Broader Horizons

More than perhaps anybody else in the world, the Swedish social scientist Björn Wittrock has contributed - both on the intellectual and institutional level - to making a truly global science possible. This book is devoted to an appreciation of his contributions.

The little-known author Jan van Naaldwijk, whose two early sixteenth-century Dutch chronicles of Holland are preserved in autograph manuscripts in the British Library, wrote at a moment reputed to be the turning point between medieval and Renaissance modes of historical writing. While he primarily relied on the medieval historical tradition of Holland, he expanded it in ways that allow us to appreciate the broader impact of innovations occurring at the same time in more 'professional' scholarly circles. This is the first in-depth study of these chronicles and their relation to their sources, placed in the wider context of history writing running from the mid-fourteenth century into the eighteenth, providing new insights into the continuities and transitions that characterized the historical tradition of Holland from the late middle ages well into the early modern period. An accompanying cd-rom contains transcriptions of both Jan's chronicles. Winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize 2012 Short-listed for the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize 2012.

How the tools of information technology can support environmental sustainability by tackling problems that span broad scales of time, space, and complexity. Environmental issues often span long periods of time, far-flung areas, and labyrinthine layers of complexity. In Greening through IT, Bill Tomlinson investigates how the tools and techniques of information technology (IT) can help us tackle environmental problems at such vast scales. Tomlinson describes theoretical, technological, and social aspects of a growing interdisciplinary approach to sustainability, “Green IT,” offering both a human-centered framework for understanding Green IT systems and specific examples and case studies of Green IT in action. Tomlinson descrobes many efforts toward sustainability supported by IT—from fishers in India who maximized the sales potential of their catch by coordinating their activities with mobile phones to the installation of smart meters that optimize electricity use in California households—and offers three detailed studies of specific research projects that he and his colleagues have undertaken: EcoRaft, an interactive museum exhibit to help children learn principles of restoration ecology; Trackulous, a set of web-based tools with which people can chart their own environmental behavior; and GreenScanner, an online system that provides access to environmental-impact reports about consumer products. Taken together, these examples illustrate the significant environmental benefits that innovations in information technology can enable.

In this broad-ranging text, Peter Dahlgren clarifies the underlying theoretical concepts of civil society and the public sphere, and relates these to a critical analysis of the practice of television as journalism, as information and as entertainment. He demonstrates the limits and the possibilities of the television medium and the formats of popular journalism. These issues are linked to the potential of the audience to interpret or resist messages, and to construct its own meanings. What does a realistic understanding of the functioning and the capabilities of television imply for citizenship and democracy in a mediated age?

In volume one, Kerr describes the private life of the university from his first visit to Berkeley as a graduate student at Stanford in 1932 to his dismissal under Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967. Early in his tenure as a professor, the Loyalty Oath issue erupted, and the university, particularly the Berkeley campus, underwent its most difficult upheaval until the onset of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Kerr discusses many pivotal developments, including the impact of the GI Bill and the evolution of the much-emulated 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. He also discusses the movement for universal access to education and describes the establishment and growth of each of the nine campuses and the forces and visions that shaped their distinctive identities.