Supplemental Material: History of earthquakes along the creeping section of the San Andreas fault, California, USA

Supplemental figures related to biomarker analysis, thermal modeling, and experimental setup; more detailed methodology, and tables containing model parameters and biomarker data.<br>

Supplemental Material: History of earthquakes along the creeping section of the San Andreas fault, California, USA

Supplemental figures related to biomarker analysis, thermal modeling, and experimental setup; more detailed methodology, and tables containing model parameters and biomarker data.<br>

Editing Versions

G. Thomas Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography — a monumental compilation of essays devoted to bibliographical theory and practice as they have evolved as a discipline since the 1960s — not only attests to Tanselle’s vibrant career but is also an occasion to reflect on bibliography as a “way of thinking” about book history, material culture, the editing of fluid texts, and digital scholarship. In our profession, the field of descriptive bibliography has endured decades of begrudging tolerance as “merely” custodial rather than critical; and yet bibliography — in so far as it records change — is the fundamental grounding for any historicist and materialist project. Melville’s so-called “L-word” in Typee — once it is tracked from manuscript to first edition to revised edition — records an “oscillating revision” in Melville’s thinking and writing that exemplifies the dance between accident and intentionality in the creative process. Tanselle’s essays on the practical workings of bibliography also suggest the field’s ability to extend its scope beyond idealized notions of the authorial work and to embrace non-authorized reprints, periodical placement, illustration, and non-literary documents, as well as adaptive revision in film and translation. Descriptive bibliography is essential for our deeper engagement with how and why versions evolve. Advancements in digital strategies related to database and display will facilitate the future acceptance of descriptive bibliography among literary scholars and critics seeking to test the interpretive potentials of biography, material history and culture, and the fluid text.

Chemistry, Society and Uncertainty

In recent years, besides the increased interest in philosophy of chemistry, we have witnessed a "material turn" in philosophy and the history of sciences with an interest in putting instruments, objects, materials and practices at the core of historical reports. Since its alchemic past, chemistry has worked with and on materials, so that its history is also a "material history". Thus, in the wake of this "material turn", it is up to philosophy and the history of chemistry to perceive the chemical substances, the chemists that create them and the industries that produce them as part of culture, society and politics. This overlap between chemical reasoning and materiality as well as the artificial character of its products makes chemistry an eminently technoscientific science. In this context, we will analyze the most general aspect that led us to identify it as "technoscientific", the hybrid that exists between chemistry and society. With that, we intend to argue in favor of considering the modern societal necessities (material, environmental, and human) with chemistry, in an effort to build a more harmonious relationship, being that it will be long and, maybe, indissoluble. Following that, our aim is to develop a concept that cannot be separated from the capillarity of chemistry in societies and the environment, the imprevisibility and essential uncertainty of the behavior of chemical entities in multiple contexts. Finally, we will highlight some reflections concerning chemical ethics associated with the production and creation of new substances that may become a part of the lifeworld.

Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting, by Jinah Kim.

Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting, by Jinah Kim. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. xv + 331 pp. $75 (hb). ISBN 978-0-520343-21-4.

Forts Henry and Donelson

This chapter explains the campaign for Forts Henry and Donelson as a contest for vital resources—human, animal, and mineral—that shaped Union and Confederate strategies and outcomes. By combining military, political, and material history, it shows how sailors, soldiers, citizens, and slaves shaped the battles and their aftermath while facing environmental challenges, including frigid weather, muddy roads, and swollen rivers. These conditions mixed with intangible factors, like morale, rumors, emotions, egos, prejudices, loyalties, and culture, to frame how people fought and thought about the campaign. By combining naval and army operations, Adm. Andrew Foote’s ironclad flotilla and Brig. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s army deprived the Confederacy of its richest iron and hog region and accelerated emancipation in the western theater by establishing its first contraband camp at Fort Donelson.

Book History without Old Books1

During the pandemic, the closure of university libraries and Special Collections meant that there were few opportunities for students to interact with the print and manuscript material of the Romantic period. These conditions created an entirely new set of interactions between instructors and students, students and their classmates, and students and their objects of study. To address these new conditions, we created a series of assignments that sought to recreate a sense of the opportunities and pleasures of the sensory experience in an archive; to foster an understanding of both the material history of Romantic literary culture and of material culture more broadly; and finally to connect students emotionally with the objects of their study. This essay reports on the outcomes of these assignments and what they can teach us about attempts to integrate play, discovery, and interactivity with material objects into the study of Romantic writing.

A shared brain system forming confidence judgment across cognitive domains

Confidence is typically defined as a subjective judgment about whether a decision is right. Decisions are based on sources of information that come from various cognitive domains and are processed in different brain systems. An unsettled question is whether the brain computes confidence in a similar manner whatever the domain or in a manner that would be idiosyncratic to each domain. To address this issue, human participants of both sexes performed a new paradigm probing confidence in decisions made about the same material (history and geography statements), but based on different cognitive processes: semantic memory for deciding whether the statement was true or false, and duration perception for deciding whether the statement display was long or short. At the behavioral level, we found that the same factors (difficulty, accuracy, response time and confidence in the preceding decision) predicted confidence judgments in both tasks. At the neural level, we observed using fMRI that confidence judgments in both tasks were associated to activity in the same brain regions: positively in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and negatively in a prefronto-parietal network. Together, these findings suggest the existence of a shared brain system that generates confidence judgments in a similar manner across cognitive domains.

THE DEEP TIME OF BITCOIN: EXCAVATING THE "WORK" IN PROOF-OF-WORK CRYPTOCURRENCY SYSTEMS

Estimates place Bitcoin’s current energy consumption at 141.83 terawatt-hours/year, an amount comparable to Ukraine. While Bitcoin’s energy problem has become increasingly visible in both academic and popular discourse (see Lally et al. 2019), the computational mechanisms through which the Bitcoin network generates coins, proof-of-work, has gone under-examined. This paper interrogates the “work” in proof-of-work systems. What is this work? How can we access its material history? I trace this history through a media archaeology of computational heat, in an attempt to better situate the intimate relationship between information and energy in proof-of-work systems. I argue the “work” in these systems is principally heat-work, and trace its ideological constructions back to nineteenth-century thermodynamic science, and the reframing of doing work as something exhaustible, directional, and irreversible (Prigogine & Stengers 2017; Daggett 2019). I then follow thermodynamic discourse through Cybernetics debates in the 1940s, illustrating how, early in the formation of Information Theory, the heat-work undergirding the functioning of a “bit” was obscured and compartmentalized, allowing information to be productively abstracted apart from its energetic infrastructures (Hayles 1999; Kline 2015). I conclude with a discussion of the heat-work within the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), Bitcoin’s principal mining tool, arguing that proof-of-work mining is not a radical exception to the computing status quo, but rather a lens through which to think more broadly about computing’s complex relationship to energy, and ultimately, how this relationship can be different.