A proposal to move the academic area of digital media and learning toward more coherence. In this report, noted scholar James Paul Gee discusses the evolution of digital media and learning (DMAL) from its infancy as an “academic area” into a more organized field or coherent discipline. Distinguishing among academic areas, fields, disciplinary specializations, and thematic disciplines, Gee d…
Computing isn't simply about hardware or software, or calculation or applications. Computing, writes Paul Rosenbloom, is an exciting and diverse, yet remarkably coherent, scientific enterprise that is highly multidisciplinary yet maintains a unique core of its own. In On Computing, Rosenbloom proposes that computing is a great scientific domain on a par with the physical, life, and social scien…
I became operational... in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. Inspired by HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, HAL's Legacy reflects upon science fiction's most famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. The informative, nontechnical chapters written especially for this book describe many of the areas of computer science critical to the des…
"A Bradford Book.""Dramatically updating and extending the first edition, published in 1995, the second edition of The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks presents the enormous progress made in recent years in the many subfields related to the two great questions: How does the brain work? and, How can we build intelligent machines? Once again, the heart of the book is a set of almost 3…
Software agents are the latest advance in the trend toward smaller, modular pieces of code, where each module performs a well-defined, focused task or set of tasks. Programmed to interact with and provide services to other agents, including humans, software agents act autonomously with prescribed backgrounds, beliefs, and operations. Systems of agents can access and manipulate heterogeneously s…
"In The Government Machine Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action - a revolutionary move.Aga…
"A Bradford book."Graphical models use graphs to represent and manipulate joint probability distributions. They have their roots in artificial intelligence, statistics, and neural networks. The clean mathematical formalism of the graphical models framework makes it possible to understand a wide variety of network-based approaches to computation, and in particular to understand many neural netwo…
Innovative uses of global and local networks of linked computers make new ways of collaborative working, learning, and acting possible. In Group Cognition Gerry Stahl explores the technological and social reconfigurations that are needed to achieve computer-supported collaborative knowledge building--group cognition that transcends the limits of individual cognition. Computers can provide activ…
The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--Concordia University, 2011.3 Practices; Pioneers (Late Twentieth-Century Digital); Twenty-First-Century Digital Practice; 4 Softwares; What Is Software Studies?; Case Studies; 5 Futures; Summation; A Few Contexts; Speculations; What May Be; Appendices; The New Bucolic: Ekphrasis in the Digital Meadow; Dance Bones and Neural Ignition: The Dilemma of Defin…