Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 36.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 06:55:35 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: new book
Toward an Anthropology of Graphing
Semiotic and Activity-Theoretic Perspectives
by
Wolff-Michael Roth
University of Victoria, BC, Canada
Toward an Anthropology of Graphing: Semiotic and
Activity-TheoreticPerspectives presents the results of several studies
involving scientists and technicians. In Part One of the book, "Graphing in
Captivity", the author describes and analyses the interpretation scientists
volunteered given graphs that had been culled from an introductory course
and textbook in ecology. Surprisingly, the scientists were not the experts
that the author expected them to be on the basis of the existing
expert-novice literature. The section ends with the analysis of graphs that
the scientists had culled from their own work. Here, they articulated a
tremendous amount of background understanding before talking about the
content of their graphs. In Part Two, "Graphing in the Wild", the author
reports on graph usage in three different workplaces based on his
ethnographic research among scientists and technicians. Based on these
data, the author concludes that graphs and graphing are meaningful to the
extent that they are deeply embedded in and connected to the familiarity
with the workplace.
Hardbound ISBN: 1-4020-1374-4 Date: June 2003 Pages: 356 pp.
EURO 135.00 / USD 130.00 / GBP 86.00
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue May 27 2003 - 02:18:35 EDT