guide to the best practices for researchers as well as a good read as a collection of research stories. The author includes useful bibliographies, vetted websites, and practical advice on doing research well.
The U.S. information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) ecosystem was the envy of the world in 1995. However, this position of leadership is not a birthright, and it is now under pressure. In recent years, the rapid globalization of markets, labor pools, and capital flows have encouraged many strong national competitors. During the same period, national policies have not sufficiently buttressed the ecosystem, or have generated side effects that have reduced its effectiveness. As a result, the U.S. position in IT leadership today has materially eroded compared with that of prior decades, and the nation risks ceding IT leadership to other nations within a generation. Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem calls for a recommitment to providing the resources needed to fuel U.S. IT innovation, to removing important roadblocks that reduce the ecosystem's effectiveness in generating innovation and the fruits of innovation, and to becoming a lead innovator and user of IT. The book examines these issues and makes recommendations to strengthen the U.S. IT R&D ecosystem.
How computer graphics transformed the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium, as seen through the histories of five technical objects. Most of us think of computer graphics as a relatively recent invention, enabling the spectacular visual effects and lifelike simulations we see in current films, television shows, and digital games. In fact, computer graphics have been around as long as the modern computer itself, and played a fundamental role in the development of our contemporary culture of computing. In Image Objects, Jacob Gaboury offers a prehistory of computer graphics through an examination of five technical objects--an algorithm, an interface, an object standar...