An account of the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
What teeth can tell us about human evolution, development, and behavior. Our teeth have intriguing stories to tell. These sophisticated time machines record growth, diet, and evolutionary history as clearly as tree rings map a redwood's lifespan. Each day of childhood is etched into tooth crowns and roots--capturing birth, nursing history, environmental clues, and illnesses. The study of ancien…
"Infrastructural Brutalism explores the necropolitics of infrastructure through the lens of artistic media: "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives. How does American "drowned town" literature, from Mud on the Stars to Sugaree Rising, contribute to the social erasure of Indigeneity? How does road movie scholarship ignore the materiality…
Why the traditional "pledge and review" climate agreements have failed, and how carbon pricing, based on trust and reciprocity, could succeed.After twenty-five years of failure, climate negotiations continue to use a "pledge and review" approach: countries pledge (almost anything), subject to (unenforced) review. This approach ignores everything we know about human cooperation. In this book, le…
We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, …
An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of "teardown" from…
Architects who engaged with cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies poured the foundation for digital interactivity.In Architectural Intelligence, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and t…
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The other nature that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours …
OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines big data not as an undifferentiated whole but contextually, investigating the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, an…