computers books information

My Mother Was a Computer By:N. Katherine Hayles Published on 2010-03-15 by University of Chicago Press We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayle...

The Book of the Heart By:Eric Jager Published on 2000-08-01 by University of Chicago Press In today's increasingly electronic world, we say our personality traits are |hard-wired| and we |replay| our memories. But we use a different metaphor when we speak of someone |reading| another's mind or a desire to |turn over a new leaf|—these phrases refer to the |book of the self,| an idea that dates from the beginnings of Western culture. Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the modern day. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a |book of the heart| modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art. For instance, medieval saints' legends tell of martyrs whose hearts recorded divine inscriptions; lyrics and romances feature lovers whose hearts are inscribed with their passion; paintings depict hearts as books; and medieval scribes even produced manuscript codices s...