Theories Technologies Instrumentalities Of Color

Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color is the outcome of a workshop, held in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2000. The editors bring together contributions from philosophy, history, classics, psychology, and anthropology to discuss the production of theories, technologies and instrumentalities - the phenomeno-technical ecology - of color. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the contributors problematise color and discuss the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, and assertibility, warrants taken for granted by "color."

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed. The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections. • Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field. • Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses. • Section III focuses on subject-object relations. • Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term. • Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity. The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America. For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.

It has been postulated that humans can differentiate between millions of gradations in color. Not surprisingly, no completely adequate, detailed catalog of colors has yet been devised, however the quest to understand, record, and depict color is as old as the quest to understand the fundamentals of the physical world and the nature of human consciousness. Rolf Kuehni’s Color Space and Its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present represents an ambitious and unprecedented history of man’s inquiry into color order, focusing on the practical applications of the most contemporary developments in the field. Kuehni devotes much of his study to geometric, three-dimensional arrangements of color experiences, a type of system developed only in the mid-nineteenth century. Color spaces are of particular interest for color quality-control purposes in the manufacturing and graphics industries. The author analyzes three major color order systems in detail: Munsell, OSA-UCS, and NCS. He presents historical and current information on color space developments in color vision, psychology, psychophysics, and color technology. Chapter topics include: A historical account of color order systems Fundamentals of psychophysics and the relationship between stimuli and experience Results of perceptual scaling of colors according to attributes History of the development of mathematical color space and difference formulas Analysis of the agreements and discrepancies in psychophysical data describing color differences An experimental plan for the reliable, replicated perceptual data necessary to make progress in the field Experts in academia and industry, neuroscientists, designers, art historians, and anyone interested in the nature of color will find Color Space and Its Divisions to be the authoritative reference in its field.

This volume represents a unique collection of chapters on the way in which color is categorized and named in a number of languages. Although color research has been a topic of focus for researchers for decades, the contributions here show that many aspects of color language and categorization are as yet unexplored, and that current theories and methodologies which investigate color language are still evolving. Some core questions addressed here include: How is color conceptualized through language? What kind of linguistic tools do languages use to describe color? Which factors tend to bias color language? What methodologies could be used to understand human color categorization and language better? How do color vocabularies evolve? How does context impact the color cognition? The chapters collected here adopt different theoretical and methodological approaches in describing new empirical research on how the concept of color is represented in a variety of different languages. Researchers in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science present a set of new explorations and challenges in the area of color language. The book promotes several methodological and disciplinary dimensions to color studies. The color category is given an in-depth and broad-based examination, so a reader interested in color conceptualization for itself will be able to form a solid vision of the subject.

Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the complexity of today cognitive theories suggest that there will hardly be only three levels of explanation. Instead, there will be many different degrees of commitments corresponding to the different granularities - from high-level (behavioural) models to low-level (neural and molecular) models of the cognitive research program. For instance, Bayesian approaches, that are usually advocated for formalizing Marr's computational level and rational behaviour, have even been adopted to model synaptic plasticity and axon guidance by molecular gradients. As a result, we can consider the behavioural scientist as dealing with models at a multiplicity of levels. The purpose of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is to promote an approach to the role of the levels and explanation and models which is of interest for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers of science.

The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color. As of February 2018, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This book presents a major leap forward in the understanding of colour by showing how richer descriptions of colour samples can be operationalized in agent-based models. Four different language strategies are explored: the basic colour strategy, the graded membership strategy, the category combination strategy and the basic modification strategy. These strategies are firmly rooted in empirical observations in natural languages, with a focus on compositionality at both the syntactic and semantic level. Through a series of in-depth experiments, this book discerns the impact of the environment, language and embodiment on the formation of basic colour systems. Finally, the experiments demonstrate how language users can invent their own language strategies of increasing complexity by combining primitive cognitive operators, and how these strategies can be aligned between language users through linguistic interactions.