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This volumes presents the first urban history of science, technology, and medicine in Lisbon, 1840-1940. It reveals how science, technology and medicine permeated even the most unlikely aspects of the urban landscape in an environment that was simultaneously a port city, scientific capital and imperial metropolis.
An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public i...
Part religious studies, part feminist theory, part philosophy, part indescribable: such is Numinous Subjects. Described by the author as ‘a kaleidoscopic exploration of why three gendered figures of the sacred matter within western culture,’ the experience of reading this text truly is akin to gazing through a constantly turning kaleidoscope. Images, concepts, phrases and quotes are continually revisited, recombined, though never repeated in quite the same way. From these tumbling constellations arises a new understanding and wary appreciation of the figures of the virgin, the mother, and the whore. Drawing on the insights of thinkers as diverse as Rudolph Otto, Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir, and Martin Buber, Numinous Subjects simultaneously expands and focuses our attention on the myth of the sacred and its implications for female subjects in western culture today.
The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theo...
The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects. Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visual...
The role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge, from Galileo and Newton to our own “computational universe.” A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called “system” to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's “message from the stars” and Newton's “system of the worl...
Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing. In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient administration, enhanced options for research, and accelerated economic growth. In practice, however, data are difficult to interpret and the many purposes often undermine one another. In this book, anthropologist and STS scholar ...
The Cold War reconsidered as a limited nuclear war “Inexorable clarity and care for his fellow humans mark Robert Jacobs's guide to the Cold War as a limited nuclear war, whose harms disfigure any possible future.”—Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End In the fall of 1961, President Kennedy somberly warned Americans about deadly radioactive fallout clouds extending hundreds of miles from H‑bomb detonations, yet he approved ninety‑six US nuclear weapon tests for 1962. Cold War nuclear testing, production, and disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima have exposed millions to dangerous radioactive particles; these millions are the global hibaku...
Stories about objects left in the wake of transactions, from cryptocurrencies to leaf-imprinted banknotes to records kept with knotted string. Museums are full of the coins, notes, beads, shells, stones, and other objects people have exchanged for millennia. But what about the debris, the things that allow a transaction to take place and are left in its wake? How would a museum go about curating our scrawls on electronic keypads, the receipts wadded in our wallets, that vast information infrastructure that runs the card networks? This book is a catalog for a museum exhibition that never happened. It offers a series of short essays, paired with striking images, on these often ephemeral, invis...
A history of New York subway passengers as they navigated the system's constraints while striving for individuality, or at least a smooth ride. When the subway first opened with much fanfare on October 27, 1904, New York became a city of underground passengers almost overnight. In this book, Stefan Höhne examines how the experiences of subway passengers in New York City were intertwined with cultural changes in urban mass society throughout the twentieth century. Höhne argues that underground transportation--which early passengers found both exhilarating and distressing--changed perceptions, interactions, and the organization of everyday life.