Warren McCulloch and his Circle: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37.3

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37.3: Warren McCulloch and his Circle
September 2012
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr/latest

All articles in this issue are available free of charge.

Preface: The McCulloch Connections, pp. 201-202
Galison, Peter

Warren S. McCulloch and his Circle, pp. 203-205
Abraham, Tara H

Warren McCulloch's Turn to Cybernetics: What Walter Pitts Contributed,
pp. 206-217
Aizawa, Kenneth

Cybernetic Sense, pp. 218-236
Halpern, Orit

Warren McCulloch and the British Cyberneticians, pp. 237-253
Husbands, Phil; Holland, Owen

An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of
Warren McCulloch, pp. 254-268
Collins, Alan F

'The Materials of Science, the Ideas of Science, and the Poetry of
Science': Warren McCulloch and Jerry Lettvin, pp. 269-286
Abraham, Tara H

Launch of Digital Humanities in Practice

ISR's Communications Editor Julianne Nyhan and Editorial Board Member Melissa Terras have recently co-Edited Digital Humanities in Practice (Facet 2012)  

The book will be launched in London on 6 November and you can attend by reserving a place via Eventbrite:  http://dhinpractice.eventbrite.co.uk/  

More details about the book are available on the Publishers Website: 

http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661 

 It would be great to meet some of ISR's readers at the launch! 

Lecture: Machines of demanding grace

Prof Willard McCarty, Editor of ISR, will tonight (18/10/2012) deliver a lecture entitled 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'. It will take place in Senate House, London (room 246) from 17:30 - 19:30. Please do attend if you are in London town! 


Willard McCarty: 'Machines of demanding grace: speculations toward a book on the problem of digital interpretation'

The great anthropological question “What is man?”, raised by Immanuel Kant in 1800 and made the overarching question of philosophy, has been taken up in our time, for example, by Anthony Giddens’ exploration of the perilously negotiated process of “going-on being” in the reflexive construction of self (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991); Ian Hacking’s dissolving away of the singular soul by probing multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul, 1995); Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” evinced e.g. in Linnaeus’ homo sapiens, which he reads as denoting a creature in perpetual becoming (L’aperto, 2002); and G. E. R. Lloyd’s subtle navigations across cultures and centuries among the historical variants of “what counts as being human” (Being, Humanity and Understanding, 2012). If, then, the human is in perpetual re-formation, what is the role of computing and the technoscience it communicates? In this talk I will use Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “great outrages” perpetrated by the sciences on human self-love and the moral programme of science that it articulates to suggest tentatively a way in which the digital humanities might do better than supply data for interpretation that happens elsewhere by other means.

Biographical note: Willard McCarty, FRAI, is Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and Professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney. He is Editor of Humanist and of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and founding Convenor of the London Seminar (2006-2012). For more see www.mccarty.org.uk.

Now available for review: Understanding Knowledge Creation: Intellectuals in Academia, the public Sphere and the Arts (2012). Edited by Nikita Basov and Oleksandra Nenko. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in reviewing this book and have relevant expertise.  


 

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Editorial Board Member presents "Materials: How they Work" on BBC 4

ISR Editorial Board Member, Professor Mark Miodownik, is presenting a television series entitled, “Materials: How they Work” which is currently being broadcast on BBC 4. In the first programme, “Metal: How it works”, Mark travelled to Israel and learned how we first extracted copper from dull rock and used it to shape our world. He revealed how our eternal quest for lighter, stronger metals led us to forge hard, sharp steel from malleable iron and to create complex alloys in order to conquer the skies. You can still view this episode, along with Episode 2, "Plastic: How it Works", for a limited time at the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fm490

The final episode in the series, entitled "Ceramics: How They Work", is to be broadcast on Monday 16th April 2012 on BBC4. Don't miss it!

For review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage

Now available for review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker, King's College London, UK (Ashgate 2012). Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in reviewing this book and have relevant expertise.   

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Toma Tasovac

Toma Tasovac is currently reviewing for ISR e-Lexicography: The Internet, Digital Initiatives and Lexicography, edited by Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Henning Bergenholtz (Comtinuum, 2011) 

ISBN: 9781441128065 

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (http://humanistika.org), and chief programmer and editor of Transpoetika: A Digital Platform for Serbian Language and Literature (http://transpoetika.org). He has degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton.  Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin.  His research interests include complex lexical architectures in eLexicography, retrodigitization of historic dictionaries, and integration of digital libraries and language resources.  Toma is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He blogs at http://metapoetika.org and tweets as @ttasovac. 

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Graham McBeath

Graham McBeath is currently at work on a review of Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen (Duke University Press: 2009). Graham is senior lecturer in Sociology and Media at the University of Northampton and has particular interests in the history and development of cybernetics. His review will be published in ISR later this year and a summary of it will be posted here too.  

Lancashire's 'Forgetful Muses' available for review

ISR has recently received a copy of Forgetful Muses: reading the author in the text by Ian Lancashire. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are able and willing to review this book and have expertise in this topic.

Explore the 2011 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews!

Explore the first 2011 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews completely free of charge! We have made the first 2011 issue of each of our journals free to read on ingentaconnect - no sign up required!

Table of Contents

Enigma rebus: Prolegomena to an archaeology of algorithmic artefact, David Link

Schoenberg, serialism and cognition: Whose fault if No one listens?, Philip Ball

Interdisciplinarity as critical Inquiry: Visualizing the Art/Bioscience interface, Andrew S Yang

Socio-Cultural characteristics of usability of bioinformatics databases and tools, Conor Douglas; Rebecca Goulding; Lily Farris; Janet Atkinson-Grosjean

Placebo: no longer a phantom response, Charles Pasternak

ESSAY REVIEW: Excavating the Future: Taking an `Archaeological' approach to technology, James G R Cronin

Don't forget, you can also download two of the new 2012 "top articles" here:
http://www.maney.co.uk/top_articles/isr/

January 2012: available for review

I recently received a copy of The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader edited by Sandra Harding and published by Duke University Press for review. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in writing a review of it and it is in your area of expertise.

Quantifying Digital Humanities

Courtesy of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

See the full article: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucldh/6730021199/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Don't forget to check out Interdisciplinary Science Reviews online:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr