Touching Objects

This groundbreaking book spans the fields of art history, material culture, and gender studies in its examination of a range of objects from Italian Renaissance society. Addressing painted and sculpted portraits, marriage and betrothal gifts, and paxes, Adrian W. B. Randolph uses themes such as family and individual memory, windows, perspectival space, and touch to investigate how these items were experienced at the time, particularly by women. Rather than focusing on the social contexts of the objects, this original study deals with the objects themselves, asking how individuals lived with, looked at, and responded to complex things that at the time hovered between the nascent category of art and the everyday. Accompanied by beautiful and engaging accounts and illustrations of late-14th- and 15th-century Italian art, this compelling and thought-provoking argument makes the case for an alternate account of art and experience that challenges many conceptions about Renaissance art.

Despite the fact that we have a range of senses with which to perceive the world around us, museums and other cultural institutions have traditionally used sight as the main way to convey information. In everyday life, though, we use touch constantly in conjunction with sight. Why, then, does it play so small a role in the study and enjoyment of museum objects? Contributors to this volume explore how the sense of touch can be utilized in cultural institutions to facilitate understanding and learning.

Museum Objects, Health and Healing provides an innovative and interdisciplinary study of the relationship between objects, health and healing. Shedding light on the primacy of the human need for relationships with objects, the book explores what kind of implications these relationships might have on the exhibition experience. Merging museum and object studies, as well as psychotherapy and the psychology of well-being, the authors present a new theory entitled Psychotherapeutic Object Dynamics, which provides a cross- disciplinary study of the relationship between objects, health and well-being. Drawing on primary research in museums, psychotherapeutic settings and professional practice throughout the US, Canada, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the UK, the book provides an overview of the theory’s origins, the breadth of its practical applications on a global level, and a framework for further understanding the potency of objects in exhibitions and daily life. Museum Objects, Health and Healing will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in museum studies, material culture, mental health, psychotherapy, art therapies and anthropology. It should also be valuable reading for a wide range of practitioners, including curators, exhibition designers, psychologists, and psychotherapists.

This text combines a practical, hands-on approach to programming with the introduction of sound theoretical support focused on teaching the construction of high-quality software. A major feature of the book is the use of Design by Contract.

What role do material objects play in the in-situ, embodied and spatial circumstances of interaction? How do people organize their embodied conduct with regard to such objects, and how is this consequential in and for their work practices? In this volume, contributors focus on these questions in terms of connections between ongoing courses of interaction within work practices, object materiality and mobility in space, bodily movement and manipulation of objects, and language. The chapters in this book address a broad range of settings and actions (including dressmaking, foreign language teaching, international business meetings and forklift driving) where a variety of objects become relevant.

Uses the brain's five major learning systems--emotional, social, cognitive, physical, and reflective--to provide a framework for designing lessons and determining teaching approaches.

A comprehensive guide to the art and science of bioimaging data acquisition, processing and analysis Standard and Super-Resolution Bioimaging Data Analysis gets newcomers to bioimage data analysis quickly up to speed on the mathematics, statistics, computing hardware and acquisition technologies required to correctly process and document data. The past quarter century has seen remarkable progress in the field of light microscopy for biomedical science, with new imaging technologies coming on the market at an almost annual basis. Most of the data generated by these systems is image-based, and there is a significant increase in the content and throughput of these imaging systems. This, in turn, has resulted in a shift in the literature on biomedical research from descriptive to highly-quantitative. Standard and Super-Resolution Bioimaging Data Analysis satisfies the demand among students and research scientists for introductory guides to the tools for parsing and processing image data. Extremely well illustrated and including numerous examples, it clearly and accessibly explains what image data is and how to process and document it, as well as the current resources and standards in the field. A comprehensive guide to the tools for parsing and processing image data and the resources and industry standards for the biological and biomedical sciences Takes a practical approach to image analysis to assist scientists in ensuring scientific data are robust and reliable Covers fundamental principles in such a way as to give beginners a sound scientific base upon which to build Ideally suited for advanced students having only limited knowledge of the mathematics, statistics and computing required for image data analysis An entry-level text written for students and practitioners in the bioscience community, Standard and Super-Resolution Bioimaging Data Analysis de-mythologises the vast array of image analysis modalities which have come online over the past decade while schooling beginners in bioimaging principles, mathematics, technologies and standards.

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.