In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.

In The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, moving progressively farther into space, then zooms back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, travelling deep into the microscopic realm. This is one of the most iconic examples of the “cosmic zoom,” a trope that has influenced countless media forms over the past seventy years.

Horton uses the cosmic zoom as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference. He considers the origins of our notions of scale, how scalar mediation functions differently in analog and digital modes, and how cosmic zoom media has influenced scientific and popular views of the world. Analyzing literature, film, digital media, and database history, Horton establishes a much-needed framework for thinking about scale across multiple domains and disciplines.

Frigid, dark, and energy-deprived, the deep sea was long considered hostile to life. However, new sampling technologies and intense international research efforts in recent decades have revealed a remarkably rich fauna and an astonishing variety of novel habitats. These recent discoveries have changed the way we look at global biodiversity. In Deep-Sea Biodiversity, Michael Rex and Ron Etter present the first synthesis of patterns and causes of biodiversity in organisms that dwell in the vast sediment ecosystem that blankets the ocean floor. They provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of geographic variation in benthic animal abundance and biomass. The authors document geographic patterns of deep-sea species diversity and integrate potential ecological causes across scales of time and space. They also review the most recent molecular population genetic evidence to describe how and where evolutionary processes have generated the unique deep-sea fauna. Deep-Sea Biodiversity offers a new understanding of marine biodiversity that will be of general interest to ecologists and is crucial to responsible exploitation of natural resources at the deep-sea floor.

The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions.
 
In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. His theory gained widespread appeal, as cuts to the foreign aid budget, the national interests of nations seeking greater independence, postcolonial activism, and the rise of the United States’ tech sector drove stakeholders across public and private institutions toward cheaper tools. In the ensuing decades, US foreign assistance shifted away from massive modernization projects, such as water treatment facilities, toward point-of-use technologies like village water pumps and oral rehydration salts. This transition toward the small scale had massive implications for the practice of global health.
 
Developing to Scale tells the history of appropriate technology in international health and development, relating the people, organizations, and events that shaped this consequential idea. Heidi Morefield examines how certain technologies have been defined as more or less “appropriate” for the Global South based on assumptions about gender, race, culture, and environment. Her study shows appropriate technology to be malleable, as different constituencies interpreted its ideas according to their own needs. She reveals how policymakers wielded this tool to both constrain aid to a scale that did not threaten Western interests and to scale the practice of global health through the development and distribution of technical interventions.

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.
 
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on US-based sciences of interaction from 1930 to 1980, Lempert meticulously traces efforts to study conversation microscopically and shows how scale-making has defined pioneering work in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences and how new tools and technologies were developed to get to the heart of social life at its most granular.
 
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect our treatment of language and communication today.

Brings together feminist and geographical approaches to the gendered dimensions of various types of infrastructure across the globe.
 
The first book to take a feminist geographical approach to infrastructure, Gendered Infrastructures delves into the complex relationships between identity, social relations, and infrastructure. By drawing on feminist scholarship to enable new frameworks for critical study, this edited volume explores the gendered nature of infrastructures as diverse as Senegal’s waste disposal, Vietnam’s cement industry, and Lilongwe’s water kiosks. The chapters consider how infrastructural assemblages rework and shape gendered relations, identities, and meanings across space, while tracing the intersectionality of relations and uneven geographies that surround infrastructure. Ultimately, the contributors show how gender is always present in the quotidian building blocks that organize the socio-material world and daily life.
 
Edited by Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok, and the third book in Amy Trauger and Jennifer Fluri’s Gender, Feminism, and Geography series, the original essays in Gendered Infrastructures respond to and build upon a “new infrastructural turn in critical scholarship”—one that has helped enliven studies of identity across scale. The volume is relevant to geographers, anthropologists, architects, sociologists, urban researchers, and other interdisciplinary scholars interested in the gendered and social dimensions of infrastructure.
 

Since the start of the twentieth century, poets have been irresistibly drawn to the image of the poem as a kind of data-handling, a way of mediating between the divergent scales of aesthetics and infrastructure, language and technology. Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry—with its particular formal affordances, and the particular hopes and fears we invest it with—has always been bound up with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. 

The Poetics of Scale takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. This history follows Apollinaire’s ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day. Threading together Apollinaire’s work in the 1910s with three of his American successors—Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley from the 1970s onward—it shows how poetry as a cultural technique became the crucial test case for the scale of our collective imagination.
 

Predictions about where different species are, where they are not, and how they move across a landscape or respond to human activities -- if timber is harvested, for instance, or stream flow altered -- are important aspects of the work of wildlife biologists, land managers, and the agencies and policymakers that govern natural resources. Despite the increased use and importance of model predictions, these predictions are seldom tested and have unknown levels of accuracy.Predicting Species Occurrences addresses those concerns, highlighting for managers and researchers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, as well as the magnitude of the research required to improve or test predictions of currently used models. The book is an outgrowth of an international symposium held in October 1999 that brought together scientists and researchers at the forefront of efforts to process information about species at different spatial and temporal scales. It is a comprehensive reference that offers an exhaustive treatment of the subject, with 65 chapters by leading experts from around the world that: review the history of the theory and practice of modeling and present a standard terminology examine temporal and spatial scales in terms of their influence on patterns and processes of species distribution offer detailed discussions of state-of-the-art modeling tools and descriptions of methods for assessing model accuracy discuss how to predict species presence and abundance present examples of how spatially explicit data on demographics can provide important information for managers An introductory chapter by Michael A. Huston examines the ecological context in which predictions of species occurrences are made, and a concluding chapter by John A. Wiens offers an insightful review and synthesis of the topics examined along with guidance for future directions and cautions regarding misuse of models. Other contributors include Michael P. Austin, Barry R. Noon, Alan H. Fielding, Michael Goodchild, Brian A. Maurer, John T. Rotenberry, Paul Angermeier, Pierre R. Vernier, and more than a hundred others.Predicting Species Occurrences offers important new information about many of the topics raised in the seminal volume Wildlife 2000 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) and will be the standard reference on this subject for years to come. Its state-of-the-art assessment will play a key role in guiding the continued development and application of tools for making accurate predictions and is an indispensable volume for anyone engaged in species management or conservation.

Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler’s first major work since his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century’s most important developments.

This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.