Author: Deborah Lupton File Type: epub With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote self-knowledge through numbers. In this groundbreaking book Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them. The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which peoples personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial. **Review Luptons book is an excellent primer for readers interested in data surveillance, self-tracking cultures, and the increasing push to metricize aspects of personal experience that were previously not considered in statistical terms. Luptons insight that no one alive today is exempt from becoming subjectedto digatization lends her project great immediate urgenc. The British Society for Literature and Science The Quantified Selfoffers an excellent overview of the breadth and depth of issues related to self-tracking cultures. It is not only a useful resource for scholars and practitioners focusing on the value of quantified data with regard to health and bodily practices, but also an invitation to use self-tracking research in new kinds of political initiatives. Ultimately self-tracking is defined as a means of communicating and challenging dominant interests and aims. Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki Luptons book is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to researchers and practitioners who wish to gain a comprehensive account of self-tracking practices. Along with the commonly discussed topics of motivation and data representations, Lupton sheds light onto less explored topics, such as data-surveillance, while offering various theoretical foundations to support her arguments. Her writing is both visionary and provocative, and the book is a must read for researchers and practitioners of the Quantified Self movement. Florian Floyd Mueller, Director, Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University Impressive and comprehensive overview of the way in which people are tracking their lives using digital technologies **Times Higher Education The Quantified Self is a careful, evenhanded survey of a trend that is on the cusp of seeming so ubiquitous that well soon forget how utterly specific the problems associated with this aspect of our sci-fi future are to the wealthy countries. Inside Higher Education** About the Author Deborah Lupton is Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra

Author: Doug Munro File Type: pdf Including contributions from leading scholars in the field from both Australia and North America, this collection explores diverse approaches to writing the lives of historians and ways of assessing the importance of doing so. Beginning with the writing of autobiographies by historians, the volume then turns to biographical studies, both of historians whose writings were in some sense nation-defining and those who may be regarded as having had a major influence on defining the discipline of history. The final section explores elements of collective biography, linking these to the formation of historical networks. A concluding essay by Barbara Caine offers a critical appraisal of the study of historians biographies and autobiographies to date, and maps out likely new directions for future work.

Author: Adam Trexler File Type: pdf Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earths atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earths ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticisms theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature Explorations in Ecocriticism

Author: Brian Kim Stefans File Type: pdf Word Toys Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual workspoetic, novelistic, and programmedas technical objects. With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and mediathe lyric, the novel, the bookhave been transformed. Word Toys Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and which views them instead as technical objects. Brian Kim Stefans considers the problems that arise when discussing these progressive texts in relation to more traditional print-based poetic texts. He questions the influence of game theory and digital humanities rhetoric on poetic production, and how non-digital works, such as contemporary works of lyric poetry, are influenced by the recent ubiquity of social media, the power of search engines, and the public perceptions of language in a time of nearly universal surveillance. Word Toys offers new readings of canonical avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, major successors such as Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Wanda Coleman, mixed-genre artists including Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, and William Poundstone, and lyric poets such as Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner. Writers that trouble the poetryscience divide such as Christian Bok, and novelists who have embraced digital technology such as Mark Z. Danielewski and the elusive Toadex Hobogrammathon, anchor reflections on the nature of creativity in a world where authors collaborate, even if unwittingly, with machines and networks. In addition, Stefans names provocative new genresamong them the nearly formless undigest and the transpacific miscegenated scriptarguing by example that interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to the development of scholarship about experimental work.