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Where is censorship in the age of digital technology?

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.

Revealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the human

Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.

Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.

Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.

Networks the intricate relationship between rapidly advancing digital technologies and environmental degradation and reveals the costs of our globally connected world.

Taking a step back from the screens of electronic devices and exploring the profound impacts of digital technologies on our environment, Enduring Digital Damage lifts the veil on the “hidden costs” in our modern technological world.

Dustin Edwards traces key moments in the lifecycle of technology—such as the extraction of raw materials to the disposal of electronic waste—to uncover the often overlooked consequence of our digital age. He illuminates how data centers, mining operations, and other digital infrastructures contribute to environmental harm and how the rapidly increasing demand for land use and water access is essential to sustain our growing digital needs. Weaving together narratives of technological advancement and ecological destruction, Edwards presents a comprehensive analysis of the true cost of our digital lives. By drawing on case studies, cultural critique, and a critical examination of labor and sustainability, Enduring Digital Damage reveals the deeper histories and ongoing struggles that make our digital lives possible, urging readers to imagine the possibility of a less harmful and extractive world.

The Lower Danube—the stretch of Europe’s second longest river between the Romanian-Serbian border and the confluence to the Black Sea—was effectively transformed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In describing this lengthy undertaking, Luminita Gatejel proposes that remaking two key stretches—the Iron Gates and the delta—not only physically altered the river but also redefined it in a legal and political sense. 

Since the late eighteenth century, military conflicts and peace treaties changed the nature of sovereignty over the area, as the expansionist tendencies of the Habsburg and British Empires encountered rival Ottoman and Russian imperial plans. The inconvenience that the river’s physical shape obstructed free navigation and the growth of commercial traffic, was an increasing concern to all parties. This book shows that alongside imperial aspirations, transnational actors like engineers, commissioners and entrepreneurs were the driving force behind the river regulation. In this highly original, deeply researched, and carefully crafted study, Gatejel explores the formation of international cooperation, the emergence of technical expertise and the emergence of engineering as a profession. This constellation turned the Lower Danube into a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of international cooperation, economic integration, and nature transformation.

• gain an overview of the contemporary STEM teaching and research enterprise by learning about the roles and needs of STEM community members such as program administrators, tenure track principal investigators (PIs), non-tenure track teaching faculty, research staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students;
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How people across society in medieval South Asia—including coppersmiths, merchants, bureaucrats, philosophers, and physicians—pioneered new vernacular sciences.

Starting in the eleventh century, South Asian scholars and artisans began to investigate and shape the world in a novel manner. Intellectuals translated Sanskrit texts into regional languages such as Kannada, situating knowledge in particular places. At the same time, architects and artisans began to assert their intellectual and literary presence, often claiming the title of “scholar” as they negotiated a space between classical textual erudition, professional expertise, and personal experience. Working within the perilous world of court politics, a new class of scholar-administrators began collecting recipes and composing texts about weather prediction, horticulture, mathematics, astrology, sexual life, and medicine.

Everyday Sciences traces this emergence of vernacular sciences by engaging with untapped archives and an array of sources in multiple languages. By exploring how historical actors resolved disputes about the physiology of vision, the use of meat and alcohol in medicine, and the management of information in elephant stables, Eric Moses Gurevitch unveils the complex textual and social orders that structured medieval society in India. He argues that a focus on everyday sciences in the non-modern non-West allows historians to reassess how places outside—and even inside—Europe are brought into narratives of a global history of science. Gurevitch articulates a “big-enough” history of science in South Asia, one open to little voices and unexpected connections that might not make their way through the fray in other histories.

Everyday Sciences demonstrates how practical, everyday activities were engines of profound intellectual innovation—and it shows the promise of revisiting the past without colonial hang-ups, and with fresh eyes.  

An incisive framework for understanding how predictive AI has reshaped our relationship with time.

Ex Ante argues that AI systems draw us into a new experience of time, a continuous stream of machine-generated futures that reshapes our relationship to ourselves, to capitalism, and to infrastructure. Unlike other predictive tools that help us prepare for what might come, these projections—produced by algorithms and sourced by massive flows of data—calibrate our actions moment by moment, second by second. 

In this book, John Cheney-Lippold offers a framework he calls the ex ante, Latin for “before the event,” as a way to consider how the future has become capitalism’s latest resource for exploitation. Through case studies spanning TikTok beauty filters that have fueled a surge in plastic surgery consultations, chess engines that redefine how the game is played, online sports betting platforms that commodify probability itself, hospital sepsis algorithms that transform the labor of nursing, and coordinated vehicle networks that collectively anticipate their surroundings to function, Ex Ante offers an exploration and powerful critique of our algorithmic present and the powers behind it.