Dear MECCSA Subscribers,

We hope the following titles will be of interest to you.

A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

Orit Halpern

"Beautiful Data is a wonderful book, deeply engaging and full of compelling insights. Reading across fields, disciplines, borders, and issues, Orit Halpern chronicles the emergence of a new way of thinking about the world for the digital moment. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in the new directions in which the humanities, the arts, and education are moving."— Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.

Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.

Duke University Press

January 2015 352pp 108 illustrations 9780822357445 PB ~~£19.99~~ now only £14.99 when you quote CSL515DATA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/beautiful-data

Digital Critical Editions

Edited by Daniel Apollon, Claire Belisle & Philippe Regnier

"This is the first collection I have seen to address such a range of questions surrounding editing in the digital age, with a well-focused approach on key issues and offering a strong theoretical and historical background."—Peter Robinson, editor of Chaucer: The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM

Provocative yet sober, Digital Critical Editions examines how transitioning from print to a digital milieu deeply affects how scholars deal with the work of editing critical texts. On one hand, forces like changing technology and evolving reader expectations lead to the development of specific editorial products, while on the other hand, they threaten traditional forms of knowledge and methods of textual scholarship.

Using the experiences of philologists, text critics, text encoders, scientific editors, and media analysts, Digital Critical Editions ranges from philology in ancient Alexandria to the vision of user-supported online critical editing, from peer-directed texts distributed to a few to community-edited products shaped by the many. The authors discuss the production and accessibility of documents, the emergence of tools used in scholarly work, new editing regimes, and how the readers' expectations evolve as they navigate digital texts. The goal: exploring questions such as, What kind of text is produced? Why is it produced in this particular way?

Digital Critical Editions provides digital editors, researchers, readers, and technological actors with insights for addressing disruptions that arise from the clash of traditional and digital cultures, while also offering a practical roadmap for processing traditional texts and collections with today's state-of-the-art editing and research techniques thus addressing readers' new emerging reading habits.

Daniel Apollon is an associate professor and head of the Digital Culture Research Group at the University of Bergen. Claire Bélisle is a researcher at the National Scientific Research Center at the University of Lyon. Philippe Régnier is director of research at the National Scientific Research Center at the University of Lyon.

University of Illinois Press

June 2014 368pp 13 black and white photographs, 8 line drawings, 1 table 9780252038402 HB ~~£45.00~~ now only £36.00 when you quote CSL515DATA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/digital-critical-editions

The Truth of the Technological World

Essays on the Genealogy of Presence

Friedrich Kittler Translated by Erik Butler

Friedrich Kittler (1943—2011) combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany. "Media studies," as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. Exemplary essays illustrate how matters of form and inscription make heterogeneous source material (e.g., literary classics and computer design) interchangeable on the level of function—with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the humanities and the "hard sciences." Rich in counterintuitive propositions, sly humor, and vast erudition, Kittler's work both challenges the assumptions of positivistic cultural history and exposes the over-abstraction and language games of philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. The twenty-three pieces gathered here document the intellectual itinerary of one of the most original thinkers in recent times—sometimes baffling, often controversial, and always stimulating.

Philosopher, cultural historian, and literary critic Friedrich Kittler had appointments at several German and American universities over the course of his academic career, concluding with his tenure as Chair of Aesthetics and Media History at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Stanford University Press

September 2014 400pp 9780804792547 PB ~~£18.99~~ now only £15.19 when you quote CSL515DATA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/truth-of-the-technological-world

Forensic Media

Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity

Greg Siegel

"An original historical analysis of the intersection of accidents and media, this book resonates with the present climate of terror and risk, bringing a significant historical dimension to our understanding of the contemporary moment. Forensic Media demonstrates how thoroughly the technological accident drives and is driven by parallel developments in modern recording media. By raising crucial questions about the role of the mediated accident in modern debates on causality, evidence, knowledge, and narrative, it makes significant contributions to media archeology and the history of science."— Karen Beckman, editor of Animating Film Theory

In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.

Greg Siegel is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Duke University Press

November 2014 272pp 57 illustrations 9780822357537 PB ~~£17.99~~ now only £13.49 when you quote CSL515DATA when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/forensic-media

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