Abstractions And Embodiments

Author : Janet Abbate
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421444380
Total Pages : 473 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Abstractions and Embodiments written by Janet Abbate and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge historians explore ideas, communities, and technologies around modern computing to explore how computers mediate social relations. Computers have been framed both as a mirror for the human mind and as an irreducible other that humanness is defined against, depending on different historical definitions of "humanness." They can serve both liberation and control because some people's freedom has historically been predicated on controlling others. Historians of computing return again and again to these contradictions, as they often reveal deeper structures. Using twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment, a reformulation of the old mind-body dichotomy, this anthology examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing. The authors examining "Abstraction" revisit central concepts in computing, including "algorithm," "program," "clone," and "risk." In doing so, they demonstrate how the meanings of these terms reflect power relations and social identities. The section on "Embodiments" focuses on sensory aspects of using computers as well as the ways in which gender, race, and other identities have shaped the opportunities and embodied experiences of computer workers and users. Offering a rich and diverse set of studies in new areas, the book explores such disparate themes as disability, the influence of the punk movement, working mothers as technical innovators, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain. Abstractions and Embodiments reimagines computing history by questioning canonical interpretations, foregrounding new actors and contexts, and highlighting neglected aspects of computing as an embodied experience. It makes the profound case that both technology and the body are culturally shaped and that there can be no clear distinction between social, intellectual, and technical aspects of computing. Contributors: Janet Abbate, Marc Aidinoff, Troy Kaighin Astarte, Ekaterina Babinsteva, André Brock, Maarten Bullynck, Jiahui Chan, Gerardo Con Diaz, Liesbeth De Mol, Stephanie Dick, Kelcey Gibbons, Elyse Graham, Michael J. Halvorson, Mar Hicks, Scott Kushner, Xiaochang Li, Zachary Loeb, Lisa Nakamura, Tiffany Nichols, Laine Nooney, Elizabeth Petrick, Cierra Robson, Hallam Stevens, Jaroslav Švelch

Author : Janet Abbate
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421444372
Total Pages : 473 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Abstractions and Embodiments written by Janet Abbate and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--

Author : Marcia Brennan
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262025713
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.1X/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Modernism's Masculine Subjects written by Marcia Brennan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rejecting the typical view of formalism's exclusive engagement with essentialized and purified notions of abstraction and its disengagement from issues of gender and embodiment, Brennan explores the ways in which these categories were intertwined. Historically and theoretically."--Jacket.

Author : Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262545233
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Architecture and Abstraction written by Pier Vittorio Aureli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

Author : Daniel Jackson
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262528908
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Software Abstractions, revised edition written by Daniel Jackson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language. In Software Abstractions Daniel Jackson introduces an approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach—which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”—takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. This revised edition updates the text, examples, and appendixes to be fully compatible with Alloy 4.

Author : Jeff Wallace
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474461670
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity written by Jeff Wallace and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx

Author : B. Liskov
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Abstraction and Specification in Program Development written by B. Liskov and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1986 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" offers professionals in program design and software engineering a methodology that will enable them to construct programs that are reliable and reasonably easy to understand, modify, and maintain. Good programming involves the systematic mastery of complexity, and this book provides the first unified treatment of the techniques of abstraction and specification, which, the authors argue, are the linchpin of any effective approach to programming. They place particular emphasis on the use of data abstraction to produce highly modular programs.The authors focus on the process of decomposing large program projects into independent modules that can be assigned to independent working groups. They discuss methods of decomposition, the kinds of modules that are most useful in this process, and techniques to increase the likelihood that modules produced can in fact be recombined to solve the original programming problem. There are many examples of abstractions throughout the text, and each chapter ends with pertinent references and exercises.Most of the sample implementations in the book are written in CLU, one of a growing number of languages able to support data abstraction. Sufficient material is included, however, to allow the reader to work in Pascal as well.The material in this book was developed by the authors during a decade of teaching undergraduate, graduate, and professional-level courses. Barbara Liskov, the developer of CLU, is Professor and John Guttag an Associate Professor of Computer Science at MIT. "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" is included in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science series.

Author : Brett M. Frischmann
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199333750
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Infrastructure written by Brett M. Frischmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.

Author : Daniel Jackson
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262017156
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Software Abstractions written by Daniel Jackson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language. In Software Abstractions Daniel Jackson introduces an approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach—which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”—takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. This revised edition updates the text, examples, and appendixes to be fully compatible with Alloy 4.

Author : Mar Hicks
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262535181
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Programmed Inequality written by Mar Hicks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.