The text of this book describes the making and contents of a time capsule that was buried 50 feet deep in the earth by the manufacturing company Westinghouse. Cupaloy refers to the outer skin of the capsule, composed of an alloy of copper, chromium and silver.

Time capsules have been used for thousands of years to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time. Such vessels have the dual purpose of causing participants to ponder their own cultural era and think about those to come. This work is a cultural history of five thousand years of time capsules and other related time-information transfer experiences. It examines both the formal and the popular culture aspects of the time capsule, from its roots in ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian building foundation deposits to the present utilization of spacecraft probes and other extreme locations. The deposits of 3000 BCE deliberately had no definite date and time to be opened; in 1876 CE came the idea of target-dated deposits. Also discussed are how "real" time capsules work, notional and archaeological time capsules, the height of the time capsule's popularity from 1935 to 1982, the preservation of writings in time capsules, keeping time in a perpetual futurescape, and turn of the century hype surrounding millennium time capsules.

An interdisciplinary volume of essays identifying the impact of technology on the age-old cultural practice of collecting, as well as the opportunities and pitfalls of collecting in the digital era.

The question of ignorance occupies a central place in anthropological theory and practice. This volume argues that the concept of ignorance has largely been pursued as the opposite of knowledge or even its obverse. Though they cover wide empirical ground - from clients of a fertility treatment center in New York to families grappling with suicide in Greenland - contributors share a commitment to understanding the concept as a productive, social practice. Ultimately, The Anthropology of Ignorance asks whether an academic commitment to knowledge can be squared with lived significance of ignorance and how taking it seriously might alter anthropological research practices.

The Age of Information has spawned a critical focus on human communication in a multimedia world, particularly on theories and practices of writing. With the worldwide web impacting increasingly on academic and business communication, the need has never been greater for advanced study in writing, communication, and critical thinking across all genres, sectors, and cultures. In recent decades, the definitions of 'new rhetoric' have expanded to encompass a variety of theories and movements, raising the question of how rhetoric is understood and employed in the twenty-first century. The essays collected here represent variations on these themes, with each attempting to answer the title?s deliberately provocative question, addressing particularly: -How the classical art of rhetoric is still relevant today; -How it is directly related to modern technologies and the new modes of communication they have generated; -How rhetorical practice is informing research methodologies and teaching and learning practices in the contemporary academy.

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.