Bodies, Technologies and Methods

Bodies, Technologies and Methods PDF

Author: Phil Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0429515316

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This book examines how different technologies can be used to enhance research methods in the social sciences and humanities. The boundary between the body and the digital has become increasingly blurred in recent years due to the rise of technologies that capture and reshape our embodied selves. New technologies all too often reflect the attitudes of the privileged white men who dominate the tech sector. This book thus, in part, considers how critical researchers can employ new technologies while challenging some of the problematic assumptions that underpin their design. It also includes a series of case studies that examine the dynamic use of different techniques to explore key questions around the intersection of embodiment and the digital. With a playful, experimental approach to conducting research today, this book offers new, cutting-edge methods that respond to the potential of different technologies. It will be invaluable reading for undergraduate and post-graduate students of social sciences and humanities to explore ways in which this approach can bring new insights to a range of interdisciplinary research questions.

Giving Bodies Back to Data

Giving Bodies Back to Data PDF

Author: Silvia Casini

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 026204529X

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An examination of the bodily, situated aspects of data-visualization work, looking at visualization practices around the development of MRI technology. Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In this book, Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image--and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization. Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists' body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen's biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.

Bodies in Technology

Bodies in Technology PDF

Author: Don Ihde

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780816638468

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New technologies suggest new ideas about embodiment - our 'reach' extends to global sites through the Internet; we enter cyberspace through the engines of virtual reality. In this book, a leading philosopher of technology explores the meaning of bodies in technology—how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world is affected by the various information technologies. 'Bodies in Technology' begins with an analysis of embodiment in cyberspace, then moves on to consider ways in which social theorists have interpreted or overlooked these conditions. An astute and sensible judge of these theories, Don Ihde is a uniquely provocative and helpful guide through contemporary thinking about technology and embodiment, drawing on sources and examples as various as video games, popular films, the workings of e-mail, and virtual reality techniques. Charting the historical, philosophical, and practical territory between virtual reality and real life, this work is an important contribution to the national conversation on the impact technology-and information technology in particular-has on our lives in a wired, global age.

Body Style

Body Style PDF

Author: Theresa M. Winge

Publisher: Berg

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1847880231

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"Body Style reveals the subcultural body as a site for understanding subcultural identity, resistance, agency and fashion. Analyzed, theorized, politicized, and sensationalized, the subcultural body functions as a framework where individuals build a sense of self and subcultural identity. Drawing on specific subcultural examples and interviews with subculture members, Body Style explores the subcultural body and its style within global culture. Body Style is the result of over eleven years of research examining these intersections within specific urban subcultures, including Urban Tribalists, Modern Primitives, Punks, Cybers, Industrials, Skates, and others. Divided into three main sections on subcultural body history, subcultural body identity and subcultural body styles, this book will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies"--

Bodies in Flux

Bodies in Flux PDF

Author: Christa Teston

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05-05

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 022645083X

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Doctors, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of “certainty” in medical practice. To help navigate the chaos caused by ongoing bodily change we rely on scientific reductions and deductions. We take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. Particularly in cancer care, processes deep within our bodies are at work long before we even know where to look. In the face of constant biological and technological change, how do medical professionals ultimately make decisions about care? Bodies in Flux explores the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter draws on rhetorical theory to investigate a specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Case studies unveil how doctors rely on visuals when deliberating about a patient’s treatment options, how members of the FDA use inferential statistics to predict a drug’s effectiveness, how researchers synthesize hundreds of clinical trials into a single evidence-based recommendation, and how genetic testing companies compute and commoditize human health. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty—an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.

Clinical Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications

Clinical Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications PDF

Author: Management Association, Information Resources

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2011-05-31

Total Pages: 2366

ISBN-13: 1609605624

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"This multi-volume book delves into the many applications of information technology ranging from digitizing patient records to high-performance computing, to medical imaging and diagnostic technologies, and much more"--

Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies

Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies PDF

Author: Jeanette Edwards

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1845458303

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The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data – brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology – the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body – this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors’ shared interest in ‘the body’ and visualising technologies.

Technologies of Speculation

Technologies of Speculation PDF

Author: Sun-ha Hong

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1479802107

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An inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.