This book explores the complex, dynamic, and contested webs of relationships in which three different groups of video makers found themselves when distributing their work on the Internet. It draws upon both the Deleuzian notion of "assemblage" and Actor-Network Theory, which together provide a rich conceptual framework for characterizing and analysing these webs. The groups examined are a UK video activist project, a community of film and television fans originating in the US, and an association of US community television producers. Rather than taking YouTube as its point of departure, this book centres on the groups themselves, contextualizing their contemporary distribution practices within their pre-Internet histories. It then follows the groups as they drew upon various Internet technologies beyond YouTube to create their often-complex video distribution assemblages, a process that entangled them in these webs of relationships. Through the analysis of detailed ethnographic fieldwork conducted across a period of several years, this book demonstrates that while the groups found some success in achieving their various goals as video makers, their situations were often problematic and their agency limited, with their practices contested by both human and technological actors within their distribution assemblages.

Architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot examines how the discipline of architecture is theorized and practiced at the periphery. Eschewing a conventionally direct approach to architectural objects – to iconic buildings and big-name architects – she instead explores the background of architectural practice, to introduce the creative ecologies in which architecture exists only in relation to other objects and ideas. Consisting of a series of philosophical encounters with architectural practice that are neither neatly located in one domain nor the other, this book is concerned with 'other ways of doing architecture'. It examines architecture at the limits where it is muddied by alternative disciplinary influences – whether art practice, philosophy or literature. Frichot meets a range of creative characters who work at the peripheries, and who challenge the central assumptions of the discipline, showing that there is no 'core of architecture' – there is rather architecture as a multiplicity of diverse concerns in engagement with local environments and worlds. From an author well-known in the disciplines of architecture and philosophy for her scholarship on Deleuze, this is a radical, accessible, and highly-original approach to design research, deftly engaging with an array of current topics from the Anthropocene to affect theory, new materialism to contemporary feminism.

A call for informed, responsible engagement with information technology at the local level. The common rhetoric about technology falls into two extreme categories: uncritical acceptance or blanket rejection. Claiming a middle ground, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day call for responsible, informed engagement with technology in local settings, which they call information ecologies. An information ecology is a system of people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment. Nardi and O'Day encourage the reader to become more aware of the ways people and technology are interrelated. They draw on their empirical research in offices, libraries, schools, and hospitals to show how people can engage their own values and commitments while using technology.

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation efforts are transformed through the political economy of platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Developing a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, Bram Büscher shows how environmental actors attempt to mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingent histories and contexts of particular environmental issues. Bringing efforts at wildlife protection in Southern Africa into dialogue with a sweeping analysis of truth and power in the twenty-first century, Büscher makes the case for a new environmental politics that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power.

Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work. Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.

Today, designers are shifting the practice of landscape architecture towards the need for a more complex understanding of ecological science. Constructed Ecologies presents ecology as critical theory for design, and provides major ideas for design that are supported with solid and imaginative science. In the questioning narrative of Constructed Ecologies, the author discards many old and tired theories in landscape architecture. With detailed documentation, she casts off the savannah theory, critiques the search for universals, reveals the needed role of designers in large-scale agriculture, abandons the overlay technique of McHarg, and introduces the ecological and urban health urgency of public night lighting. Margaret Grose presents wide-ranging new approaches and shows the importance of learning from science for design, of going beyond assumptions, of working in multiple rather than single issues, of disrupting linear design thinking, and of dealing with data. This book is written with a clear voice by an ecologist and landscape architect who has led design students into loving ecological science for the support it gives design.

Providing a unique collection of perspectives on the persistence of documentary as a vital and dynamic media form within a digital world, New Documentary Ecologies traces this form through new opportunities of creating media, new platforms of distribution and new ways for audiences to engage with the real.