About the book: Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship.
In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays, this unique digital field guide offers innovative new approaches to digital scholarship, the design of digital tools and objects, and the deployment of critically grounded technologies for analysis and discovery. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, including software development, hackathons, digitized objects, diversity in the tech sector, and distributed scientific collaborations. They discuss methodological considerations of social networks and data analysis, design projects that can translate STS concepts into durable scientific work, and much more.
Featuring a concise introduction by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes and accompanied by an interactive microsite, this book provides new perspectives on digital scholarship that will shape the agenda for tomorrow’s generation of STS researchers and practitioners.
About the author:
Hanna Rose Shell studies aesthetics, media archaeology, textiles, and the interface of art and science; her scholarship takes the form of text and film. Shell’s book on camouflage, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, published by Zone Books in 2012, has since been translated into French (Zones Sensibles) and inspired her own and others’ multimedia works. Shell has published widely in scholarly and popular journals on subjects including taxidermy, waste processing, and the history of chronophotography. She is currently co-editor and art curator for a volume on science studies forthcoming from Princeton University Press and previously released an edited reprint of The Extermination of the American Bison [1886] with Smithsonian Institution Press (2002). The founder and commissioning editor of “Beyond Words,” a section on film and audio-visual practices in the history of technology for the journal Technology and Culture, her scholarship has appeared in publications Journal of Visual Culture, Configurations, History and Technology, Bidoun, Natural History and Cabinet among others.
Shell’s current book manuscript, Shoddy: Textiles, Technology, and Identity in Rags (under contract with University of Chicago Press), examines recycled textiles as transformative media forms through the lenses of aesthetics, material culture, history, and critical theory. It dovetails with a series of experimental documentary shorts and a textile installation in the Czech Republic on the subject of waste, recycling and old clothes. Her films and media works have appeared worldwide, at art and film venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Machine Project, Slamdance, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Machine Project, the Zimmerli Art Museum.
Praise:
"This delightful collection of thought-provoking essays, case studies, and research findings creates a coherent story out of the disparate threads that have helped animate digital science and technology studies. digitalSTS is an essential volume, helping junior scholars get their bearings while also enabling reflexivity among those deeply immersed in this field."
-danah boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of Data & Society, and author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
"A dazzling collection of STS writing and thinking--an indispensable handbook for the next generation of science and technology studies."
-Paul N. Edwards, author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
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