Contact between cultures has been understood in various ways and this particular volume considers the European cultural, social, scientific, philosophical and political contexts framing encounter. All of the essays thus look at the different ways in which individuals and institutions work these contexts into their representations of contact settings. In Part 1, the conventional stance is adopted where encounter is understood as taking place elsewhere and not on European soil. The chapters examine contact far afield and focus on how public and private contexts act upon ensuing interpretations and representations of inter-cultural interaction. Part 2 considers ‘contact within’, positing inversed sites of encounter. The essays point to the arrival of these discovered peoples on European soil as the eras of exploration ushered in periods of settlement and extended colonisation. The paradigm of contact between Europeans and Others (and Other spaces) was thus displaced both figuratively and literally. Amongst the conduits for such representations were the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century European exhibitions or fairs. The studies here suggest that these encounters were also engineered by domestic contexts which gradually enclosed interaction within further, restrictive conceptual frameworks, not on islands and beaches, but in European towns and cities.

To make sense of the world, we’re always trying to place things in context, whether our environment is physical, cultural, or something else altogether. Now that we live among digital, always-networked products, apps, and places, context is more complicated than ever—starting with "where" and "who" we are. This practical, insightful book provides a powerful toolset to help information architects, UX professionals, and web and app designers understand and solve the many challenges of contextual ambiguity in the products and services they create. You’ll discover not only how to design for a given context, but also how design participates in making context. Learn how people perceive context when touching and navigating digital environments See how labels, relationships, and rules work as building blocks for context Find out how to make better sense of cross-channel, multi-device products or services Discover how language creates infrastructure in organizations, software, and the Internet of Things Learn models for figuring out the contextual angles of any user experience

Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itself—most people understand that this is crucial to social life —but the inappropriate, improper sharing of information. Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, Helen Nissenbaum counters that information ought to be distributed and protected according to norms governing distinct social contexts—whether it be workplace, health care, schools, or among family and friends. She warns that basic distinctions between public and private, informing many current privacy policies, in fact obscure more than they clarify. In truth, contemporary information systems should alarm us only when they function without regard for social norms and values, and thereby weaken the fabric of social life.

In 2006, co-authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote Naked Conversations, a book that persuaded businesses to embrace what we now call social media. Six years later they have teamed up again to report that social media is but one of five converging forces that promise to change virtually every aspect of our lives. You know these other forces already: mobile, data, sensors and location-based technology. Combined with social media they form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. Armed with that knowledge our personal devices can anticipate what we'll need next and serve us better than a butler or an executive assistant. The resulting convergent superforce is so powerful that it is ushering in a era the authors call the Age of Context. In this new era, our devices know when to wake us up early because it snowed last night; they contact the people we are supposed to meet with to warn them we're running late. They even find content worth watching on television. They also promise to cure cancer and make it harder for terrorists to do their damage. Astoundingly, in the coming age you may only receive ads you want to see. Scoble and Israel have spent more than a year researching this book. They report what they have learned from interviewing more than a hundred pioneers of the new technology and by examining hundreds of contextual products. What does it all mean? How will it change society in the future? The authors are unabashed tech enthusiasts, but as they write, an elephant sits in the living room of our book and it is called privacy. We are entering a time when our technology serves us best because it watches us; collecting data on what we do, who we speak with, what we look at. There is no doubt about it: Big Data is watching you. The time to lament the loss of privacy is over. The authors argue that the time is right to demand options that enable people to reclaim some portions of that privacy.

The apparently simple notion that it is contextualization and invocation of context that give form to our interpretations raises important questions about context definition. Moreover, different disciplines involved in the elucidation and interpretation of meanings construe context indifferent ways. How do these ways differ? And what analytical strategies are adopted in order to suggest that the relevant context is "self-evident"? The notion of context has received less attention than is due such a central, key concept in social anthropology, as well as in other related disciplines. This collection of contributions from a group of leading social anthropologists and anthropological linguists addresses the question of how the idea of context is constructed, invoked, and deployed in the interpretations put forward by social anthropologists. The ethnographic focus embraces peoples from regions such as Bali, Europe, Malawi, and Zaire. Primarily theoretical in its aims, the work also draws on expertise from anthropological linguistics and philosophy in order to set the issue as much in a comparative disciplinary perspective as in a comparative cross-cultural one. R.M. Dilley is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.

This volume, covering a range of topics such as Spanish as a heritage language in the United States, policy issues, pragmatics and language contact, sociolinguistic variation and contact, and Bozal (Creole) Spanish, will serve the interests of linguists, educators, and policy makers alike. It provides cutting edge research on varieties of Spanish spoken by children, teenagers, and adults in places as diverse as Chicago, New York, New Mexico, and Houston; Valencia and Galicia; the Andean highlands; and the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The emphasis is on spoken Spanish, although researchers also investigate code-switching in the lyrics of bachata songs and the presence of creole in Cuban and Brazilian literature. This collection will be of interest wherever Spanish is spoken.