Object Studies: Introductions to Material Culture is a textbook that introduces students to an interdisciplinary approach to material cultural study. This text helps reveal how everyday objects from pens and coffee cups to our most cherished keepsakes help define our collective histories and personal narratives. Object Studies is organized around accessible and engaging chapters on objects with “model essays” that present original projects designed to engage students with a series of concepts and research activities. Each will demonstrate a key methodology tied to specific learning outcomes, but all chapters will be intertwined in their attention to the project of developing the core skills of “object studies”: careful viewing, writing detailed descriptions, setting out and testing research hypotheses, and telling stories through material artifacts. Aimed towards undergraduate students taking courses in material culture as well as postgraduate students embarking on independent research projects these chapter “studies” are practically oriented and demonstrate research projects that can be undertaken either in a course or even through personal study. Chapters in Object Studies conclude with research questions, suggestions on methodology, and a discursive bibliography designed to help students pursue their own projects based on these examples.

A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, Robyn Wiegman turns her attention in Object Lessons to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. In a series of case studies drawn from womens studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, she examines the unspoken belief that better theory will produce progressive social change in order to consider the political desire that fuels current scholarly debate. Her metacritical analysis is neither a defense nor a dismissal of such political commitment but a sustained inquiry into the hope it generates, the thinking it inspires, and the conformity it inadvertently demands.

In the modern lexicon, ‘object’ refers to an entity that is materially constituted, spatially defined, and functionally determined. In contrast, the Latin word ‘fantasia’ has, since antiquity, referred to an apparition or the ability to imagine something that could be equally an object, an image, or a concept. This tension prompts further inquiry into the interrelations and differences between the experience of tangible objects (their perception and handling) and the creation of new objects (their conception and formation). What correlations exist between object fantasies, the self-consciousness of subjects, and the concrete and imagined conditions of human beings’ social lives? By addressing this question, this interdisciplinary book opens new perspectives in the field of object studies.

Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum objectâ€_x009d_ in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisationâ€_x009d_ of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

Automatie object recognition is a multidisciplinary research area using con cepts and tools from mathematics, computing, optics, psychology, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and various other disciplines. The purpose of this research is to provide a set of coherent paradigms and algorithms for the purpose of designing systems that will ultimately emulate the functions performed by the Human Visual System (HVS). Hence, such systems should have the ability to recognise objects in two or three dimensions independently of their positions, orientations or scales in the image. The HVS is employed for tens of thousands of recognition events each day, ranging from navigation (through the recognition of landmarks or signs), right through to communication (through the recognition of characters or people themselves). Hence, the motivations behind the construction of recognition systems, which have the ability to function in the real world, is unquestionable and would serve industrial (e.g. quality control), military (e.g. automatie target recognition) and community needs (e.g. aiding the visually impaired). Scope, Content and Organisation of this Book This book provides a comprehensive, yet readable foundation to the field of object recognition from which research may be initiated or guided. It repre sents the culmination of research topics that I have either covered personally or in conjunction with my PhD students. These areas include image acqui sition, 3-D object reconstruction, object modelling, and the matching of ob jects, all of which are essential in the construction of an object recognition system.

The purpose of these essays is to mine the complexity and expressive richness of still life, traditionally considered one of the lesser genres. Though theorists have commented on its appeal since antiquity, the status of still life has risen significantly only recently, as the priorities of art history and criticism have been reordered to validate areas outside the canon of traditional inquiry. Here six distinguished scholars interpret a wide range of still lifes, using diverse current methods, including paleoethnobotanical research (which makes it possible to reconstruct diets), social history, technical examinations, and material culture studies. The introduction provides a historiography of still life with an emphasis on the twentieth century. Reindert Falkenburg's essay is "Matters of Taste: Pieter Aertsen's Market Scenes, Eating Habits, and Pictorial Rhetoric in the Sixteenth Century," Anne Lowenthal's, "Contemplating Kalf," Julia Ballerini's "Recasting Ancestry: Statuettes as Imaged by Three Inventors of Photography," and Doreen Bolger's "The Early Rack Paintings of John F. Peto: Beneath the Nose of the Whole World.'" Petra ten-Doesschate Chu writes on Vincent van Gogh's still lifes and the nineteenth-century vignette tradition; and Nan Freeman, on Tom Wesselmann and still-life painting and American culture, circa 1962. In view of the current interest in still life, the publication of this book is ideally timed. Cumulatively, the six essays alert the reader to the myriad meanings carried by still lifes and the diverse ways in which those meanings can be studied.

Category theory is a general mathematical theory of structures and of structures of structures. It occupied a central position in contemporary mathematics as well as computer science. This book describes the history of category theory whereby illuminating its symbiotic relationship to algebraic topology, homological algebra, algebraic geometry and mathematical logic and elaboratively develops the connections with the epistemological significance.