Machines People and Politics RFG

Chinese writing is character-based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Over the past two centuries, Chinese script has encountered presumed alphabetic universalism at every turn, whether in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, or...

Asif Siddiqi (History, Fordham University) Wednesday, May 13, 2015 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4020 Secrecy was endemic in Soviet society and culture. Information that we might consider benign in the Western context was off-limits to most of the general populace throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Controls...

Paul Edwards (History and School of Information, University of Michigan) Thursday, February 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Why does climate change remain controversial despite an overwhelming scientific consensus? Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constantly changing, poorly standardized data practices created...

Sarah Dry (author, independent scholar) Rob Iliffe (History, University of Sussex) Thursday, May 30 / 3:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Isaac Newton generated a huge amount of manuscript material during a long and active life.  This rich and daunting archive includes millions of words...

Katrina Daly-Thompson (Applied Linguistics, UCLA) Friday, April 26 / 12:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB This timely talk reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that...

[vc_row css_animation="" row_type="row" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no" type="full_width" angled_section="no" text_align="left" background_image_as_pattern="without_pattern"][vc_column][vc_column_text]Conveners W. Patrick McCray, History pmccray@history.ucsb.edu Lisa Parks, Film and Media Studies lisa.parks@ucsb.edu The relationship between technology and society remains a central problem for today’s citizens, policy makers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Too often, these issues, as addressed by scholars, become nebulous and...