Archive for » May, 2012 «

Actor Network Theory in Southern California

Some more opportunities to extend conversations across the humanities, social sciences, and informatics:

Dominique Boulier, who works with Bruno Latour’s group at Sciences Po, is visiting UC Irvine this week, on friday, May 18:
http://habitele.blogspot.fr/2012/05/opportunity-to-discuss-habitele-theory.html

Latour will visit in UC Irvine in Spring 2013. He recently visited the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, where Nishant Shah organized his visit.
http://cis-india.org/events/climate-change-and-controversy-mapping

[Hmm, if I were Professor Latour and had to choose among a slew of international invitations in the middle of a busy term, I think I would choose CIS over UCI too. Of course that’s just speculation – I imagine there was no direct choice, but it’s a productive fiction to dwell on briefly: I’ve been struck by how many exciting conversations – those that touch on issues seemingly urgent and critical in those traditional intellectual tasks of analyzing pasts and imagining futures – happen these days in spaces that until very recently were marginalized and ignored by scholars in the metropole. I think this is a good change, historically speaking. How scholars in the industrialized North will deal with this change remains to be seen.]

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Signs of life: the people who scan Google Books


Flipping through Dewey & Tufts’ now public domain Ethics on Google Books, I think I’ve come across the scanned image of a woman’s fingertip. Google scans books in two ways. In some cases, Google cuts the spines off of books and workers feed the stack of pages into scanning machines. In cases where the book cannot be destroyed, they have workers flip the pages while a photographic contraption snaps the pages. (See Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex for more.)