Subversion, Conversion, Development

Subversion, Conversion, Development PDF Author: James Leach
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262322501
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Explorations of design, use, and reuse of information technology in diverse historical and cultural contexts. This book explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies. These encounters are alternative because they counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption; they include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, “DIY cultures,” and other nonmainstream models of technology production. The contributors—leading thinkers in science and technology studies, anthropology, and software design—pay special attention to the specific inflections that different cultures and communities give to the value of knowledge. The richly detailed accounts presented here challenge the dominant view of knowledge as a neutral good—information available for representation and encoding but separated from all social relations. The chapters examine specific cases in which the forms of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters are shaping technology use and development. They consider design, use, and reuse of technological tools, including databases, GPS devices, books, and computers, in locations that range from Australia and New Guinea to Germany and the United States. Contributors Poline Bala, Alan Blackwell, Wade Chambers, Michael Christie, Hildegard Diemberger, Stephen Hugh-Jones, James Leach, Jerome Lewis, Dawn Nafus, Gregers Petersen, Marilyn Strathern, David Turnbull, Helen Verran, Laura Watts, Lee Wilson

Subversion, Conversion, Development

Subversion, Conversion, Development PDF Author: James Leach
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262322501
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explorations of design, use, and reuse of information technology in diverse historical and cultural contexts. This book explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies. These encounters are alternative because they counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption; they include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, “DIY cultures,” and other nonmainstream models of technology production. The contributors—leading thinkers in science and technology studies, anthropology, and software design—pay special attention to the specific inflections that different cultures and communities give to the value of knowledge. The richly detailed accounts presented here challenge the dominant view of knowledge as a neutral good—information available for representation and encoding but separated from all social relations. The chapters examine specific cases in which the forms of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters are shaping technology use and development. They consider design, use, and reuse of technological tools, including databases, GPS devices, books, and computers, in locations that range from Australia and New Guinea to Germany and the United States. Contributors Poline Bala, Alan Blackwell, Wade Chambers, Michael Christie, Hildegard Diemberger, Stephen Hugh-Jones, James Leach, Jerome Lewis, Dawn Nafus, Gregers Petersen, Marilyn Strathern, David Turnbull, Helen Verran, Laura Watts, Lee Wilson

Subversion 1.6 Official Guide

Subversion 1.6 Official Guide PDF Author: Ben Collins-Sussman
Publisher: Fultus Corporation
ISBN: 1596821698
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This is the official guide and reference manual for Subversion 1.6 - the popular open source revision control technology.

Experiencing Public Relations

Experiencing Public Relations PDF Author: Elizabeth Bridgen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351803093
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Experiencing Public Relations examines the everyday experiences of PR practitioners in order to better understand how public relations is perceived by those outside and within the field. The book aims to provoke debate around the nature of public relations by looking at how it is defined at a theoretical level, compared to how it is lived and represented in the real world. Chapters feature work from some of the world’s leading public relations scholars. They cover a diverse range of subjects, such as representations of PR in fiction and film, terrorist use of public relations, the impact of social media on this medium and a study of ‘dirty work’ within the PR industry. The book also explores international PR practices, presenting analysis from contributors based in Australia, Germany, India, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, UAE, UK, USA and Venezuela. Experiencing Public Relations goes beyond the ‘frontstage’ scholarship of public relations to bring together stories of PR in daily life, revealing how influential theories work out in practice and translate into different cultural and social contexts. This book will provide researchers, professionals and students with a vital perspective on the inner workings of public relations today.

Energy at the End of the World

Energy at the End of the World PDF Author: Laura Watts
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552655
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Making local energy futures, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at the edge of the world. The islands of Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, are closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. Surrounded by fierce seas and shrouded by clouds and mist, the islands seem to mark the edge of the known world. And yet they are a center for energy technology innovation, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel networks, attracting the interest of venture capitalists and local communities. In this book, Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world. Orkney, Watts tells us, has been making technology for six thousand years, from arrowheads and stone circles to wave and tide energy prototypes. Artifacts and traces of all the ages—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Viking, Silicon—are visible everywhere. The islanders turned to energy innovation when forced to contend with an energy infrastructure they had outgrown. Today, Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre, established in 2003. There are about forty open-sea marine energy test facilities in the world, many of which draw on Orkney expertise. The islands generate more renewable energy than they use, are growing hydrogen fuel and electric car networks, and have hundreds of locally owned micro wind turbines and a decade-old smart grid. Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Watts tells an Orkney energy saga—an account of how the islands are creating their own low-carbon future in the face of the seemingly impossible. The Orkney Islands, Watts shows, are playing a long game, making energy futures for another six thousand years.

Repairing Infrastructures

Repairing Infrastructures PDF Author: Christopher R. Henke
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360683
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures--communication, food, transportation, energy, and information--are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them.

Digital Oil

Digital Oil PDF Author: Eric Monteiro
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262544679
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
How is digitalization of the offshore oil industry fundamentally changing how we understand work and ways of knowing? Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor, and in doing so shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing. For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Eric Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil. What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative.

A Billion Little Pieces

A Billion Little Pieces PDF Author: Jordan Frith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262551284
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
How RFID, a ubiquitous but often invisible mobile technology, identifies tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is ubiquitous but often invisible, a mobile technology used by more people more often than any flashy smartphone app. RFID systems use radio waves to communicate identifying information, transmitting data from a tag that carries data to a reader that accesses the data. RFID tags can be found in credit cards, passports, key fobs, car windshields, subway passes, consumer electronics, tunnel walls, and even human and animal bodies—identifying tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. In this book, Jordan Frith looks at RFID technology and its social impact, bringing into focus a technology that was designed not to be noticed. RFID, with its ability to collect unique information about almost any material object, has been hyped as the most important identification technology since the bar code, the linchpin of the Internet of Things—and also seen (by some evangelical Christians) as a harbinger of the end times. Frith views RFID as an infrastructure of identification that simultaneously functions as an infrastructure of communication. He uses RFID to examine such larger issues as big data, privacy, and surveillance, giving specificity to debates about societal trends. Frith describes how RFID can monitor hand washing in hospitals, change supply chain logistics, communicate wine vintages, and identify rescued pets. He offers an accessible explanation of the technology, looks at privacy concerns, and pushes back against alarmist accounts that exaggerate RFID's capabilities. The increasingly granular practices of identification enabled by RFID and other identification technologies, Frith argues, have become essential to the working of contemporary networks, reshaping the ways we use information.

America by the Numbers

America by the Numbers PDF Author: Emmanuel Didier
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262538377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
How new techniques of quantification shaped the New Deal and American democracy. When the Great Depression struck, the US government lacked tools to assess the situation; there was no reliable way to gauge the unemployment rate, the number of unemployed, or how many families had abandoned their farms to become migrants. In America by the Numbers, Emmanuel Didier examines the development in the 1930s of one such tool: representative sampling. Didier describes and analyzes the work of New Deal agricultural economists and statisticians who traveled from farm to farm, in search of information that would be useful for planning by farmers and government agencies. Didier shows that their methods were not just simple enumeration; these new techniques of quantification shaped the New Deal and American democracy even as the New Deal shaped the evolution of statistical surveys. Didier explains how statisticians had to become detectives and anthropologists, searching for elements that would help them portray America as a whole. Representative surveys were one of the most effective instruments for their task. He examines pre-Depression survey techniques; the invention of the random sampling method and the development of the Master Sample; and the application of random sampling by employment experts to develop the “Trial Census of Unemployment.”

Remaking Berlin

Remaking Berlin PDF Author: Timothy Moss
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
An examination of Berlin's turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin's turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin's networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes.

The Connectivity of Things

The Connectivity of Things PDF Author: Sebastian Giessmann
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262381087
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place, how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains everything one ever could wish to know about networks.