Ways of Sensing

Author: David Howes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317929470
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Ways of Sensing is a stimulating exploration of the cultural, historical and political dimensions of the world of the senses. The book spans a wide range of settings and makes comparisons between different cultures and epochs, revealing the power and diversity of sensory expressions across time and space. The chapters reflect on topics such as the tactile appeal of medieval art, the healing power of Navajo sand paintings, the aesthetic blight of the modern hospital, the role of the senses in the courtroom, and the branding of sensations in the marketplace. Howes and Classen consider how political issues such as nationalism, gender equality and the treatment of minority groups are shaped by sensory practices and metaphors. They also reveal how the phenomenon of synaesthesia, or mingling of the senses, can be seen as not simply a neurological condition but a vital cultural mode of creating social and cosmic interconnections. Written by leading scholars in the field, Ways of Sensing provides readers with a valuable and engaging introduction to the life of the senses in society.

Sensing the World

Author: David Le Breton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000183394
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn – seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.

Sensual Relations

Author: David Howes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory. David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.

Sensing in Social Interaction

Author: Lorenza Mondada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108657656
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 632

Book Description
This book offers a novel perspective on how people engage in sensing the materiality of the world as a way of social interaction. It proposes a conceptual and analytical advance in how to approach sensing as an intersubjective and interactional phenomenon within the framework of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Based on a uniquely rich set of video-recorded data, the author shows how people reacting to cheese in gourmet shops across Europe highlights the part the senses play in human behaviour and communication. The multimodal analysis of the case studies reveals the systematic features of looking, touching, smelling, and tasting in situated activities. By blending interdisciplinary research with real life, the volume puts together a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the embodied and linguistic dimensions of sensing in interaction.

Sensing Changes

Author: Joy Parr
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774859180
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar? One of Canada's premier historians tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past where state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and technological changes forced ordinary people to cope with transformations that were so radical that they no longer recognized their home and workplaces or, by implication, who they were. In concert with a ground-breaking, creative, and analytical website, megaprojects.uwo.ca, this timely study offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Sensing the Future

Author: Trish MacGregor
Publisher: Crossroad Press
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Discover Your Untapped Potential to Predict the Future Have you ever had a hunch that became reality? You may be ignoring signs from the universe about what is to come. Trish and Rob MacGregor, authors and founders of the blog Synchro Secrets, explain how to train your brain and recognize signs in order to enhance your innate precognitive abilities. Over 400 years ago, Nostradamus wrote predictions that are still relevant, and even today, there are those who experience dreams and physical symptoms prior to catastrophic events such as 9/11. Whether you have had prophetic dreams about a loved one or wish to learn more about these mysterious abilities, Sensing the Future will show you how to harness the power of your intuition. We all have the ability to predict the future if we open ourselves up to the signs of the universe.

People Analytics

Author: Ben Waber
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 0133158330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Discover powerful hidden social "levers" and networks within your company... then, use that knowledge to make slight "tweaks" that dramatically improve both business performance and employee fulfillment! In People Analytics, MIT Media Lab innovator Ben Waber shows how sensors and analytics can give you an unprecedented understanding of how your people work and collaborate, and actionable insights for building a more effective, productive, and positive organization. Through cutting-edge case studies, Waber shows how: Changing the way call center employees spent their breaks increased performance by 25% while significantly reducing stress Quantifying the failure of marketing and customer service to communicate led to a more cohesive and profitable organization Tweaking the balance of in-person and electronic communication can enhance the value of both Sensor data can help you discover who your internal experts really are Identifying employees involved in "creative" behaviors can help you promote innovation throughout your business Sensors and simulations can help you optimize your sick-day policies Measuring informal interactions can improve the chances that a merger, acquisition, or "mega-project" will succeed Drawing on his cutting-edge work at MIT and Harvard, Waber addresses crucial issues ranging from technology to privacy, revealing what will be possible in a few years, and what you can achieve right now. In bringing the power of analytics to organizational development, he offers immense new opportunities to everyone with responsibility for workplace performance.

Sensing Law

Author: Sheryl Hamilton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317282043
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
A rich collection of interdisciplinary essays, this book explores the question: what is to be found at the intersection of the sensorium and law’s empire? Examining the problem of how legal rationalities try to grasp what can only be sensed through the body, these essays problematize the Cartesian framework that has long separated the mind from the body, reason from feeling and the human from the animal. In doing so, they consider how the sensorium can operate, variously, as a tool of power or as a means of countering the exercise of regulatory force. The senses, it is argued, operate as a vector for the implication of subjects in legal webs, but also as a powerful site of resistance to legal definition and determination. From the sensorium of animals to technologically mediated perception, the ways in which the law senses and the ways in which senses are brought before the law invite a questioning of the categories of liberal humanism. And, as this volume demonstrates, this questioning opens up the both interesting and important possibility of imagining other sensual subjectivities.

Program Earth

Author: Jennifer Gabrys
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950172
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Book Description
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

Social Sensing

Author: Dong Wang
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 0128011319
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Increasingly, human beings are sensors engaging directly with the mobile Internet. Individuals can now share real-time experiences at an unprecedented scale. Social Sensing: Building Reliable Systems on Unreliable Data looks at recent advances in the emerging field of social sensing, emphasizing the key problem faced by application designers: how to extract reliable information from data collected from largely unknown and possibly unreliable sources. The book explains how a myriad of societal applications can be derived from this massive amount of data collected and shared by average individuals. The title offers theoretical foundations to support emerging data-driven cyber-physical applications and touches on key issues such as privacy. The authors present solutions based on recent research and novel ideas that leverage techniques from cyber-physical systems, sensor networks, machine learning, data mining, and information fusion. Offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective bridging social networks, big data, cyber-physical systems, and reliability Presents novel theoretical foundations for assured social sensing and modeling humans as sensors Includes case studies and application examples based on real data sets Supplemental material includes sample datasets and fact-finding software that implements the main algorithms described in the book