Take a trip across British Columbia with this enchanting collection of essays from thirty local writers.What makes wandering the vibrant land called British Columbia really special? Encounters with locals who are ready to share, over a coffee or a beer, quirky tales and powerful truths rooted in place and time. Consider this book a meet-up with 30 such storytellers, the perfect road companion for your journey real or imagined. The Tyee is the province’s ol...

More than seventy years after his untimely death, this collection of essays and lectures provides the first appearance of Charles Norris Cochrane's follow-up to his seminal work, Christianity and Classical Culture. Augustine and the Problem of Power provides an accessible entrance into the vast sweep of Cochrane's thought through his topical essays and lectures on Augustine, Roman history and literature, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Edward Gibbon. These shorter writings demonstrate the impress...

In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of...

This book examines the powerful and intensifying role that metrics play in ordering and shaping our everyday lives. Focusing upon the interconnections between measurement, circulation and possibility, the author explores the interwoven relations between power and metrics. He draws upon a wide-range of interdisciplinary resources to place these metrics within their broader historical, political and social contexts. More specifically, he illuminates the various ways that metrics implicate ou...

We are living in algorithmic times.From machine learning and artificial intelligence to blockchain or simpler newsfeed filtering, automated systems can transform the social world in ways that are just starting to be imagined.Redefining these emergent technologies as the new systems of knowing, pioneering scholar David Beer examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable. Drawing on cases ranging from the art market and th...

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember?Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, this book critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and stud...

The culture we consume is increasingly delivered to us via various digital on-demand platforms. The last decade has seen platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Google and the like become massive players in shaping cultural consumption. But how can we understand culture once it moves on to big tech platforms? How can we make sense of the changes this brings to our lives? These platforms have the power to shape our cultural landscape and to use data, algorithms and other technolo...

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic...

A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering.It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of...

The vast circulations of mobile devices, sensors and data mean that the social world is now defined by a complex interweaving of human and machine agency. Key to this is the growing power of algorithms – the decision-making parts of code – in our software dense and data rich environments. Algorithms can shape how we are retreated, what we know, who we connect with and what we encounter, and they present us with some important questions about how society operates and how we understand it.

Quinn’s study brings together the results of his nearly fifty years of research on the voyages outfitted by Sir Walter Raleigh and the efforts to colonize Roanoke Island. It is a fascinating book, rich in details of the colonists' experiences in the New World. Quinn “solves” the mystery of the Lost Colony with the controversial conclusion that many of the colonists lived with the Powhatans until the first decade of the seventeenth century when they were massacred.

She's arrived . . .Light years from Earth, an alien planet forced their queen from power, and cast her into space. For millions of years, the queen's ship wandered the cosmos . . . Until it crashed on Earth.And no one can stop her . . .As a child, Michael Hems first lost his mother to cancer, and then his father to the bottom of a bottle. Growing up in a small town, Michael's friends became his life. The only one he knew. T...