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Marketing Technologies

Autor: Elena Simakova

Número de Páginas: 210

Global corporations initiate, join and maintain socio-technological change and hence, alter the ways in which we organize our lives. Demanding significant investment of resources and time, the development and implementation of new technologies on different levels must take into consideration these subtle processes. As such, it is particularly important that we have a greater insight into the practices of hi-tech corporations, in view of the often inflated promises of and concerns about the destiny of technological breakthroughs, especially those promising sizeable economic outcomes and societal transformation. Elena Simakova undertook a lengthy ethnographic study, working alongside marketing managers in a global IT corporation in their Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in the UK. Using the experience gained through a close participation in their everyday corporate rituals and routines, her account challenges common perceptions of how corporations make the world think and act with regard to technologies in particular ways. The book contains an interesting case study on the launch of a radio frequency identification (RFID) based solution. Unravelling the...

La medicina ante el nuevo milenio

Autor: José Martínez Pérez

Número de Páginas: 1142

Edición en cartoné con sobrecubiertas a todo color, que incluye los siguientes textos según el Índice del volumen: Introducción Primera parte: EL SABER MÉDICO Género y saber médico La adquisición del saber y sus aplicaciones Saber médico y construcción de la enfermedad Segunda parte: ESPACIOS DE LA PRÁCTICA MÉDICA El ejercicio profesional y sus diferentes espacios Espacio social y salud pública Espacios científico-asistenciales y especialismo médico Tercera parte: TEXTOS MÉDICOS Cuarta parte: MESAS TEMÁTICAS Tecnologías médicas Filología clásica y textos médicos: trabajos y líneas de investigación La invención de la perversión. La medicina y el régimen de la sexualidad Enfermedades infecciosas en el siglo XX: control y percepción ¿Resistencia o adaptación? Ciencia médica y conciencia obrera en la España contemporánea Quinta parte: EL PAPEL DE LA HISTORIA DE LA MEDICINA EN EL SIGLO XXI La Historia de la Medicina en el siglo XXI: Reflexiones y perspectivas

La vida en el laboratorio

Autor: Bruno Latour , Steve Woolgar

Número de Páginas: 370

Publicado por primera vez hace más de cuarenta años en colaboración con Steve Woolgar, La vida en el laboratorio es la primera obra de Bruno Latour y el esbozo inicial de lo que más tarde daría forma a la Teoría del Actor-Red. Fruto de dos años de investigación etnográfica en el laboratorio de neuroendocrinología del Premio Nobel Roger Guillemin en el Salk Institute, este libro fundacional sentó las bases de las nuevas tendencias en los estudios de la ciencia. A partir de una mirada antropológica, Latour y Woolgar ponen en jaque las concepciones tradicionales de la investigación científica para someter a su juicio al "hecho científico" y definirlo, desde un enfoque constructivista, como el "producto" de las complejas relaciones que establecen entre sí el conjunto de prácticas, instrumentos e instituciones que conforman el ámbito científico. Ahora, cuando la ciencia se entrelaza cada vez más con nuestro día a día a través de la omnipresente amenaza del colapso climático y las diversas tendencias negacionistas y anticientíficas, pero también del ecofascismo, parece más necesario que nunca volver a los postulados de Latour para comprender la necesidad de un ...

Philosophie de l'idéologie, théorie de l'intersubjectivité

Autor: Gilbert Larochelle

Número de Páginas: 329

L'idéologie commence lorsque l'interrogation philosophique cesse. Elle ne se développe pleinement que par la mise en service de certitudes pour permettre au sujet de se réaliser historiquement. La nation en fut la première expression moderne. Toutefois, par delà son apparition dans le tumulte de la Révolution et la véhémence de sa critique sous la Restauration, l'idéologie inaugure un mode de pensée qui, depuis Marx particulièrement, pose le problème de son rapport avec les autres discours, surtout la philosophie et la science. Loin d'ajouter une voix de plus à l'éternel cantique de la fin de l'idéologie, il s'agit plutôt ici de prendre le problème au sérieux et dans tous ses aspects, à la lumière des grands débats philosophiques contemporains. Ce livre s'efforce de resituer l'idéologie par rapport à l'histoire de la philosophie. De la Renaissance à cette hypothétique postmodernité, de Descartes à Rorty, il cherche à en retracer les signes annonciateurs (l'utopie, la métaphysique de l'humanisme, l'esprit de conquête, etc.), les instruments conceptuels (la conscience de soi, la prise en main du devenir, l'utilitarisme de la connaissance, etc.) et les...

The Reflexive Thesis

Autor: Malcolm Ashmore

Número de Páginas: 340

This unusually innovative book treats reflexivity, not as a philosophical conundrum, but as a practical issue that arises in the course of scholarly research and argument. In order to demonstrate the concrete and consequential nature of reflexivity, Malcolm Ashmore concentrates on an area in which reflexive "problems" are acute: the sociology of scientific knowledge. At the forefront of recent radical changes in our understanding of science, this increasingly influential mode of analysis specializes in rigorous deconstructions of the research practices and textual products of the scientific enterprise. Through a series of detailed examinations of the practices and products of the sociology of scientific knowledge, Ashmore turns its own claims and findings back onto itself and opens up a whole new era of exploration beyond the common fear of reflexive self-destruction.

Reflection Without Rules

Autor: D. Wade Hands

Número de Páginas: 496

This book is a comprehensive and often controversial survey of economic methodology.

Reconsidering Social Constructionism

Autor: Gale Miller

Número de Páginas: 815

With the impact of social interactionist and ethnographic methodology twenty-five years ago, the research agenda in social problems began to shift its focus, giving rise to the Social Constructionism movement. The present volume and the related shorter text, Constructionist Controversies, review the substantial contributions made by social constructionist theorists over that period, as well as recent debates about the future of the perspective. These contributions redefine the purpose and central questions of social problems theory and articulate a research program for analyzing social problems as social constructions. A generation of theorists has been trained in the constructionist perspective and has extended it through numerous analyses of diverse aspects of contemporary social life.The debates in this volume pose fundamental questions about the major assumptions of the perspective, the ways in which it is practiced, and the purposes of social problems theory. Their point of departure is Ibarra and Kitsuse's essay, cutting new theoretical ground in calling for ""investigating vernacular resources, especially rhetorical forms, in the social problems process.""Contributors are...

Y después del postmodernismo qué?

Autor: Román De La Calle

Número de Páginas: 272

Se trata de revisar no la crisis de la Modernidad, sino la crisis de la crisis, el después de una catalogación cultural que pretendía certificar el fin de una época. Tras la polémica Modernidad / Postmodernidad, se trata de averiguar si el postmodernismo ha generado un movimiento teórico y artístico coherente, y si sus líneas maestras tienen todavía vigencia.

Inventions in Sociology

Autor: Sal Restivo

Número de Páginas: 425

This book presents a collection of old and new essays exploring the author’s unique contributions to the sociology of science, mathematics, logic, robotics, brain, and god. Known for his defense of a strong social constructionist approach to the hard problems in the sociology of science, the power and range of Restivo’s interests and studies are discussed in this unique text. The essays range from his introduction of the sociology of objectivity early in his career to his recent construction of a social brain paradigm. The author situates himself in the context of the leading paradigms in science studies and his relationships with leading figures in the field including Latour, Woolgar, Needham, and D.T. Campbell. The book demonstrates a general theoretical focus on the rejection of transcendence. He rejects Platonism in mathematics and socially situates consciousness, genius, and God. The author’s wide ranging interdisciplinary competencies reflect classical and postmodern influences and will be an invaluable reference for researchers working in this field.

Social Codicology

Número de Páginas: 484

This study includes a wide range of contributions on the materiality and social practices of book copying, consuming, collecting, storing, venerating, discarding and preserving, both in historical and contemporary societies, stretching from Mauritania to Yemen, Kerala, and Malaysia. The volume consists of contributions made by academics, curators, and librarians both from the global North and the global South (India, Kenya, Syria, South Africa).

L'observatoire de Toulouse aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles

Autor: Jérôme Lamy

Número de Páginas: 548

Comment saisir un établissement savant dans ses changements, ses évolutions et ses modifications ? Quel point de vue adopter pour comprendre les continuités et les ruptures dans l’histoire d’une institution scientifique ? Ce livre entreprend l’archéologie d’un espace savant, l’observatoire de Toulouse aux xviiie et xixe siècles, examiné dans ses multiples dimensions : scientifiques et techniques, sociales et économiques, politiques et culturelles. L’observatoire n’est pas seulement un espace clos sur lui-même, érigé en vue du déploiement de la raison scientifique. C’est aussi une architecture, une collection d’instruments, un lieu de vie pour les astronomes, un symbole pour les acteurs politiques, une surface d’inscription des pratiques savantes, ainsi qu’un point nodal dans un ensemble de réseaux. Ces éléments sont tous travaillés en profondeur par de grands régimes de savoirs qui définissent, pour une époque donnée, la place de la science dans la société. L’observatoire de Toulouse est ainsi tour à tour l’incarnation de la science aristocratique à la recherche de la distinction individuelle au xviiie siècle, l’élément...

Bruno Latour in Pieces

Autor: Henning Schmidgen

Número de Páginas: 166

Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had “never been modern.” In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent—and also popular—exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of “modes of existence.” In the course of this enquiry it becomes clear that the basic problem to which Latour’s work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems, anniversary edition

Autor: Wiebe E. Bijker , Thomas Parke Hughes , Trevor Pinch

Número de Páginas: 471

An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT...

Bourdieu and Literature

Autor: John R. W. Speller

Número de Páginas: 208

Bourdieu and Literature is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works. One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy. This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.

Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue

Autor: Louis Pinto , Gisèle Sapiro , Patrick Champagne , Marie-christine Rivière

Número de Páginas: 370

Pierre Bourdieu est sans doute le sociologue français le plus lu depuis un demi-siècle, tant en France qu’à l’étranger. Emanant de spécialistes de son œuvre, les contributions réunies dans ce volume en évoquent la genèse, depuis le Béarn natal, la rue d’Ulm et le premier poste d’enseignant en Algérie, puis l’évolution, avec le passage de la philosophie à l’ethnologie et à la sociologie. Comment ont été forgés les grands concepts, comme habitus ou champ ? De quelle manière s’inscrivent-ils dans la tradition intellectuelle et dans les problématiques de l’époque qui les a vus naître ? Comment ont-ils contribué à renouveler les connaissances dans le domaine de l’éducation, des études littéraires, du droit, de la science, des rapports entre les sexes, et quel a été l’impact de l’entreprise de dévoilement des mécanismes, des rapports de forces, des déterminations qui les constituent ? Quelle relation l’œuvre de Bourdieu entretient-elle avec sa discipline de formation, la philosophie ? L’entreprise scientifique de Pierre Bourdieu a eu un impact politique. Ses engagements, qu’il concevait dans la continuité de son travail de...

Mapping Reality

Autor: Jane Azevedo

Número de Páginas: 344

Using the insights of evolutionary epistemology, the author develops a new naturalist realist methodology of science, and applies it to the conceptual, practical, and ethical problems of the social sciences.

The Morals of Measurement

Autor: Graeme Gooday

Número de Páginas: 332

The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialization of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanized practice. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on the metrological standards used in measurement, this book shows the central importance of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour. Alongside ambiguities about the very nature of measurement and the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in generating error-free numbers, the book also addresses controversies over the changing identity of the measurer through the themes of body, gender and authorship. The reader will gain fresh insights into a period when measurement was widely treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.

Unifying Biology

Autor: Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

Número de Páginas: 378

Unifying Biology offers a historical reconstruction of one of the most important yet elusive episodes in the history of modern science: the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. For more than seventy years after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, it was hotly debated by biological scientists. It was not until the 1930s that opposing theories were finally refuted and a unified Darwinian evolutionary theory came to be widely accepted by biologists. Using methods gleaned from a variety of disciplines, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis argues that the evolutionary synthesis was part of the larger process of unifying the biological sciences. At the same time that scientists were working toward a synthesis between Darwinian selection theory and modern genetics, they were, according to the author, also working together to establish an autonomous community of evolutionists. Smocovitis suggests that the drive to unify the sciences of evolution and biology was part of a global philosophical movement toward unifying knowledge. In developing her argument, she pays close attention to the problems inherent in writing the history of evolutionary science by offering historiographical...

The Recovery of Rhetoric

Autor: Richard H. Roberts , James M. M. Good

Número de Páginas: 300

Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers

Autor: David Turnbull

Número de Páginas: 277

In an eclectic and highly original study, Turnbull brings together traditions as diverse as cathedral building, Micronesian navigation, cartography and turbulence research. He argues that all our differing ways of producing knowledge - including science - are messy, spatial and local. Every culture has its own ways of assembling local knowledge, thereby creating space thrugh the linking of people, practices and places. The spaces we inhabit and assemblages we work with are not as homogenous and coherent as our modernist perspectives have led us to believe - rather they are complex and heterogeneous motleys.

Seeing Like a Rover

Autor: Janet Vertesi

Número de Páginas: 331

In the years since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity first began transmitting images from the surface of Mars, we have become familiar with the harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape. But those images are much less straightforward than they may seem to a layperson: each one is the result of a complicated set of decisions and processes involving the large team behind the Rovers. With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the scenes to reveal the work that goes into creating our knowledge of Mars. Every photograph that the Rovers take, she shows, must be processed, manipulated, and interpreted—and all that comes after team members negotiate with each other about what they should even be taking photographs of in the first place. Vertesi’s account of the inspiringly successful Rover project reveals science in action, a world where digital processing uncovers scientific truths, where images are used to craft consensus, and where team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. Ultimately, Vertesi shows, every image taken by the Mars Rovers is not merely a picture of Mars—it’s a...

Cultural Expertise, Law, and Rights

Autor: Livia Holden

Número de Páginas: 287

Cultural Expertise, Law, and Rights introduces readers to the theory and practice of cultural expertise in the resolution of conflicts and the claim of rights in diverse societies. Combining theory and case-studies of the use of cultural expertise in real situations, and in a great variety of fields, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive examination of the field of cultural expertise: its intellectual orientations, practical applications and ethical implications. This book engages an extensive and interdisciplinary variety of topics – ranging from race, language, sexuality, Indigenous rights and women’s rights to immigration and asylum laws, international commercial arbitration and criminal law. It also offers a truly global perspective covering cultural expertise in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America. Finally, the book offers theoretical and practical guidance for the ethical use of cultural expert knowledge. This is an essential volume for teachers and students in the social sciences – especially law, anthropology, and sociology – and members of the legal professions who engage in cross-cultural dispute resolution, ...

History and the Study of Religion

Autor: Stanley Kent Stowers

Número de Páginas: 401

What is religion? How is religion constituted as a social entity? Is religion a useful category for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists? In History and the Study of Religion Stanley Stowers addresses these questions and discusses examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Judean and especially early Christian religion to illustrate a theory of religion as a social kind. He explains how ancient Mediterranean religion consisted of four sub-kinds: the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion, the religion of literate and literary experts, and the religion of literate experts with political power. Through these categories he shows how Christianity arose and succeeded.

Science and Public Reason

Autor: Sheila Jasanoff

Número de Páginas: 306

This book offers an empirically detailed, cross-nationally comparative account of the institutional logics and practices through which modern democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument designed to persuade publics that legal and policy decisions are founded on reliable knowledge and expertise.

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching: A Personal Story

Autor: Michael R. Matthews

Número de Páginas: 313

This book is an historical narrative of academic appointments, significant personal and collaborative research endeavours, and important editorial and institutional engagements. For forty years Michael Matthews has been a prominent international researcher, author, editor and organiser in the field of ‘History, Philosophy and Science Teaching’. He has systematically brought his own discipline training in science, psychology, philosophy of education, and the history and philosophy of science, to bear upon theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in science education. The book includes accounts of philosophers who greatly influenced his own thinking and who also were personal friends – Wallis Suchting, Abner Shimony, Robert Cohen, Marx Wartofsky, Israel Scheffler, Michael Martin and Mario Bunge. It advocates the importance of clear writing and avoidance of faddism in both philosophy and in education. It concludes with a proposal for informed and enlightened science teacher education.

Science in Society

Autor: Matthew David

Número de Páginas: 207

Science/Technoscience has moved to centre-stage in debates over change, power and justice in twenty-first century societies. This text provides a general framework for understanding, combining and applying the rich range of approaches that exist within sociology about science: in particular, the role (and limitations) of science in generating knowledge, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and social progress. Drawing on case studies from the past up until today's new genetics, this is a clear, even-handed and comprehensive introduction to the field.

Documenting the World

Autor: Gregg Mitman , Kelley Wilder

Número de Páginas: 292

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that defined historical moments and generations. Today such a history feels insubstantial and imprecise, even unscientific. And yet photographic technology was not always a necessary precondition for the accurate documentation of history. The documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to capture the world visually, order it, and render it useful for future generations. This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. It explores their creation and production as well as the collecting practices of librarians, archivists, and corporations. Together, the chapters of Documenting the World call into question the canonical qualities of the authored, the singular, and the valuable image, and transgress the divides separating the still photograph and the moving image, as well as the analogue and the digital. They also definitively overturn the traditional...

Scientific and Medical Communication

Autor: Scott A. Mogull

Número de Páginas: 364

Scientific and Medical Communication: A Guide for Effective Practice prepares readers to effectively communicate in professional scientific communities. The material in this book is firmly grounded in more than 500 published research findings and editorials by scientific writers, authors, and journal editors. Thus, this text provides the broadest and most comprehensive analysis of scientific writing. In addition, carefully selected and thoroughly annotated examples from the scientific and medical literature demonstrate the recommendations covered in the text. These real-world examples were carefully selected so that the scientific content can be understood by those without a detailed background in any particular scientific or medical field—thus clearly illustrating the content organization and writing style. This text will prepare individuals to write and edit scientific manuscripts, conference abstracts, posters, and press releases according to journal and professional standards. Readers will also learn to conduct effective searches of the scientific and medical literature, as well as proper citation practices.

Theorizing Culture: Critique

Autor: Barbara Adam , Stuart Allan

Número de Páginas: 288

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Theorizing Culture

Autor: Barbara Adam , Stuart Allan

Número de Páginas: 290

This highly original and timely volume engages scholars from the breadth of social science and the humanities to provide a critical perspective on cultural forms, practices and identities. It looks beyond the postmodern debate to reinstate the critical dimension in cultural analysis, providing a "student-friendly" introduction to key contemporary issues such as the body, AIDS, race, the environment and virtual reality. Theorizing Culture is essential reading for undergraduate courses in cultural and media studies and sociology, and will have considerable appeal for students and scholars of critical theory, gender studies and the history of ideas.

Sociología de la ciencia y la tecnología

Autor: Juan Manuel Iranzo

Número de Páginas: 484

Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine

Autor: Isabelle Dussauge , Claes-fredrik Helgesson , Francis Lee

Número de Páginas: 346

This book provides a compelling scholarly statement about the interrelation and pliability of values in the life sciences, medicine and health care. The volume aims to aid our understanding of the roles of power, knowledge production, and economic action in the heavily scientised and economised areas of life science and medicine.

Beyond Reason

Autor: Sanjay Seth

Número de Páginas: 265

Introduction -- Part I. Modern western knowledge under challenge -- Unsettling the modern knowledge settlement -- Defending reason : a postcolonial critique -- Part II. Postcolonialism and social science -- The code of history -- The anachronism of history -- International relations : amnesia and empire -- Political theory and the bourgeois public sphere -- Epilogue. Knowledge and politics.

Reparatur

Autor: Christine Abbt

Número de Páginas: 392

The Male Pill

Autor: Nelly Oudshoorn

Número de Páginas: 324

The Male Pill is the first book to reveal the history of hormonal contraceptives for men. Nelly Oudshoorn explains why it is that, although the technical feasibility of male contraceptives was demonstrated as early as the 1970s, there is, to date, no male pill. Ever since the idea of hormonal contraceptives for men was introduced, scientists, feminists, journalists, and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs have questioned whether men and women would accept a new male contraceptive if one were available. Providing a richly detailed examination of the cultural, scientific, and policy work around the male pill from the 1960s through the 1990s, Oudshoorn advances work at the intersection of gender studies and the sociology of technology. Oudshoorn emphasizes that the introduction of contraceptives for men depends to a great extent on changing ideas about reproductive responsibility. Initial interest in the male pill, she shows, came from outside the scientific community: from the governments of China and India, which were interested in population control, and from Western feminists, who wanted the responsibilities and health risks associated with contraception shared more equally between the...

Les formes de l’action

Autor: Collectif

Número de Páginas: 266

L’analyse de l’action est remise au premier plan par certains courants actuels de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. L’étude de la sémantique de l’action (intention, volonté, motif, désir, etc.) a fait apparaître le rôle important du langage dans la constitution du champ pratique. Elle a permis d’éclairer sous un jour nouveau les rapports entre langage ordinaire et analyse sociale. Cet ouvrage restitue l’état du débat suscité, en sciences sociales, par la prise en compte de la spécificité du langage de l’action, et présente quelques-unes des recherches qui en sont issues. Les formes de l’action inaugure une série de volumes collectifs qui interviendront sur des questions vives d’épistémologie, d’analyse sociologique et de théorie sociale, dans un souci de confrontation avec les principaux courants de réflexion qui, depuis plusieurs décennies, modifient nos façons de concevoir l’homme, la culture et la vie sociale.

Archaeology

Autor: Bjørnar Olsen

Número de Páginas: 266

“This book exhorts the reader to embrace the materiality of archaeology by recognizing how every step in the discipline’s scientific processes involves interaction with myriad physical artifacts, ranging from the camel-hair brush to profile drawings to virtual reality imaging. At the same time, the reader is taken on a phenomenological journey into various pasts, immersed in the lives of peoples from other times, compelled to engage their senses with the sights, smells, and noises of the publics and places whose remains they study. This is a refreshingly original and provocative look at the meaning of the material culture that lies at the foundation of the archaeological discipline.”—Michael Brian Schiffer, author of The Material Life of Human Beings “This volume is a radical call to fundamentally rethink the ontology, profession, and practice of archaeology. The authors present a closely reasoned, epistemologically sound argument for why archaeology should be considered the discipline of things, rather than its more commonplace definition as the study of the human past through material traces. All scholars and students of archaeology will need to read and contemplate...

Big Data, Little Data, No Data

Autor: Christine L. Borgman

Número de Páginas: 411

An examination of the uses of data within a changing knowledge infrastructure, offering analysis and case studies from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. “Big Data” is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in this examination of data and scholarly research, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. In many cases, there are no data—because relevant data don't exist, cannot be found, or are not available. Moreover, data sharing is difficult, incentives to do so are minimal, and data practices vary widely across disciplines. Borgman, an often-cited authority on scholarly communication, argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure—an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. After laying out the premises of her investigation—six “provocations” meant to inspire discussion about the uses of data in scholarship—Borgman...

Handling Digital Brains

Autor: Morana Alac

Número de Páginas: 215

An analysis of how fMRI researchers actively involve their bodies—with hand movements in particular—in laboratory practice. The results of fMRI brain scanning require extensive analysis in the laboratory. In Handling Digital Brains, Morana Alač shows that fMRI researchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures, and talk as they work with computers. Alač argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning we must consider their dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands. These multimodal actions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals. A semiotician trained in cognitive science, Alač grounds her discussion in concepts from Peirce's semiotics and her methodology in ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis. Basing her observations on videotaped records of activity in three fMRI research labs, Alač describes scientists' manual engagement with digital visuals of the human brain. Doing so, she turns her attention to the issue of practical thinking....