Inscriptive Practices Research Articles

Streynsham Master's office: accounting for collectivity, order and authority in 17th-century India

This paper examines the uses of writing in early modern global trade in order to argue for the constitutive role of inscription practices in the making of the social and spatial relations of mercantile capitalism. At the heart of this is a detailed study of the reform of the accounting and bookkeeping practices of the English East India Company at Fort St George carried out by Streynsham Master (1640–1724) in the late 17th century. This is used to show that the collective decision-making, social and moral order, and relationships of respect upon which the Company relied were constructed in and through the factory's consultation books, accountancy ledgers and the letters sent between England and India. This paperwork was part of the making of institutional structures and spaces which worked through a series of divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’, and which made the ‘logic’ of mercantile capital evident to the Company's servants.

Exploring middle school students' use of inscriptions in project-based science classrooms

This study explores seventh graders' use of inscriptions in a teacher-designed project-based science unit. To investigate students' learning practices during the 8-month water quality unit, we collected multiple sources of data (e.g., classroom video recordings, student artifacts, and teacher interviews) and employed analytical methods that drew from a naturalistic approach. The findings showed that throughout the unit, provided with the teachers' scaffold and social, conceptual, and material resources, the seventh graders were able to use various inscriptions (e.g., digital pictures, Web pages, and models) to demonstrate meaningful inscriptional practices such as creating and using inscriptions to make arguments, to represent conceptual understandings, and to engage in thoughtful discussions. Inscriptions and associated practices provided students with experiences and understandings about certain ways to organize, transform, and link data or scientific ideas. However, when constructing inscriptions, students did not consider how the inscriptions could serve certain reasoning purposes. In addition, more scaffolds were needed to help students use multiple inscriptions to make a coherent argument. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:852–873, 2006

Inscriptional practices in two inquiry‐based classrooms: A case study of seventh graders' use of data tables and graphs

AbstractThis case study characterizes the inscriptional practices demonstrated by seventh graders, particularly their use of data tables and graphs, in an inquiry‐based learning environment. Using a naturalistic approach, we collected multiple sources of data during an 8‐month instructional unit that emphasized water quality and relevant concepts. The analyses show that constructing and interpreting graphs and tables provided students with opportunities to discuss, review, and clarify questions about concepts and the inquiry process. At the end of the unit on water quality, students were capable of fully participating in designing a more complicated inscription and interpreting new inscriptions. The findings suggest that four features of the learning environment promoted the development of inscriptional practices: (1) embedding the use of inscriptions in students' science inquiry; (2) providing scaffolds to support students' inquiry process; (3) sequencing tasks and the inquiry process; and (4) engaging students in science inquiry in an iterated manner. This study provides insight into the design of a learning environment in which students can develop competent scientific practices. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 63–95, 2006

The Warlpiri alphabet and other colonial fantasies

This article is a critical interrogation of the alphabet as it has been used to write a so-called ‘pre-literate’ or ‘oral’ language, Warlpiri, an Aboriginal language of the Central Desert of Australia. The author compares a literacy-teaching chart called Warlpiri Letters with traditional Warlpiri inscriptive practices, and finds that both employ a culturally specific form of writing - a writing understood in terms of material ‘imprints’ or ‘traces’. In developing this notion of writing as material ‘trace’, the author argues that it is not the case that Warlpiri Aborigines are without writing. On the contrary, the fact that Warlpiri do indeed possess writing has been simultaneously acknowledged and yet disavowed by a colonial context where only one form of writing is allowed. This analysis shows that an effacement of Warlpiri writing, of Warlpiri culture - including the radical challenge(s) they pose - has occurred in the creation of alphabetically written Warlpiri.

Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape: Part Two: Corporeal Axiomatics

posthuman is getting under our skin, and they offered ways of resisting interpretations of a posthuman future that depend on the notion that information is disembodied. Our discussions have attended to the distinction between practices of inscription and practices of incorporation. By “inscription practices” we mean the range of discourses and rhetorics of persuasion from computer science, biotechnology, robotics and nanotech, media studies, art, film, video games, science fiction, literary studies, philosophy, and advertising—all the things we say and write, the representations we construct; in short, the codes we circulate about information and its relation to bodies. By “practices of incorporation” we mean the norms, behaviors, skills, and schemas of physical enaction that modulate the embodiment of these culturally constructed inscriptions and the performances of actual bodies—insofar as it is possible—in terms of them. In this dynamic of material/semiotic agents, resistances of material bodies produce fissures in the various strata; feedback between these processes generates new lines of flight. But how literally are we to understand the processes of inscription? Discussions of hybrid human-machine interactions have tended to see the material, machinic components on the other side of the cyborg interface as “enhancements,” extensions, or reconfigurations of the senses; the machine extends anthropomorphically, rather than fundamentally remaking the human. By contrast, the recent developments in cellular robotics that we described may

Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication

1. Inscription practices and materialities of communication Timothy Lenoir 2. The language of strange facts in early modern science Lorraine Daston 3. Shaping information: mathematics, computing and typography Robin Rider 4. The technology of mathematical persuasion Brian Rotman 5. On the take-off of operators Friedrich Kittler 6. Switchboards and sex: the nut(t) case Bernhard Siegert 7. Politics on the topographer's table: the helvetic triangulation of cartography, politics, and representation David Gugerli 8. Writing Darwin's islands: England and the insular condition Gillian Beer 9. Illustrations as strategy in Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Phillip Prodger 10. The Leviathan of Parsontown: literary technology and scientific representation Simon Schaffer 11. Technology, aesthetics and the development of astrophotography at the Lick Observatory Alex Pang 12. Standards and semiotics Robert Brain 123. Experimental systems, graphematic spaces Hans-Jong Rheinberger 14. Emergent power: vitality and theology in artificial life Richard M. Doyle 15. Science and writing: two national narratives of failure Lisa Bloom 16. Perception versus experience: moving pictures and their resistance to interpretation Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Notes Index.