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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Library & information sciences > General
In November 1918, the implementation of agrarian change in the Scottish Highlands threatened another wave of unemployment and eviction for the land-working population, which led to widespread and varied social protest. Those who had been away on war service (and their families) faced returning to exactly the same social and economic conditions in the Scottish Highlands they had hoped they had left behind in the struggle to make 'a land fit for heroes'. Widespread and varied social protest rapidly followed. It argues that, previously, there has been a failure to capture fully the geography, chronology typology and rate of occurrence of these events. The book not only offers new insights and a greater understanding of what was happening in the Highlands in this period, but illustrates how a range of forms of protest were used which demand attention, not least for the fact that these events, unlike most of the earlier Land Wars period, were successful. There are functioning townships in the Highlands today that owe their existence to the land invasions of the 1920s. The book innovatively concentrates on formulating explanation and interpretation from within and looks to the crofting landscape as base, means and motive to disturbance and interpretation. It proposes that protest is much more convincingly understood as an expression of environmental ethics from 'the bottom up' coming increasingly into conflict with conservationist views expressed from 'the top down' It focuses on individual case studies in order to engage more convincingly with an important evidential base - that of popular memory of land disturbances - and to adopt a frame and lens through which to explore the fluid and contingent nature of protest performances. Based upon the belief that in the study of landscapes of social protest the old shibboleth of space as solely passive setting and symbolic register is no longer tenable is paid here to nature/culture interactions, to vernacular ecological b
During its brief existence Wikipedia has proved astonishingly successful with 2.8 million articles in English alone available freely to all with access to the internet. The online encyclopedia can be seen as the 21st century's version of earlier historical attempts to gather the world's knowledge into one place - this unique book offers a description of some of these earlier attempts. O'Sullivan follows with a thorough analysis of Wikipedia itself, suggesting how to approach and contribute to the site, and what can be gained from using it. Writing in an accessible style the author takes a socio-historical approach and argues that by looking at communities of practice in the past we can come to understand the radical, even political, nature of Wikipedia. The book will have a broad appeal to anyone interested in the development of this unique project, including information management professionals but also historians, sociologists, educators and students.
The need for public libraries to tackle social exclusion and engage in social justice becomes ever more urgent as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, and the very survival of public libraries in the heart of the community is open to debate. If public libraries are to develop and grow in the future and become relevant to the majority of their local communities, then they need to abandon outmoded concepts of 'excellence' and fully grasp the 'equity' agenda. This book examines the historical background to social exclusion and the strategic context in terms of government and professional policy. The authors propose a compelling manifesto for change and outline practical ways in which public libraries can be transformed into needs-based services.
The performance of heritage takes place in prestigious institutions such as museums and archives, in officially sanctioned spaces such as jubilees and public monuments, but also in more mundane, ephemeral and banal cultural practices, such as naming of phenomena, viewing exhibitions or walking in the countryside. This volume examines the performance of Nordic heritage and the shaping of the very idea of Norden in diverse contexts in North America, the Baltic and the Nordic countries and examines the importance of these places as sites for creating and preserving cultural heritage. Offering rich perspectives on a part of Europe which has not been the centre of discussion in the Anglophone world, this volume will be of value to a wide readership, including cultural historians, museum practitioners, policy-makers and scholars of heritage, ethnology and folkloristics.
Genealogy has become a widely popular pursuit, as millions of people now research their family history, trace their forebears, attend family reunions and travel to ancestral home sites. Geographers have much to contribute to the serious study of the family history phenomenon. Land records, maps and even GIS are increasingly used by genealogical investigators. As a cultural practice, it encompasses peoples' emotional attachments to ancestral places and is widely manifest on the ground as personal heritage travel. Family history research also has significant potential to challenge accepted geographical views of migration, ethnicity, socio-economic class and place-based identities. This volume is possibly the first ever book to address the geographical and scholarly aspects of this increasingly popular social phenomenon. It highlights tools and information sources used by geographers and their application to family history research. Furthermore, it examines family history as a socio-cultural practice, including the activities of tourism, archival research and DNA testing.
Research into the ways in which the past is constructed and consumed in the present is now reaching a mature stage. This maturity derives from the general acceptance that heritage as a social and cultural construct is closely connected to the making and maintaining of identity at all spatial scales. This unique book contributes to the developing discourse by focusing on 'heritage from below' in a field where the literature on the relationship between heritage and identity has, rightly, been focused on national identity. Never before have the contemporary manifestations and the theoretical structuring framework of the idea of heritage from below been discussed in the depth offered by this book. The authors first establish the concept and then engage with the actual practice and practitioners of heritage from below in the UK, Europe, Australia and North America.
This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs. The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through communitybased peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens. This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.
Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.
Collaboration within digital humanities is both a pertinent and a pressing topic as the traditional mode of the humanist, working alone in his or her study, is supplemented by explicitly co-operative, interdependent and collaborative research. This is particularly true where computational methods are employed in large-scale digital humanities projects. This book, which celebrates the contributions of Harold Short to this field, presents fourteen essays by leading authors in the digital humanities. It addresses several issues of collaboration, from the multiple perspectives of institutions, projects and individual researchers.
Information is everywhere, and defines everything in today's society. Moreover, information is a key concept in a wide range of academic disciplines, from quantum physics to public policy. However, these disciplines all interpret the concept in quite different ways. This book looks at information in several different academic disciplines - cybernetics, ICT, communications theory, semiotics, information systems, library science, linguistics, quantum physics and public policy. Perspectives on Information brings clarity and coherence to different perspectives through promoting information as a unifying concept across the disciplinary spectrum. Though conceived as a contribution to the ongoing conversation between academic disciplines into the nature of information, the deliberately accessible style of this text (reflecting the authors' backgrounds at The Open University) will be make it valuable for anyone who needs to know something more about information. Given the ubiquity of information in the 21st century, that means everyone.
How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) are the two major international organisations that are involved in the regulation of international communications. The ITU deals with electronic communications including radio. The UPU deals with mail. As such, both organisations are of major importance in modern life. This volume provides an up-to-date analysis of their development from inception to the present as they have responded to technical and political change. It also makes suggestions for the future. The volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students, policy-makers, government officials and administrators, and legal staff in telecommunication and postal organisations.
Using monuments and ruins by way of illustration, this fascinating book examines the symbolic, ideological, geographical and aesthetic importance of Greek classical iconography for the Western world. It examines how classical Greek monuments are simultaneously perceived as sublime national symbols and as a mythological and archetypal reference against which Western modernism is measured. The book investigates the dialogue this double identity leads to, as well as frequent clashes between ancient (but also later) monuments and their modern urban or regional environment. Living Ruins, Value Conflicts examines the complex historical process of monument restoration and enhancement, and analyses the nexus of changing perceptions, aesthetic visions and formal principles over the past two centuries. The book shows the ways in which archaeology and monumentality affect modern life, the modern aesthetic, our notions of nationhood, of place, of self - and the limits to and possibilities for national development imposed by the need to ensure ruins are kept 'alive'.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the information profession. The series IFLA Publications deals with many of the means through which libraries, information centres, and information professionals worldwide can formulate their goals, exert their influence as a group, protect their interests, and find solutions to global problems.
Researching ballot measures can be one of the most daunting types of legal research. Exploring Initiative and Referendum Law: Selected State Research Guides offers legal researchers an easy-to-use guide that provides thorough overviews of I&R (initiative and referendum) laws within twenty-three states. This unique resource provides state-specific guidance about both forms of I&R law, those state laws permitting I&R, and those state laws enacted as a result of the I&R process. Any legal researcher beginning a project or needing to know just where to go for the right resources will get helpful general and specific information on practical research strategies and resources. Up to now, finding the literature to research the state-specific history of a law passed by initiative or referendum has been extremely difficult. This book fills this gap by providing top researchers with brief overviews of the individual state processes while providing important primary and secondary sources, including Web sites. The guide's chapters are separated alphabetically by state for fast and easy reference. Annotated bibliographies of books, articles, and Web sites are provided, along with instructions about what documents one can expect to find on the Web, and how to use free databases. Because of this useful volume's unique focus, the book may well become an essential resource for law librarians, attorneys, law faculty, law students, and Political Science scholars. This book was published as a special issue of Legal Reference Services Quarterly.
This book draws on a wide selection of interdisciplinary literature discussing complex adaptive systems - including scholarship from economics, political science, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and religion - to apply general complexity tenets to the institutions, conceptual framework, and theoretical justifications of the copyright system, both in the United States and internationally. The author argues that copyrighted works are the products of complex creative systems and, consequently, designers of copyright regimes for the global 'information ecosystem' should look to complexity theory for guidance. Urging legal scholars to undertake empirical studies of real-world copyright systems, Tussey reveals how the selection of workable configurations for the copyright regime is larger than that encompassed by the traditional, entirely theoretical, debate between private property rights and the commons. Finally, this unique study articulates how copyright law must tolerate certain chaotic elements that may be essential to the sustainability of complex systems.
The frequency with which particular words are used in a text can tell us something meaningful both about that text and also about its author because their choice of words is seldom random. Focusing on the most frequent lexical items of a number of generated word frequency lists can help us to determine whether all the texts are written by the same author. Alternatively, they might wish to determine whether the most frequent words of a given text (captured by its word frequency list) are suggestive of potentially meaningful patterns that could have been overlooked had the text been read manually. This edited collection brings together cutting-edge research written by leading experts in the field on the construction of word-lists for the analysis of both frequency and keyword usage. Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the most exciting research being conducted in this subject.
Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.
Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information in order to achieve aims such as the advancement of Western civilization, the alleviation of inequalities across classes and countries, and the promotion of peaceful coexistence between nations. In doing so, the contributors provide a novel historical context for assessing widely-held assumptions about today's globalized, 'post modern' information society. This volume will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society.
Electronic imaging and digital applications have brought numerous benefits for museums, galleries, archives and other organizations in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Bringing together leading international practitioners from different disciplines, the EVA (Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts) conferences help those working in the field to gain the most from developments in multimedia technology. This accessible volume collects recent papers from EVA conferences, covering case studies from the world's greatest institutions, as well as from some of the smallest and most innovative. Topics covered include virtual reconstruction of destroyed buildings, digital image archiving, 2D and 3D digitization projects, website evaluation, virtual archaeology, handheld interactive visitor support, exploiting digital cultural heritage and electronic aids for non-speaking people, as well as summaries of international research and technology development. The volume presents in convenient form the wealth of experience of a great variety of international specialists, allowing readers to further enhance the visitor experience of their collections.
Overuse of the internet is often characterized as problematic, disruptive, or addictive, with stories frequently claiming that online use interferes with relationships, or that 'excessive' time in front of computer screens is unhealthy. The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction contests the claim that computers - specifically Internet use - are addictive, arguing that use of the Internet is now a form of everyday leisure engaged in by many people in Western society. Offering an analysis of the nature of addiction alongside a detailed empirical study of home computer use, this book will be of interest not only to sociologists of culture and popular culture, but also to scholars of media, ICT and education.
What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.
Blogging and other types of social media such as wikis and social networking sites have transformed the way we use the internet in recent years. It is a transformation that business is eager to exploit. In order to do so, a clear commercial strategy needs to be established; does your organization wish to use the media actively as a business tool, or do you need to respond to the use of social media by others? Blogging and Other Social Media will address this question with practical guidance on using social media as well as the risks associated with it. A collaboration by leading thinkers and business users of social media, the book contains detailed and practical advice on the various forms of social media - their applications, advantages and disadvantages, how these technologies are evolving, and whether or not their use will benefit your business. The section covering social media and the law explains the risks and remedies related to abuse of copyright, defamation, privacy, data protection and user contracts as well as the opportunities and threats for online reputation. If you are looking to encourage your employees but want to protect your business from the threats this emerging media presents, get a copy of this practical guide and study it before you start including social media as part of your corporate marketing or communications strategy.
Bringing together theoretical and empirical research from 22 countries in Europe, North America, Australia, South America and Japan, this book offers a state-of-the-art survey of conceptual and methodological research and planning issues relating to landscape, heritage, [and] development. It has 30 chapters grouped in four main thematic sections: landscapes as a constitutive dimension of territorial identities; landscape history and landscape heritage; landscapes as development assets and resources; and landscape research and development planning. The contributors are scholars from a wide range of cultural and professional backgrounds, experienced in fundamental and applied research, planning and policy design. They were invited by the co-editors to write chapters for this book on the basis of the theoretical frameworks, case-study research findings and related policy concerns they presented at the 23rd Session of PECSRL - The Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape, organized by TERCUD - Territory, Culture and Development Research Centre, Universidade LusA(3)fona, in Lisbon and A"bidos, Portugal, 1 - 5 September 2008. With such broad inter-disciplinary relevance and international scope, this book provides a valuable overview, highlighting recent findings and interpretations on historical, current and prospective linkages between changing landscapes and natural, economic, cultural and other identity features of places and regions; landscape-related identities as local and regional development assets and resources in the era of globalized economy and culture; the role of landscape history and heritage as platforms of landscape research and management in European contexts, including the implementation of The European Landscape Convention; and, the strengthening of the landscape perspective as a constitutive element of sustainable development. |
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