This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research ... more This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Copyrights of all the articles rest with the respective authors and published under the provisions of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Diagrams make wonderful templates for technical action. It follows that for scholars of science a... more Diagrams make wonderful templates for technical action. It follows that for scholars of science and technology they are both an object and a tool of study. The author explores this relationship in the first part of the article, focusing on one particularly effective format for communicating or retrieving complicated technological sequences: the chaîne opératoire, or procedural sequence. Today we usually think of a diagram as a graphic, but diagrammatic thinking is also frequently expressed in other forms, including text or hybrids of graphics and text. To illustrate this, the author compares the formulation and use of chaînes opératoires in two canonical Chinese agricultural treatises. The Qimin yaoshu (Essential Techniques for the Common People) by Jia Sixie, completed ca. 540 CE, was composed before printing was available and makes no use of graphics. The Nongshu (Agricultural Treatise) of 1313, authored by Wang Zhen, was published using woodblock print, a medium that facilitated ...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a broader study of the technologies that affected wom... more AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a broader study of the technologies that affected women's lives in imperial China, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. In it I examine domestic architecture and repro-ductive techniques as well as the technologies of textile ...
Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their envir... more Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of “cropscapes”: the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public und...
Bulletin De L Ecole Francaise D Extreme Orient, 2003
The citizens of the United States take great pride in their high-tech lifestyle, which they belie... more The citizens of the United States take great pride in their high-tech lifestyle, which they believe plays a key role in making their country the greatest in the world. Yet they seldom think of the everyday devices and technical routines which are so distinctively American air-...
Resum: En una recerca anterior sobre la darrera fase de l'època imperial a Xina, vaig elaborar el... more Resum: En una recerca anterior sobre la darrera fase de l'època imperial a Xina, vaig elaborar el concepte de ginecotècniques per referir-me a un conjunt de tecnologies bàsiques de la vida quotidiana que definien els rols i activitats de les dones i transferien principis socials i morals a una xarxa de formes materials i pràctiques del cos. Actualment, estic assajant el desenvolupament d'un treball semblant, des d'un punt de vista històric i antropològic, per estudiar les tecnologies domèstiques de la vida quotidiana a la California del segle XXI. Per això estic prestant especial atenció a la incorporació de "tecnologies punteres" a l'equipament utilitzat a casa i a la relació entre productors i consumidors com a conseqüència de la seva transformació d'"article de luxe" a "necessitat".
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research ... more This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Copyrights of all the articles rest with the respective authors and published under the provisions of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Diagrams make wonderful templates for technical action. It follows that for scholars of science a... more Diagrams make wonderful templates for technical action. It follows that for scholars of science and technology they are both an object and a tool of study. The author explores this relationship in the first part of the article, focusing on one particularly effective format for communicating or retrieving complicated technological sequences: the chaîne opératoire, or procedural sequence. Today we usually think of a diagram as a graphic, but diagrammatic thinking is also frequently expressed in other forms, including text or hybrids of graphics and text. To illustrate this, the author compares the formulation and use of chaînes opératoires in two canonical Chinese agricultural treatises. The Qimin yaoshu (Essential Techniques for the Common People) by Jia Sixie, completed ca. 540 CE, was composed before printing was available and makes no use of graphics. The Nongshu (Agricultural Treatise) of 1313, authored by Wang Zhen, was published using woodblock print, a medium that facilitated ...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a broader study of the technologies that affected wom... more AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a broader study of the technologies that affected women's lives in imperial China, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. In it I examine domestic architecture and repro-ductive techniques as well as the technologies of textile ...
Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their envir... more Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of “cropscapes”: the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public und...
Bulletin De L Ecole Francaise D Extreme Orient, 2003
The citizens of the United States take great pride in their high-tech lifestyle, which they belie... more The citizens of the United States take great pride in their high-tech lifestyle, which they believe plays a key role in making their country the greatest in the world. Yet they seldom think of the everyday devices and technical routines which are so distinctively American air-...
Resum: En una recerca anterior sobre la darrera fase de l'època imperial a Xina, vaig elaborar el... more Resum: En una recerca anterior sobre la darrera fase de l'època imperial a Xina, vaig elaborar el concepte de ginecotècniques per referir-me a un conjunt de tecnologies bàsiques de la vida quotidiana que definien els rols i activitats de les dones i transferien principis socials i morals a una xarxa de formes materials i pràctiques del cos. Actualment, estic assajant el desenvolupament d'un treball semblant, des d'un punt de vista històric i antropològic, per estudiar les tecnologies domèstiques de la vida quotidiana a la California del segle XXI. Per això estic prestant especial atenció a la incorporació de "tecnologies punteres" a l'equipament utilitzat a casa i a la relació entre productors i consumidors com a conseqüència de la seva transformació d'"article de luxe" a "necessitat".
Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers some powerful tools for understanding history. Here I... more Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers some powerful tools for understanding history. Here I use the STS concepts of technological landscape and technological culture to explore China's rise from 19 th -century technoscientific "backwardness" to 21 st -
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