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Cultures of Computing
``` Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 16:30:28 -0600 From: slstar@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Leigh Star) Subject: New Book of Possible Interest
The Cultures of Computing Edited by Susan Leigh Star Blackwell Publishers Oxford, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts October, 1995
Computers are rapidly diffusing through every organizational, creative and domestic setting, creating cultural changes in all of them. Scholars are using the tools of anthropology, sociology and organizational theory to understand these processes. Some of them are associated with making, and some with using, computers and information technology. Because computers are simultaneously intimate and formal, they offer a good opportunity to study a variety of processes: the development of material culture, the formation of practice-based networks, the fallibility of language, the relationship between power and infrastructure.
This book is one of the first collections to explore the range of cultural practices associated with the design and use of computing. Each of the contributors examines specific kinds of work that people do together with and around computers. Each essay examines the ways in which people are brought together in computing practices as learners, artists, gatekeepers and scientists - sometimes as insiders, sometimes as outsiders. The contributors cover a range of topics, from the military to gender in cyberspace, from education to multi-national corporate IT use.
A Sociological Review Monograph.
Audiences: Advanced undergrads, graduate students; researchers in: sociology and anthropology of computing; human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work; technology and education; organizational computing; history of technology.
Contents
Introduction 1 Susan Leigh Star
=46rom practice to culture on Usenet 29 Nancy K. Baym
Changing documents/documenting changes: using computers for collaborative writing over distance 53 Eevi E. Beck
Cyberpunks in cyberspace: The politics of subjectivity in the computer age 69 Paul N. Edwards
Connecting cultures: Balinese character and the computer 85 Dianne DiPaola Hagaman
Information systems strategy, a cultural borderland, some monstrous behaviour 103 Mike Hales
Making space: a comparison of mathematical work in school and professional design practices 118 Rogers Hall and Reed Stevens
Contextualization, cognitive flexibility, and hypertext: The convergence of interpretive theory, cognitive psychology, and advanced information technologies 146 Robert A. Jones and Rand Spiro
Constructing easiness-historical perspectives on work, computerization, and women 158 Randi Markussen
`Pulling down' books vs. `pulling up' files: textual databanks and the changing culture of classical scholarship 181 Karen Ruhleder
The visual culture of engineers 196 Kathryn Henderson
Cross-classroom collaboration in global learning circles 219 Margaret Riel
Sex and death among the disembodied: VR, cyberspace, and the nature of academic discourse 243 Allucquere Rosanne Stone
References 256
Notes on Contributors 276
Index 279
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Ordering Information:
=46or inspection copies:
UK and elsewhere: inspcopy@BlackwellPublishers.co.uk 0800-716328 USA and Canada: blkwell@world.std.com 1-800-216-2522
To Purchase:
ISDN #0-631-19282-4 (paperback)
UK/Europe, etc.: Marston Book Services PO Box 87, Osney Mead Oxford OX2 ODT UK (44) (0) (1865) 791100 =46AX: (44) (0) (1865) 791347 =A312.99
US: Blackwell Publishers 238 Main St. Suite 501 Cambridge, MA 02142 USA (617) 547-7110 =46AX: (617) 547-0789 $19.95
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Susan Leigh Star Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois 123 LIS Building 501 East Daniel St. Champaign, IL 61820 Phone: (217) 244-3280 =46AX: (217) 244-3302 email: slstar@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
"The web of ten thousand dimensions in heaven and net on earth." -- Chinese translation of "World Wide Web", Int'l Herald Tribune, 6/95 ```
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