In 1926, François Machon, a Swiss physician who lived for many years in Argentina, organised the restitution of a religious garment that had been stolen from the cathedral of Paraguay in the late 1860s and was kept in the Swiss Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN) in exchange for a small part of his ethnographic collection. In the following decade, he donated more of his own collections to the MEN, but also negotiated as a go-between for the donation of (...) his son Roger's collections. On one occasion he managed, again, to arrange the exchange of a proto-historic Swiss lake-dweller axe for a small collection of Amerindian artefacts. The Machons' case sheds light on the logics of donations of a private collection holder, his tactics and strategies of persuasion, and his entangled web of affects, straddling two countries and two networks of fidelity in a context of migration. It also helps us understand the complex rationalities of acquisition and the polysemy of a peripheral municipal cultural institution. This case informs us about the rationales of a peripheral museum and on the criteria used to assess the quality of donators and their collections; it illustrates the asymmetry of the exchange values of European and South American, ancient and contemporary, artefacts, and the unequal vocality of the different actors. Similarly, it gives us a perspective on the rationales that were mobilised to justify giving away parts of its collections. The exchange of artefacts between the Machons and the MEN helps us understand museums not only as patrimonial of scientific institutions, but also as economic actors, whose agents convince, gamble, bargain, and negotiate, and try to make best use of their resources, symbolic and monetary, to increase their assets and social benefits. (shrink)

The word blat refers to the system of informal contacts and personal networks which was used to obtain goods and services under the rationing which characterised Soviet Russia. Alena Ledeneva's book is the first to analyse blat in all its historical, socio-economic and cultural aspects, and to explore its implications for post-Soviet society. In a socialist distribution system which resulted in constant shortages, blat developed into an 'economy of favours' which shadowed an overcontrolling centre and represented the reaction of (...) ordinary people to the social constraints they faced. In social and economic terms, blat exchanges became vital to the population, and to the functioning of the Soviet system. The book shows that the nature of the economic and political changes in contemporary Russia cannot be properly understood without attention to the powerful legacy of the blat economy. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of informal networks in securing post‐public school occupational advantage. Both the ‘official’ view of the private sector and the experiences of recent pupils are cited. A significant disparity is found between the two. A denial of the relevance of the ‘old boy network’ is revealed in the sector's publications, a position fully consistent with the overall reconstruction of image currently being pursued. In contrast, ex‐pupils unequivocally asserted the continued influence of non‐meritocratic means of advancement, (...) though crucially, only for an element of pupils. It is argued that adequate social analysis requires not simply an awareness of the presence of covert mechanisms, but also an acceptance of the socially restricted, rather than universally available, nature of the processes. Recognition is needed that contemporary informal networks have evolved from an historically familiar form, yet constitute a particular, dynamic, era‐specific manifestation of it. (shrink)

This article describes developments in the use of information technology in the biological discipline of taxonomy, using both a historical overview and a detailed case study of a particular information systems project. Taxonomy has experienced problems with both its scientific legitimacy and its utility to other biologists. IT has been introduced into the discipline m response to these perceived problems. The information systems project described here served as a means of managing the tensions between scientific legitimacy (...) and utility. It is argued that this project represents an example of the use of a technological development m an attempt to re-engineer a discipline. The development of the information system is analyzed as an attempt to develop a scientific instrument that will embody a particular model of the discipline. The concerns of taxonomy with status and legitimacy make it appropriate that this new technology should be introduced at the interface between the discipline and the rest of biology as a means of disseminating results, and thus come to represent the discipline and the plants described to outsiders, just as the system represents outsiders to taxonomists. (shrink)

This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour and The International Association for Computing and Philosophy) World Congress 2012, held at the University of Birmingham, celebrating Turing centenary. The COMPUTING NATURE is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe. (...) By physical we mean all phenomena, objects and processes, that are possible to detect either directly by our senses or via instruments. Historically, there have been many ways of describing the universe (cosmic egg, cosmic tree, theistic universe, mechanistic universe) while a particularly prominent contemporary approach is computational universe, as discussed in this article. See more: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7784. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 240-262, July 2022. Although the art historical canon has been the subject of fierce debate, it remains an essential construct, shaping textbooks and survey courses. Visual representations of the canon often illustrate these narratives. Students encounter diagrams in their studies and it is important to make them aware of the illusion of scientific objectivity. This paper proposes the use of the computer ontology, as a modeling tool with which (...) students can make translations of existing diagrams. This forces them to reconsider the modeling decisions underlying traditional representations. The article takes as its case study the translation of Alfred Barr’s diagram of Modern Art, using the free tool Protégé. An analysis of this process allows us to consider the ambiguous meanings of nodes, relationships and dimensions of the model. Asking students to actively recreate this network of information is shown to be a valuable addition to traditional survey courses on Modern Art. (shrink)

Through both a conceptual analysis of historical evidence in general, and a specific study of Thucydides' evidence on the Peloponnesian war, the structure of justification of historical knowledge is described and evaluated. The justification is internal in the sense of being done entirely within a network of evidential and descriptive claims about the past. This forces a coherence form of justification in which the telling epistemic standards are eliminative, indicators of what is not likely to be true (...) rather than what is. The epistemological contrast is between justification by coherence among historical claims, or by appeal to epistemic foundations. Any evidential claim in history that is informative and credible must itself be justified in the context of other things known about the past. Thus, the evidence used to support historical claims is neither foundational nor a direct report on the facts of the past, and an appeal to evidence is itself an appeal to coherence. (shrink)

The advent of social networking sites has changed the face of the information society Mason wrote of 23 years ago necessitating a reevaluation of the social contracts designed to protect the members of the society. Despite the technological and societal changes that have happened over the years, the information society is still based on the exchange of information. This paper examines various historical events involving social networking sites through the lens of the PAPA framework (Mason 1986 (...) ) to highlight select ethical issues regarding the sharing of information in the social-networking age. Four preliminary principles are developed to guide the ethical use of social networking sites (SNS). (shrink)

This paper argues for a hybrid and alternative theory of names—Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism, which consists of six claims: (1) the referring relation between a name and an object originates from a generalized “initial baptism” of that object. (2) The causal chain of the name N firstly and mainly transmits informative descriptions of N’s bearer. (3) The meaning of N consists of an open-ended collection of informative descriptions of N’s bearer acknowledged by a linguistic community. (4) With respect to practical (...) needs of agents there is s weighted order in the collection of descriptions of N’s bearer. (5) The meaning or even partial meaning of N, together with the background of a discourse, the network of knowledge, speaker’s intention, etc., determines the referent of N. (6) All names have their own referents, including physical individuals, and parasitic, fictional, or intensional objects; there are few names absolutely without reference. (shrink)

Traditional historical scholarship struggles to keep up with the rapid pace of modern scientific publication trends. Even focusing on a particular scientific field, the rate of new publications far outpaces even the most studious historian’s research capacity. This essay summarizes an approach to this problem that uses computational techniques of network analysis. As a complement to close analysis of particular documents, network analysis can give a large-scale perspective on the history of science, identifying relational patterns across a (...) vast number of documents that might otherwise require an entire career to digest. To demonstrate the power of the approach, the essay applies network theory to a corpus of publications in evolutionary medicine. Four distinct networks, including those focused on authors, keywords, and citations, quickly unearth a range of relevant historical information. The essay illustrates how interpretable historical conclusions are drawn from a variety of quantitative metrics. The aim is to provide an overview of network techniques for historians looking to add robust network analysis to their research repertoire. (shrink)

Public policy issues around access to networked information are explored and examined. Long viewed as the quintessential public good, information has evolved into a critically important market commodity in little more than a generation. New technologies and a political climate in which the meaning of universal access to information is no longer commonly understood and in which its importance is no longer taken for granted pose significant challenges for American society. Libraries, as information commons, offer the (...) means of meeting those challenges. Historical, economical, and professional factors that shape the conflict are described and discussed. (shrink)

Predicting stock movements is a valuable research field that can help investors earn more profits. As with time-series data, the stock market is time-dependent and the value of historical information may decrease over time. Accurate prediction can be achieved by mining valuable information with words on social platforms and further integrating it with actual stock market conditions. However, many methods still cannot effectively dig deep into hidden information, integrate text and stock prices, and ignore the temporal (...) dependence. Therefore, to solve the above problems, we propose a transformer-based attention network framework that uses historical text and stock prices to capture the temporal dependence of financial data. Among them, the transformer model and attention mechanism are used for feature extraction of financial data, which has fewer applications in the financial field, and effective analysis of key information to achieve an accurate prediction. A large number of experiments have proved the effectiveness of our proposed method. The actual simulation experiment verifies that our model has practical application value. (shrink)

The agenda informing this compact book has the transparency of crystal. Against the widely repeated claim that the so‐called Information Age began with the invention of the transistor in 1947, a claim trumpeted both by the knowledgeable and the ignorant , Daniel Headrick seeks a more distant source for the information‐saturated environment in which we now live. He sensibly points out that human demand for information is as old as humanity itself, and consequently we should not look (...) to name any single moment as the “dawn” of the Information Age. Instead we should be attentive to historical periods during which the availability of information accelerates sharply. Often such moments are associated with particular technical innovations, such as the appearance of double‐entry bookkeeping, printing, the telegraph, and, yes, the computer. But Headrick wants to direct attention away from particular machines and technologies as accelerators of information and toward the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period during which a host of novel information systems were introduced.On this basis the book discusses a series of developments in information systems under five headings. The first, “Organizing Information,” describes how Linnaeus and Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau created new languages to process and communicate scientific information. The creation of the metric system finds a niche in this chapter as well. Headrick's second heading, “Transforming Information,” discusses the attempt by governments to collect statistics about populations, culminating in the specification of a decennial census in the American Constitution and the repeated attempts by French revolutionary regimes to conduct a census during the 1790s. The third heading, “Displaying Information,” turns to innovations in mapmaking during the eighteenth century and the invention of graphical representation. Under the fourth heading, “Storing Information,” Headrick describes eighteenth‐century encyclopedias and dictionaries, an overview that thankfully ranges considerably more widely than Diderot's Encyclopédie. Finally, the heading “Communicating Information” discusses the development of postal systems in various European countries and North America, as well as the invention of telegraphy. Of particular interest here is the extensive network of visual telegraphs established in France during the 1790s and then elsewhere in Europe.This breadth of coverage is impressive and suggests the comprehensiveness and significance of Headrick's story, but it also betrays certain weaknesses. First, the treatment of topics is highly uneven. The discussion of encyclopedias and dictionaries, for example, is deep and well informed by the primary sources. The treatment of Linnaeus's taxonomy, Lavoisier's chemical nomenclature, and the metric system is far more superficial, as is the analysis of postal systems. Second, this same breadth causes one to wonder just what the phenomenon is that Headrick means to describe. Such concerns are certainly not diminished by the wholly unsatisfactory definition provided for the book's central concept, information. As the book defines it, information is “the patterns of energy and matter that humans understand” . That somewhat underdetermines the object, I should say.Disappointing too was the book's failure to engage very deeply with an explanation of why these changes occurred. Leaving aside the question of whether all of the changes described really constitute changes in information systems , and also the question of whether all of these eighteenth‐century novelties could not be traced farther back in time, as several surely could, we can still ask what brought such developments together. A book of such synthetic reach ought to be ideal for such ruminations. As one might expect, Headrick does attribute the rising demand for information to the attempt by enlightened absolutist governments and later revolutionary regimes to develop policies to stimulate economic growth, along with the needs of actors in an increasingly complex and robust economic system. But all too often the book simply asserts that because this was the Age of Reason, the innovations occurred because they were inherently more rational. Linnaeus's nomenclature appealed to the “orderly minds of mid‐eighteenth‐century rationalists” , while the physician William Farr's statistical compilation of disease data for the English General Register Office gave “a more scientific basis to the classification of diseases” , and so on. (shrink)

This paper revisits and reassesses the intellectual and practical contribution of Caroline Benn (née DeCamp, 1926–2000) to politics, policymaking and practice at a crucial turning point in English education, which I call the ‘long comprehensive moment’ between 1950 and 1990. It articulates a strong sense that her involvement in significant public events warrants close investigation before it disappears from professional memory. The American wife of Tony Benn, one of the most influential post-war socialists in Europe, Caroline Benn stands out for (...) her commitment to an educational system in which all young people could develop their talents to the full. Based on her newly available archive, containing thousands of documents, historically informed network ethnography is used to map her on-going effort and provide a detailed descriptive account of the ideological power and pervasiveness of the idea that a school system designed for an elite is not about social engineering, whereas comprehensive education which values all children, all parents, all neighbourhoods, equally is. (shrink)

The optimism vs. pessimism debate about the historical sciences is often framed in terms of arguments about the relative importance of overdetermination vs. underdetermination of historical claims by available evidence. While the interplay between natural processes that create multiple traces of past events (thereby conducive of overdetermination) and processes that erase past information (whence underdetermination) cannot be ignored, I locate the root of the debate in the epistemic granularity, or intuitively the level of detail, that pervades any (...) historical claim justification network. To reveal the role played by granularity, I elaborate a model of historical claim justification. This model maps out the different elements that enter the justification of historical claims (incl., actual and inferred states of affairs, dating and information reconstructing theories). It also incorporates the different types of processes that affect traces of past events (information creating, preserving, modifying, and destroying processes). Granularity is shown to play a pivotal role in all elements of this model, and thereby in the inferred justification of any historical claim. As a result, while upward or downward shifts in granularity may explain changes about claims being considered as overdetermined or underdetermined, epistemic granularity constitutes an integral part of evidential reasoning in the historical sciences (and possibly elsewhere). (shrink)

During the first two decades of the 20th century, the expansion of private foundations and philanthropic initiatives in the United States converged with a comprehensive, nationwide agenda of progressive education and post-war social reconstruction that situated childhood at its core. From 1924 to 1928, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was the main foundation behind the aggressive, systematic funding of the child development movement in North America. A pioneering institution, the Institute of Child Welfare Research, established in 1924 at Columbia's Teachers (...) College, was the first Rockefeller-funded programme of its kind at an American university. The Institute was influential in helping set up a nationwide network of child welfare institutes at other universities. Twelve years later, it would also be the first of those institutes to close. Nonetheless, the Institute's context, emergence, and development have been overlooked or misrepresented by previous scholarship, which calls for a new, critical historical analysis. By drawing on a number of archival sources and unpublished materials, this paper offers a critical reconstruction of the Institute's internal, often unstable history, emphasizing its origins, members, and administrative changes. I argue that the demise of the Institute should be understood in the context of both the revision of philanthropic policies in the late 1920s and the Institute's singular emphasis on teaching and training over research. The resulting narrative allows for a deeper, more informed understanding of both the Institute's origins and its eventual folding. (shrink)

As an answer to the humanistic, socially oriented critique of the information-processing paradigms used as a conceptual frame for library information science, this article formulates a broader and less objective concept of communication than that of the information-processing paradigm. Knowledge can be seen as the mental phenomenon that documents (combining signs into text, depending on the state of knowledge of the recipient) can cause through interpretation. The examination of these “correct circumstances” is an important part of (...) class='Hi'>information science. This article represents the following developments in the concept of information: Information is understood as potential until somebody interprets it. The objective carriers of potential knowledge are signs. Signs need interpretation to release knowledge in the form of interpretants. Interpretation is based on the total semantic network, horizons, worldviews, and experience of the person, including the emotional and social aspects. The realm of meaning is rooted in social-historical as well as embodied evolutionary processes that go beyond computational algorithmically logic. The semantic network derives a decisive aspect of signification from a person’s embodied cultural worldview, which, in turn, derives from, develops, and has its roots in undefined tacit knowledge. To theoretically encompass both the computational and the semantic aspects of document classification and retrieval, we need to combine the cybernetic functionalistic approach with the semiotic pragmatic understanding of meaning as social and embodied. For such a marriage, it is necessary to go into the constructivistic secondorder cybernetics and autopoiesis theory of von Foerster, Maturana, and Luhmann, on the one hand, and the pragmatic triadic semiotics of Peirce in the form of the embodied Biosemiotics, on the other hand. This combination is what I call Cybersemiotics. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of access in relation to globalization, feminism and information society. It argues that the virtual settings of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are beginning to place significant emphasis on sociospatial as well as geospatial understandings of the world and the interactions that take place within it. The article examines the extreme material and other associated inequalities of contemporary globalization, and the concentration of technological development and power in the rich economies. Historical developments (...) related to these factors are discussed, including the gendered nature of technologies and social processes shaping their production, application and use. It is argued that feminist theory and practice is relevant to broad debates about inequality of access in the information age, as well as to those concentrating specifically on gender and women. The tension between liberal/neoliberal focus on 'equality' and the 'grotesque' levels of contemporary inequality is raised. It is argued that feminism's long-standing and extensive critique of the problematic masculinist and partial nature of liberal/neoliberal theory, and its framing of agency, offers a major contribution in addressing this. Cyberfeminism works in theory and practice on horizontal networks and consciousness-raising about their potential, arguing that the era of the cybercitizen raises new and important risks of marginalization, on the basis of gender and other factors, and new forms of empowerment. (shrink)

This article focuses on Manuel Castells's claim that the information age announces major changes in stratification and, accordingly, in social and political mobilization. His assertion that informational labour displaces generic labour in informational capitalism is examined in terms of its conceptual and historical accuracy, and questions are raised about the notion of meritocracy embedded in his depiction of informational labour. The idea that the network society is characterized by `a faceless collective capitalist' is also called into question (...) by evidence of the persistence of a propertied class. Finally, Castells's analysis of the emergence and significance of identitybased mobilizations is examined. (shrink)

This article examines the connecting lines between the Chilean Project Cybersyn’s interface design, the German Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and its cybernetically inspired approaches towards information design, and later developments in interaction design and the emerging field of Human–Computer Interaction in the USA. In particular, it first examines how early works of designers Tomàs Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe on operative communication, that is, language-independent pictogram systems and visual grammars for computational systems, were intertwined with attempts to ground industrial design (...) in a scientific methodology, to address an era of computing machines, and to develop the concept of the interface as a heuristic for a renovated design thinking. It thereby also reconstructs further historical vanishing lines—e.g. the pictorial grammar of Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE—of the development of the ‘ulm model’ of design. Second, the article explores how an apprehension of first-order cybernetics in West Germany—e.g. represented by hfg ulm staff like Max Bense or Abraham Moles, merged with Cybersyn’s second-order cybernetics ideas, as represented by Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. And third, it asks about a further conceptual turn regarding an understanding of design which resulted in a focus on communicative interaction, e.g. in the later works of Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd on HCI, or in Beer’s Team Syntegrity approach. As an effect, the text will explore a specific and international network of cybernetic thinking between Latin America, Europe, and North America which emerged around Project Cybersyn, and which was occupied with questions of HCI, a democratization of design, and intelligence amplification. (shrink)

During most of the twentieth century, it was possible to consider Switzerland a coordinated market economy, characterized by dense interfirm networks and the strong role of business associations. Thanks to their cohesion and collective organization, in a context of quiet politics and informal institutions, business elites could largely self-regulate major socioeconomic issues in the shadow of politics. However, since the end of the twentieth century, Swiss business elites have undergone profound changes not only in their composition, but also in (...) their coordinating capacity, their growing political divisions, and their connections to politics. This growing sociological and political fragmentation, combined with changes in the way of doing politics, through noisier and more formal politics, has weakened the instrumental power of Swiss business elites. To compensate for this loss of direct influence, business elites of the largest Swiss companies have developed new political strategies, relying on their growing structural power in a context of global and financial capitalism. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the reporting practice andpaper technologieslike forms on reports that were later used for national morbidity statistics by studying the Swiss reporting system for infectious diseases between 1886 and 1921. Analysing the production processes of notifications shows the difficulties and solutions in the implementation of the statutory reporting process. Two disease outbreaks—a smallpox outbreak in Schaffhausen and a typhoid outbreak in the canton of Lucerne—serve as case studies. It is shown that reports are not (...) only objective representations of diseases, but also symbolize the medico-social interactions that produce them, timed by administrative tools like reporting forms and the act of reporting. This destabilises historical statistics and illustrates the complexity of the historical source material, as these interactions and their impact on reporting must be considered. These findings are further supported by examining the Swiss reporting system during the Spanish flu of 1918 and its failure to record influenza cases. (shrink)

This is a work of literary history in which the author reconstructs the epistolary network of a German philologist and philosopher named Gottfried Leibniz and his extended coterie of far-flung correspondents who exchanged information and insights, by way of letters, about the emergent study of historical linguistics, as a means of retracing the origins of the various peoples of Europe. This book contributes to our understanding of the so-called international Republic of Letters in the early-modern period of (...) Europe and the near East. (shrink)

This article explores the domain of legal analysis and its methodologies, emphasising the significance of generalisation in legal systems. It discusses the process of generalisation in relation to legal concepts and the development of ideal concepts that form the foundation of law. The article examines the role of logical induction and its similarities with semantic generalisation, highlighting their importance in legal decision-making. It also critiques the formal-deductive approach in legal practice and advocates for more adaptable models, incorporating fuzzy logic, non-monotonic (...) defeasible reasoning, and artificial intelligence. The potential application of neural networks, specifically deep learning algorithms, in legal theory is also discussed. The article discusses how neural networks encode legal knowledge in their synaptic connections, while the syllogistic model condenses legal information into axioms. The article also highlights how neural networks assimilate novel experiences and exhibit evolutionary progression, unlike the deductive model of law. Additionally, the article examines the historical and theoretical foundations of jurisprudence that align with the basic principles of neural networks. It delves into the statistical analysis of legal phenomena and theories that view legal development as an evolutionary process. The article then explores Friedrich Hayek’s theory of law as an autonomous self-organising system and its compatibility with neural network models. It concludes by discussing the implications of Hayek’s theory on the role of a lawyer and the precision of neural networks. (shrink)

As a brand-new marketing method, network marketing has gradually become one of the main ways and means for enterprises to improve profitability and competitiveness with its unique advantages. Using these marketing data to build a model can dig out useful information that the business is concerned about, and the company can then formulate marketing strategies based on this information. Sales forecasting is to speculate on the future based on historical sales. It is a tool for companies (...) to determine production volume and ensure the balance of product supply and sales. It can help companies make correct business decisions to maximize profits. The neural network can approximate the nonlinear function with arbitrary precision, and the time series prediction model based on the neural network can well reflect the nonlinear development trend of information. Based on the analysis of the shortcomings of the traditional BP network, this paper uses a genetic algorithm with good global search capabilities to improve the neural network. The thought and theory of optimizing the initial weight and threshold of the neural network of the GA algorithm are discussed in detail. While expounding the forecasting method, it uses specific examples to analyze the performance and characteristics of the GA-BP network in the enterprise network marketing forecasting. The results show that the GA-BP neural network is higher than the traditional BP neural network in terms of prediction accuracy and adaptability. (shrink)

Historically, Judeo-Christian doctrine has been used to justify the mistreatment of nonhuman animals through the “dominion” view of human superiority. Linzey and others have questioned this perspective, suggesting that critical tenets of religion, and particularly Christianity, support the ethical treatment of other animals by defining dominion as stewardship. This article considers how framing and networks help explain the complex relationship between religion and support for animal rights. We offer ways in which social networks and framing might inform the beliefs and (...) behaviors of religious individuals who support animal rights as well as the strategies of the animal rights movement intended to appeal to such individuals. (shrink)

There are two primary arguments against scientific realism, one pertaining to underdetermination, the other to the history of science. While these arguments are usually treated as altogether distinct, P. Kyle Stanford's ‘problem of unconceived alternatives’ constitutes one kind of synthesis: I propose that Stanford's argument is best understood as a broad modus ponens underdetermination argument, into which he has inserted a unique variant of the historical pessimistic induction. After articulating three criticisms against Stanford's argument and the evidence that he (...) offers, I contend that, as it stands, Stanford's argument poses no threat to contemporary scientific realism. Nonetheless, upon identifying two useful insights present in Stanford's general strategy, I offer an alternative variant of the modus ponens underdetermination argument, one that, although historically informed by science, requires no inductive premises. I contend that this non-inductive but historically informed variant of the modus ponens clarifies and considerably strengthens the case against scientific realism. (shrink)

We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction o advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task (...) is no longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information and computer-mediated interactions. We think the theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies, for its focus has always been on whole environments: what we really do in them and how we coordinate our activity in them. Distributed cognition provides a radical reorientation of how to think about designing and supporting human-computer interaction. As a theory it is specifically tailored to understanding interactions among people and technologies. In this article we propose distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketch an integrated research framework, and use selections from our earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials. (shrink)

In this second issue of volume one, a welcome feature are those articles that bring to our readers, new historical information about women philosophers, new analyses of important positions supported by and questions addressed by select women philosophers, as well as articles that compare and contrast the views of several women philosophers on particular topics. This issue reflects on the context of women’s theoretical contributions, with articles that address the question of women’s agency and the historical account (...) through which women were acknowledged (or not) as originators of or contributors to important theoretical developments within the mentioned disciplines. In recent decades an overwhelming amount of philosophical works by women has been made available by historians of philosophy. This issue reflects those strides towards recovering philosophical writings by women. Issue 2 of this volume is organized chronologically and starts with a paper from Jonathan Head: “Anne Conway on Heaven and Hell”. Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690) offers representations of heaven and hell, revising our conventional image of hell. Conway presents hell in a way that she believes is more consistent with the postulate of a loving and just God. In part, Conway denies the possibility of eternal torment and emphasizes the benefits that suffering brings to a living being. Conway describes heaven as a realm of “perfect rest” where creatures enjoy unity and harmony with Christ and other heavenly spirits. This state involves an increasing understanding of the world, a continual process of perfection and harmony with other heavenly spirits. The article concludes with a description of Conway’s eschatology in the broader intellectual context of the revival of Origenist theology in its intellectual setting and in the changing framework of eschatological thought in the early Quaker community. Monica M. Mastrantonio discusses in her paper, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – a philosopher? The epistolary woman, because women could not be called Philosophers, Scientists, Entrepreneurs” aspects of a different and new transcultural worldview that reflects diversity and knowledge combined with philosophy in a new way. In the past, there were two roles with which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was associated. One was her experience at the Turkish Embassy, where she highlighted cultural diversity. A second role she was associated with was international travel. Mastrantonio argues that Montagu was more than a literary aristocrat who could describe customs and traditions from abroad. Using Montagu’s complete letters, the author brings into discussion the fact that Montagu was also a vaccine entrepreneur and a journalist on political and urban issues, paving the way for discussions on philosophical questions. Many letter writers of the 16th and 17th centuries were already feminists who were politically and artistically active in their time and wrote letters with precision and expertise. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are an important aspect in building a transcultural worldview in which diversity and knowledge combine with philosophy differently than it was before. In this short but engaging article, “American Women in the Transcendental and Pragmatist Movements”, Carol Bensick provides an overview of two important philosophical movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Transcendentalism and the Pragmatism that emerged in part from that movement. In the course of identifying numerous women who contributed to both movements, Bensick examines how some of them were included in the early history of American philosophy, only to be omitted from later histories. Bensick argues that the recent designation of women philosophers as “feminist pragmatists” is historically an inaccurate identification and one that pragmatists did not use to describe themselves. The French philosopher Simone Weil, the Swiss Jeanne Hersch and the Spanish Maria Zambrano each examined how bodily elements function in the rational search for truth. In his paper Oblique Paths to Truth: Myth and Bodily Elements in Simone Weil, Jeanne Hersch and Maria Zambrano, Piergiacomo Severini examines popular “body” myths referred to by these philosophers and analyses the language they use to express that bodily elements precede consciousness and reason. Through these myths/stories we learn that truth cannot be known directly through objects. Instead, the “knowing subject” necessarily elaborates indirect paths to transcendent truth. Severini argues that the effort to reintegrate the human attachment to the marginal world is peculiar to women philosophers in the history of philosophy and thus points to an alternative path to the human search for meaning that differs from the mainstream of Western male philosophy. As a philosopher, Hedwig Conrad-Martius has been intensively engaged throughout her life in researching the question of what reality is and has contrasted her reflections with those of Husserl and others. In her contribution “Conrad-Martius: the ´Real-Reality of the World – in Dialogue with Aristotle, Aquinas and Husserl”, author Irene Breuer deals with Conrad-Martius’ concepts of reality as “real reality”, with being, existence and essence and relates them to the concepts in Aristotle, Aquinas and Husserl. She discusses once again the questions of the hypostasis of being – by which the author claims that this is about the noema itself, and about the emergence of being in particular. The author’s thesis is that although Conrad-Martius rejects transcendental reduction, Conrad-Martius does accept eidetic reduction and the positing of a sphere of primordial and given facts. Driving this sphere back into a transphysical realm, it can provide a ground for Husserl’s sphere of original facts, which itself remains beyond the reach of phenomenological enquiries. Consequently, the author concludes, Conrad-Martius and Husserl meet here in their investigations, and yes, they complement each other, at a point where “the real bursts into reality”. Join us in unveiling this universe of women’s ideas. We are happy to welcome our contributors and readers, as we improve our understanding of the history of philosophical ideas by adding new perspectives and new insights. We enter a new universe of praiseworthy ideas by women theorists, one that will doubtlessly contribute to a world description that is more accurate than a narrative written without these voices. Philosophy starts here. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary analytic philosophy of music has characterized historically informed performance practice as compliance-focused, impersonal, and work-centered. The first part of the paper gathers evidence in support of this claim from the works of Julian Dodd, Peter Kivy, James O. Young, Aron Edidin, and Stephen Davies. In the second part of the paper, I reject this received view. Evidence from actual performance practice, as well as from the practitioners’ reflection on their activity, belies the received view outlined (...) in the first part of the paper. I conclude by drawing three methodological lessons from the oversights I attempt to rectify. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the digital culture on football supporters through analysis of official and unofficial websites and media reports. At first glance it would appear that technology has brought about greater opportunities to communicate, to share views which previously could not be widely published, and to organise against the commercial power of the large football clubs. However, surveillance, censorship and control continue to impact on supporters to restrict and ultimately prevent the ideal (...) speech situation that is necessary to empower fans and promote greater participation in their clubs. Current media manipulation and corporate interests restrict and alienate fans who often have more of a historically constituted sense of ownership and culture within their local clubs.Design/methodology/approachA critical social theory approach is adopted to examine structures and processes related to communication between fans, the media, football clubs and the public. Habermas' theory is draw upon using the concepts of “colonization of the Lifeworld” and “communicative action” to inform a theme and discourse analysis of official and independent football club websites and media reports. How corporate interests are manipulating public opinion and freedom to speak openly within an overall goal of profit maximization for club owners and the large media corporations are explored.FindingsAlthough steps to enable free communication have been made we are still a long way off supporters having a powerful enough voice to organise against the commercial power of the large football clubs and media conglomerates. The ideal speech situation remains elusive and the hegemonic state remains unchallenged. Football supporters are increasingly constructed as “consumers” and the ultimate power remains in mass media and broadcast rather than personal “narrowcast”.Originality/valueThis paper extends debate on the impact of the developing “digital culture” focusing on football supporters, a specific and prevalent community within British society. It raises issues for further research in this area. (shrink)

The Second World War offered an excellent opportunity for some U.S. think tanks to influence foreign-policy-making processes and get involved in transatlantic diplomacy. This study seeks to demonstrate that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) challenged the stalemate between the U.S. and French authorities by gathering together U.S. experts and non-collaborationist French leaders. A first-hand reconstruction of this informal network is based on the unreleased Peace Aims Group’s records. This was a unique CFR exchange programme for European governments-in-exile’s representatives. (...) In the first part, a general reconstruction of Council on Foreign Relations’ planning introduces an original assessment of the meetings with some prominent French intellectuals and politicians. It is argued that these conferences can be interpreted as rare examples of wartime public diplomacy. The second part discloses new historical evidence demonstrating the participation of Jean Monnet in a Peace Aims session. This discovery proves the existence of a long-term partnership between one of the key protagonists of the European integration process and the most authoritative foreign-policy think tank working for the Roosevelt administration. Overall, the analysis of Peace Aims Group’s off-the-record discussions sheds new light on the WWII transatlantic debate on postwar Europe and France. (shrink)

This article deploys Spinoza’s ethic of joy alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of micropolitics to expose how fascist desires and affects bloom and circulate through digital communications ecosystems that generally promote a diffusion or decentralisation of power. Beyond the steady barrage of alt-right content conscientiously documented by liberal journalists and progressive watchdogs, a more persistent and widespread fascist impulse permeates the very forms of some of our most banal digitally mediated acts and encounters. Rather than a sole looming authoritarian figurehead, (...) the network itself – particularly with the new image paradigms propelled by apps such as Instagram and TikTok – has become the rallying point for the circulation of fascistic affects, burnished through the art and ethos of following: of rules, routines, protocols, accounts. I contend that a joyful passion accompanies much of this everyday experience of keeping up with one’s feeds, engaging the platforms, participating in the spectacles. This is what Sontag, interrogating the appeal of the Third Reich, calls the ‘joy of followers’, a joy in fascist belonging, which is to suggest that fascist movements thrive not only on the circulation of negative affects like hatred and fear, but also on the profusion of pleasure and affiliation. Deleuze’s Spinoza, resolutely anti-fascist, helps us parse this situation as it plays out in the social media sphere. Spinoza offers a bipartite conceptualisation of joy that allows us to diagnose the pleasures particular to fascist belonging and network belonging alike as passive, partial and indirect. Ultimately, what we today share with historical fascisms is a ubiquitous aesthetic that merges art with life and bodies with information, and a corresponding ethos that cultivates conformism, barbarises critical thought and redirects joyful impulses into reactionary social forms. As fascistic power relations spread anew through digital cultures’ newly evolving modes of visuality, hapticity, vibration and expression, one can observe something of what Deleuze calls ‘sad joy’, a sort of joy rooted in conquest and domination. The aim of this article is to root out such sad joys, to appreciate their appeal, and ultimately to reject them in all their various forms. (shrink)

The amount of information that is produced on a daily basis in the financial markets is vast and complex; consequently, the development of systems that simplify decision-making is an essential endeavor. In this article, several intelligent systems are proposed and tested to predict the closing price of the IBEX 35 index using more than ten years of historical data and five distinct architectures for neural networks. A multi-layer perceptron was the first step, followed by a simple recurrent neural (...) network, a gated recurrent unit network and two long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The results of the analyses performed on these models have demonstrated a powerful capacity for prediction. Additionally, the findings of this research point to the fact that the application of intelligent systems can simplify the decision-making process in financial markets, which is a substantial advantage. Furthermore, by comparing the predicted outcome errors between the models, the LSTM presents the lowest error with a higher computational time in the training phase. The LSTM was able to accurately forecast the closing price of the day as well as the price for the following one and two days in advance. In conclusion, the empirical results demonstrated that these models could accurately predict financial data for trading purposes and that the application of intelligent systems, such as the LSTM network, represents a promising advancement in financial technology. (shrink)

In physics, the temporal dimension has units of infinitesimally brief duration. Given this, how is it possible to perceive things, such as motion, music, and vibrotactile stimulation, that involve extension across many units of time? To address this problem, it is proposed that there is what is termed an “information construct of happening” (ICOH), a simultaneous representation of recent, temporally differentiated perceptual information on the millisecond time scale. The main features of the ICOH are (i) time marking, semantic (...) labeling of all information in the ICOH with ordinal temporal information and distance from what is informationally identified as the present moment, (ii) vector informational features that specify kind, direction, and rate of change for every feature in a percept, and (iii) connectives, information relating vector informational features at adjacent temporal locations in the ICOH. The ICOH integrates products of perceptual processing with recent historical information in sensory memory on the subsecond time scale. Perceptual information about happening in informational sensory memory is encoded in semantic form that preserves connected semantic trails of vector and timing information. The basic properties of the ICOH must be supported by a general and widespread timing mechanism that generates ordinal and interval timing information and it is suggested that state‐dependent networks may suffice for that purpose. Happening, therefore, is perceived at a moment and is constituted by an information structure of connected recent historical information. (shrink)

We investigated how the structure of the brain network relates to the stability of perceptual alternation in binocular rivalry. Historically, binocular rivalry has provided important new insights to our understandings in neuroscience. Although various relationships between the local regions of the human brain structure and perceptual switching phenomena have been shown in previous researches, the global organization of the human brain structural network relating to this phenomenon has not yet been addressed. To approach this issue, we reconstructed fiber-tract (...) bundles using diffusion tensor imaging and then evaluated the correlations between the speeds of perceptual alternation and fractional anisotropy (FA) values in each fiber-tract bundle integrating among 84 brain regions. The resulting comparison revealed that the distribution of the global organization of the structural brain network showed positive or negative correlations between the speeds of perceptual alternation and the FA values. First, the connections between the subcortical regions stably were negatively correlated. Second, the connections between the cortical regions mainly showed positive correlations. Third, almost all other cortical connections that showed negative correlations were located in one central cluster of the subcortical connections. This contrast between the contribution of the cortical regions to destabilization and the contribution of the subcortical regions to stabilization of perceptual alternation provides important information as to how the global architecture of the brain structural network supports the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. (shrink)

Book Review: Samuel Lebens (2017) "Bertrand Russell and the Nature of Propositions: a History and Defense of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement".

Path-dependence offers a promising way of understanding the role historicity plays in explanation, namely, how the past states of a process can matter in the explanation of a given outcome. The two main existing accounts of path-dependence have sought to present it either in terms of dynamic landscapes or branching trees. However, the notions of landscape and tree both have serious limitations and have been criticized. The framework of causal networks is both more fundamental and more general that that of (...) landscapes and trees. Within this framework, I propose that historicity in networks should be understood as symmetry breaking. History matters when an asymmetric bias towards an outcome emerges in a causal network. This permits a quantitative measure for how path-dependence can occur in degrees, and offers suggestive insights into how historicity is intertwined both with causal structure and complexity. (shrink)

This article reevaluates the historical conditions of the concomitant rise of computational systems and DNA-coding in the 1950s and addresses the implementation of behavioral psychology and cybernetic technologies of control after the Second World War. From this historical perspective, this article interrogates the intersectional relation that automatic systems of control share with models of segregation and structures of knowledge oppression. It engages with the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and poses Simondon’s cybernetic theory as an opportunity to (...) question systems of knowledge imposed on ontological domains. Finally, it reveals how cybernetics reproduces a model of cultural understanding based on exclusion/inclusion and addresses the difficulty of creating new critical paradigms from within the informational technologies of neo-colonial episteme. -/- Too often, technologies of scientific knowledge such as machine learning and informational networks are used as alibi for the imple- mentation of neo-colonial values that dictate the epistemological trajectory of societies. Scientific projects that, for example, promote the testing of pharmaceuticals on individuals in third world countries privilege beings based on categorical understandings of race, class, gender, and ability. Such projects not only legitimize structural hierarchies among subjects, as seen in the use of cephalometric technologies in imperial systems of exploration; they also sustain the cultural framework of values that segregate collective beings on a global scale. (shrink)

Explicit, quantitative procedures for identifying biodiversity priority areas are replacing the often ad hoc procedures used in the past to design networks of reserves to conserve biodiversity. This change facilitates more informed choices by policy makers, and thereby makes possible greater satisfaction of conservation goals with increased efficiency. A key feature of these procedures is the use of the principle of complementarity, which ensures that areas chosen for inclusion in a reserve network complement those already selected. This paper sketches (...) the historical development of the principle of complementarity and its applications in practical policy decisions. In the first section a brief account is given of the circumstances out of which concerns for more explicit systematic methods for the assessment of the conservation value of different areas arose. The second section details the emergence of the principle of complementarity in four independent contexts. The third section consists of case studies of the use of the principle of complementarity to make practical policy decisions in Australasia, Africa, and America. In the last section, an assessment is made of the extent to which the principle of complementarity transformed the practice of conservation biology by introducing new standards of rigor and explicitness. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the micro-foundations of elite politics by focusing on changes in network structures that emerge from informal conversations. Empirically, we offer a novel “situational conflict” explanation to account for the puzzle of why reformist leaders were periodically ousted during China’s reform era (1977–1992), emphasizing the unexpected power collision that catalyzed the violent crackdown on the Tiananmen movement in 1989. To do so, we employ network analysis and narrative to utilize an original dataset of elite (...) conversations and primary sources that have only recently been made available. We find that ideological cleavage and manipulative brokerage produced each conflict to varying degrees but were contingent on the relational structure arising from elite conversational interactions. Furthermore, the actual unfolding of those conflicts often resulted from key actors’ discrepant understandings of the changing relationships via ongoing interactions at vital moments, such as during the Tiananmen movement. Integrating micro-sociological theories and network analysis, our work has methodological and theoretical implications for unpacking the black box of elite politics and its role in macro-historical change. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to consider individual symptoms and areas of alienation in the history of mankind and in the modern information society, and the disclosure of its logic and patterns. Methodologically, the study is based on the historical, information and cybernetic approaches. The paper points to a positive feedback between the amount of knowledge in alienated form and figures of society, the development of its comprehensive intelligence. New forms of exclusion, which exist in the (...) form of artificial intelligence, robotics, and global computer networks, are analysed. The findings suggest a communicative model of the interaction of mankind with man-made external memory, which describes a non-linear process of communicating to it all human knowledge and intellectual abilities. It is emphasized that the contradiction between man and the material world created by him is the main contradiction of modernity. (shrink)

This study conducted a social network analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of the world dairy trade network based on the overall trade pattern. In addition, the evolution of trade blocs and the co-opetition relationships involving dairy products in major countries were analyzed in terms of supply and demand. The results show that continuous and complex changes have taken place in the world’s dairy trade network since 2001. The number of trade entities in dairy products has stabilized since (...) 2012. At present, approximately 94% of countries (regions) are involved in dairy product trade, such that the world dairy trade network exhibits the small-world effect and scale-free property. The world import pattern for dairy products has changed. While export centers have not changed, import centers have shifted from Europe, America, and East Asia to North America, East Asia, and the Middle East. The world dairy trade network consists of the EU trade bloc headed by Germany, the former Soviet Union–Brazil trade bloc, and the Asia–Australia–America trade bloc. The trade blocs have evolved due to geographical positions, historical cultures, and political relations. In a trade bloc, the diversification of import sources is more prominent in demand countries. European and Asian markets have become the main markets of the major exporters. In this study, the evolutionary characteristics of the world dairy trade network and the co-opetition relationships were analyzed to provide scientific support to inform the development of dairy trade policies. The results can provide technical and psychological support to policy-makers in various countries in their dairy trade decision-making. (shrink)

Globalization, in its earlier stages, was expected to erode national and ethnic identities. In contrast, ethnicity and ethnic affiliations persisted, growing socially and politically. This paper examines the role of the globalizing new communications technologies on this process, focusing on Diasporas. The study of trans-state networks based on ethnic solidarity, connections and affinities in the framework of social and political science is quite recent. Following a clarification of the distinction between classical and modern Diasporas we analyse a particular case study, (...) that of the Jewish Diaspora. This diaspora was an early adopter of computer-based communications and the Internet for a wide range of purposes. Early events are described including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, the planning of a Global Jewish Information Network, Israel 2020 macro scenarios for Israel and the Jewish People and the decision on Jewish Peoplehood through communication technologies. A survey of historical systems follows by a description of the Jewish population and the wide variety of Jewish Web based activities today. These include the Institutional landscape; Jewish media — press, radio, video and blogs; the impact on Jewish religious observance; Jewish genealogy; Online dating; Social networks; Jewish education; Online learning; Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities; Jewish memory. Judaica Europeana supports the activities previously described by aggregating and facilitating the access and the re-use of Jewish digital culture. Europeana is the leading global digital library for cultural heritage as well as a lively eco-system for relevant stakeholders. (shrink)

This article examines central tensions in cybernetics, defined as the study of self-organization, communication, automated feedback in organisms, and other distributed informational networks, from its wartime beginnings to its contemporary adaptations. By examining aspects of both first- and second-order cybernetics, the article introduces an epistemological standpoint that highlights the tension between its definition as a theory of recursion and a theory of control, prediction, and actionability. I begin by examining the historical outcomes of the Macy Conferences to provide a (...) context for cybernetics’ initial development for scientific epistemology, ethics, and socio-political thought. I draw extensively from Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Ross Ashby, and Gregory Bateson, key figures of this movement. I then elaborate upon certain premises of cybernetics to further elucidate an intellectual history from which to begin to construct a cybernetic epistemology. I conclude by offering the second-order cybernetic concept of recursivity as a model and method for ethico-epistemological questioning that can account for both the constructive potential and the limitations of cybernetics in science and society. (shrink)

The relevance of the problem of the development of sociological thinking in the context of the digitalization of society is due to the process of sophistication of society, which requires a constant increase in the ability to ensure the adequacy of social management. The subject of the research is the development of sociological thinking in the post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the problem of the development of sociological thinking in the context of the formation (...) of a digital society. The methodology for studying the problem of the development of sociological thinking is based on the use of systemic, logical, historical, dialectical and civilizational approaches and methods. Scientific research results. The formation of sociological thinking is carried out on the basis of the theoretical ideas about this phenomenon of E.Giddens, J.Masionis, C.Mills. The need to develop sociological thinking in the modern world is due to the need to streamline and ensure the life of society in the face of growing influence of threats, dangers and risks. Sociological thinking is professional thinking, the object of which is social management at all levels of the social structure of society. The training of sociologists with a high level of sociological thinking requires a deep assimilation of specific sources devoted to understanding the social realities of society. An analysis of social changes in the post-Soviet Ukrainian society indicates the appearance in it of all the main features that characterize it as a “risk society”. The formation of an information and communication society requires the training of large groups of specialists both in the field of information and communication technologies and in the field of social and humanitarian technologies. The growth of information networks and the formation of a network social order give rise to new opportunities for the use of social and humanitarian technologies in both constructive and destructive directions. Therefore, the condition for the preservation and development of society is the existence of a broad social group capable of providing effective social management based on sociological thinking. Unfortunately, in modern Ukraine the level of sociological thinking is not measured by anyone, the trends of its changes are not tracked, and the number of professionals with a high level of sociological thinking does not correspond to the challenges faced by the post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The practical value of the results lies in substantiating the contradiction between the state of development of sociological thinking of students and the need to update the social management system in order to ensure its ability to be adequate to the threats, dangers, risks and challenges faced by our Ukrainian society. (shrink)

Political theory and political philosophy are marked by a wide variety of approaches, which can be grouped broadly into normative/prescriptive, historical, and critical traditions of political thought. These are not just distinct in terms of scholarly focus, but also in methods, standards for evaluation, informal networks, conferences, and journals. Many scholars spend their graduate school years and much of their careers largely engaged in one or another of these fields, leading to a fractionalization of political theory. This contribution offers (...) a conceptual framework for better understanding their interrelated nature, seeing these distinct fields as part of a common project of political theorizing. We call this framework ‘The Toronto School,’ named after a class Carens taught for graduate students at the University of Toronto. The Toronto School is less a particular method for doing political theory (the way, say, Skinner or Foucault offers) and more an ecumenical understanding of political theory as a discipline, which sees the various approaches and aims of our field as having unique and complementing competencies and blindspots that fit into a more general project of intellectual inquiry. This contribution articulates the broad contours of the Toronto School, with a particular eye toward the way it reconciles normative, historical, and critical approaches. (shrink)

The term ‘nurse’ (hushi—’caring scholar’) did not enter the Chinese language until the early 20th century. Modern nursing—a fundamentally Western notion popularized by Nightingale and introduced to China in 1884—profoundly changed the way care of the sick was practiced. For 65 years, until 1949, nursing developed in China as a transnational project, with Western and Chinese influences shaping the profession of nursing in ways that linger today. Co‐authored by Chinese, Canadian, and American nurses, this paper examines the early stages of (...) nursing in one province of China as an exemplar of the transnational nature of nursing development. By identifying sociopolitical influences on the early development of nursing in Shandong, the authors aimed not only to contribute to the nascent body of knowledge on China nursing history, but also to heighten readers’ sensitivity to the existence of historical echoes, residue, and resonances in their own nursing practices. Tracing current issues, values, or practices back to their roots provides context and helps us to better understand the present. Whether we are aware of the details or not, the gestalt of nursing practice in a particular place has been shaped by its history—including in Shandong province in China. (shrink)