Applications have transformed the collaboration environment from a mere document collection into a highly interconnected social space. These systems interoperate within a social and organizational context that drives their everyday use and provides a rich context for understanding the role of nodes that represent both people and abstract concepts. Techno-Social Systems for Modern Economical and Governmental Infrastructures provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of mining technological and social systems for the creation of scalable methods, systems, and applications within economic and government disciplines. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as analysis models, data navigation, and empirical sociology, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, executives, managers, and developers seeking current research on the interconnecting roles of technology and social space.

Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks and practices of cognitive scientists of religion. Employing philosophical tools as well as drawing on case studies, contributions not only illuminate psychological experiments, anthropological observations and neurophysiological research relevant to understanding religious phenomena, they allow cognitive scientists to either heed or clarify their position in relation to Wittgenstein’s objections. By developing and responding to his criticisms, Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion offers novel perspectives on his philosophy in relation to religion, human nature, and the mind.

With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations of rhetoric. Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred. This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Michelle Ballif, Jean Bessette, Trey Conner, Richard Doyle, David Frank, Daniel M. Gross, Kevin Hamilton, Cynthia Haynes, Steven Mailloux, James R. Martel, Jodie Nicotra, Ned O’Gorman, and Brooke Rollins.

This international collection brings together scientists, scholars and artist-researchers to explore the cognition of memory through the performing arts and examine artistic strategies that target cognitive processes of memory. The strongly embodied and highly trained memory systems of performing artists render artistic practice a rich context for understanding how memory is formed, utilized and adapted through interaction with others, instruments and environments. Using experimental, interpretive and Practice-as-Research methods that bridge disciplines, the authors provide overview chapters and case studies of subjects such as: * collectively and environmentally distributed memory in the performing arts; * autobiographical memory triggers in performance creation and reception; * the journey from learning to memory in performance training; * the relationship between memory, awareness and creative spontaneity, and * memorization and embodied or structural analysis of scores and scripts. This volume provides an unprecedented resource for scientists, scholars, artists, teachers and students looking for insight into the cognition of memory in the arts, strategies of learning and performance, and interdisciplinary research methodology.

This books aims to demonstrate how semiotic models of textual analysis can be used to study any social reality or cultural process. In addition, it shows how semiotic models work by using examples from everyday life and social praxis, communicative processes and modes of consumption, online interactions and cross-media procedures, political experiences and scientific universes.

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt� indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

Geoinformatics is the science and technology of gathering, analyzing, interpreting, distributing, and using geospatial information. It encompasses a broad range of disciplines brought together to create a detailed but understandable picture of the physical world and our place in it. ""The Handbook of Research on Geoinformatics"" is the first reference work to map this exciting interdisciplinary field, discussing the complete range of contemporary research topics such as computer modeling, geometry, geoprocessing, and geographic information systems. This expansive reference work covers the complete range, of geoinformatics related issues, trends, theories, technologies, and applications. Following are the features: 42 authoritative contributions by 67 of the world's leading experts in geoinformatics; comprehensive coverage of each specific topic, highlighting recent trends and describing the latest advances in the field; more than 925 references to existing literature and research on geoinformatics; a compendium of over 300 key terms with detailed definitions; organized by topic and indexed, making it a convenient method of reference for all IT/IS scholars and professionals; and, cross-referencing of key terms, figures, and information pertinent to geoinformatics.

This volume gathers the latest advances and innovations in the triple helix of university-industry-government relations, as presented by leading international researchers at the II International Triple Helix Summit 2018, held in Dubai, UAE on November 10-13, 2018, which brought together experts, practitioners and academics across disciplines that address the dynamics of government, industry and academia. It covers analysis, theory, measurements and empirical enquiry in all aspects of university-industry-government interactions, as well as the international bases and dimensions of triple helix relations, their impacts, and social, economic, political, cultural, health and environmental implications. It also examines the role of government/academia/industry in building innovation-based cities and nations, and in transforming nations into knowledge-based sustainable economies. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, highlight numerous exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaboration among different specialists.

A resource for students and supervisors alike, the topics covered are related to the management of postgraduate research studies: the development of a successful research proposal (with examples); research resource management; research ethics and more.

Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000-2000 focuses on the changing relationships between what gradually emerged as the Arts and Christianity, the latter term covering both a stream of ideas and its institutions. The book as a whole is addressed to a general academic audience concerned with issues of cultural history, while the individual essays are also intended as scholarly contributions within their own fields. A collaborative effort by twenty-five European and American scholars representing disciplines ranging from aesthetics to the history of art and architecture, from literature, music and the theatre to classics, church history, and theology, the volume is an interdisciplinary study of intermedial phenomena, generally in larger cultural and intellectual contexts. The focus of topics extends from single concrete objects to sets of abstract concepts and values, and from a single moment in time to an entire millennium. While Signs of Change acknowledges the importance of synthesizing efforts essential to hermeneutically informed scholarship, in order to counterbalance generalized historical narratives with detailed investigations, broad accounts are juxtaposed with specialized research projects. The deliberately unchronological grouping of contributions underlines the effort to further discussion about methodologies for writing cultural history.

A complete course for beginners, reflecting a multiplicity of roles. It has a slight bias towards the spoken language, with most of the course based on dialogue format, but also provides notes on relevant linguistic points on a sufficiently detailed level so that it can be used as a self-teaching material for independent learners with the help of tapes and instructions on tape.

White House expert Lauren A. Wright identifies, explains, and measures the impact of the expanding role of presidential spouses in the White House and presidential campaign communications strategy, with a focus on the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. More than any other time in history, the First Lady now bears responsibilities tantamount to those of any high-ranking cabinet member. This fascinating book documents the growing presence of the president's wife in the communications strategies of the last three administrations, explaining why their involvement in a campaign has been critical to its survival. The book explores how the First Lady serves to persuade public opinion, make personal appeals to the public on behalf of the president, and promote initiatives that serve as uncontroversial frames for controversial policies. The author delves into political discussions about what makes presidents and presidential candidates likable, what draws public support to their agendas, and why spouses appear to be more effective in these arenas than other surrogates or even the presidents themselves. The content features dozens of interviews with former White House staff and communications strategists; in-depth analysis of almost 1,700 public speeches made by Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama; and surveys testing the effect of public relations strategies involving spouses on political opinion.

This exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the later decades of the nineteenth century in America - the immediate postbellum period, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era - as a time of critical change in the cultural visibility of women, as they made new kinds of appearances throughout American society. The essays show how, across the USA, it was fundamentally women who drove changes in their visibility forward, in groups and as individuals. Their motivations, activities and understandings were essential to shaping the character of their present society and the nation's future. The book establishes that these women's engagement with American society and culture cannot be simply understood in terms of the traditional polarities of inside/outside and private/public, since these frames do not fit the complexities of what was happening, be it women's occupation of geographic space, their new patterns of employment, their advocacy of working-class or ethnic rights, or their literary or cultural engagement with their milieux. Such women as Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Jane Addams, Rebecca Harding Davis, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Louisa May Alcott and Kate Douglas Wiggin all come under consideration in the light of these radical changes.

This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism. It reveals how semiotics provides fresh and valuable insights into multiculturalism: in contrast to the binary logic of dualistic philosophy, semiotic logic does not understand the value of truth in rigid terms of 'true' or 'false', 'right' or 'wrong' only. The value of truth resides in meaning, which is a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon, rooted, nevertheless, in factuality. Drawing on recent developments in biosemiotics, the book presents a theoretical approach to multiculturalism, regarding the lives of people living in multicultural environments. Rather than analyzing political or economic phenomena, it offers a semiotic analysis of multiculturalism and discusses its educational implications. It also invites readers to regard learning as a phenomenon of ecological sign growth and to understand multiculturalism along the same lines. As such, it brings together the life and social sciences and the humanities in a unified perspective, in an approach fitting postmodernism. Developing a postmodern philosophy for contemporary non-experts, which allows distancing from political discourse in favor of a posthumanistic stand, where altruism is seen as an opportunity, not a threat, this book appeals to a wide readership, from scholars seeking state-of-the-art theories to general readers looking for a thought-provoking and enlightening read.

Linguistic landscapes can play an important role in educating individuals beyond formal pedagogical environments. This book argues that anywhere can be a space for people to learn from displayed texts, images, and other communicated signs, and consequently a space where teachable cultural moments are created. Following language learning trajectories that 'exit through the language classroom' into city streets, public offices, museums and monuments, this volume presents innovative work demonstrating that anyone can learn from the linguistic landscape that surrounds them. Offering a bridge between theoretical research and practical application, chapters consider how we make sense of places by understanding how the landscape is used to express, claim and contest identities and ideologies. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom highlights the unexpected potential of the informal settings for learning and for teachers to expand their students' intercultural experience.