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A Golden Weed
Drew A. Swanson has written an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
My Slade Phenomenon
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The Structure of Concern: A Challenge for Thinkers
This book has two goals. It introduces a pattern of 4 interlocking constraints which I call the "structure of concern" and it issues a challenge to all of the thinkers of world to find the best level of description for it; the level at which it might be explained... concern structure models turn up everywhere, including discussions of knowledge management methodologies, suicide, yoga, information systems, sex, multi-agent networking, ethics, nervous system organization, drama, military planning, speech pragmatics, forest conservation, education and even philosophy. Some concern structure models are quite specialized and obscure, but some others count among the most widely used conceptual frameworks we have. My main goal in this book is simply to compare all of these frameworks to point out the similarities between them. This "catalog" itself is the argument I make in this book - the argument that some universal pattern lurks among all these models - a universal pattern that needs description.
Expressive Processing
From the complex city-planning game SimCity to the virtual therapist Eliza: how computational processes open possibilities for understanding and creating digital media. What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential. Wardrip-Fruin looks at “expressive processing” by examining specific works of digital media ranging from the simulated therapist Eliza to the complex city-planning game SimCity. Digital media, he contends, offer particularly intelligible examples of things we need to understand about software in general; if we understand, for instance, the capabilities and histories of artificial intelligence techniques in the context of a computer game, we can use that understanding to judge the use of similar techniques in such higher-stakes social contexts as surveillance.
Bound Together
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