MITPressLog

AGO Hires New Director of Exhibitions and Publications

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, which is currently closed awaiting completion of its extensive Frank Gehry-designed renovation, has hired Catherine de Zegher as new director of exhibitions and publications.   de Zegher, former executive director of The Drawing Center in New York, will work with other AGO curators to create a vibrant exhibitions program for the AGO, which is scheduled to reopen this fall.   She is involved with creating the European exhibits, among others.

According to the  CBC, The AGO said it was attracted by her "passion for connecting historical and contemporary themes" as well as her understanding of "audience interaction."  She has curated exhibits on the drawings of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin and art from Latin America and the low countries.

De Zegher has a background in archeology and art history and was co-founder and director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Belgium, which is involved in publishing and curating shows.  She is the co-editor of Women Artists at the Millennium. 

The AGO has not yet announced the date it will reopen.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Participation

Wednesday Blog Watch is always interested in new social networking websites - this week we're enthralled with the artreview website set up by UK-based Art Review magazine.  The website is described as "social networking site for the art world, creating a global forum for discussion, interactivity and debate".  Anyone can join, and "members are artists, galleries, collectors, critics, curators and the curious" who can post their own artwork, share comments and critiques, review art shows and books, and so on.  More about it can be found here.  In the book section, we just happened to notice a review of Participation.  Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, discusses the desire to move art viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers. An apt title to review on this new website!  Interested in participating?  Have a look.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Women in Science and Engineering

Australian National Radio recently aired a show about Florence Violet McKenzie (1890-1982) , who was Australia's first female electrical engineer, first female amateur radio operator (the first "YL"), and founder of the Electrical Association for Women.  The show discusses her life and work, and the challenges faced by women in technical fields.  Interviewed on the show is Kristen Haring, author of Ham Radio's Technical Culture.  If you didn't catch the show on the airwaves, you can listen to it here.
And speaking of women in male-dominated fields, controversial scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has written this article in The American about the idea of gender bias in the physical sciences.  The article critiques the work of MIT Press author Virginia Valian and her book Why So Slow?, and also discusses the research of MIT Press author Simon Baron-Cohen.

Award News - New England Book Show

The New England Book Show is an annual juried show sponsored by Bookbuilders of Boston. The Book Show recognizes outstanding work by New England publishers, printers and graphic designers. Winning books are selected for their design, quality of materials, and workmanship.

This year - the 51st Annual Book Show - the MIT Press won seven awards.  And the winners are:

General Trade, Illustrated Book Category:
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Matthew Frederick

General Trade, Nonillustrated Book Category:
I Am a Beautiful Monster / Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal
This title won the "Best of Category" designation.

Professional Illustrated Book Category:
Imagining MIT
William J. Mitchell
This title won the "Best of Category" designation.

General Trade - Cover/Jacket Category:
The Internet Imaginaire
Patrice Flichy

General Trade - Cover/Jacket Category:
Journey to the East: Le Corbusier
Edited and translated by Ivan Zaknic
This title won the "Best of Category" designation.

Professional - Cover/Jacket Category:
Imagining MIT
William J. Mitchell

Professional - Cover/Jacket Category:
Video, The Reflexive Medium
Yvonne Spielmann

For more information, and to see the full list of winners, visit
http://www.bbboston.org/pageAboutUs_BookShowWinners.cfm
These awards will be presented at a dinner on April 9 at the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston.  If you'd like to attend the New England Book Show, there is an Open House (free to the public) that day for book viewing from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm.

Choice Outstanding Academic Titles from 2007

Choice Magazine reviews scholarly books and media for academic libraries. Choice recently announced its list of outstanding academic titles for 2007. MIT Press titles from this list:

Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change by Bruce E. Wexler
Polarized America: the Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches by Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal
The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi
Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation edited by J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray
Global Migration and the World Economy by Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson
Always Already New by Lisa Gitelman
Georeferencing: the Geographic Associations of Information by Linda L. Hill
Hot Thought by Paul Thagard with Fred Kroon et al.
Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter
Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work by Susanne Lange tr. by Jeremy Gaines
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology edited by Elliott Sober
Models and Cognition: Prediction and Explanation in Everyday Life and in Science by Jonathan A. Waskan
The Political Future of Social Security in Aging Societies by Vincenzo Galasso
Degrees that Matter by Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton
Debt Defaults and Lessons from a Decade of Crises by Federico Sturzenegger and Jeromin Zettelmeyer
From Embryology to Evo-devo: a History of Developmental Evolution edited by Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Mainenshein

Wednesday Blog Watch - Online Reading...and Black and White Television

Ian Bogost, videogame researcher (as well as author of Persuasive Games and Unit Operations), has opened up an interesting discussion on his blog about the difficulty of reading books and other lengthy texts online.  As an example, he refers to Noah Wardrip-Fruin's online peer review process, but he also raises larger questions about the nature of online reading and how it might be better viewed.

Here's one idea: in their drive to move textual matter online, creators of online books and journals have not thought enough about the materiality of specific print media forms. This includes both the physicality of the artifacts themselves (I violently dogear and mark up my print matter) and the contexts in which people read them (I need to concentrate and avoid distraction when reading scholarship). These factors extend beyond scholarship too: the same could be said of newspapers and magazines, which arguably read much more casually and serendipitously in print form than they do in online form.

He suggests that we may need to re-conceptualize how to "translate our interactions with particular kinds of print media online, rather than just moving the characters that comprise them from ink to pixels".
Does the technology we use change our experience of the same information?  In a related note, this article at the BBC discusses the 34,700 people in the UK who still watch television a on black and white television set.  One comment from a black and white devotee:

 

I am one of those still watching in black-and-white on a 1937 Marconiphone television set (with a 405-line converter). This lends a sense of occasion to viewing which is entirely missing from the modern experience, I assure you! But even a 70 year-old set still needs a licence.
Steve, Sedgeberrow Worcestershire

Wednesday Blog Watch - Online Learning

You probably already know about MIT's OpenCourseWare Project - and it was recently covered in a popular New York Times article about the lectures of physicist Walter H. G. Lewin.  But you may not have run across UC Berkeley's webcast site, where you can also watch lectures, events, and examine course material.  Perhaps now, before spring lures you away from your desk, is the time to brush up on your Buddhist Psychology or your European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present?  That latter course, incidentally, was taught by Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Solitary Sex: a Cultural History of Masturbation.  He recently received a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award for his studies.

Can the media cover climate change accurately?

That's the question raised by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times in his blog DotEarth. And he has some thoughtful and compelling ideas, marshaled in response to complaints about the mainstream media's coverage of global warming:

[T]he main impediment to effective societal responses to global warming lies less in the count of front-page headlines than in the basic disconnect between the nature of the issue — complex, spread in time and space, laden with some unavoidable uncertainty — and the nature of human nature.

Frankly, I think one could write the perfect story on global warming, or create the perfect documentary, and repeat it over and over, and still not see much movement if the goal is to rapidly shift society out of its coal-fired comfort zone as the world heads toward 9 billion people.

Revkin wrote a chapter on exactly this topic for our book Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, from which he excerpts a few more choice thoughts in his post.

RTWT here.

Award News - Secrets of Women wins Rossiter Award

Secrets of Women by Katharine Park (Zone Books), has won the 2007 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize given by the History of Science Society.
 
Here’s what the judges had to say about the book:

Katharine Park’s Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection is an outstanding demonstration of the fundamental insights that consideration of gender brings to the history of science. The womb, Park shows, became the privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts in the 15th and 16th century due to both its significance for generation and the challenges posed by its anatomical complexity. Whereas depictions of male anatomy focused on the outside of the body, the female figure came to illustrate internal anatomy in general. Far from being an aberration, then, women’s bodies and their secrets became the paradigm for the secrets of life, and were crucial for the development of anatomical knowledge from the thirteenth century until Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body of 1543. In this exciting challenge to existing historiography, Park traces the role of women and the female body through several Italian case studies: a religious visionary, a lactating virgin, Florentine matrons, and the executed criminal of Vesalius’s famous frontispiece. While leading her readers into discourses and practices quite remote from contemporary experience, Park challenges well-established opinions about religious prohibitions against dissection, the transgressive nature of physician’s desire to understand women’s secrets, the misogynous motivation of Renaissance doctors’s critique of vernacular midwives’s knowledge, and the “one-sex” model of the human body previously assumed to characterize anatomical understanding from Galen to the Enlightenment. Katharine Park does all of this in a book that is richly documented, lucidly argued, soberly provocative, and both fittingly and beautifully illustrated.

For more information, see the HSS website’s awards page: http://www.hssonline.org/about/society_awards.html