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Examines the way the corporation - a legal concept of enduring and
timely importance in the Anglo-American legal tradition - was
imagined in the nineteenth-century historical imagination. Stefanie
Mueller traces the ways in which literary and cultural
representations of the corporation in nineteenth-century America
helped shift how the corporation was envisioned; from a public tool
meant to serve the common good, to an instrument of private
enterprise. She explores how artists and writers together with
lawyers and economists represented this transformation through
narrative and metaphor. Drawing on a range of legal, literary and
visual texts, she shows how the corporation's public origins as
well as its fundamentally collective nature continued to be
relevant much longer than previous scholarship has argued.
Reading the Social in American Studies offers a unique exploration
of the advantages and benefits in using sociological terms and
concepts in American literary and cultural studies and, conversely,
in using literature-understood broadly-to uncover a microlevel of
the social. Its temporal scope ranges from the early 19th to the
21st century, providing a historical dimension that is otherwise
often missing from studies on the conjunction of literature and
sociology. The contributors' approaches include genre reflections
as well as close readings, theoretical discussions of crucial
sociological terms, and literary observations backed up by
empirical sociological studies. The book will familiarize
international readers with ideas on the social from both sides of
the Atlantic, including scholarship of such figures as John Dewey,
Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu.
While fabrication technologies have been in use in industry for
several decades, expiring patents have recently allowed the
technology to spill over to technology-enthusiastic "makers". The
big question now is whether the technology will further progress
towards consumers, which would allow the technology to scale from
hundreds of thousands of users to hundreds of millions of users.
Such a transition would enable consumers to use computing not just
to process data, but physical matter. This holds the promise of
democratizing a whole range of fields preoccupied with physical
objects, from product design to interior design, to carpentry, and
some areas of mechanical and structural engineering. Personal
Fabrication analyzes similar trends in the history of computing
that made the transition from industry to consumers, such as
desktop publishing and home video editing, and comes to the
conclusion that such a transition is likely. The analysis also
reveals, however, that any transition to consumers first requires a
hardware and software system that embodies the skills and expert
knowledge that consumers lack. These are: (1) hardware and
materials that allow fabricating the intended objects, (2) software
that embodies domain knowledge, (3) software that embodies the
know-how required to operate the machinery, and (4) software that
provides immediate feedback and supports interactive exploration.
At the same time, sustained success will only be possible if we
also consider future implications, in particular (5) sustainability
and (6) intellectual property. Personal Fabrication argues that
researchers in HCI and computer graphics are well equipped to
tackle these six challenges. It surveys the already existing work
and derives an actionable research agenda. While the main focus is
on human-computer interaction and computer graphics, it also
includes selected works from adjacent fields such as mechanical
engineering, material science, and robotics.
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